What most stands out for me about 52 Artists at the Aldrich Contemporary is the sense of both engaging with and resisting categories.
Alexis Clements
Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She recently started a podcast, The Answer is No, focused on artists sharing stories about challenging the conditions under which they are asked to work. She also recently completed her first feature-length documentary, All We've Got, which examines LGBTQ women's communities and spaces across the US. In addition to writing for Hyperallergic, her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Bitch Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, Nature, and Two Serious Ladies, among others. Learn more about her work at www.alexisclements.com.
Posted inArt
An Artist’s Embroideries Reflect the Complexity and Interconnectedness of Queer New York
What struck me most about LJ Robert’s Carry You With Me is the way in which it depicts some of the complexity of queer New York.
Posted inBooks
JEB’s Groundbreaking Book of Lesbian Portraits Gets a Second Edition
First published in 1979, Eye to Eye is a work of social practice art that existed decades before the term entered the lexicon.
Posted inBooks
Making the Case for Debt Abolition
Saddled with student loan debt? Now might be a good time to pick up the Debt Collective’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, which makes a compelling case for “economic disobedience.”
Posted inBooks
The Many Stories of Stonewall
Attempting to complicate dominant narratives, “The Stonewall Reader” offers a broader, but not always balanced, range of accounts.
Posted inBooks
Contrariness and Subtle Humor from a 19th-Century Proto-Feminist Art Writer
A recently published volume of Vernon Lee’s writing reveals a woman who is a product of privilege, as well as someone who used what it afforded her to resist the status quo.
Posted inArt
Opening Up the White Cube
By asking what is and is not allowed, for whom, and who is writing the rules Curriculum at EFA Project Space offers tangible opportunities to challenge viewers’ thinking.
Posted inBooks
Franklin Furnace’s Pioneering Performances Are Now Archived Online
By championing work in two perennially overlooked forms, artists books and performance art, often by artists who themselves are overlooked, Franklin Furnace’s archive is a repository of what doesn’t easily fit.
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Liliana Porter Shows How Everything Familiar Must Be Magnified or Forgotten
An exhibition at El Museo del Barrio brings us to the thorny side of profound themes like martyrdom and labor.
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A Photographer’s Moving Record of Lesbian Activism in the 1970s
In Donna Gottschalk’s photographs we’re not seeing LGBTQ history filtered or retold; we’re seeing it in the moment, from women who were there as it was unfolding.
Posted inArt
Compressing Time With David Wojnarowicz
“Time is now compressed and every painting I do… I make with the sense that it may be the last thing I do,” Wojnarowicz wrote after his AIDS diagnosis in 1987.
Posted inArt
Why Grown-Ups Should Play With Artists’ Books Designed for Kids
A gloriously tactile exhibit at the Center for Book Arts offers a refreshing sense of playfulness in this age of anxiety.
