It’s the opening night of MIX NYC’s 28th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, and at the entrance to the festival’s art installations, XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”) has set up their decks and monitors, ready for work.
Sarah Cowan
Sarah Cowan is a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she works on projects based on the collection and exhibitions, and edits two web series featuring Met staff, Connections and 82nd & Fifth. She studied art history at Tufts University, currently lives in Brooklyn, and is on Twitter.
Posted inArt
Art-Minded Feminists Become Wikipedians for a Weekend
When Shulamith Firestone wrote in 1970, “Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society,” she couldn’t have predicted she was referring to Wikipedia.
Posted inArt
For the Harvard Art Museums, a Top-to-Bottom Renovation and Rethinking
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — On a warm day in June six years ago, the front doors of the Fogg Museum closed quietly. There was no banner reading “Closing Day” on Quincy Street at the edge of Harvard Yard, no ceremony, no press, no speech. At five o’clock, museum visitors shuffled out the exit in droves, toting travel books and the last discounted souvenirs.
Posted inArt
Alternative Media: Software and Video in 1970s Counterculture
In the midst of laments that the shared culture of television is dwindling – that charming picture of a nuclear family gathered around the TV set outshone by the glow of individual screens — “Send Blank Tape,” an installation at Pioneer Works, is providing an alternative communal viewing experience.
Posted inArt
Saul Steinberg Decodes the Symbols of Society
Plastered on the title wall of Saul Steinberg’s 100th Anniversary Exhibition at Pace Gallery is an impenetrable photographic self-portrait.
Posted inArt
Polly Apfelbaum Plays with Pattern
Among the sleek catalogues at the entrance to the Clifton Benevento Gallery sits a tattered hardcover, its paper jacket ripped to reveal the plain binding. This is artist Polly Apfelbaum’s copy of A Handweaver’s Pattern Book.
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The Yams Collective’s Collage of Black Experience
There was no mention of the Whitney Museum or the Biennial, of Joe Scanlan, Donelle Woolford, or Michelle Grabner on the microphone at alternative arts space Freecandy last Thursday night.
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Searching for Jay DeFeo (Again)
A show like the one currently up at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which homes in on Jay DeFeo’s post-“Rose” output until her death in 1989, is still direly important.
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Collaging Art History in the Kitchen
Suffering from inner ear problems possibly related to the chemicals in the black-and-white photographic process, and urged further by the extinction of Kodak film, Jed Devine has turned to (gasp!) digital, and what’s more, to color. He might as well be working in a different medium altogether.
Posted inArt
Seeing Calder Through His Shadows
When I was little I went to the Whitney Museum over and over to see “Cirque Calder,” Alexander Calder’s three-dimensional cartoon of performers preening, frozen in mise-en-scène. Walking into Calder Shadows, on view at Venus Over Manhattan, I felt the same childish camaraderie with the artist, only this time it held fear of the bogeyman.
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All the Art That’s Fit to Print
It’s not clear who scooped whom, but there are two gallery shows now on view in New York that examine the relationship between art and the newspaper.
Posted inPerformance
Without Beginning or End: Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony
Last Wednesday, the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was filled with an unlikely congregation of strangers: from art insiders to the media-savvy lucky enough to snag a ticket to Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony.
