Art
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Controversial Afro-Swedish Artist Speaks, “It’s a Disturbing Picture But It’s Also a Disturbing Subject”

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

In the last few days, Afro-Swedish artist Makode Linde has learned the power of the viral web. His controversial cake performance at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet has ricocheted around the world and has garnered reactions of all types from support of his edgy gesture to raise awareness about female genital mutilation to the denunciation of the artist and the Swedish culture minister pictured in the event photos as racists. Linde spoke to Hyperallergic about the controversy and he was happy to explain the context for the piece and how commenters have not wanted to delve deeper into the work and what it has to say.

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Turning the Seven Year Itch into a Retrospective

by AX Mina

LOS ANGELES — Most artist retrospectives occur decades after an artist’s career really takes off, once their name has been recognized in the annals of art world lore. But long time collaborators Chan and Mann — Audrey Chan and Elana Mann, respectively — have organized their own retrospective to recognize their “seven year itch” of collaboration and “historicize now.”

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Art and Science Get Intimate

by Leila Nadir

A lot has changed since novelist and physicist C.P. Snow’s assertion in the 1960s that Western intellectual life was split between two irreconcilable cultures: the arts and the sciences. Around that time, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was just beginning its efforts to bridge those two spheres. Fifty years later, Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery has made a significant contribution to representing and documenting where the relationship between art, science, and technology stands with the exhibition Intimate Science and the related book New Art/Science Affinities.

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Why There Are Great Artists (Part 3)

by John Yau

The rigorous parameters that Sylvia Plimack Mangold established in her earlier bodies of work (the floor paintings and the landscapes framed by “tape”) continue to inform her paintings of individual trees (specifically the maple, elm, locust, and pink oak), which have been focus of her attention since the early 1980s. Year after year, in different seasons and subtly changing light, the artist has returned to the same handful of subjects seen from the same tightly cropped viewpoint.

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The Wonders of the Human Brain

by Ellen Pearlman

The brain and perception are, in the words of Buster Poindexter, “hot, hot, hot,” with the buzz they are generating in certain reaches of the art world. Curators Koan Jeff Baysa and Caitlin Hardy, both medical doctors, should be commended for surveying this vast subject with their exhibition Seeing Ourselves, though it proffers mixed results.

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Comfort in Limbo

by Marisa Carroll

If you find yourself at the Museum of Arts and Design this spring, be sure to check out its survey of unsettling quasi-documentary videos by Julika Rudelius, titled What Is on the Outside. The pieces, which were created by Rudelius between 2001 and 2010, range in length from three to 29 minutes, and the complete program will be playing on a continuous loop until July 5.