SANTA FE — At this point it’s hard to keep track of which type of art event there are more of: art fairs or biennials. There are art fairs that look like biennials, biennials that look like art fairs, triennials, pop-ups, and everything in between. But the trope of the biennial has long been a fixture in the art world.
Biennials
Posted inArt
The Many Contradictions of a “Ghetto Biennale”
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In 2011, for the second Ghetto Biennale, artist Jason Metcalf hired a Haitian translator to translate the chapter on creolization from Nicholas Bourriaud’s The Radicant into Creole and distributed it throughout Port-au-Prince, the location of the biennale. When I read about that, after the fact, I became interested in visiting.
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A Deep Dive into Digital Art
Some people spend Christmas Eve going to mass or sitting around a tree; others spend it eating Chinese food and going to see a movie. If you don’t have any family or friend traditions to adhere to, or if you do but want an escape, one possibility I’d recommend is to spend this late afternoon/evening digging into digital art via The Wrong, a new online biennial.
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Made in New England: The 2013 deCordova Biennial
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Stashed away in the tony suburbs just west of Boston, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and its engagement with the wider, grittier world outside its gates has sometimes been called into question. But the museum has begun focusing its attention every two years on local artists of New England — six states by last count if you include the parts of Connecticut where there are unharmed Red Sox fans.
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Museum Shows to See in the Fall of 2013
The fall season is upon us, and art lovers’ thoughts turn to museum exhibitions. Here’s our very short list of what not to miss.
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SITE Santa Fe’s Attempt to Kill the Biennial
SANTA FE, New Mexico — SITE Santa Fe claims to have established the first international art biennial in the United States. The year was 1995, the theme was “Longing and Belonging,” the raison d’être was to create a global exhibition in lil’ ole Santa Fe, and the response was so strong, according to the organization’s current director and curator, Irene Hofmann, that “SITE Santa FE” shifted from the name of a biennial to a cultural institution with full-time programming the very next year.
Posted inOpinion
Performa Launches a Post-National Country Pavilion Program
The world’s most famous biannual art event, the Venice Biennale, stands apart from other biennials because of its network of country-specific pavilions, discrete buildings that different countries use to show their exhibitions. Now, the Performa performance art biennial, one of the world’s more diffuse instances of the form, is launching a pavilion program that emphasizes international cooperation and “international artists.”
