Hyde Park Art Center

This is the blog for the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC). This space you’ve found yourself in – this sticky netweb of potential – is meant to act as a different opening into what we do at HPAC.

[wreeducat]

“The Resurgence of Women-Only Art Shows” by HILARIE M. SHEETS via NYT Arts http://ift.tt/1V33rCV

[womanmadegallery]

More than 7,500 women artists have exhibited their work here since Woman Made Gallery was established. We are pleased to see that galleries and museums today are sharing our vision to ensure the equal placement of women’s art in the world.

[brooklynmuseum]

“When I drive, I feel free.” —Noor Daoud, member of Speed Sisters

March may be over, but we never stop celebrating boundary-breaking women at the Brooklyn Museum. On Saturday, April 9 at 2pm we’re screening films about women who defy stereotypes and live life on their own terms despite living under occupation in Palestine.

First up is The Cup Reader (Suha Araj, 2013, 12 min.) which follows Warde, who once shamed as a young girl, becomes renowned in Palestine for her mystical seeing and matchmaking abilities. Living with her sister Jaleleh, she reads the fortunes of her clients, as they rhapsodize about love. Each woman grapples with a choice between love and marriage, not having had the luxury of both.

Never last to cross the finish line are The Speed Sisters (Amber Fares, 2015, 80 min.). The first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East, the Speed Sisters are tearing up tracks all over Palestine. These drivers are breaking barriers and challenging not only Middle Eastern, but global stereotypes about women in sports. Their pursuit and attainment of freedom through the sport of race car driving despite the restrictions placed on their daily movement living and racing in the occupied West Bank left me ready to take on anything.  

Both films are refreshing glimpses into the lives of fictional and real women living in occupied Palestine. These are stories many of us are not used to seeing on screen and a far cry from the tired portrayals of the Middle East that circulate mainstream media from this hyper-narrated region of the world.

A conversation between the filmmakers and a Q&A follows.

Posted by Lauren Zelaya

[hydeparkart-blog]

Reimaginings: A Conversation with Tyanna Buie

Today we are featuring a conversation with Tyanna Buie, who is showing work in the Residual Lives show at HPAC (up until April 24th! GO!). Tyanna is showing a series of collaged prints based on mugshots of her various family members, interrogating the way that the prison system creates subjects in a certain way, and also how to challenge the production of that subjectivity and to make space for transformation. Tyanna is currently based in Detroit. 

In our conversation, we talked the genealogy of artists that have shaped her practice, navigating protection/ exposure when doing really vulnerable work about her own family, and negotiating a public art practice when it’s not just about her. 

Tyanna is an incredibly dynamic person to talk to and we are so excited to share this conversation with y’all -- and this is only part one of two in this series with her. 

Helena Bassett: What are your handles, websites, etc - what should people click on to find you on the internet?

Tyanna Buie: I love that I have a website, that’s gold, and I’m also on Instagram as @tyanna_buie. 

HB: Many of your works feature people but with faces that are abstracted/ emptied out/ otherwise made illegible. What does this refusal signify to you?

TB: I would say it definitely came out of the fact that these are personal photos and I didn’t know how to navigate them either. So I want to work with them, but how do I work with them and be cognizant of the fact that these are personal photos -- I’m not ready for the world to know everything. I did a somewhat accidental flash once and noticed what that showed; I realized oh, they’re all vacant faces, how do I navigate that now, what do I do. And I purposefully started to do that a little bit more. I just put up a show last week, this past Friday, and I have some figures in there, some personal photos. I’m actually starting to bring faces to my work.

Two more things on that: I love Kerry James Marshall. He’s one of Chicago’s biggest artists other than Theaster Gates, they’re in the same boat [the MCA is doing a Member’s Preview of their survey of Marshall’s work on April 21] . When I was in graduate school, I was working in this way, and I didn’t know his work that well. And all of my professors were saying that my work was  starting to look a little Kerry James Marshall-ish. He took photos of people and noticed that if black people aren’t under good lighting, all you would see is their teeth and their eyes -- you won’t see any facial recognition. He doesn’t do silhouettes, but he darkens the skin and exaggerates the glow of the eye and the teeth. That’s his thing.

And I knew very well who Kara Walker is and was, and she deals with silhouettes. And I think that my initial blanking of the face or working with the silhouette form came from my obsession with Kara Walker. Reimagining the silhouette, what that means, and why I would use that in my work.

And there was another artist that I’d remember looking at when I was little, everybody would have her paintings (or replicas of her paintings) in the living room. Her name is Annie Lee. So you have Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and you have Annie Lee. And we subconsciously pick up things as visual artists. And we think that we’re the originators, but we’re not. Our brain is just constantly seeing things, and then when you go to make art, all of a sudden you’re making something that you saw fifty years ago, or ten years ago, or when you were a child. And the first black art that I saw was by Annie Lee, and all of the faces are blank in her work. And it took me until this year to realize that she was working this way long before me, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker [laughs]. And a lot of local artists in Milwaukee do the same thing.

I think there should be a conversation about black artists making work with black bodies and the faces are blank. I think I need to like, start that conversation [laughs]. I feel like I’ve painted the picture enough, that here’s this mystery -- and it’s just like a novel or a movie in that you don’t get the full picture until the end. And I feel like now that I’m at the end of some type of era, and now I’m putting faces on things, but they’re still distorted. I still am interested in protection.

They’re a little weird looking now. I’m like, I’m okay with indications that there’s a face, but I’m no longer obsessed necessarily with the silhouette of the face. I will do it if I need to, but if I feel like I don’t need to then I move on. But I do think my work is like a visual memoir. It’s not a novel, you get a back and forth, constantly changing the narrative, or playing with the idea of what that narrative looks like today, or a week ago, or a year ago.

HB: You’ve said: “it’s easier to make this personal work about my family because we weren’t close, and that your mom has said that the “past is the past, you can tell whoever.”  I’m currently doing some performance work with my mom, and it’s a difficult space of negotiation. Can you talk about why it was easier to make this work when you and your family weren’t close, and some of the responsibility inherent in making personal or family based work?

TB: I guess when I say “weren’t close,” I need to find another way to say that -- it’s because we didn’t grow together. And we still have not -- we’re slowly growing together, but it’s difficult. Now I’m in Detroit, my family is in Wisconsin. We have not been able to be that close knit family that I see in my friends. I actually find it a little bit [frustrating] when I see families so close, that I have to check myself, I’m like, “why do I find it annoying that they’re so close?” [Laughs] And I’m like ohhh, oh, I didn’t have that. There’s this distance that we’ve just had because of our circumstances, we didn’t get to know each other. And it’s not a bad thing, probably the best thing that could’ve happened is that we didn’t grow together because not everybody was growing; a lot of people were doing harm to themselves. So if you’re around that, then you’re going to get that. So I’m actually grateful for our circumstances today because I couldn’t imagine growing up with my mom if she kept us around her while she was doing what she was doing. It’s why she left us -- because she knew, “I can’t be around them with my life like this.”

That natural division propels me, helps me, and gives me the confidence to have a comment about it without being so entrenched in it. I’m not so immersed in our family to the point where it’s hurtful. Some things I’ll never bring up or talk about (it’s not me, it’s actually because other people in our family aren’t comfortable) but I’m very respectful of what my family chooses to be a part of or not. Like my brother wanted nothing to do with the mug shot project, and even though his mugshots were online and free domain, I still feel like as a family member I’m going to respect you as much as I can. Maybe I don’t always hit the mark, and I don’t know how to negotiate that part. Like, these things happened to me, it’s my story to tell, I’m sorry that you’re a part of it, but you are -- deal with it.

It has not been easy selling. Like for instance, my brother didn’t understand what I was doing.  So then I had to call him because he wasn’t going to call me, take him to my website, walk him through, and give him an artist’s statement, like a spiel: this is what I’m doing and why. After that, he was just like, “Okay, fine.” So I reached out to him because I knew he was uncomfortable. My mom, on the other hand, is not uncomfortable at all, which I’m surprised about. She’s uncomfortable about other things, but not about me making art about our family. She’s very proud. My sisters -- it took them a little bit to realize what I was doing, and that I was not doing anything harmful. They are proud of the work, but it took them a minute… I think that’s one issue: I have no problem talking, and they are more quiet. So if my sister goes on a date and she mentions me, and they google me and see images of all of us, they start to ask her questions and it makes her uncomfortable. We got into arguments about it. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary! It is hard stuff to be trying to talk about and deal with when there’s so many people connected to the story.

I feel like it’s collaborative, then, in that I constantly am connecting with my family. I’ll show them images afterwards, I’ll say this is what I’m doing, this is what I got going on. An aunt of mine recently contacted me because I finally got some precious photos from a different aunt (who I had to pay to borrow them. I’m going to share that because it’s the truth: I had to pay you to get family photos of me when I was a child, and that’s crazy, it should be something that’s a known thing, I have no shame in that, and she shouldn’t either, she should be bold about that.) So I get the photos and my aunt and I start to send photos to everybody, on the phone and instant message talking about the photos. And my other aunt was wondering what I’m planning on doing with the photos.  And I had to come to grips with the fact that this is how they see me: as someone who just wants to disseminate information, personal family information, in that bit. And I do public art - there’s so many things I do - but they will never see that, there’s not enough time to get your family to truly understand what you do. They only see a couple things that you do.

But I see it as a healing process. That’s one thing I refuse to do, is to say, “This happened to me,” and never discuss it again. I feel like my family has dealt with that enough. There’s enough shame. All I’m trying to do is get over that. And so, I let you deal with your shame and embarrassment before I was born. I’m not gonna deal with that after I’m born, you know? You guys were doing what you were doing in the seventies and eighties, you had all that time to be jerks or whatever it was that wasn’t good. And then when they wanted to do good, it was like they didn’t want to recognize the bad. And I was like, you gotta do that, sorry, you gotta go back to go forward a little bit.

And another thing is, if I wasn’t getting press, they wouldn’t give a shit. It was when I got into the Milwaukee Journal, a full page, front page article about me -- that right there was the thing that for them was like, “Oh shoot, she’s doing some things that other people care about” [laughs]. When I was just in college, they didn’t care! I would call them, they’d be like oh that’s cool, they would give me stuff to talk about, give me some insight. As soon as it starts to get a little bigger, and then I was on PBS, if it wasn’t for those things, they wouldn’t care at all. It’s interesting, what media does!

HB: Any projects or people that you wanna hype or are really into right now?

TB: I just moved to Detroit, and I’m learning about some new artists in the city. One is Tylonn J Sawyer. I’ve been really interested in his content, and we’re going to be working together. I’ve been in Detroit since August and I haven’t had a solo show yet -- I think when you’re new to a city you meet people in the area and figure out where you want to situate yourself as an artist. I’m so interested in collaborating with people, and we both admire each other’s work.

Check out Tyanna’s work at HPAC, up until April 24th, and stay tuned for her insight on navigating the prison system and how an art practice can address the affective residue of the PIC. 

[hydeparkart-blog]

Activations: A Conversation with Chris Kraus + Sabina Ott (Part 2)

Earlier this week, we posted part one of our conversation with Chris Kraus and Sabina Ott. Refresher: Chris is a feminist legend with a cult following based on her books and films (I Love Dick is one example). Sabina Ott is a Chicago art world star (Guggenheim fellow, Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-resident, educator, curator, and founder of Terrain Exhibitions.)

Chris and Sabina sat down with Helena Bassett of the Hyde Park Art Center and talked the role of the white artist in the contemporary moment, activism as theory, art as making space for transformation, what’s on their bookshelves, and some people they wanted to hype (Helena was super excited about Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage because it’s based in New Mexico where kye is from -- hit kye up for a bookclub with kyr colleague Ariel!) 

Helena Bassett: What is the role of the white artist in the contemporary moment, in which black and brown people are criminalized on a mass scale, put in cages, and killed by police? When art is being made in struggle, how do you conceive of your own role in this moment?

Sabina Ott: My work doesn’t address, in a didactic way, any of that reality. What I do well is creating a scene that’s so experiential that there’s a freedom that’s offered, a freedom that is for everyone, and it’s real. I know it’s real. All these classes are here [at the Hyde Park Art Center] and there are teens every day after school in the hall, and usually they’re teens of color. I’ve just been sitting in the mountain and usually kids come up and they’re just enthralled --  “I didn’t know an art thing could do this! I didn’t know a thing could do this!” What they’re saying is, “I didn’t know I could make this.” To me, that’s a different kind of offering.

So in talking about trauma, do you keep re-iterating the trauma or do you offer a space where that trauma becomes something else. For me in my work, I’ve had my share of traumas and I want to offer a space where it becomes something else. Not to deny that it exists, but that it becomes something else. Thats an opportunity. That’s how I think about it.

As a human being - I’m an activist. I go to protests, I do what I can to combat systemic racism and individual racism. But it feels very frustrating and limiting. As a human being it’s like [frustrated scream] but as an artist, I can do it non-directly.

HB: Lauren Berlant talks about two modes of approaching historical violence. Are you going to experience the re-injury of it again, like Mapplethorpe does, sort of to shock the viewer into their own racial imaginary through these photos? Or, do you not want to participate in the reinjury and instead choose to explode a world around it that can transform something differently? What I’m hearing you say is that you want to make room for that space of transformation, that you want to invent a thing for a world that doesn’t exist yet, or make space for a repair yet to come. And what I think is really important about what you said is that you are in the space; it’s not like ‘Here is my art! Take it!’ But you are there talking to people and that’s a pedagogical strategy -- it’s not just on a museum wall, you are literally alive and in the world with people.

Chris Kraus: These things bother me, all the time, on a daily basis. But I can only work on one thing at a time as a writer. Summer of Hate came out of that. I couldn’t breathe during the Bush years -- the American flag lapel pins and the war, the introduction of screens everywhere, and then personally being in the Southwest and close to the border. Seeing the prison system up so close. Things that I always theoretically knew, but seeing that being confirmed with actual people that I knew. I spent 2-3 years writing a book about that.

But I have another chance with Semiotext(e), to act on these feelings. We have an activist series now that’s one of the streams in print with Semiotext(e) called Active Agents, where we’ve been looking beyond theory towards publishing work of and about more domestic activism. We’re trying to get Jackie Wang to do a project. Did you see the ebook called “Lies: Everything We Write Will Be Used Against Us”? She was a member of that collective. She wrote Against Innocence, a brilliant text that we published in a pamphlet series in 2014 for the Whitney. We’ve also been working with Sergio González Rodríguez, who was a journalist from Mexico City who was very involved in reporting from the Juarez femicides and murders. We’ve done two of his books and are about to do a third book of his, this time on the murder of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa. It’s already come out in Spanish, we will do the American version of it.

HB: How does that work, shifting from a focus on theory to this Activations series?

CK: It’s very fluid. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to publish theory or fiction anymore. The Active Agents thing started long ago when Sylvere and I did a book together by some former Black Panthers when Dhoruba Bin Wahad was just being released from prison. And we knew someone who was friends with Dhoruba’s partner, Tanaquil Jones, and we published those texts within the book Still Black, Still Strong. So the imprint has been going since then and we keep looking for things that will fall into it because we think all the things animate each other. The activism is a reflection of the theory, especially the theory that we published in the last decade, which is Italian economic theory. Everything about the collapse, before/during/after -- Christian Marazzi, Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato -- those are really important books about the global economy.

The fiction books recently are kind of a way of sharing the psychic other side of this macro economic structure. One of our books just out, Natasha Staggs Surveys: A Novel, was reviewed in the New York Times today. The first time ever a Semiotext(e) has ever been reviewed in the New York Times.

SO: What I like about Semiotext(e), even though it’s been going for 40 years, is that there’s always this underground aspect of what it is you do that is really powerful. It’s stealth.

HB: Are there any questions you two would like to ask each other?

CK + SO: No.

HB: You know everything?

CK + SO: Yeah.

SO: We know everything.

CK: We do. We do.

HB: I want to let you go soon, so I’m just going to present my last three questions and you can choose between them: What’s on your bookshelf? What are you craving? Who is someone you want to hype, that you’re really interested in right now? Or you can just rapidly list off answers.

CK: I’ll give you the truthful answer. I’m traveling so it’s more like what’s in my backpack. Wuthering Heights for the plane, because I’ve never read it. Bruce Boone, a San Francisco New Narrative writer, he’s an incredible writer, his work changed my life when I read it in the early 80s and we’re reading together April 2nd and so I thought I should re-read some of his work. He wants to talk about UFOs and aliens and I need to kind of be up with it. So that’s the bookshelf. I’m also craving time to get back to Baja to work on another chapter of my book. I’m more than halfway through and every time I have to leave it now, it’s very frustrating. So I’m craving to be left in peace and finish my book. What do I want to hype? Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage is coming out in a couple of weeks. As a New Mexican, you must read this book. It’s about two girls growing up in Los Cruces, it’s synchronous with  all the border disasters of the 90’s and NAFTA and she kind of brings together NAFTA issues with Tiqqun young girl issues. It’s a brilliant book: 

SO: Thats a hard one, for me. I would like to hype Anna Showers-Cruser, who’s my assistant but more importantly she’s a grad student at the University of Chicago, and I’m really interested in her work. She’s really into materials as well. Iris Bernblum, she has a show at Aspect Ratio, my gallery. It’s really good, it’s creepy. I also have a book answer. I’ve been really bad -- I’ve been listening to audiobooks but I only get halfway through everything -- bad attention span. I have a book that I’m trying to read, though. Margaret Cavendish, who is dead but she was around in the 1700s I believe, she wrote a book called The Blazing World. It’s a science fiction book where she proposes this matriarchy. She was one of those disappeared women authors. She was from a wealthy family, she wrote constantly, she wrote tons of books, and she has pretty much disappeared. I got interested in it because I really like that Siri Hustvedt book, The Blazing World, which is a new book written about a woman artist who has no success and everyone trashes her work. So she gets three guys to be the frontmen to her work and each time the people love her work but it’s under the name of a young man. She gets these false identities. Its this really internal, great, weird story that I loved. It freed me. You think about all the women that have been working, that have always been secondary. You just get buried -- you’re not a sexy package with a dick. [Shared laughter]

- iris bernblum’s work. 

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). Together we hope to draw attention to the gender imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women’s names to everyone’s lists.

Since their founding in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have continued to hit the nail on the head in terms of issues that are facing the art world and the rest of the world. Their innovative work is nicely represented at the Brooklyn Museum in a number of areas including the current exhibition entitled Agitprop!, as well as in the Sackler collection and in its Feminist Art Database and other web based resources. The Museum Library also has some very cool holdings that document their work. 

Greatest Hits, an artists’ book, published by Pyramid Atlantic, made up of bound postcards representing the Guerrilla Girls’s Conscience of the Art World posters including The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, We Sell White Bread and At Last! Museums will no longer discriminate against women and minority artists. The Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum  Activity Book, is a comic book-style call to action published by Printed Matter. 

Their poster from 2002 also resonates with the issues of today in regard to the need for diversity—especially at the Oscars. The image made a great billboard and the resulting poster in Brooklyn’s collection is inscribed to Elizabeth Sackler with the message “Make Trrrouble” by Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz. 

Find more publications from the Guerrilla Girls here.

Can you name #5WomenArtists?

Posted by Deirdre Lawrence Photos by Brooke Baldeschwiler

[mymodernmet]

Artist Fills Massive Inflatable Dome with Tremendous 360° Landscape Drawings

[lalalaleilala-blog]

Migraine Hell, available this weekend at the Small Press Expo and soon online.

[hydeparkart-blog]

Chicago Artist Leila Abdelrazaq

[filterphoto]

Call for Entry for Aint-Bad Magazine Issue 11

http://www.aintbadmagazine.com/call-for-entry/2016/03/01/issue-no-11/

As of 2016, Brooklyn is the most unaffordable housing market in the nation, Los Angeles is slowly running out of water while the traffic chips away at everyone’s sanity, and Chicago has an ever growing problem of violence and corruption in local government. And though in the American Metropolis the creative mind is in high demand, the competition is steeper than ever before, and the economy in which artists must survive is equally as unforgiving. But despite all this, artists and hopefuls are still pouring into these cities, searching for a creative community that is unlike anywhere else in the country.

Aint-Bad Magazine is looking for your work. We are seeking photographs and written work made by contemporary artists who are thriving, working, building community, or simply trying to get by in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles. A-B is interested in artists who have uprooted and displaced themselves from home in order to continue working in the industry, or artists who have seen their very homes in these cities change from the constant influx of people seeking a new life.

Are you living and working in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago? Have you created work about one of these cities in the past? We want to see how you live in the city and why. What motivates you to get out and shoot? What challenges have you experienced while keeping yourself afloat in these urban environments that are often merciless and sometimes impossible?

This call for entry will be curated into a physical publication, and in addition will be curated into a variety of exhibitions and pop up shows in each of these three cities. By submitting to this call you are eligible for both the printed publication and the gallery exhibitions.

Submission Guidelines – Deadline June, 1st, 2016.

Entry Fee – $20

Send 15-20 photographs.

Size your images to : 1000px on the longest side 72dpi, sRGB, jpeg format.

Written submissions are accepted in .doc and .pdf formats. Maximum of 1500 words.

Label the files with your name and numeration. (Example: firstname_lastname_1.jpg)

Please date the work and include relevant titles.

Accompanying the work please include a detailed artist statement, biography and a link to your website.

Photo courtesy of Tim Bradley

[criticalmera]

John H White - Black Balloon Salesman On South Side Chicago’s 47th Street

[octopusgirl]

Solidarity With Refugees

[melaniecervantes]

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Akonadi Foundation’s iInvited me to create a poster they will distribute in recognition of the ongoing struggle against White Supremacy.

This piece is called the Power to Heal Our Hearts.

My own experiences with racist structures started early on in my life when I was forced to assimilate into an English-only classroom even though I was a native Spanish speaker. Though I was only five years old, it wasn’t difficult to comprehend that there was little value placed on the language my parents taught me. As I got older, I continued to have experiences that made me internalize a hatred for who I was. I hated having brown skin and wished my mom would let me bleach my hair blonde. The harm I experienced was so deep that by the time I was seven, I had internalized the bigotry I experienced via my fellow schoolmates, teachers and the racist policies of the school system. It wasn’t until I attended college and I joined a campus organization that I started working on undoing internalized oppressions and started to feel affirmed in my identity and the collective experiences of my community.

Systems of oppression like White Supremacy are structured into laws and policies that are then reproduced by everyday people. The logic of these systems over time and practice gets embedded in our thinking and our actions and can result in people consciously and unconsciously inflicting harm and trauma in the community.

Today, several community organizers in my life talk about the need to work at the intersection of culturally rooted healing and community organizing. This approach resonates with my own experiences and inspired me to create this piece, which illustrates how I see organizing. For me, organizing is a process for individual and collective healing through building power to achieve large changes in society that value each of us as sacred beings with interconnected lives.

If you would like a free poster visit http://akonadi.org/gallery/request-a-poster/

[hydeparkart-blog]

Activations: A Conversation with Chris Kraus and Sabina Ott (Part One)

Chris Kraus is a feminist legend with a cult following for her books and films (I Love Dick is one example). She’s really good friends with Sabina Ott -- Guggenheim fellow, Jackman Goldwasser Chicago artist-in-resident, educator, curator, and founder of Terrain Exhibitions. 

Chris and Sabina sat down with Helena Bassett of the Hyde Park Art Center and talked Chris’s “commie” ideological core, Sabina’s use of play and movement, the best way to read Gertrude Stein, and the poets who inspired Kathy Acker. Stay tuned for part two of their conversation! 

Helena Bassett: How did y’all met? How did this conversation start happening?

Chris Kraus: Do you even remember, Sabina? We met at Art Center. Sabina was full time faculty at Art Center in Los Angeles and I was visiting there sometimes in the summer with Sylvere Lotringer,  the character in I Love Dick and the founder of Semiotext(e) -- and my then husband. Sabina, you were looking for a way out of LA and then you found one… and you said ‘do you want to take my job and do you want to take my house?’ Take my job. Take my house. And I said OK! We got to be really closer friends after that.

Sabina Ott: And you wrote I Love Dick that summer. In my house. That’s my claim to fame: I Love Dick was written in my house.

CK: Sabina was one of the very few people who were supportive of I Love Dick when I was writing it, but we also looked and talked about her artwork. I remember one of our first meetings was you invited me over to do a studio visit, so my first memory of our being together is talking about painting. I missed Pink Melon Joy [Sabina’s show at the Chicago Cultural Center] but when I look at this work now, it’s as if seeing this process that has taken 20 years fully realized; the really interesting thing for me about this conversation is that I’ve seen Sabina’s work develop over all these years.

HB: What do you see as different?

CK: All of the elements are in the early work, but they’ve leapt out of their old frames and they’re performing something in this new work that makes them completely what they are meant to be. They have fulfilled their destiny.

SO: This is really similar to things that I’ve been working on for 20 years. The first painting that I showed in a gallery in Los Angeles was an image of a mountain and a rose, and that was in 1985 -- the exhibition was called Fairy Tales. So I’ve been working with these images for a very long time. The video [in the current exhibition] is almost identical to my last series of paintings -- I was using text, I using the letters r-o-s-e, I was using silhouettes. It was so weird when I was working with this, I was like “oh my god, this is so much like what I was trying to do with painting, except it’s moving.” It’s better. It needed to move. When I started making those paintings, I wanted to use photographic images, but it was pre-digital really. Now you can digitize any substrate.

CK: You always wanted them to be liquid.

SO: True. And I think artists tend to have one or two ideas. I have one or two ideas. Although, Chris has more ideas. Your work always has a core that’s consistent; your ideological core is always at the center. You’re a total communist, socialist, communal, radical, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal thinker. It’s something you came to through your own experience and because you’re brilliant you can attach how other philosophers informed it. Your worldview is very core, very consistent.

CK: No one has said that Sabina, but I agree with you.

HB: Do you have a consistent argument, Sabina, or has it changed through the different forms?

SO: I love how you put that. I was reading your questions and I thought, “I know this time period” [shared laughter]. Ok - the argument is the same. My proposal is that you would come into the space, or any space that I make, and you would be engaged with play. You would be confounded by the improbable and it would lift and separate you to the point where you’re free. Your imagination is there, you’re just there, you’re present and that’s the Stein thing. You’re in the present is present is present. I’ve seen it happen. That’s what weird; I never saw it happen with a room full of my paintings.

HB: Do you think about play as a strategy as well, Chris?

CK: Well, I mean there is no way to compare what my sense of play would be as a writer to what Sabina is talking about. She’s creating this play space for people that is informed by all these visual lexicons. It’s emotional, it’s conceptual, and it’s public! For the writer, the play is private. I sit at my desk and it’s like 4, 5, 6 hours -- and eventually the connections begin to arise, and then they’ll be in the book. Other people can experience them, but they happen alone through me.

SO: But also with writing, writing ends up being descriptive as well -

CK: No! Not merely descriptive. You’re talking about your work, it enacts something. That’s what makes a piece of writing exciting: it’s not merely descriptive; its enacting something there. I feel like when I’m writing -- and the reason I drag and stall every day until noon -- is because it’s like performance. Something is happening there. But it can only happen alone with one person, and then people can experience it later.

HB: I was trying to think about the relationship between writing and about these embodied scenes of play through the lens of performativity. Where is the performativity of readers and how do they play?

CK: The performative happens in the writing, and hopefully the reading experience is entertaining and people enjoy it. The very best experience in the world is to give a reading, and someone comes up after the reading with the book and it’s completely dog eared and full of underlining and yellow post its. That’s the engagement. From a very private experience, it becomes someone else’s private experience.

HB: The scene you just described is not just private, though. Something is leaking, when someone comes up with their private experience and puts it in friction with your private experience; something shifts.

CK: Of course. The nature of reading is that it’s solitary and internal, and if a book is successful it gets inside the person in some way and people bond with each other because they’ve had a similar experience.

SO: I wanted to do a performance in here, which I think I will do spontaneously because they didn’t schedule it. I wanted just to have a microphone and have tons of used Gertrude Stein books and have everyone have a book and just have people pick a passage and read it all around. So it would be an exquisite corpse of Gertrude Stein readings, which, in a way, enacts what you’re asking. The text becomes inside the space, activated by the sculpture. But the text itself is then performed by other people, and lives in this other way. That, to me, is how Stein needs to be read. Even Making of Americans is so long. Have you tried to read it? Its very long.

CK: Every year there is a marathon Gertrude Stein reading somewhere in New York.

SO: We need one here. We always have James Joyce marathon readings. Eh. Not the same thing. It’s always been really important in my work to have the participant be physically active in the space. Even when it failed in other installations and things, that’s what I was after. For me, if I have to talk to a group, I have to be standing and to have that space activated - its how I learn, it’s how I speak, it’s how I am. You know something through the physical experience of it, so if you’re really moving through space and walking through it, your body develops a cellular memory -- and you change.

Pink Melon Joy was spread out over three rooms and the story of the Divine Comedy is totally a device to allow for that movement. It acknowledges the desire to have a narrative, but the narrative is outside of the space. We know it’s referenced, it’s from a book, it’s there. The experience itself is all at once, everywhere. It takes for granted that you saw the other one and now you go to this one.

CK: There’s all these different traditions in literature, and people act like something just erupted overnight. But it always looks back -- maybe it’s not the dominant tradition, but for every kind of current practice you can usually see it linking up to some other tradition. For example, I couldn’t believe people would talk so enthusiastically about I Love Dick and never mention Kathy Acker’s work as an influence. As if it all began with that book. Kathy Acker’s work was a huge influence on me. In writing her biography, I’m tracing back over all the things that were influences on her.

HB: What’s one interesting thing you’ve learned?

CK: Well, she read a lot of Latin poetry. She majored in Classics, or she started to. She did Classics in high school, she did Classics for two years of college and in her work she read a lot of Latin poets like Empiricus, Sextus, and Catullus, who were being re-discovered by New York School and Post-New York School people at that time. Catullus being, “it’s sexual, it’s funny, it’s in the first person, it’s a direct address,” -- it’s like this 20th century person reaching through 2000 years of history to you, it’s amazing. All of that work was being translated for the first time in the mid-century. It was a big influence on Kathy and a lot of other writers.

HB: I was designing this game for this class I’m in, and I was convinced that our game was the first of its kind. It’s like a pervasive exploration game on community care networks in times of (mental health) crisis. But my teacher was like, No! Letterboxing existed in the 19th century, where people would bury letters and other people would find them and leave behind another letter, like residue. All through the Victorian era, that’s how some of the first epistolary novels were actually written, through this letterboxing tradition. I was blown away! The fact that everything is coming from a historical projection and you can change its pattern of sedimentation but it’s not like you’re this new phenomenon.

SO: It should be a relief. You have your family, and those are your relatives that are building all of it,  and you just access that history.

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). Together we hope to draw attention to the gender imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women’s names to everyone’s lists.

Rachel Kneebone is recognized for her ornately figurative sculptures that, in their use of traditional porcelain techniques and poetic titles, meld historical references with contemporary imagery and ideals. 

The vertical structure of The Paradise of Despair subversively alludes to the triumphal column, a classical monument to military victory, dating back to ancient Rome, that can be read as a phallic symbol. In this sculpture, however, Kneebone’s signature headless, mutating bodies invite conflicting associations of orgiastic frenzy and corpses piled up after battle, as if they simultaneously climb and collapse in a teeming mass. Undermining the fantasy of invincibility and mastery inherent in the triumphal marble monument, these delicate porcelain figures tear each other down in their attempts to ascend to great heights.

Can you name #5WomenArtists?

[filterphoto]

As a way to celebrate Filter Photo’s upcoming exhibition, Context 2016, we will be featuring several artists from the show on our blog. We asked each photographer to provide a bio, an artist statement, and a response to this question:

This year’s theme for Context 2016 addresses notions of fragility and vulnerability. How are these ideas conveyed within your own photograph practice?

We will begin today with the work of Patty Carroll!

-

Patty Carroll

Bio:

Patty Carroll for many years taught photography and was Adjunct Full Professor Photography at SAIC until 2014. As an Adobe Instructor in Photoshop, she does Photoshop training at Ascend Training, Chicago. Education includes BFA in Graphic Design, University of Illinois, and MS in Photography, Institute of Design, IIT. Grants/Prizes include 2003 Artist Fellowship, Illinois Arts Council, 2011 Art Takes Miami, Photography Category, 2014 Photolucida Critical Mass: Top 50. 

Selected one-person museum exhibits include: Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England, State of Illinois Gallery and Museum, Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio, TX, White Box Museum, Beijing, China, Northern Illinois University Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Zheijhang Museum of Art, Hangzhou, China. 

Authored/Photographed books: Spirited Visions, Culture is Everywhere, Living the Life: The World of Elvis Tribute Artists, Man Bites Dog: The Culture of Hot Dogs in America, and a monograph of Anonymous Women, to be published by Daylight Books, 2016. Artist Residences include: Akiyoshidai Arts Village, Japan, Anderson Ranch, Colorado, Texas A&M University, Columbia College, Chicago, and currently at Studios Inc, Kansas City, MO. Work included in many public and private collections.

Artist Statement and Response:

The scenes and narratives that I create in the studio are about women who use their objects and décor to shore themselves up against a dark, scary world. Obsessing and perfecting home life with its objects, decoration, and activities, fills a void of futility, and creates usefulness beyond caring for family or career. We are all vulnerable to past and present hurts, but choose different ways of pushing it out of our lives. Instead of approaching these issues directly, humor is my ally to gently make fun of myself and other women who find themselves creating the perfect home. 

The project started when we were living in England, and I was only known through my domestic status as Mrs. Jones, my married name. It left me feeling like I was lost or fading into the woodwork, literally. 

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago provided the basis of all of my work, and I continually seek to come to terms with it. I grew up when suburban life was idealized; the home was a place of perfection and harmony, free from harsh realities of the city, without crime, or messy interiors, where everyone’s drapes and sofa matched, where people were normal, without dark little secrets. It was at time when the “woman’s place was in the home.” I am photographically creating worlds that debunk, critique and satirize these myths of claustrophobic perfection.

Website:

www.pattycarroll.com

[ameerahvania]

CHEN PENG AW 16/17

[brooklynmuseum]

We on the Adult Programming team are constantly in the process of dreaming up new and exciting ways to connect the art that is present at the Brooklyn Museum to the lived realities of our dynamic public. One of our upcoming special exhibitions that we are extremely excited for and are in the midst of programming is Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, opening April 29th. Using traditional African masks and masquerade culture as a site of departure for 25 contemporary artists to draw inspiration from, this vibrant exhibition reflects a multi-media dialogue between imagined pasts, contemporary realities and future possibilities. One of the things Disguise asks us to do is question the position of African masks in the museum space. These objects were not made for display but had a use, function, and performative life that often gets lost behind the transparent glass and static pedestals that they now occupy in museum galleries around the world. What happens when artists confront that life—the spiritual, cultural, political dynamism that lies behind cloaking one’s identity or transforming into something that is other? What does this reflection on cultural practices tell us about ourselves and the world around us?

From a programmatic point of view we have eagerly dived head first into creating events that tease out the complexities subsumed by this exhibition. We are intrigued by the multimedia components special to Disguise’s engagements with digital technologies and are brainstorming ways to bring this virtual component to our programming. We are also looking forward to working with many of the artists in the show and creating opportunities for artist and audience engagement. Through our programming we hope to celebrate the vastness and complexity of the African Diaspora but also to showcases the linkages and continuities that exist within this dynamic space. With sound, video, sculpture, photography and installation art present in this exhibition Disguise is truly a multi-sensory experience. We want our programs to capture this dynamism by creating immersive events that explore how we as human-beings reference cultural legacies that are given to us by our predecessors but are also constantly in the process of reinventing ourselves, re-discovering our pasts in order to imagine new possibilities for our future. So, mark your calendars for May 7th for a First Saturday that celebrates Disguise and keep a look out for the other Disguise related programs that we have up our sleeves waiting to be revealed in the early summer!

Posted by Omololu Refilwe Babatunde Photos from Saya Woolfalk’s performance at Art off the Wall: Wangechi Mutu, February 2014. (This spring, see Woolfalk’s work included in Disguise)!

[saic-graduate-studies]

BFA Show Now On View in the Sullivan Galleries

Edin Cook and Kaleigh Moynihan, All of the Things in this Entire Room, 2015, mixed media.  Courtesy of the SAIC website.  

More than 270 talented SAIC students completing undergraduate degrees this spring exhibit their innovative work. SAIC promotes crossing disciplines and challenging received assumptions, and the results of this approach are showcased in this exhibition. 

March 12–April 1, 2016 Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor