The speed with which the Hong Kong demonstrators’ informative zines have been distributed, collected, and even exhibited internationally is remarkable. We spoke with ZineCoop, one of the groups behind the effort, to discuss why they are so powerful.
If art and culture can go beyond symbolic power and occupy both poetic and utilitarian registers, Mladen Miljanović succeeds with his Didactic Wall exhibition.
The Bastard Cookbook is more than a collection of recipes; it is a form of resistance against nationalism and xenophobia — and an homage to co-creation rather than assimilation.
The book Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson published in 1994 has particular insights that go beyond institutional critique and into our individual complicities that are crucial to consider now.
The video art of Isuma, the first international media organization created by and for Indigenous peoples, highlights the contemporary and historical impasses they are forced to navigate.
A conversation with Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu, the founders of Look at Art. Get Paid., a program that pays people who wouldn’t otherwise visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and the institution.
The RISD Museum has held this Benin bronze head in its collection for 80 years. “No one would have given it up unless under duress,” the curators say. But tracing its provenance and repatriating it is no simple matter.
Current museum expansions are hung up on the concept of size. Instead, could we rethink the “grow or die” museum mentality of the 1990s and 2000s?
“(Some of) The Mechanics of Critique” is an instructional video by Lisi Raskin that unpacks how Enlightenment Era philosophies and epistemologies affect how we engage with the world around us.
Here’s what I learned from an intimate studio visit where these artists showed me their process, vision, and the goals fueling their work.
Nine curators share their favorite wall colors — a decision that constructs a sensibility for an exhibition, echoing around the artworks on view.
This is the first article in a series by Laura Raicovich, the recipient of Hyperallergic’s inaugural Journalism Fellowship for Curators, made possible by Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. Today, she connects Anand Giridharadas’s latest book on philanthropy and late-capitalism with useful questions about how cultural institutions function today.
“There is a deep need to examine the history of neutrality within museums and cultural institutions, to make visible its impacts, and to produce suggestions for its undoing, all in service of creating greater equity within the cultural sector—with the hope that if some change may be achieved within the arts, it might provide a structure for confronting societal inequities on a larger scale. To confront the myth of neutrality is no easy task as it is often so forcefully present and yet invisible, obscuring the systemic exclusion of people and artistic practices from consideration.”
“Given the status of immigrants and migrants in the US and indeed, the world over, and the persistent question of how cultural institutions must contend with rising xenophobia, nationalism, anti-black, brown, and LGBTQAI rhetoric, and assaults on many forms of freedom of expression, there has never been a more urgent time to make the case for cultural institutions offering spaces of sanctuary. At this particular moment of precarity, what structures of mutual care and support can the art world offer?”
Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), co-edited by Raicovich, Carin Kuoni, and Kareem Estefan, explores the urgent territory of artistic production and resistance. Assuming Boycott is an essential reader for today’s creative leaders and cultural practitioners, including original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. Far from withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a productive tool of creative and productive engagement.
An exploration of coincidences of history, light, space, duration, chaos theory, mathematics, memory, and Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field.
Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field is four hundred stainless steel poles, positioned two hundred and twenty feet apart, in the desert of central New Mexico. Over the course of several visits, it becomes, for Raicovich, a site for confounding and revealing perceptions of time, space, duration, and light; how changeable they are, while staying the same.
I think my friend’s eyes are tearing up. I know how she feels. I hold her hand. We are two women sitting in a coffee shop. Trying to lift one another’s spirits, and reminding each other of the pleasures of being. Sometimes we agree to make the rituals of life gleeful. Other times we want to start a revolution.
She once said to me, “What I am talking about is a new revolution in the labor movement…questioning the meaning of work͛ altogether.”
I wasn’t surprised, we often talk about this.
Written just prior to Raicovich assuming the role of director at the Queens Museum, this essay is a reflection of what role art and museums can play in society. She concludes, “It is up to institutions like the Queens Museum to enact and reflect the shifting patterns that describe points on the arc of our cultural moment. And just as bell hooks insists that we “open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions…enabl[ing] transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries,” places like the Queens Museum must create spaces, exhibitions, and programs to question and explore that which has been excluded and disregarded, and for inspiration and beauty in all its manifestations. Within this web, we may find our liberation.”
“I cannot bear to leave good tomatoes, nor anything else, on my plate. I’m not really hungry anymore, but I’m compelled by a force greater than biology, a voice pleading to leave nothing behind. I’m convinced it is my genes, the impact of my father’s, my grandparents’ experiences. The ghosts of their hardships emerge as I cringe seeing four long-cooked Italian flat beans, or two slices of glorious summer tomato, slide into the garbage. That one last bite of something, the ghosts say, ‘Eat it, eat it, don’t let it go to waste!’ Or, ‘Save it, you can mix it with ceci and scallions tomorrow. It will still be good. Just don’t throw it away, for goodness sake!’”
A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties (Publication Studio, 2014) was borne out of spam received over a period of several months. These emails circumvented spam filters by including odd texts beneath image-based ads for Viagra, Cialis and penis enlargement. As the same proper names continually surfaced, it seemed likely that these excerpts were taken from a longer text. In fact, they were lifted from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. These bits of text, once a Dickens novel, are reworked, strung together, and augmented to create a spy-story/melodramatic romance novel.