Spot 1: Monumental Interventions
Monumental Futures
TK Smith maps a trajectory of interventions toward the articulation of a monument aesthetic for the African diaspora.
Nate Lewis: Latent Tapestries
Nate Lewis and Tash Nikol Smith discuss seeing the unseen, the transition from being a nurse to an artist, and the overlapping influences of diagnostics and art making.
The Political Afterlife of the Babri Masjid
Tausif Noor explores histories of a destroyed Muslim monument in India, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and Sahmat Collective’s formation and multimedia practices of response and resistance.
Spot 2: Monumental Futures Dossier
Beverly Buchanan
Beverly Buchanan’s practice referenced southern vernacular architecture to interrogate relationships between Black people, history, and the landscape.
Che Onejoon
Che’s project makes evident how monuments are political tools that can manipulate, erase, uncover, and idealize histories, not just in one’s own country but around the world.
Thomas J. Price
In an attempt to expand the perimeters of classical sculpture, Price creates figurative works of Black men—and in this single case, a Black woman—in bronze and aluminum at various scales.
Paul Ramírez Jonas
In a nation where symbols are often divisive, Paul Ramírez Jonas reveals the potential of appropriating monument aesthetics to bring people together.
Spot 3: From the archives
Where is the Art World Left?
Where is the artworld “Left” in the age of “trickle-down,” homelessness, the rise of the Aryan Nation and corporate art coma: a dehumanization of art and artist into a common denominator of profit?
Meteorite & Monument
Is this meteorite the only intergalactic rock to have struck a work of modern art?
Much Ado About Nothing
An empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square sparks a public debate.
Philip Glass: Frontiers of the Acceptable
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Thomas Rain Crowe and Philip Glass talk boundaries, social change, and the “new” music of the 21st century.
Spot 4: Public Trust
Paul Ramírez Jonas: Disappearing Vows, Disguised Lies
Spot 5: Living & Working
Chang Yuchen: Language, Use, Value
Traveling from China to the US in early 2020, the strangely fragmented temporality of solitude, and feeling useless.
Carolyn Lazard: Living Here and Together
On the limitations of institutional critique, and the transformative beauty of disability justice frameworks.
Lilly McElroy: Absurdity Is a Protest
Wrestling with light and absurdity in a world transformed by a global virus.
Spot 6: Origins of Creativity
Colin Renfrew: Where Are We Going?
An archaeologist at the University of Cambridge known to ask big-picture questions, such as “Where do we come from?” and “Where are we going?,” answers some of ours.
We Were Creative Before We Were Human
Freshly back from excavating in the Afar desert of northeast Ethiopia, Yonas Beyene PhD sat down in his Addis Ababa office to discuss the origins of human creativity.
Gender and Artistic Practice in the Ice Age
Keeper of antiquities and curator of the blockbuster 2013 exhibition “Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind,” Jill Cook explains the idea of spiritual landscapes, the surreal continuity between ancient and modern artistic practice, and gender equality in the Paleolithic.
Spot 7: WALKING AND WAITING
Wong Ping: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Urban life can be alienating; it limits our mobility and entraps us in fantasy. In Hong Kong, an artist’s erotic animations offer brief release.
The Patty Chang Landscape
“Mao Tse-tung once said that the south had a lot of water and it would be okay if the north borrowed a little.” An artist tracks wandering lakes through piss and tears, from Central Asia to Queens.