A U.S.-Born Editor Arrives via London and Berlin
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Guest editor Fahamu Pecou led off the year with a spectacular study of Art x Hip-Hop, begun appropriately with an invocation of trickster Eshu and the diasporic tales of Basquiat and Kendrick Lamar and flowing onward through the burgeoning of queer hip-hop, a new-millennial black dandyism, and neo-hip-hop cultural expression. After that, Victoria Camblin brought her fresh editorial sensibility to the magazine, exploring the Bucharest Biennial that never was, the Slavs and Tatars collective’s invitation to Central Asian art spaces to exhibit at Art Dubai, experimental arts education in West Africa, a proposal for art reflective of a people’s culture independent of state structures, and, among other things…Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewing an emotionally perceptive spam bot, Douglas Coupland defining “occession,” the use of smart-phone apps to renew public protest—the usual, plus surprises. Bruce Mau made a return via a commencement address, new British ceramics nestled next to discussions of the data self, flow charts of process cohabited with different ways of looking at the Whitney Biennial, and the visual transgressions of Chicago Imagism got a fresh examination alongside an interview with Jay Kinney about how his influential Gnosis magazine coupled occultism and technology with the spirit of American underground comix. If all this weren’t enough, the regional imperative reappeared in Franklin Sirmans’ combination of global and local in New Orleans’ Prospect 3, and internationally famous Atlanta-based musician and vernacular artist Lonnie Holley shared a page spread with a memorial homage to a beloved Atlanta chef and “matriarch of sorts.”