Interview
Pearl Cleage: Fragile Bodies on a Fragile Planet
The thing that strikes me more and more as I get older is how we spend so much time and energy and bluster building cities, having wars, dominating and insulting each other, when all the time, we are living inside these fragile bodies that have to exist on a fragile planet in the company of other fragile beings and unknown viruses.
Curtis Patterson: A Monument Maker Gets His Due
Melissa Messina, the show’s curator, speaks with Patterson about teaching, monuments to civil rights leaders, and his current studio practice, on the occasion of the artist’s first commercial gallery exhibition.
Itziar Barrio: Stella!—working on, and through You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid was filmed in multiple cities and makes overt narrative references to three films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), La estrategia del caracol (The Strategy of the Snail) (1993) and Accattone (1961).
Ge Yulu: Cutting In—Dances with the State and the Collective
Ge Yulu’s artistic practice playfully pulls at the strings of a social system that, although seemingly all-encompassing, is in fact a malleable structure consisting of individual human beings.
Doireann O’Malley: Floating Worlds Apart
Lydia Horne interviews Doireann O’Malley about getting lost, the building of virtual spaces, and presenting us with a post-human reality in their recent work, New Maps of Hyperspace_Test_01.
Hew Locke: A World Before the World We Know
Cosmo Whyte speaks with Hew Locke about how Locke’s work delves into deep histories of migration and colonialism.
Katherine Jentleson: Whose History of American Art?
Katherine Jentleson and Logan Lockner reflect on the creation of two concurrent exhibitions at the High Museum of Art—”Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe and “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America.”
Angela Ziqi Zhang and Maggie Crowley: Flash, Bang, Fizz
In the summer of 2021, two solo exhibitions in Chicago, one by Maggie Crowley and another by Angela Ziqi Zhang, echoed one another in many ways: connected by the dotted lines of the artists’ friendship and shared history, the presentations revealed common concerns—around value and experience, affect and attention—that play out in both of their practices through distinct visual and material registers.
Mark Thomas Gibson: Chaos Is The Season
Will Corwin interviews Mark Thomas Gibson about Honoré Daumier’s influence on Gibson’s works of political satire, keeping momentum after a political win, and the challenges of building upon a broken foundation.
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya: Devastated and Hopeful
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya is an art- and myth-maker whose work distorts the imaginary lines that exist on land between states. His chimeric “lil beings,” as he calls them, are reconfigurations of found, personal, and organic materials, which he animates with allegories of displacement, inspired by ancient Mesoamerican myth and folklore.