Web 2021
An Eye for An Eye — Bambitchell’s Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
Bugs and Beasts works to remind viewers that such stories aren’t simply dusty curiosities from the footnotes of history books, but practices that fundamentally shaped how we came to understand the intersections between performance, punishment, and the social and legal limits of personhood.
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.
Look, it’s daybreak, dear, time to sing
Against Closure: John Akomfrah and the Monumental
John Akomfrah’s practice can be considered in relation to the problematics of monuments, and it is apt to do so at a time of widespread decommissioning of statues depicting individuals long celebrated for their roles in dominant narratives of human progress.
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
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.
Karen Holmberg: Archaeology in an Emergency
In Part Two of this two-part conversation, Karen Holmberg discusses the seemingly intractable problem of convincing people that they are in danger, or helping them to see that the world is changing around them and encouraging them to mitigate, or prepare for, those changes.
Jared Buckhiester: Male Trouble
Jared Buckhiester and Logan Lockner discuss the thrill and humiliation of attraction, the influences of Billy Budd and Querelle on Buckhiester’s current exhibition, and the question of how much of a person’s “arousal template”—the fantasies, thoughts, images, sights, and smells that turn you on—is given, rather than chosen.
Boy With Luv
BTS’ offers a new incarnation of the boy band, one that refuses the limitations of Western, propagandized stereotypes and White supremacist ideals, intent instead on promoting self-acceptance.