Anuradha Vikram is a critic, curator, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been an Instructor in art history and theory at San Jose State University, College of Marin, and UC Berkeley. She has curated exhibitions for Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, as well as Kala Art Institute, ProArts, SOMArts and other Bay Area venues. Her writing has appeared in Artillery, Art Practical, Afterimage, LEONARDO, and OPEN SPACE: The SFMOMA Blog, as well as in books and catalogues on contemporary American artists including Sonya Rapoport and Chitra Ganesh. From 2009-2013, she was Curator at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery in the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice. Previous positions include Gallery Director at Aicon Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; Program Director at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; Associate Producer of ISEA2006 Symposium and concurrent Zero One San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, San Jose, CA; and Exhibitions Director at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA. Prior to relocating to the Bay Area from New York, she managed the studio of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. She has an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from New York University.
How is Blackness performed? Most African American contemporary artists will admit in confidence that they are often expected to perform their Blackness for the power players of the art mainstream, regardless of their choice of artistic medium. Artists working in two dimensions such as Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Wangechi Mutu have gained currency by creating work that makes the construction of black identity[…..]
#access #gentrification #street art #painting #historicity A panel at the San Francisco Art Institute on October 20 in conjunction with the Walter and McBean Galleries exhibition Energy That is All Around – Mission School: Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, posed the question: “Mission School: Yes or No?” The general consensus, both on the panel and in the wider Bay Area[…..]
#politics #statehood #borders #biennials #nationalism The Venice Biennale is fundamentally shaped by its founders’ belief in statehood. Each nation-state secures its site, much like an embassy, and asserts its self-image through the choice of curators and artists. Four pavilions at the 2013 Biennale demonstrate how the notion of the nation-state is constructed and deconstructed in the face of contemporary global pressures. For Bangladesh, the pavilion[…..]
#gentrification #displacement #race #class #technology #industry #neo-colonialism Any conversation among artists these days is bound to turn to the question of gentrification—the process of urban renewal by private developers that ultimately displaces poor residents in favor of the upwardly mobile. Modernism in art has always accompanied displacement of poor citizens from city centers, from the time of the Impressionists when Georges-Eugène Haussmann refashioned Paris, to[…..]
The title of this year’s Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), illuminates the event’s political ideology via its philosophical and curatorial conceits. The main exhibition centers on a utopian fantasy of comprehensive knowledge, aspiring to a completist vision of human achievement with the caveat of inevitable failure built in. Though self-reflective in that sense, this theme does not acknowledge the long shadow of[…..]
If the Venice Biennale is the United Nations of contemporary art, then the Giardini is its Security Council. The park’s stately pavilions belong to the (mostly European) nations that were best situated to claim them in the early- to mid-twentieth century. National pavilions are organized by state entities and can be counted on to present a government-sanctioned view of art, which tends toward the conceptually[…..]
#institutions #race #jeffreydeitch #elibroad #lacma #moca #manifestdestiny #americanexpansionism Los Angeles museums have recently demonstrated the old adage that “nothing endures but change.” Since 2006, Michael Govan has been in charge of transforming the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from a Victorian-style encyclopedic museum into a powerhouse for contemporary art. During his tenure, Govan has recruited top American curators, including Franklin Sirmans and Christine Y. Kim, from privately endowed museums to his massive[…..]
