TBA is Portland, Oregon’s Time Based Art festival, a group of performance, dance, music, and visual happenings hosted by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. The visual portion of the festival is held at what the institute refers to as “The Works,” an abandoned circa-1910 redbrick former high school. It’s an iconic building: if you grew up in the 80s watching after-school specials (or if[…..]
Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion. Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist. “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.” We talked about[…..]
One of the worst things about summer is also one of the best: it’s transitory. Like an awkward first love affair, that fact that it’s all over so fast is exactly what makes summer such a mythologized season. In the art world, summer is the spiritual home to the group show, a time to test out new ideas or bring together artists still in an[…..]
Ai Weiwei is without a doubt one of the most intelligent makers negotiating the art/craft divide. Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon is his first museum exhibition on the west coast, and a fitting venue for an international contemporary artist engaged in a deep dialog with Chinese culture, art history, ceramics and craft. The exhibition addresses ceramic[…..]
Today, Daily Serving continues our seven-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate the work of seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate[…..]
Ghada Amer is known for appropriating images of women taken from pornography, so it’s not unusual to encounter the stylistic conventions of x-rated material in her work. At her recent solo exhibition at Cheim & Read, big-breasted women display spread legs and vulvas; two women clutch each other passionately as one penetrates the other with a dildo; a single woman is seen from behind in[…..]
Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light[…..]
