As university presidents, corporate CEOs, and political leaders on the left and right toss the terms “multiculturalism” and “postcolonial” around in speeches and promotional materials, I am reminded that these buzzwords of the new transnational order have resisted domestication and dilution through the sharp, thoughtful, uncomplacent writing of Homi K. Bhabha.[1] Bhabha’s recognition that cultures must be understood as complex intersections of multiple places, historical[…..]

Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. I am often torn when applying for jobs, residencies, and grants when it comes to the references section. Is it better to list the names of people you do not know[…..]

Today from our sister publication Art Practical we bring you Andrew Berardini’s article published in issue 8.3: Art can’t do anything if we don’t. Berardini finds the place where art and self-expression exist in the face of illicit power. He states, “If it does nothing else, art gives us authorship of our experience. Layers of meaning and exchange, the nuances of aesthetics and economics, and the complexity[…..]

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Sofia Villena Araya reviews En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance at SFMOMA. Jacolby Satterwhite, an African American artist well known for[…..]

Cynthia Daignault is always confounding our ideas about the nature of painting—and asks if it has an essential nature at all. In her latest show, The Pure Products of America Go Crazy, at CAPITAL in San Francisco (a sort of return home for a prodigal daughter educated at Stanford), she has done it again. Daignault has placed seventy oil-on-linen paintings like dinner plates on six[…..]

Is it still important to talk critically about Surrealism today? This avant-garde episode of international art history has been revisited over and over again, from tributes and revivals to critical works and retrospective exhibitions. From a purist, restricted view, Surrealism is reduced to a datable European movement that ended in the mid-20th century. For others, the term is a tradable currency, a flexible category used[…..]

Hank Willis Thomas has long illuminated the histories of racialized labor, Black cultural economies, politically crafted imagery, and their cumulative roads to revolution. His keen examinations of political gesture are steadily outgrowing their categorization as visual art and becoming increasingly discursive projects rooted in actualization. On the heels of his recent exhibition at Savannah College of Art and Design, Willis Thomas offers new avenues for[…..]