The theme of this month’s Summer Session is celebrity, and today we’re thinking about how celebrity narratives can offer different possibilities for contextualizing our current moment. In a video from our friends at SFMOMA, artist Judy Chicago talks about her installation The Dinner Party (1974–79), in which she creates a banquet both to honor female heroes throughout Western history and to provide an alternative historical record that acknowledges[…..]

This Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today there are perhaps no celebrities more popular than fictional superheroes. Their popularity can serve as a valuable social tool, as Callie Humphrey’s review of artist Neil Rivas’ installation at Galería de la Raza shows, where the familiarity of superhero personae is used as a humanizing entry point into difficult conversations about illegal immigration. This review was originally published January 05, 2014. […..]

For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we bring you a video by Berlin-based artist Hannah Black that delves into the ideological battles found within the public’s interest in celebrity lives. In Team Jolie, Black plays off the infamous presumed romantic rivalry between actresses Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston, reading poetic verses over sections of each actress’s face that speak to the aesthetic, political, and[…..]

For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and the ways in which the ideas and connotations of celebrity impact our lives and our art. Today, we bring you three interwoven stories from our friends at Art Practical by Lindsey Boldt, Anne McGuire, and Steve Orth, who take the late, great Prince as the inspiration and guide for their surreal, collaborative project. This article was[…..]

For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today from our sister publication Art Practical we bring you Sean Uyehara’s exploration of celebrity’s affective underpinnings. Uyehara locates the tension between earnestness and irony as perhaps the core dynamic of celebrity experience, with the audience constantly vacillating between these two poles as they consider stories and lives outside of their own. This article was originally published July[…..]

For this Summer Session’s topic of celebrity, we bring you an article by former Daily Serving columnist Catherine Wagley, who explores artistic practices that take specific personages, both real and imagined, as their subject matter. Wagley’s piece begins the complex work of mapping out the intersections of fantasy and reality in the face of celebrity, and what’s at stake when they overlap. This article was originally[…..]

For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and therefore also its opposite: anonymity. Today we bring you a video clip from our friends at SFMOMA of Glenn Ligon on his 1997 exhibition Glenn Ligon: Day of Absence. Here, Ligon presents his subjects as generic figures, their faces turned away from the camera or out of frame, in order to play with the idea of[…..]