As part of our ongoing partnership with Beautiful/Decay, today we bring you the installation work of artist Ni Haifeng. For the better part of the last decade, Ni has been working with concepts of manufacturing and production, illustrating, in the words of curator and scholar Pauline J. Yao, “the symbolic systems that govern the movement of certain goods across international borders.” This article was written[…..]

The title of El Museo del Barrio’s biennial exhibit Here Is Where We Jump refers to one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Braggart.” In the tale, a man boasts of an extraordinary jump he once made in Rhodes. He claims witnesses will attest to the jump if the listeners ever visit his home country. Eventually, someone challenges the man to reproduce the jump, saying, “Jump here, jump now.[…..]

Ontario College of Art & Design’s professional gallery space, Onsite [at] OCAD U, is raw and industrial. Its warehouse-like ambiance is enhanced by the cinder block walls, industrial piping crisscrossing the ceiling, and bank of floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. These features present a number of restrictions when mounting an exhibition, a challenge for artists and curators in this unconventional gallery setting. In No Dull[…..]

Though I can’t remember the first time I saw Liz Magic Laser‘s work (and yes, it’s her given name), I was entranced by this video of her commission for the 2013 Armory Show in New York. So much artwork these days looks like it was made by committee, so why not explicitly use the methodology of a focus group to create the work for the commission? It’s[…..]

#race #class #access #commerce #representation #empowerment #codeswitching As the values of the contemporary art elite veer ever farther toward commerce, art with a social justice conscience is rallying in New York—arguably the center of the global art market. This summer, three prominent artists known for their political consciences have been drawing attention for thoughtful, research-heavy projects. In Chelsea, Hank Willis Thomas and the team of William Powhida and Jade Townsend have[…..]

The artist’s hand is evident from the moment you walk into BUSTER SIMPSON // SURVEYOR, the first comprehensive survey of the Seattle-based artist’s forty-year career, now on view at the Frye Museum of Art. Simpson has chiseled the exhibition title’s two parallel lines into the gallery wall (on which the rest of the title is painted), like a giant trail marker or series of bite[…..]

In 1776 Benjamin Franklin was a celebrity in France. In a series of portraits made during that year, Franklin was depicted wearing a fur hat, the same chapeau that French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was known for wearing. According to the French, this made Franklin an enlightened thinker, like Rousseau. In his painting A Momentary Enlightenment (2010), Philadelphia artist Alexander Rosenberg depicts himself in the same[…..]