This week, the New Museum opened a major exhibition of works by path-breaking multimedia and video artist Pipilotti Rist. As author Elspeth Walker observed in her 2015 review, Rist’s work confounds the divide between the human body, the natural world, and video technologies. Fielding otherworldly experiences made from footage of this world, Rist’s installation likely felt hypnotic to many viewers for a reason—she drew inspiration from[…..]

Jeff Robinson: Dummy Vexillography is the second exhibit at STNDRD, a gallery project curated by St. Louis artist Sage Dawson and temporarily located within the entrance of the Luminary, a space that facilitates artistic research, production, and presentation through residencies, studios, and exhibitions. STNDRD—comprising only a wall-mounted flagpole and the 10-by-13-foot wall immediately surrounding it—generates unique challenges for participating artists. As a result, STNDRD elicits[…..]

Upon entering Carla Rippey’s retrospective, Resguardo y Resistencia,* at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, the viewer is confronted by a large-scale installation that presents a multiplicity of themes carried throughout the exhibition. The installation, Cuando Mi Sangre Aún No Era Mi Sangre [When My Blood Was Not Yet My Blood] (2008–16), consists of dozens of historical archive images transferred onto paper and intervened upon with sewn marks.[…..]

We are thinking through the origins of democracy and systemic racism and misogyny.

The question of work becomes complex when one asks who is doing it, and for whom. The precarious labor of domestic chores gone unfairly compensated, the frequently banal performance of activism and demonstration, sex work—these labors remain concerns in our current social and economic spheres, and reflect a problematic, historical trajectory that often fails to incorporate and value unseen, marginalized work and workers.[1] In Pictures[…..]

What does it mean to transcribe a work from one medium to another? Is the result a kind of translation, a form of documentation, a new piece of art, or all three? In a fascinating range of media—painting, video, found objects, weaving, and sound—Manila-based artist Gerardo Tan investigates these questions through three different projects presented in his solo exhibition Hablon Redux and Other Transcriptions at[…..]

#museums #race #representation #institutional critique The recent controversy over Kelley Walker’s exhibition Direct Drive at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the departure of that exhibition’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip, was another reminder that museums are not built and programmed for all audiences alike. As this column has taken up questions of race in the museum on numerous occasions (and class in the museum, and[…..]