Our intrepid columnist is on the road this week, so today we bring you a popular Q&A from our archive. It’s good to note that support for parent–artists is increasing: The Bemis Center has a six-week residency with on-site child care in 2016; Kala Art Institute offers ten Parent Artist Residency Awards with a stipend of $1,000 each; and The Present Group is currently accepting nominations for the Present Prize #4: Family Matters. If you know of other forms of support, we hope you’ll leave a note in the comments.

Louise Bourgeois. The Curved House, 1990; marble; 14 x 37 x 13 in.

I’ve now reached the age where the question regarding children has become increasingly relevant. To have or not to have? How does a successful artist combine her career with her life as a mother?

In the three-year history of this column, never have I been so uniquely unqualified to answer a question. Not only do I not have a child, but at no time have I ever experienced a pang for one. Additionally, I have the gift of a mother who never pressured me to produce grandkids; instead, when I asked what might happen if I skipped that particular life experience, she merely shrugged and said, “Not everyone has to have children.” Still, for some people it is life’s best and greatest adventure, and since that’s how I got here, I won’t contradict them. The important thing is that you choose what’s right for you.

I reached out to some artist−mothers to find out how they combine career and motherhood. Desirée Holman suggests you start by asking yourself some hard questions about your goals and your lifestyle: “What’s your ambition, or what level of an art career do you want to have? How much do you want to be working? What’s your standard for parenting, and how do you feel about outsourcing the care of a young child? How well do you deal with the world on less than a full night’s sleep? What’s your support system—is there a partner involved, or a family support structure? Is there money? Do you have high standards about how clean your house is going to be? Are you willing to take a part-time approach, or even a hiatus, for the first several years of your child’s life, and then ease back into your career?” She notes, “These are all substantial parts of the life/time management of a mother and artist.”

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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, Marie Martraire reviews Talk to Me: Samuel Levi Jones at ProArts in Oakland.

Samuel Levi Jones. Talk to Me, 2015; installation view; mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland.

In front of Oakland City Hall, thirty-three large square collages are hung on two adjacent walls visible from the street through large windows. Neatly arranged in a giant grid, the canvases provide a feeling of order and calm. Upon closer inspection, each canvas consists of sewed unbound book covers in similar tones of pale green, yellow, and olive green. Not a single letter appears on the exposed covers, obscuring any possibility of identification.

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Today from our friends at MN Original, we bring you an inspiring video on Greta McLain and her work with murals and communities. The artist says, “The mural is not making the change. The mural is making the connections and the relationships, and standing as a suggestion of where this neighborhood or community is going.” The video was originally published on February 14, 2014.

“I am an artist of America,” declared Lonnie Holley during a talk for the opening of his exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. This self-identification was Holley’s response to being labeled a folk artist throughout his career. While the visibility of his work may have suffered due to this label—his most recent solo museum show was in 1994—Holley proves himself in this exhibition as a capable and provocative artist with a large body of work.

Lonnie Holley. Blood on the Shoes of a Civil Rights Worker, 2005; installation view, Something to Take My Place, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. Photo: Rick Rhodes.

Holley’s choice of materials acts as a consistent refrain throughout his career, and this is apparent in the works in the show, which date from 1984 to 2015. Throughout this wide temporal range, his sculptures continually feature discarded goods and reclaimed materials such as wood, wire, and concrete. But many of his materials are loaded with political meanings, including shoes supposedly worn by a civil-rights marcher, a bucket allegedly used by his grandmother for a variety of tasks, and discarded electrical cables from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the site of a massacre in June 2015. At his talk, commenting on his choice of materials, Holley was quick to point out that he never works with visual preconceptions of sculptures; instead, each is the result of working with the various materials he finds.

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I first met David Levi Strauss in the spring of 2013, after taking a red-eye flight from San Francisco to meet him at his home in the Hudson Valley. He was interviewing me for admission to the MFA Art Criticism and Writing program at the School of Visual Arts. We sat in his studio–library, a two-story renovated barn filled to the brim with art, artifacts, and thousands of books. After starting the program, I wasn’t surprised to hear him say that you can’t write without reading everything. Reading, he said, is a way to be a part of the ongoing discourse and the current questions being asked. It is also one of the few ways to take control of the information we consume, through academic study or otherwise. Strauss’ education was anything but orthodox—traveling around the country to study with people he found interesting, and even spending time on a floating university—and as an educator, he takes risks. He challenges students to challenge the world. While some people may perceive critics as pessimistic, Strauss demonstrates that generating change through writing requires fervent optimism and the belief that we can improve the status quo. In July 2015, I drove back to Strauss’ house, this time to interview him about his thoughts on the current state of criticism and writing.

John Berger and David Levi Strauss, 2009. Photo: Yves Berger.

Amelia Rina: Can you talk about your relationship with teaching writing and your own education as a writer?

David Levi Strauss: The Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York is really modeled after the Poetics program at the New College of California, San Francisco, in the 1980s. It was built around the teachings of the poet Robert Duncan and the other poets that gathered around him, including Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Michael Palmer, and Duncan McNaughton. It was pointedly not a creative-writing program, but a program in poetics, the study of how things are made. The poets who taught there intended to give us an intellectual base that we could build on for the rest of our lives and to give us sources we could continue to draw on as we built our own network of sources. I think that’s probably even more important today. We now live in the Golden Age of Search, where a vast amount of material is accessible, so the need to develop ways to make distinctions among these disparate sources is crucial.[1]

AR: Something that seems integral to the SVA department’s mission is that it isn’t in the business of “discourse production.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And if it’s not in the business of discourse production, what is it in the business of?

DLS: I don’t know when the term discourse production was first used, but I think it was imported from cognitive neuroscience. To me, it always sounded like a needless bureaucratization of writing and thinking. Our approach is very different from this. We look at writing as a way of thinking—and a way to live, actually—and, at the same time, as a craft.

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Thomas Hirschhorn’s show at the South London Gallery is a precarious, postapocalyptic mess. Collapsing floors are propped up with broken posts, and adjoining walls are held together by packing tape, which creates a foreboding sense that the installation could come down on the viewers at any moment. Yet the actual threat of fabricated precariousness is quite different than the threat posed to the viewer who emotionally invests into this fantastical arrangement, for this is not an actual ruin whose decay is reclaimed. In actuality, nothing actually fell into ruin and no one has ever lived here. This show is a ruse of ruin, completely constructed, collected, and assembled.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

However, due in part to the overwhelming volume of visual information to take in, the details take time to understand. And so it isn’t obvious at first glance that this is a completely constructed ruin. These collapsing structures aren’t the result of neglect or misfortune, but facades made from a lot of cardboard, tape, and paint. The tubes that cross through the space, along with the hundreds of bricks, collapsing flooring, suspended walls, and I-beams, are all constructed of cardboard, while hundreds of meters of knotted tan packing tape adorn the installation. Most of the cardboard is sprayed dark gray, but some areas have an additional white-painted brick motif. The grayness of the installation reinforces the overall bleakness of the collapsing environment, but the flatness of tone signals that this is an entirely invented space. It’s exactly the opposite of a slick Hollywood movie facade that looks real from a specific distance. It has more the light feel of a school fete in which the students have spent a week constructing a spooky funhouse out of available materials—albeit one that’s super-sized. It’s intentionally crude and still easily understood. The decay here is created, and it is clearly about facsimile.

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Mona Hatoum’s solo exhibition, currently on view at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, is made entirely of newly gifted works from philanthropist and political activist Barbara Lee. The Barbara Lee Family Foundation is focused on advancing female representation in politics. Lee is a major supporter of Hilary Clinton, in addition to being a collector who has shifted her focus exclusively to female artists. At the end of 2014, she donated forty-three works by twenty-five female artists from eight different countries to the ICA, including Tara Donovan, Marlene Dumas, and Amy Sillman, all of whom had their first major U.S. exhibitions at the museum. The gift, valued around $10 million, is the largest in the institution’s history and a “game changer.”[1]

Mona Hatoum. Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine), 2010; Murano glass and cabinet; 54 ½ x 24 x 11 ¾ in. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Without a doubt, a gift this generous, focused, and conscious of the gender inequities that plague so many museum collections plants fertile roots for the ICA’s future curatorial innovations and potential loan relationships. Also currently on view is Transcending Material, a selection of the museum’s collection that mixes much of Lee’s recent donation with previously acquired works. It is clear the ICA was nimble in adjusting its programming to showcase these newly expanded offerings. By having all three concurrent solo exhibitions by women (Arlene Schechet in the main gallery; Hatoum and Erin Shirreff in the smaller galleries), the ICA is a stirring inspiration, if only for its outright rarity.

Mona Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents, who had to renew their residency annually.[2] Hatoum’s father worked at the British embassy, which entitled the family to British citizenship. When the artist first visited London in 1975 in her early 20s, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was unable to return home. It was nearly a decade until she saw her parents again. These early experiences of displacement and familial separation set off a nomadic trajectory for Hatoum, who currently splits her time between London and Berlin while not traveling internationally to a variety of exclusive artist residencies. “I think best on the move,” she has said, feeling both “at home and alien at any place.”[3] This unease with stable definitions of home is a theme running throughout the artist’s practice.

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