#institutions #race #jeffreydeitch #elibroad #lacma #moca #manifestdestiny #americanexpansionism Los Angeles museums have recently demonstrated the old adage that “nothing endures but change.” Since 2006, Michael Govan has been in charge of transforming the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from a Victorian-style encyclopedic museum into a powerhouse for contemporary art. During his tenure, Govan has recruited top American curators, including Franklin Sirmans and Christine Y. Kim, from privately endowed museums to his massive[…..]

#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[…..]

#institutions #representation #access #sustainability #visibility #regionalism #globalism Two shows at San Francisco museums this past July proposed to reconcile gaps between local and global concerns. For Proximities I: What Time Is It There? at the Asian Art Museum, guest curator Glen Helfand asked a group of Bay Area artists to consider the concept of Asia from the perspective of the culturally uninitiated. Migrating Identities, at Yerba[…..]

#visibility #labor #institutions #class #race #access Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier makes her New York solo debut with A Haunted Capital, a tightly crafted, personal-is-political installation at the Brooklyn Museum. The artist’s hometown of Braddock, a forgotten steel mill town in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is marked by a geography of postindustrial degradation. An outsider might take a social documentary approach to Braddock’s history and current woes. As an insider, Frazier documents that[…..]

#punk #institutions #historicity #commerce #style Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Punk: Chaos to Couture the death knell of punk as a social and cultural movement? Certainly, the Met’s assertion that the locus of punk’s importance is in its influence on high fashion would indicate that it is no longer relevant to these larger concerns. The A-list attendees at May’s opening gala were decidedly mainstream[…..]

#institutions #work #language #InternationalArtEnglish Writing in Triple Canopy last year, Alix Rule and David Levine coined the term “International Art English” (hereby referred to as IAE) to describe a linguistic mode that is part polyglot, part jargon—peppered with French, German, and Latin but based on the structure of English. The authors took this hybrid language to task for lending a veneer of substance to numerous examples of art[…..]

In the face of economic fluctuations, not to mention the whirlwind of popular taste, how do galleries survive, adapt, evolve, and thrive? The popular perception of the contemporary art gallery is one of inaccessibility and elitism.  By and large, the gallery’s reputation is one of isolated sanctity, an entity that sustains itself through a preserved set of conventions and a closed system of values. The[…..]