#access #institutions #race #class #performance #intersectionality Two major New York exhibitions this winter have raised the question of access to contemporary art and museums in important and divergent ways. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Studio Museum in Harlem continues reframing the historical narrative to include African Americans, as begun in Part 1 at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. Mike Kelley’s sprawling retrospective[…..]

#race #ethnicity #gender #institutions #access #identity Since the Civil Rights Era, it has become commonplace for marginalized ethnic communities to instate their own institutions of sociological and cultural study such as university Ethic Studies departments and museums like Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts. In the face of extreme prejudice and exclusion from the discourses of history and art, many have felt the necessity[…..]

#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[…..]

#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[…..]