Anonymous. Untitled (Clenched Fist), circa 1965; wood; 3 x 5.5 inches. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum Purchase.

2016 was an exceptional year for Daily Serving! We celebrated our tenth anniversary and Michele Carlson became our new executive director. We inaugurated “Odd Jobs,” a new interviews column regarding art and labor, and covered major art-world stories like Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Of course, we also turned an assessing eye to exhibitions in cities such as Birmingham, Dhaka, Nashville, Mexico City, St. Louis, Taipei, and Warsaw. Your support made it happen!

We’re looking forward to another year of the best in arts criticism from around the world, and we hope that your 2017 will be filled with tenacity, courage, and love! 

Michele Carlson in the classroom.

The difference between DS and some of the other publications you have worked with:

I love working for a team and org with heart and guts—those who aren’t afraid, don’t just hop on trends to follow the money, and are willing to take on the long hard road that is “making the world better.” This describes Daily Serving. The organization is run by a group of administrators who also happen to be artists and writers, thus the stakes are significant for us here at DS. It’s not just about putting out stellar content or hitting analytics and budgets, but the work we do at DS is also the work we do outside of it. It is the work we will do after. It means that our approach to facilitating art, artists, and arts writing is driven by something greater than the needs of the organization itself or “the field.” We have the rare opportunity to intervene into the system, even if a small one, and quite literally produce the changes we want to see. You don’t often get this chance.

In Daily Serving‘s future:

We’ve spent a lot of time considering the internal operations of DS and we’re excited to be turning our attention to the future and external-facing projects. That DS has been holding space for art and writing for ten years is an unbelievable accomplishment and we don’t plan on going anywhere! So much has changed in the arts but also in digital and internet culture since 2006. We want DS to continue to grow and change with the dynamic worlds it draws from, and think more expansively in how it operates as a platform for arts discourse. As an online media source, how do we create reciprocity with our audiences and how do we stay a resource without drowning in trends or clichéd ideas about innovation? How do we reconcile that while our work manifests online, our readers and the art we love are IRL and have IRL concerns? How do we do the best work we can with little resources and capacity? How do we be brave? These are the sorts of questions we are asking ourselves as we move into the future, while continuing to confront larger systemic inequities around who has access to creating the narratives of art and culture and disrupting which art, artists, writers, editors, and leaders are valued in the art world.

Read the full interview here.

Dee Hibbert-Jones (left) and Nomi Talisman in their studio. Photo: Michele Carlson.

Living Condition both tells and reimages the experiences of those who have, or have had, family members on death row. What began as a series of short animated portraits has flowered into a feature-length film and an interactive component. The latter part is the focus for Hibbert-Jones and Talisman’s YBCA residency. Told in the voices of those impacted by their relative’s experience with capital punishment, and set visually by Hibbert-Jones and Talisman, the stories in Living Condition are heartbreaking and confounding in equal measure. Hibbert-Jones tells of the son of an interviewee “who literally grew up and was stabbed when he was 12, he was shot when he was 14, he was stabbed when he was 16, and then shot again in the head when he was 18. And only the last one was intentional. The rest were accidents.” She continues, “I’m sorry but that’s not a reality I know anything about. It’s so far away from how I hope our son will grow up.”

Read the full article here.

Jeremy Blake. Century 21 (video still), from the Winchester trilogy, 2002–4; Collection of SFMOMA

SFMOMA’s doors may have closed, but nothing about the museum is departed. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The $610 million renovation and expansion plan will double the museum’s current size, in part, to accommodate the new acquisition of Doris and Donald Fisher’s private collection of more than 1,100 works. SFMOMA won’t reopen again until 2016, which begs the question, where will all that art go?

Instead of hiding their extensive collection in storage, around 29,000 works of art, SFMOMA is partnering with a plethora of outside cultural institutions and cities, along with a substantially beefed-up digital component, to launch an aggressive campaign to keep SFMOMA alive for its loyalists. In all certainty, by closing its doors, SFMOMA is more open and accessible than ever. Here are five things to look forward to:

Read the full article here.