Albert Yowshein Kuo’s solo exhibition, Gonna Be Alright, at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary features three large paintings. In them, he depicts figurative tableaux that obliquely reflect social values such as race and gender. The paintings are familiar and unfamiliar, timeless and contemporary. To simply say that Kuo’s juxtapositions of figures and scenes is surreal would be too easy a summation. While painted in a traditional style[…..]

Born on the Danish island colony of Saint Croix with two generations of slaves behind him, the champion heavyweight boxer Peter Jackson cuts a lean and noble figure in his 1889 photographic portrait, his top hat perched level upon his head, his elegant Victorian garments pressed, his stylish accoutrements placed as evidence of his social persona as a gentleman–dandy. The portrait was taken just a[…..]

Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. I freelance in a museum in a major metropolitan area with a diverse population, but the racial demographics of the institution’s staffing seem glaringly segregated. The white​-​collar office employees are mostly[…..]

Here at Daily Serving, we keep an eye on the ways an exhibition’s impact changes depending on geographical location. With a recent editorial on what 30 Americans means in Detroit and December’s protest of omitting artists of color in Art AIDS America at the Tacoma Art Museum in mind, today we bring you Anuradha Vikram’s observations on shifting context, intended audiences, and racialized access to and[…..]

Pope.L returns to Los Angeles, after his MOCA exhibition William Pope.L: Trinket this past summer, with a two-part, two-gallery, map-sprawling, time-spanning show—Desert at Steve Turner in Hollywood and Forest at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City—connected by a downloadable GPS driving tour. Samuel Beckett, whose influence appeared in Trinket, returns again in the GPS guide’s insistently jolted repetitive language, “this thing this thing this thing[…..]

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Author Brian Karl notes: “The urgent need to collect and re-present this work—not in a static archive but in a living arena—stems from the continuing conditions of marginalization, oppression, and worse that black people have suffered over[…..]

#institutions #race #conceptualism #access #appropriation A recent performance at Brown University by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has resurrected what had seemed to be a long-ago-settled debate. Goldsmith, whose poetic practice is based on appropriation, presented an adaptation of the autopsy report of Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting victim Michael Brown as a poetic reading during the Interrupt 3 arts festival in mid-March. The subsequent commentary has largely taken Goldsmith to task for what many perceive to have[…..]