The theme of this month’s Summer Session is celebrity, and today we’re thinking about how celebrity narratives can offer different possibilities for contextualizing our current moment. In a video from our friends at SFMOMA, artist Judy Chicago talks about her installation The Dinner Party (1974–79), in which she creates a banquet both to honor female heroes throughout Western history and to provide an alternative historical record that acknowledges[…..]

For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and therefore also its opposite: anonymity. Today we bring you a video clip from our friends at SFMOMA of Glenn Ligon on his 1997 exhibition Glenn Ligon: Day of Absence. Here, Ligon presents his subjects as generic figures, their faces turned away from the camera or out of frame, in order to play with the idea of[…..]

As part of this month’s Summer Session regarding the theme of labor, today we bring you a video clip from our friends at SFMOMA. Artist Akram Zaatari describes the work of Hashem el Madani, the first person to own a 35mm camera in Saïda, Lebanon. Zaatari calls Madani the “photographer of the working class,” whose studio both documented daily life in the city and became an important[…..]

Today from our friends at SFMOMA, we bring you a short video of Ewan Gibbs discussing the concept and labor of the drawings he completed for his 2009 exhibition at the museum. Daily Serving also conducted an interview with the artist that year, and we invite you to read it for a deeper understanding of how the artist came to use these techniques.

In June 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art closed its doors to begin a massive expansion project. This weekend is the first public reopening of the museum, which now holds the status of the largest museum (by square footage) dedicated to modern art. Today we bring you a flashback to those last few hours at SFMOMA three years ago, when Christian Marclay’s The Clock[…..]

We always like to see artist Mark Bradford’s name pop up in the press. Of course, there’s the fantastic news that Bradford will be representing the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale, in addition to last week’s cheekily delivered critique of art auctions (while onsite at Christie’s). Today, we’re republishing Bean Gilsdorf’s meditations on the tactility of Bradford’s work in relation to textiles. This article[…..]

Today we continue our Summer Reading series with an essay on Tacita Dean’s film Day for Night. Author Juana Berrío explains, “Day for Night is a term used to describe a cinematographic technique that uses a particular camera lens to turn a scene filmed during daylight into a night-scene. In other words, it’s about capturing an image and re-presenting it under a different ‘light.’ In that[…..]