By the way, Macy’s doesn’t have a pet department anymore.

LO: Your work is a series of lists and highlight bureaucracy, obsession and on the surface a need for control. Tell us more about the themes in your work.
JBR: Well I lived in Paris for ten years and the French are the world champions of bureaucracy. They most likely inspired me.

Extensive travel also inspired my interest in maps. Discovering foreign cities, the details of other cultures, is exciting, but also frustrating and harrowing; like a puzzle to decipher. Maps have an absurd quality. Behind a tiny dot are the lives of millions of people. How can you make any sense out of that?

Also I guess I see life as an ineluctable struggle against disorder. That’s probably why I’m preoccupied with fathomless inventories and compilations.
One of my works lists all the destinations of the Indian railroad and another has 298 panels naming all the streets in Venice, which took me three years to do. I think it’s important to decline and to organize things; it’s reassuring. Maybe I’ve transformed my angst into compulsion.

LO: As a long time NYC resident how do you think the NYC art scene is compared to what is used to be? What are the pros and cons of the scene
now and before in your opinion?
JBR: As an outsider, I can’t really answer that question, but I suppose it partially echoes the evolution of other aspects of New York society: less whimsical, less fraternal, more individualistic, more elitist, more venal …

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?
JBR: For the usual reasons: art remains a humanizing and civilizing force in our society; it’s an ancient and universal language which permits all people to communicate and to record their history…

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?
JBR: Get a job which will enable you to survive and to devote time to your work, then work; talk to people, try to enjoy life.

LO: Who are you favorite artists and why?
JBR: Nancy Spero, Paul Klee, David Schrigley … I can’t really explain why, but I suppose humor has something to do with it …

The post Leah Oates Talks Art and NYC with Judy Blum Reddy appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

My mother also encouraged me without thinking about it, having taken me to the Met and the Frick Collection when I was very young and having intellectual conversations about art at a very young age. This was unheard of having been raised in a very tough neighborhood in the Bronx.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you to make art?
MB: My paintings are based on mythology, superstition, religion, and race. It is not necessarily a theme I set about going after, but they tend to go in that direction.

LO: Who are your influences? Teachers, artists?
MB: Michael Goldberg, Lucio Pozzi, and Marilyn Minter were teachers of mine whilst going to SVA. They were the ones I felt a close connection to. In my early years I obsessed with many of the female surrealists, including Leonor Fini.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an individual artist?
MB: I often think about this and think about how the average person would think it that it is a very bourgeois activity. Especially being a woman and a person of color, I often think about my roll as an artist. I began my early training in art school as an abstract painter because of the push to be one and how it was looked down upon to be a figurative painter. But, I felt I had so much to say as a woman, a person of color, and one who came from a poor working class family. So, in my third year I changed and began to make paintings which, to me, had more meaning and a subtle message that sometimes incorporates the figure.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who want to exhibit in NYC etc?
MB: My advice would be to not judge a book by its cover. Generally the ones who look the least important are the ones that are actually the most important, and have a website!

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows etc that you have coming up.
MB: I am continuing my series of paintings from the influence of living on the upper east side and dealing with class, race, and the bourgeois culture. I will be part of a summer group exhibition, “Juicy” at Gitana Rosa Gallery, Chelsea, opening June 19, as well as artmrkt Hamptons, from July 10 – 13. I am also excited to announce a group exhibition that I am curating, “The New Bitch, Twilight of the Idols.” It will be open from September 4 – October 4 at Gitana Rosa Gallery, Chelsea.

The post Talking Mythology, Race, and Class with Michele Basora appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

During my undergraduate studies at Parsons School of Design I majored in photography, and I found myself doing mostly performative work—performing for the camera. It wasn’t until the end of my BFA studies that I realized what was crucially missing from this practice was the live performance itself—the physical body in time, used as a vehicle for communication, and the engagement and interaction with a live audience. I started working primarily with performance art as a medium in 2008, and knew that I had found my most fulfilling means of creative expression. I have remained focused on this practice all through my time living in Berlin and working internationally.

LO: What are the ideas in your work and what is your working process? 
EK: My topics of focus vary, in some cases I’m concentrated on challenging the limitations of the body, in other instances on making a commentary on cultural/social conventions, and often these days I’m concentrated on post-memory and historical perception. Foundational to all my work, however, is an aim to create an experience of questioning and even unlearning what is assumed in society.

In terms of creative process, I never know when ideas will come to me. What will resonate and stimulate ideas, or simply intrigue, is always unpredictable. In some cases, I know that I am engaged by a set of circumstances and that I want to make an artistic commentary on it, but the idea for the artwork doesn’t come until later. I am very visual, so frequently the idea for a performance, or photo, video, or installation piece surfaces as a visual image. And, a great deal of what I do is based on intuition—an artist should never disregard intuition. Even if one doesn’t understand immediately one’s intuitive decision, in my experience, an understanding always comes in retrospect. In this way I actually learn a lot from my own work.

LO: What is it like as the artist being observed in a performance and also observing the audience at the same time. Does it give you a creative boost?
EK: I gain a great deal of energy from the audience, even without direct contact. I can feel their presence, even though most of the time my performances don’t even involve eye contact. The presence of the public almost always produces creative strength in me—even when I don’t feel their support. If I feel judged by them, for instance, I still feel their engagement, their participation, and I gain strength from this.

LO: What kind of reactions and impressions have your performance works had from audience members?
EK: In some cases my work strikes a cord in the viewer and they understand it and connect with it immediately. I am always thrilled when this happens of course, as it means that my communication was absorbed in a very straightforward manner. Sometimes the public is also made uncomfortable by my performances, and they respond in a way that is judgmental or mocking, and I consider such responses to be also be very important and even successful, as it means my work has generated a challenging situation for the viewer. Performance work has the potential to provoke thought and feeling, so in fact I find that whenever this occurs, it means that the work is powerful, and it is thus successful work.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?
EK: Art has the potential to make one see the world in new ways; it can awaken an understanding (whether this be visual, sensory, or conceptual), within the viewer through the unique sensitivity of the work, and it has the capacity to force one to question and step outside of what one knows.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin? 
EK: I really wouldn’t know what advice to give, I am not based in New York myself, and I have not lived in New York City as a working professional for any extended period of time (only for several months in 2010, when I moved back to the city to work as a re-performer for Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA). I actually might tell them to first go someplace else in order to build a practice in an environment conducive to creativity and with less financial pressure than in New York. This is what I have done myself in Berlin. I do intend to return to New York one day soon, however. The city has such a remarkable energy, it is stimulating and inspiring like no place else. Once one has built some experience and accomplishment as an artist, surviving in New York without compromising one’s practice is more reachable, this is my impression at least. Let’s see in the next few years if I’m right about that

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
EK: Marina Abramovic, Marta Jovanovic, Nezaket Ekici, Ai WeiWei, Arti Grabowski, Philip Metz, Paul McCarthy, and Louise Bourgeois.

All of them, in completely different ways, make me see the world in new ways. They awaken understandings within me through their unique sensitivity, and/or they force me to question and step outside of what I know.

LO: What are your upcoming projects?
EK: I am currently working on an extensive project in the Balkans titled Spaced Memory, which pertains to places of Jewish history that no longer exist—that were destroyed, built-over, and forgotten. I work with mostly site-specific performances to contemplate the topics of post-memory and absence at these locations of historical erasure. I recently financed the work through a successful crowdfunding campaign, with the help of over 131 contributors. In May I had two performances within the frame of this project in Belgrade, where I worked in collaboration with the REX Cultural Center and the Embassy of Israel in Serbia. I will be continuing the project this spring in Serbia and Kosovo, and in the fall I will be researching and creating site-specific artwork in Romania.

In June, I have a new series of performances and a solo exhibition in Belgrade at Gallery 12 HUB. It is titled Blue Holding, and the work deals with references to corporeal pain, the live and dead body, and the body as an instrument. This show runs June 05 – 20, with performances on June 5th, 6th, and 7th.

In July I will be performing in New York, I’m excited to be working for the first time with Station Independent Projects on the Lower East Side. I will be doing a new performance that pertains to cultural assimilation, and the piece will result in an installation which will remain on view for several days at the gallery.

In 2015 I’m also planning a new large-scale performance in Germany, which will deal with the memory/ post-memory of my family history in Aachen (Western Germany). This work will deal again with the topic of cultural assimilation, and will also, somewhat indirectly, contemplate methods of commemoration of the World War II period.

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The only other artist in my family was my great aunt. I never met her, but one of her paintings of a swan on a lake hung over her sister’s fireplace. It was magical to me as a child.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you?
KM: The major themes in my work have to do with temporal and spatial experiences of the body that cross over into a psychological engagement. I am interested in how we construct past experiences in the present and perceptions of dislocation and connection.

LO: Did you begin as a video artist? One sees painting, drawing, and photographic references when viewing your videos. Please tell us more.
KM: I make videos, but I also paint and draw. I work on the videos as if they were paintings and the paintings as if they were videos, or a part of a longer narrative over time. The ideas in my work are the same regardless of medium, so I can freely move back and forth.

LO: What is your working process? Each artist is so different in how they approach their work. How do you approach the creation of your work? Do you plan things out or play in the studio?
KM: When I begin a new phase of making work, I experiment in the studio until some theme begins to reveal itself. I then focus on this theme until its internal logic builds into a body of work. I feel it’s akin to asking a question and then letting the answer take its time to unfold. I make art because I enjoy this process.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an artist?
KM: I am an artist because making things is the way I process and understand the world around me. It’s like thinking with my hands.

Art is important because it performs the double task of reflecting culture while pointing beyond it. Art simultaneously embraces and critiques culture.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who are emerging?
KM: Do what you love. If you don’t love what you are doing, it’s not worth your time. And protect your solitude.

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows etc. that you have coming up.
KM: I just returned from a two and a half month research trip in Japan in preparation for a collaborative sound/video project with composer Akemi Naito. The project is based on Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel “The Woman in the Dunes”. The music is scored for percussion and the eighteen minute video is made up of stop-motion animation. Abe’s story is a post-war Sisyphean tale that I think still resonates today. The DVD is planned for release next year.

The post Leah Oates Talks Psychology, Solitude with Kristine Marx appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

There was a lady named Ruth Ettling in my church who was a fairly well-known artist. She made beautiful prints and collages. I got to visit her studio when I was in high school, and I remember wanting to have a studio like hers. She went to Rhode Island School of Design and was thrilled for me when I was accepted to go to college there.

I studied painting because I wanted to master color, but I’ve evolved into a sculptor. Now I make this hybrid between painting and sculpture where I build surfaces of color with weaving, sewing, and beading instead of paint.

LO: Please explain the themes in your work as well as your working process. For instance, some artists are very methodical while others are more instinctive. Please elaborate.
KD: The idea of a garden in paradise influences the organic abstractions I make. I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years in Asian and Islamic art, and that time deeply influenced my work. The symmetry in jewelry from India, the balance between realism and abstraction in Japanese screens, and the beauty and fantasy of the borders in Persian paintings really connected with me.

I work instinctively but in a very orderly and organized manner. I organize my materials so that I have a sense of color, scale, and a goal of what I want to accomplish, and then I dive in.

LO: You are a painter, sculptor and also create public works. Are there any differences with each way of working?
KD: I approach each medium differently.

With painting, I have an idea about a size, palette, and compositional approach, but it’s pretty loose. I usually can’t articulate what I am doing in a piece until after I’ve done it.

With sculptures and installations, I usually gather together materials that I want to work with and start organizing the colors and forms until I develop a compositional plan.

I can usually say what direction I’m going in if not the final destination.

With public work, the site rules all of those elements. I look at the site and try to imagine how I can bring my visual voice to the space, history, and requirements of the place.

Public art requires that you fully articulate what you’re going to do before you find out if you are going to get the opportunity.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
KD: I love Calder’s use of color and play, Lee Bontecou’s articulation of nature and abstraction, the way Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois use materials. Judy Pfaff’s compositions are so dynamic. Having worked at the Met, I developed a long, close relationship with the collection there. The Tiepelos at the top of the main staircase blow me away every time I see them; I’m awed by the color and compositional dynamism of those paintings.

LO: What advice would you give younger artists on how to mark success as an artist? Success seems to be marked by big galleries making big money. Do you think that there are other ways to mark success as an artist?
KD: Not everyone is going to get rich or even get by, and very few artists will always be “hot stuff.”  My advice: commit to a life of making art, with success being measured by your satisfaction with a piece or body of work. Make making art and building a body of work the priority; then, you need to find a balance in which you are creating the work, showing it, and engaging with the art world outside of your studio.

The post Leah Oates in Conversation with Katherine Daniels appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

LO: What are some of the highlights from Momenta’s 27 (26?) years in operation? Best shows, artists, performances, etc…?
EH: The first exhibition that made us realize this was “Reimaging America,” in 1987. It was a group exhibition guest-organized by social practitioner Mark O’Brien. Titled “Reimaging America,” It included some known and lesser known artists whose work addressed strategies of art practice that parallel social concerns of activism at that time: education, social justice, and the embracement of marginalized individuals (including native Americans, African-Americans, prisoners, gays, and lesbians), and suggested to us that art could have a larger social function than visual experience alone. The idea that you can simultaneously present, through an exhibition, a critique of the society we live within and a vision of the world we would want to live in, has become a guiding principle of the work we show.

We moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1995. Our aim there was to present exhibitions that reflected a diversity of visions from a multitude of perspectives. First solo exhibitions of artists including Omer Fast, Wangechi Mutu, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, and Momoyo Torimitsu serve as examples. At that time, Williamsburg was designated by the press as the new art neighborhood defined by a DIY, funky style. Momenta presented an alternative vision of Williamsburg as an international destination for artists with a diversity of backgrounds brought together because of the availability of relatively inexpensive industrial space, close to the center of art appreciation. With very limited means, Momenta presented group shows by artists from Uruguay, Thailand, Mexico, and elsewhere.

LO: What do you think of the Bushwick art scene, i.e. how it was, how it’s changing, and why its important to a larger NYC art scene?
EH: The gentrification of neighborhoods follows a pattern of searching for a space to create meaningful discourse. We look for places that will allow us to perform these dialogs. As these places are capitalized that space is lost and we look for another place for them to continue, to watch them grow. As artists we bemoan the loss and fear that space will disappear and we will lose any sense of connection between production and meaning. Our progress is being increasingly monitored and calculated because capital knows our worth. But that worth is another system of valuation that we do not recognize. Without these spaces of dialog capital will exist, however, without even the semblance of meaning. New York should fear this loss. As dialogue gets replaced by lifestyle, we lose the bedrock of cultural significance.

LO: Please talk about your work and how it intersects with running a non-profit art gallery?
EH: Recently I’ve been studying the Biosphere2 science/art project in Tucson in the early 1990’s. It was an experiment in a “closed system,” in which nothing came into or left the system. All food to sustain them was grown and harvested by the “Biospherans,” the system providing all their needs. It was both a utopic project, and a project that was defined by capital and ruled by class. It has a rich metaphoric content to reflect the desires of individual versus social needs within a capitalist discourse, about escapism and privilege. It ended badly, with the participants not speaking to one another, malnourished, and overworked. I am interested in the construction of ideals and the way these ideals are actually manifested, and what that says about us. These are the concerns that draw me to particular artworks and the administration of an organization.

LO: What do you think of artists as curators? Do artists bring something different, if at all?
EH: It’s difficult to generalize and I don’t know what other artist/curators get from it personally, or intend to contribute. For me it is an externalization of studio practice, a more public place for the presentation of ideas that is outside myself, that involves others. It may appear to be generous, but it is more complicated than that, and I have to wonder why I seem to need this space of control/lack of control.

LO: What advice would you give to emerging artists who are just out of BFA/MFA programs or who have settled in NYC?
EH: I have taught at NYU, Cooper Union, and Pratt. I cannot say that I feel good about art school. I enjoy having that place to speak together, to talk about their work, and what it could signify. But the slavery that lies below that freedom is disturbing. I am concerned about the debt that an “art education” incurs. How, on top of that debt, can one be expected to maintain a studio as a “professional artist” after school, or to “afford” to question the assumptions that we live with? Perhaps we need to find alternatives to institutionalized education.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
EH: My favorite artists are the ones who want to talk about the world we are living in now, not just about their own practice. Artists that have an awareness of the complications of generosity, of the systems of power that we live with, use, and are not exempt from as artists.

LO: What shows and projects do you have coming up as an artist and at Momenta?
EH: I am presenting my Biosphere2 project at the Galveston Artist Residency in November. Upcoming exhibitions at Momenta include a solo exhibition by Jacqueline Nguyen concerning immigration policy in Canada in the 1960’s, an exhibition of Chilean artists organized by Christian Viveros-Faune, and an exhibition that examines art and power in the US in a historical context with Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf of Eidea Projects.

The post Leah Oates Talks NYC Culture With Momenta’s Eric Heist appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

LO: And?
GS: All that was before my unhappy encounter with higher mathematics. We didn’t get along. Science was out. But my parents were. Though neither professionals nor academics (my dad sold automobile insurance for a living) I was encouraged to explore my obsession with drawing and making things out of cardboard to play with. Around age six they managed to set aside some money to send me to weekly art classes with a local watercolorist named Jeanne Doan Burford (who in fact just turned ninety).

I think its worth noting, Leah that I really don’t think before starting these lessons I was consciously making “art.”  I mean drawing and so forth seemed more like a half-magical, half-megalomaniacal ritual or tool with which to manage, or escape the big, sometimes intimidating world of adults. Jeanne began to channel this intensity, focusing it with such classical exercises as collage, illustration, color mixing and the like. She effectively opened-up to me the possibility of my becoming an “artist,” something that my family background would have probably foreclosed as a serious option.

LO: Why do you say that?
GS: Because so much depends on seeing oneself succeed in a particular role don’t you think Leah, and there were simply no role models to follow. None within reach so to speak.

LO: But this was also what, the mid-1960s, there must have been other influences on you as well?
GS: Yes, and as clichéd as it sounds radical change was filling the air it seemed in those days. Nor was it lost on me. In 1970 I was caught stuffing student lockers at my Junior High school with an anonymous “underground” newspaper that my friends and I printed on a mimeograph machine, then state of the art reproduction technology. Bluish-green and terribly naive, the cover showed Mickey Mouse raising a clenched fist to decry the war in Vietnam, imperialist “Amerika,” and police brutality in nearby Philadelphia. I believe we also reviewed LPs by Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

LO: How did other students respond to this?
GS: I don’t recall any of our twelve to thirteen year old peers showing much interest in our paper, our politics, or the music we recommended. We on the other hand smoked pot, listened to protest rock, and worried about being drafted some five or six years down the road. I also can’t recall being invited to many parties.

LO: When did you actually realize you were going to be an “artist?”
GS:  Not until about 1976 I think when I attended Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania. There I met the artist Charlotte Schatz who was a brilliant teacher. She pretty much figured me out. She helped me get into The Cooper Union and once in New York my previous political leanings found an ally and mentor in professor Hans Haacke. But I also took some memorable classes with Louise Bourgeois, filmmaker Robert Breer, and art historian Dore Ashton.

LO: And after that?
GS: Well, after graduating in 1979 I became involved with the artists’ collective called PAD/D or Political Art Documentation/Distribution, which was co-organized with Lucy R. Lippard among others. About a decade later I co-founded the group REPOhistory with another gang of artists, educators and activists including Jim Costanzo (AKA Aaron Burr Society today), Tom Klem, Lisa Maya Knauer, Todd Ayoung, Lisa Prown, and Neill Bogan and among others.

LO: What does REPOhistory mean and what did you do?
GS: The name is a spin on the 1984 indy film Repo Man with Harry Dean Stanton, but our objective was to “repossess” lost or forgotten or suppressed histories of working people, women, minorities, radicals and then mark these in public spaces around New York City.

In 1992 we managed to get City permission (under Mayor David Dinkins) to install dozens of temporary, metal street signs around lower Manhattan revealing such things as the location of the first slave market on Wall Street, the shape of the pre-Columbian island coast line, Nelson Mandela’s historic visit to New York just two years earlier, and the offices of a famous 19th century abortionist named Madame Restell—once located where the Twin Towers also once stood. One side of each sign had an image. The other told the story.

LO: So you collaborated making art projects for quite a few years?
GS: Yes, but I continued to make my own work all along as well: wall pieces, dioramas, photo-based bas-reliefs.

LO: But how do these public, collective practices you’re your own art making overlap and inform each other?
GS: In retrospect I think my individual art making has functioned as a sort of refuge for experimentation that in turn feeds back into my more public practices, writings, teaching and so forth.  For example REPOhistory was founded in 1989 with a sizable group of other people. However, my interest in exploring alternative ways to represent history had already found expression earlier that year in a nine-foot wide panoramic-collage entitled “Massacre of Innocence” about the death of children in historical battle zones. One year before that I produced a three-part photo-relief piece entitled “Men Making History/Making War:1954” about the politics of the McCarthy era. More of this work can be found on the back pages here. 

LO: And this cross-pollination continues today?
GS: Sure, something similar is happening today, for example with my book “Dark Matter” whose themes about history, archives, and resistance reappear in my graphic novel “Double City” that is still in progress. I supposed this is why I prefer to describe what I do as an expanded art practice rather than calling it post-studio, or relational aesthetic, or even social practice art. Besides, as you know I like to make “things.”

Installation view of assorted Greg Sholette collectibles, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

LO: But when did you become a teacher?
GS: Short version is that during the mid-1980s I also tried to run a business. It was a prop and model-making shop located in the Gowanus area. The techniques I still use in some of my art stem from this venture, which, shortly after the financial crash of 1987 collapsed along with the local advertising industry. I decided to get my MFA. Heading west I attended the University of California in San Diego where, between 1992 and 1995, I worked primarily with French new wave filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin. No, I wasn’t making films (though I taught film theory), I was instead creating installations and sculpture influenced by cinema. After that I returned to New York as a critical theory fellow in the Whitney Independent Studies Program (ISP) where Benjamin Buchloh, Mary Kelly, and Ron Clark encouraged me to write about the kind of collective, political art of PAD/D and REPOhistory. It was excellent advice. But even with all this education and experience finding a teaching position took a long time to land. Its even harder today.

LO: Do you think the art world has gotten out of hand in terms of money and class elitism? Would it be better to go back to the good ol days of Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory?
GS: Those particular good ol’ days were somewhat before my time Leah, though I did arrive here as the East Village scene unfolded in the 1980s. Young artists showed their work in galleries like Nature Morte and Fun Gallery and also at various clubs including the Palladium, Danceteria, and Pyramid. Some even sought to reenact aspects of a 1960s SoHo they had only read about in magazines including Warhol’s Factory. In general East Village art was a compilation of campy gestures, or perhaps campiness to the second power, and its ironic self-consciousness dovetailed neatly with dominant versions of post-modernist theory.

LO: Where did you fit into this “scene” then?
GS: Yeah, well my outlook, as well as that of my friends and collaborators, was pretty skeptical. PAD/D for instance produced a critical parody of the East Village art scene in 1984. We claimed to open up four “new” galleries showing anti-gentrification art. In reality these exhibition spaces were just boarded up buildings on street corners east of Second Avenue. We named them “Discount Salon,”  “Another Gallery,” and the “Guggenheim Downtown.” For several weeks that summer a group of about eight wheat-pasted posters denouncing real-estate speculators and spray-painted stencils calling on our peers to fight the displacement of low-income residents.

LO: Artists fighting gentrification? Did it work, did you reach your audience with the message?
GS: Yes, and no. But one way or the other our ersatz art venues and the actual galleries they satirized were soon enough replaced by trendy restaurants and boutiques.

LO: So things have really changed for the worse?
GS: Also yes and no. I mean maybe the feeling today that the art world has been swallowed by hedge fund operators, global real estate tycoons, and finance capital is not entirely new, no, but you could also say it is really like the 1980s art scene turned up full volume.

LO: That seems pretty bleak, no?
GS: Thankfully there is still push-back by artists and their allies. I am thinking of Groups like Temporary Services, Aaron Burr Society, Chto Delat, and Pussy Riot and many others who continue to do the kind of resistance PAD/D and REPOhistory were engaged in today, just as PAD/D and REPOhistory were continuing to do the work of Art Workers’ Coalition, Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and Angry Arts and other groups that came before them.

LO: What about your own work? You might best be described as a conceptual artist and a political activist, writer, curator and educator, yes?
GS: Conceptual Art? Right because of my association with Haacke, Gorin, Lippard and the ISP of course this aligns me with this legacy. I guess that is true in a way.

LO: Correct, though?
GS: It’s an honor to have my art connected to theirs. Then again, labels are hard to make peace with (as much as they are impossible to live without). So yes, while I do try to maintain a theoretically informed practice at the same time my work does not look like “conceptual art.” In fact it often seems just the opposite: hand made, figurative, with low-brow, pop-cultural references. Sometimes my art even comes off as conspicuously “rearguard.” I mean, over the years my projects have made use of an odd assortment of things such as artificial plants, diorama techniques, comic book imagery, miniature tableau, and sculpted action figures in order to present narratives about history, class, and political injustice.

LO: So what is your working process like?
GS: Hard to describe, but I just finished David Joselit’s recent book “After Art,” and thought for a while I had the answer. Joselit starts off discussing the far too many images that are constantly coming at us from the Internet, advertising, cinema, TV, etc…  And then he counter-intuitively argues that “art” is not getting lost in this image-blizzard. Instead it has become a powerful generator of what he calls format. What is format? He explains that if traditional artistic mediums lead to object making, then format establishes patterns that create links and connections across images and long threads of content. The format therefore, is how an artist re-uses images, or ideas in order to produce a work. One of his favorite examples is Pierre Huyghe whose art always changes form, but there is a range of ideas lurking behind each piece.  So After Art is when artists stop making discrete “works” and instead reiterate and comment on existing materials, sort of like recycling with a mission.

LO: I can see a certain connection to what you do Greg.
GS: Me too. But then when I finished After Art and really thought about it I realized that if Joselit’s concept is correct, then my work suffers from format failure! I mean he subordinates mediums, materials and content to his morphing paradigm. But I still retain a relationship with all three in my “expanded” practice. When I make art, or when I write a text for that matter, I find that I am assailed by the specific concrete nature of form and content.

LO: Please Explain.
GS: Lets say I am trying to write about the concept of the archive. Despite every attempt to discuss it conceptually, I know sooner or later that I will be forced to dip down into the archive’s specificity: its sprawling mass of missing practices, lost details, and dog-eared documents. Its as if some archive-agency commanded attention from below.  And this dusty dark matter force tears up holes in smooth surfaces and turns abstraction pathological.

LO: A conceptualist!
GS: Ok, why not. Because what has shaped my art and its working process is less some profound inner drive to become an “artist” (although I admit I am as attached to that romantic idea as anyone) and is much more like the result of a string of fortunate encounters involving certain individuals and groups, certain institutions and historical moments, even certain objects and materials. As much as I would like to claim I am in full command of this process it’s a collaboration of sorts, a collaboration with the past –thus my interest in archives and history– as much as it is with the future expectations of a more egalitarian society. So that when all is said and done “art” is for me at least the way we think thought in material, plastic terms, but also reciprocally, it is how certain events, ideas, hopes and encounters become thinkable to us. And it’s a process that sort of bypasses our best attempts at exercising total authority or control over it.

LO: What are your upcoming projects?
GS: I am currently working on a new iteration of Imaginary Archive (http://www.gregorysholette.com/?page_id=587) for Kiev Ukraine this Spring, which, given the situation there should prove pretty compelling. I am also continuing to add chapters to my graphic novel Double City, and I am especially looking forward to the solo exhibition of new work I am preparing for Station Independent Projects in the Fall.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?
GS: Do your research. Seek out like-minded people. Map out the terrain. Stay tough.

The post Leah Oates In Conversation with Greg Sholette appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Growing up in Brooklyn in a working class family, my grandfather was my mentor. He retired from being a subway conductor and we enjoyed our time together after school while both my parents worked. He saw I liked to draw and he’d encourage me. We would read together and argue philosophy. I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in New York where the whole city was my playground. My childhood museums were not only world class but they were more than art museums, they were the encyclopedic museums of the Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum and the exciting dioramas of the Natural History Museum. From an early age I was thinking of making art in relationship to a broader context. The first art I felt a connection to was the wonderful Egyptian collection at the Brooklyn Museum. I also felt advantaged that I could have a public school art education, finding the 1.5 hour commute to the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan worth it. Scholarships allowed me to complete a formal art education and to go on to Cornell University for my BFA and eventually Bard College for my MFA.

LO: What are the ideas in your work and what is your working process?
MR: In my work, I deal with memory embedded in places and spaces of the past, whether they be the remains of ruins or resonances of the layering and pentimentos and palimpsests of centuries. On reflection, I realized being a native New Yorker informed my subject matter and themes. I was drawn to the eclectic architecture and the mix of times and styles, a reflection of the history of New York itself. I see in buildings the lives past lived that inform and live on in a presence, the history of a place and the people who lived there embedded in its structures. I create my own environments by drawing my reference from various sources both historical and from my sketchbook of accumulated photographs. I assemble images, removing them from their original context to create a new world of my own. I deal with both the illusion of real space and objects with a reiteration of the flat surface (especially in my paintings, where I combine and alternate in multi-panels highly painted images with flat areas of color). Of course, it’s all not so deadly serious, there are visual plays and historical winks, I’m attracted to the witty and playful as a curator and it’s there in my studio work as well (albeit subtly).

As to process, I travel often for my projects and spend several months each year in Europe. Wherever I go, I build a sketchbook of images. I take photographs of building facades, grotesques and gargoyles, interior as well as exterior spaces and collect all kinds of reference. Sometimes what I am seeing triggers an idea, sometimes I have an idea of the concept and cull through my images for the form the work will take.

LO: You’re an artist, curator and gallery director and like many artists juggle many things and have several jobs. What is your advice for this juggling act?
MR: We all juggle different roles and priorities in our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not. I make sure to give my full focus to what I am doing at the moment. As I always say, my career is my day job. And I think of all my work as one of a piece, whether in the studio or in the gallery or on the computer; everything I do is related to my art projects and my life as an artist first and foremost. I think it is important not to resent the time needed for anything I take on to be accomplished well and thoroughly. There will always be the frustration of never having enough time for everything, but that just makes for an interesting life. I can’t imagine being bored.

LO: Tell us about your new gallery CENTRAL BOOKING in the Lower East Side ie the artists, the goals for the gallery, why LES?
MR: I think of CENTRAL BOOKING more as my curatorial space rather than a traditional contemporary art gallery. After years of curating with other spaces, I felt the necessity of having complete control over my curatorial vision and decision-making so more than four years ago I founded the gallery. As a hybrid gallery (a commercial gallery with non-profit sponsorship), I feel I have the freedom to do all sorts of programming.

CENTRAL BOOKING is an interdisciplinary two gallery space focusing on the art of the book and its integration into the larger art world through exhibitions of all media on art and science themes. I have a very expansive idea of the book form and look for artists who do as well. Besides the more traditionally bound codex books, we specialize in books that push the form, whether it is utilizing the flat wall, or sculpturally situated on shelves, floor or ceiling. We represent over 160 international artists, many I’ve known and worked with for years, others I add as I see new work that excites me in its unique vision.

The quarterly exhibitions in our newly named Haber Space showcase a broad variety of work in a series of explorations where art meets science. I enjoy creating complete environments with the work, utilizing and designing the entire space- walls, floor and ceiling. The integration of the two spaces is organic as many book artists work in other media as well: painting, sculpture, installation and video art. In fact, book art often incorporates these other media itself. Therefore both galleries are distinctive but also have an interactive relationship. For each one of these exhibitions we always have a thought provoking art and science panel that puts several artists in the exhibition in discussion with scientists and scholars in the field.

The themes of my exhibitions mostly come from what I see that artists are doing in their studios. I collect files on artists whose work interests me and begin to break the work up into categories of thematic relationships. When I feel there is enough work and enough variety of approaches and media, then I have an exhibition.

We also have a full programming schedule that includes screenings, talks, original performances, readings, lecture series, discussion panels and workshops. And we publish CENTRAL BOOKING Magazine, a quarterly that focuses on book art issues that also contains a full catalog for each of our exhibitions.

CENTRAL BOOKING opened in DUMBO, Brooklyn in September 2009, but as our success grew I was looking for a storefront space that would be more than a destination space. I thought we were going to remain in Brooklyn but after I looked for over a year and had two spaces fall through, I spoke with other Brooklyn galleries that were moving to LES and heard the same story – that it was a growing gallery neighborhood and the rents were often less than in Brooklyn. I was encouraged when I found in my first walk around a number of possible spaces. And I love the fact that it is still a bit of the New York I grew up with, a real neighborhood where people live and shop and is still full of old family businesses. The other galleries have also been open and welcoming, though unfortunately there isn’t a lot of time for too much interaction, we’re all so busy. But I found that storefront with quite a large window frontage and a space big enough to comfortably fit my whole program. And one in which my community can share as we build it together. I feel a real part of something in LES and have made friendships with a number of my neighbors, many who have already become regulars in just the few months since we opened there.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?
MR: Humans were drawing on cave walls when they could barely grunt communications. Art is part of our humanity, do we really need to argue why it is important? Good or bad, what in our world has not been created by art? Can we even look at a snowflake under a microscope and say that art is irrelevant or non-essential to our lives? Obviously, it’s intrinsic in all nature.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?
MR: As a native New Yorker, I took a lot for granted as a young artist. I knew how to navigate the vastness, understanding that NY is just a bunch of neighborhoods strung together. My advice would be to find your community, a place of comfort, and move out from there. Take a class, join a printmaking workshop, get involved in a non-profit, attend events that interest you. And keep your expenses as low as possible so that you have to earn as little as possible and can have as much time to work both in the studio and on organically building a career.

LO: What are your upcoming projects?
MR: Besides the four exhibitions I curate yearly at CENTRAL BOOKING and the 4 issues of the magazine I need to put to bed each year, I have an exhibition at Bennington College, long in the works, that opens in April which brings together artists I have worked with in both parts of the gallery. Also on the curatorial front, I will be co-jurying the summer exhibition at the Center for Book Arts and will also be working on their 40th anniversary exhibition. I am also in the process of two longer term international book art exchange exhibitions with Bristol, England and Poland.

My studio projects include finishing up my current painting series, editioning my new artist’s book, and working on my painting animation.

The post Leah Oates Talks Work with Maddy Rosenberg appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

As for where this is going we have several ideas that we are kicking around. A few of them include expanding Curate NYC to other states and other national and international cities. We aim to curate the world (laughs). Other ideas include deeper penetration into particular areas of the city involving nontraditional art spaces such as stores and restaurants. The goal is always to include more artists and art professionals and create greater economic opportunity and exposure for artists.

LO: Please speak about your life in the arts and why you think art is important.
DSJ: My life is fully emerged and integrated in the arts as I’m a working painter and writer, a collector, a curator, a gallery owner, have an arts foundation that serves adult artists and employees artists to work with children in NYC schools and the two galleries I run. I sit and have sat on many arts and culture boards of directors and have served as chairman of New York States Art Council. The arts are my life and one which is supremely satisfying.

The importance of the arts in everyone’s and especially children’s lives is incalculable. It feeds the spirit and fuels the imagination, it brings people together and promotes diversity, commonality and dialogue. Creating and viewing art in any form is soul satisfying. It is also a great source of economic activity for local and national economies providing thousands of jobs and billions in tax revenue for New York City alone.

LO: Do you think there is a difference or connection between making art and curating?
DSJ: Not all artists are curators or curators are artists. In order for an artist to be a curator one has to detach from a bias for work similar to ones own and understand the merits of styles and content of other artistic visions. Thats not always an easy task. The connection is an overall love for art. Both curators and practicing artists must bring a love for the arts when doing either.

LO: How where artist selected for Curate NYC?
DS: Curate NYC is an open call to join in the project which means any artist with a NYC studio or home address is eligable to participate. All an artist has to do is provide proof of NYC residence and upload an image of their work and biographical information and bang your apart of curatenyc.

LO: Curate NYC organized exhibitions in all five boroughs. How are the various art scenes in boroughs the same and/or different?
DSJ: I find that each borough has a different artistic identity as far as density of exhibition spaces and artists. The public is more accustomed to finding art in Manhattan than the other boroughs but as artists expand living throughout the city so do the amount of venues that show their work and the nature of the other businesses that support artists increase ie art stores coffee shops clubs music venues etc.

LO: What kind of advice would you give artists who want to show their work in NYC galleries, museums etc.
DSJ: My advice to artists is mingle and go to shows to meet other artists. Join CurateNYC and go to galleries to talk about your work. Get out there and let folks know what your doing.

The New York art scene is very varied and lively with many interesting shows and events going on but it can also be commercial and market driven. What are your thoughts on the art scene in NYC?

The art scene in NYC is the liveliest in the world but there are other markets that are very important. Africa, Asia, Europe and other cities in the USA. The art market is fast becoming a global one. CurateNYC recognizes this trend and has engaged curators from around the globe to help market NYC artists.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
DSJ: My favorite artists today are too varied to mention but from modern art history…Paul Klee, Cy Twombly, Norman Lewis, Wifredo Lam, Romare Bearden , Jean Michel Basguait , Andy Warhol, Ed Clark , Picasso, and the list goes on and on and on.

LO: To wrap up please share any upcoming shows and/or projects or shows.
DSJ: I have a newbook of poetry and painting coming spring 2014 as well as several exhibits around the country. An exhibition on abstraction I’m curating in three NYC galleries. I will be at Art Basel Miami and I have many day to day art activites and of course CuratenNYC 2014 and its new surprises.

The post Leah Oates Talks to Danny Simmons Jr. of Curate NYC appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Kristen Copham: I have identified myself as an artist for as long as I can remember.  I had strong drawing skills as a kid, so I benefited from early encouragement.  I now find the title to be a little vague and commonplace, so sometimes in response to “whaddyado?”  I say I’m an illustrator, an entrepreneur, an international playgirl, or a janitor.  My family background is about as idyllic as it gets: close knit, working class, Midwestern, rural, fun, genuine, devoted, quasi-religious and to top it all off, lucky.

LO: What are the ideas in your work and what is your working process? 

KC: First, I try to work at all.  It’s easy to be busy, discouraged or frustrated with what I’m trying to express.  And since it’s pretty entertaining to create work in my head and takes a lot of effort to do it in reality, discipline can be a challenge. But, I know that practice is crucial to successful expression.  I keep a sketchbook in my purse most of the time. I draw in it some of the time, and I embark upon drawing sprees and then drawing famines. In the studio I paint because it’s easier and feels more natural.  Painting is all about my process – organizing and mixing color and materials, and  supporting the ideas both have to coalesce into one cohesive moment.  By the time I do all that, the brush does the rest. Unlike a pen, a brush is fairly forgiving. I need the pen in order to quickly capture ideas or images that seem to come out of nowhere, and usually those are the ideas and images worth exploring further.

My specific ideas tend toward interpretation and representation of the natural world. This planet and the human experience fascinate me every single day.  I’m working on merging the internal with the external world – practicing both seeing and feeling. I try to paint looking at both the outside world or “reality” and the inside world, my place of intuition. I like to paint people from life verses photographs, which flatten out expression and nuance. I’m not saying I can capture those things in a painting either, but the process of building the personality through layers of color and tone while watching how someone moves and interacts with the world seems more dynamic to me than capturing the shadows and light across a face in a fraction of a second.  Doing the latter successfully takes way more talent than I have!  Mostly I just have a color addiction.

LO: You’re a portrait painter, which is a tradition that has produced some of the best works of art ever created. What is it about the human face in painting that fascinates us and what are some of your favorite portrait paintings?

KC: In terms of portraits, some of my all-time favorites are Alice Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol, affected and fresh; Lucien Freud’s raw, honest and unapologetic portrayal Queen Elizabeth; Sylvia Sleigh’s various paintings of her hairy, handsome Latino model with the humungous afro; Dana Schutz’s portraits of her fantasy last-man-on-earth “Frank”– especially the one where he is bright orange and floating on an ice chunk in an endless sea; Nicole Eisenman’s fabulous prints of faces; Elizabeth Peyton’s romanticized depiction of Kurt Cobain; and Frances Bacon’s disjointed portraits of his lover. Classically, I appreciate the rawness of Rembrandt’s moody self-portraits, and figuratively I’m a fan of El Greco’s movements and gestures as well as Jenny Saville’s big juicy nudes.  Don’t get me going, I could go on and on … I love all of it!

The face expresses so much.  It’s how we connect with each other.  And faces are so varied and interesting, yet they are all fundamentally the same.  Eyes, mouth, nose, ears, and hair (or not!) on a head.  We all have a face, and we simultaneously express through it and receive information through it:  through all the features of the face we see the world, we hear and listen, we speak, breathe and consume.  It’s telling how we tend to find faces in abstract works, isn’t it? The face is the first thing we recognize as babies. I must add that the human body is equally incredible: how it moves in space and interacts with the world, its curves and lumps and lines, the way it can express feeling.

LO: How do you select the subjects that you paint?

KC: Often I let them select me, as with my 1000 faces project.  Sometimes I’ll see a person who I just want to paint because they look so unique or their expression is especially intriguing.  Occasionally I’ll ask a stranger to sit for me, but usually they just think I’m strange and don’t respond. For my “Male Artists Exposed” Series, I painted men who were artists, not models – in order to subvert the idea of the model as object, explore ideas of subject-hood, and because I thought it was fun being a woman artist painting nude men.  I’ve also done a series of nude paintings of my friend David Gibson, a talented curator about town. He’s a big guy, which for me is exciting because the resulting works challenge our ideas about beauty and the human form.

Painting family, friends and lovers is a natural inclination. I want to study the faces of the people I love and record my vision of them. It’s a perceived form of making them immortal, I suppose. I never want them to die!

LO: You ran a gallery called LZ Project Space in the Lower East Side for several years. How was this experience and how was it to be part of the emerging gallery scene in LES?

KC: NY Studio Gallery started with my studio rental on the fifth floor of the Whitehall Building on 25^th street in Chelsea.  I consolidated my living and working space in 2007 and moved myself and NYSG to my building in the Lower East Side. Later we expanded to a small annex space in the back of the building and called it LZ Project Space. We hosted artists such as Arielle Falk, Emmy Mikelson, Ernest Concepcion, and many more amazingly talented voices. It is a tradition that continues to this day with Leah Oates’ sophisticated vision at Station Independent.

At the time we had a great line-up of dealers with exceptional exhibits on the block:  Alix Sloan, who still deals at fairs and has shown out of the NYSG space, Collette Blanchard on Clinton Street, the non-profit Participant who is still a player. I feel honored to have been a small part of the emerging scene in the area. It continues to grow. Today longtime East Village art dealer Paul Bridgewater runs Smart Clothes Gallery out of the space.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?

KC: Art captures the time, place, and feeling of a culture and on a grander scale, of the collective unconscious of the planet. We preserve art because people relate to it at a fundamental or archetypal level and in turn it relates back to the experience of being human. It speaks to something universal, which is why humanity has the urge to preserve art and look to it for answers. It offers a time-space thread of connection to our past and future, to shared and personal experiences. It’s the same reason people are often threatened by art. Why else would ancient relics be defaced, or coveted or stolen, or traded at breathtaking prices?  As E. H. Gombrich points out in The Story of Art, why would you care if someone poked holes in the eyes of a picture of your mother? Because the image has power!

Another interesting thing about art is that it is both all around us and inside us. Making art is a way to give yourself a voice, give yourself that power.  The emergence of graffiti-art all over the world is just one example of how young people use mark-making as an outlet.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?

KC: It depends on what you want to achieve. I can’t really give advice generally since everyone has different dreams. Do you want to make more work?  Organize your life so that you can work. Do you want to sell your work?  Figure out your niche, find your audience, create a selling plan. Maybe you use the Internet or throw open studio parties or connect to an interior designer. Do you want a dealer?  Do your research and make a plan to find representation. Having representation outside New York can help, especially if your rep does art fairs and has a solid collector base for whose taste your work fits.

There’s nothing that feels worse than being an artist and not working.  Even if other things are out of place – money, or love, or logistics, of life – find some way to make work, even if it’s simply jotting down ideas on napkins you carry in your pocket.  If you have a serious practice or think you’re good enough to be represented, research your possible galleries and make a plan to have your work considered.  Haha, I should take my own advice!

LO: What are your upcoming projects?

KC: That’s top-secret information! (smiles)  But I can tell you a little bit … In my upstate studio I’m working on a series of mountain paintings based on the time I spent last year in Colorado and the Swiss Alps. In entrepreneur-land I am developing a cartoon character that teaches yoga to kids. Of course I still regularly paint portraits, either in Manhattan or on the road. Can I paint yours?

Lately I’ve been trying to synthesize aspects of the external world, specifically the natural world, with ideas of the internal world: living life, learning, making errors, being human and animal at once. I’m trying to mesh those ideas in the mountain paintings, which are both large and sparse – a challenge for a painter who typically covers every square inch of canvas with paint. I may need to bring the practice into plein air for a while. Now and again I’ll find myself fussing with collage, culling old sketchbooks, and looking at art in NY in order to find inspiration and make connections. I meditate and ask the universe for clarity, focus, and clues to discover that next big project that will consume my passion.  Anyway, those are just a few of the grand and sometimes ridiculous ideas that I wake up and go to sleep with. I’m ashamed to say I have another three or four non-art related projects that regularly distract me as well, like fitness, food, writing, or real estate, to name a few.  Unfortunately, I’m a busybody, and that’s never done my art any favors.

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