The “Oficina de Gestion de Muros” (Walls Management Office) is an independent Spanish project that fills the empty spaces around the city of Madrid with art. WMO is putting the best street artists on the planet in touch with Madrid locals, neighbors, shopkeepers and businesses alike who have empty walls waiting to be filled with art. For their first project “Medianeras de Madrid”, or Joint Walls of Madrid, they worked with two amazing street artists: Blu and Sam3. Now, they are putting together a listing of artists to collaborate with other wall-owners. The person responsible for founding WMO is Remedios Vincent. I had a chat with Remedios to get to know a little more about this project.
Interviews
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Brooklyn Museum’s New Acquisition Shines Light on Unlikely 18th C Racial Revolutionary
The Brooklyn Museum has an extensive collection of Spanish Colonial painting, but the institution’s relatively new curator of European art Richard Aste knew the museum lacked the same depth in their British colonial works. Recently, Brooklyn’s premiere fine art institution announced the acquisition of a new work by Agostino Brunias, “Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape” (ca. 1764-1796), which will partially fill that gap but there is something else about the painting that makes it interesting to the contemporary viewer, namely its multicultural subjects.
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Steve Lambert’s Anti-Advertising Agency Takes a Long Coffee Break
Yesterday, someone suggested to me that artist Steve Lambert’s Anti-Advertising Agency was calling it quits after six years of producing some of the most socially engaged work around. For those who may be unfamiliar with the group, they actively co-opted the language of advertising and public relations to question and parody its pervasiveness in our lives. The ominous looking header on the homepage of the Anti-Advertising Agency, complete with start and end dates, pushed me to contact Lambert about what’s happening with his artistic brainchild.
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Talking to Nate Hill About Punch Me Panda
During last month’s #TheSocialGraph exhibition, Hill dressed as a panda and lived in a crate in the gallery. He named the character, “Punch Me Panda.” For a penny you could either punch him in the gallery or invite him to your home in Brooklyn via tweet (@natexhill). He also roamed the streets trying to relieve people’s frustration and anger while he was dressed up in his persona. This conversation with artist happened late last month and reflects on his performance and what it is all about.
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FREE VOINA! Two Russian Art-ivists Languish in Jail
The radical performance art collective, Voina, has been challenging the Russian authorities for years but on November 15 two of their artists, co-founder Oleg Vortonikov and Leonid Nikolayev, were arrested for a performance this past summer that involved the overturning of a cop car as part of an anti-corruption protest.
Even with this major set back, Voina continues to fight and they resist the efforts of the authorities to squash their artistic protests. The group has fans all around the world and even stealthy street artist Banksy is a fan and has thrown his support behind the group and pledged £80,000 in an effort to help. To find out more about the situation I conducted the following email interview with Natalie Sokol, a third member who was also detained but later released, about the arrests.
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Interview with Hide/Seek Co-curator David C Ward
David C. Ward is co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition, which has become a lightning rod for right-wing attacks on the federally funded Smithsonian institution. The show is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. There are many LGBT images on display but the work is not limited to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender artists and encompasses work by many names that are mainstays in art history, including Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, AA Bronson, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
But what has really catapulted the show into the limelight is the fact that last week Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video pulled from the National Portrait Gallery show.
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New Museum Director Lisa Phillips Explains Decision to Show Wojnarowicz Video
When the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that it would be removing “A Fire in My Belly,” a David Wojnarowicz video work, from its Hide/Seek exhibition due to Republican political pressure, the art world rushed to the work’s defense. Among the first art institutions to respond to the scandal was the New Museum. In a press release on December 6, the museum announced that it would be displaying the video in its lobby “as an act of solidarity with the many artists whose rights of expression continue to be limited by misinformation and fear.”
In a Hyperallergic-exclusive Q+A with New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips, the director explains how the museum reacted to the initial controversy and how the decision was made to display the censored video in the lobby.
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Rawson Projects Takes Root on Bedford Avenue
On November 11, a small gallery opened its doors on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and caused a ripple of excitement in local art circles. Not only was this one of the first galleries to open on Bedford for ages but many people are taking it as hopeful sign that some energy was returning to a neighborhood that used to be a central part of New York’s art world dialogue.
Named Rawson Projects, the small gallery consists of Christopher Rawson, Julian Calero, and James Morrill. Their first exhibition, Fingers in the Sun, features the work of local painter Sam Martineau and it is a smart show filled with works that are nuanced and almost impossible to capture in photographs.
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Marc Horowitz Crowdsources Life/Art From Strangers
On November 1, one of People Magazine‘s Top 50 Hottest Bachelors, conceptual artist and Internet start Marc Horowitz, took a line from Subservient Chicken and let the Internet tell him what to do. He agreed to bound by these decisions, no matter how absurd, and to broadcast the results online for the wider world to see.
For the entire month, with the backing of the New York-based public art organization Creative Time, Marc has been crowdsourcing his life. Everything from what he should wear to how he should celebrate Thanksgiving becomes open to the masses. The piece continues in the tradition of Marc’s extensive body of enormously popular Internet-based works, from “Talkshow 247,” where he broadcast his life continuously for three months, and the “Google Maps Roadtrip,” a journey across the country using only Google Streetview.
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Covering Times Square’s Ads With Art, Impossible?
Over the years, various artists including Maya Lin, Marina Abramovic and Keith Haring have presented artwork in Times Square, often on one of the large video screens that dot the space. But why not turn every advertisement in Times Square into art? Justus Bruns, an enterprising Dutch guy, started a project that has gradually snowballed into something like a viral movement. His goal? To turn Times Square into Art Square (so goes the name of the project, TS2AS), and cover up all the visual noise in New York City’s most famous public space with works of contemporary art. It’s certainly a tall order, but with the momentum Justus and his team have already pulled together on an international level, there’s a better chance than ever before. I interviewed the young art impresario to get his thoughts on the future of TS2AS.
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James Gilbert On Tweeted, Googled and Inappropriately Touched
Los Angeles-based artist James Gilbert has been exploring the nature of privacy online with Tweeted, Googled and Inappropriately Touched. The cleverly named series incorporates smaller sub-projects, like “Privacy Is Dead Because We Said So, 2.0” (2010), which is included in #TheSocialGraph.
As part of the Brooklyn incarnation, Gilbert asks participants who would like to take one of the hundred hand-sewn plastic undergarments home to agree to the following conditions, including promising not to sell them, to post a photo with them online on some form of social media, and to send us the link. The images we’ve received (and posted on our tumblelog) portray everything from the very mundane shots of people holding them up to the definitely NSFW (see images here).
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From Bushwick Block Party To Street Art Park?
Last Saturday’s All City Block Party at Factory Fresh in Bushwick attracted street art fans and artists to cover the walls of the block-long Vandervoort Place with murals and art work by Brooklyn talents, including Chris Stain, Gaia, Skewville, Imminent Disaster and Tek33 and Dscreet of London’s Burning Candy crew.
Of course, photographer Luna Park has the goods at The Street Spot, and there are some more pics on Juxtapoz via Gaia, but I wanted to talk to Ali Ha, co-founder of Factory Fresh, about the project. I was dying to ask her what exactly is going on with Vandervoort Place and their dream of turning it into a street art park or more specifically an artist-run green space for the community.
