colonialism – Page 2

April 20, 2023October 6, 2024, by Art Spiel

Jamie Martinez in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Artist Jamie Martinez at his studio with his work “Vision Mask I”.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Jamie Martinez whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

December 7, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Another Fumble at the Whitney: no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

Opinion

A group of people in a room with posters on the wall

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view. Photo courtesy of the writer.

The exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, though it includes 50 works by 20 artists, seems overwhelmed given it has been installed in an enormous space. With the exception of two lounge-like areas in which billboard-sized video projections are installed, most of the works, modest in scale, seem to be scattered through the space, or enigmatically clustered together. Ironically, where the Wake of Maria is sparsely installed and attended, the Edward Hopper NY exhibition, given its scale and popularity, would definitely benefit from more space than the half floor it has been jammed into. Another oddity is the disparity in the number and scale of works each artist is represented by. I can only suspect the budget of this show was insufficient to achieve its stated ambition of “presenting artworks made over the last five years by an inter-generational group of artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora.”

July 4, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Alicia Piller – Weathering Climates

A picture containing person

Description automatically generated — Alicia Piller in her Inglewood studio.

LA based artist Alicia Piller creates multi layered sculptures and installations in which material, media, form, and color metamorphose into alluring environments filled with cultural, political, and biographic references—latex balloons, sycamore seeds, silkscreen images fuse into a cosmos with visually complex and open ended layers of meaning.

April 1, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Mira Dayal: In that Empire at Spencer Brownstone Gallery

In Dialogue with Mira Dayal

*Mira Dayal, installation view (wall text), “…In That Empire…” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist.*

In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.

December 8, 2020November 2, 2022, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Abena Motaboli

Abena Motaboli, The Pieces that hang far up above – in you, in me, in I, in We, in Us, 2019 Plastic Tarp. Dimensions variable approximate 12ft x 12ft x 12ft. Photo courtesy the artist

The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) is a volunteer, female-led, artist-run project. TIAB 2020 launched in March in New York City at Brooklyn Museum, and continued in September through December at EFA Project Space, Greenwood Cemetery, and virtually, presenting 60+ artists. This interview series features 10 participating artists.

Abena Motaboli is a Southern African born educator, visual artist, and writer based in Chicago. She grew up in Lesotho, a landlocked country in Southern Africa, before moving to the U.S where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Columbia College Chicago and at L’Institut Catholique de Paris in Paris, France. With a strong commitment to social justice work in the South and West sides of Chicago and being an immigrant, her artwork comments on displacement, immigration, the African diaspora, and the loss of the sense of home. In her intricate plastic installations and meditative line-work in her paintings, she uses ephemeral material such as plastic, tea, dirt, and coffee to comment on colonialism, past memories, and the culture of creating.

June 21, 2020June 21, 2020, by Melissa Stern

Artists on Coping: Merritt Johnson

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Merritt Johnson was born in West Baltimore and spent her childhood navigating between trees, tarps and concrete. She earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work navigates the spaces between bodies and the body politic, land and cultures by making images and objects that connect, reflect and refract vision and experience. The multiplicity of materials and processes Johnson employs embody her multiplicity, exploring layering, allegiance and agency in the face of continued threats to land, water and bodies. Johnson’s works are containers for story, feeling and thought: images of what cannot be seen, exercises for existence, and political bodies. She lives and works with her family on Tlingit land in Sitka Alaska.

February 26, 2020November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Zac Hacmon at the Border

Eva Mayhabal Davis in dialogue with Art Spiel – Beyond the Pale

Installation view of *Beyond the Pale* by Zac Hacmon. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Etienne Frossard

Zac Hacmon‘s sound sculptures at the intimate Border project space are overpowering in size, as if cutting the air with their sharp diagonal tiled lines to create a sense of suffocating sterility. Their oddity is intriguing and repelling simultaneously, and their placement in the room forces the visitor to navigate around with considerate effort. The sound consists of a series of stories recorded at the Arizona-Mexico border, and adds another layer of urgency, creating altogether an inspired fusion of sound/form. Eva Mayhabal Davis, the curator of Beyond the Pale , elaborates on the premise behind the show.

March 26, 2018November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Kanad Chakrabarti: Sites of Exchange

Kanad Chakrabarti in front of his installation Derivative Work (Clifford Torus) (2014-2018), installation shot, mixed media, Photo courtesy of Etty Yaniv

Kanad Chakrabarti’s sense of cultural rootlessness translates into his video and installation work in complex and thought provoking ways, combining analytical approaches with visceral sensibility. After a stimulating conversation about his installation work at SpringBreak art fair, curated by Jason Andrew from Norte Maar, we had the following interview. Continue reading “Kanad Chakrabarti: Sites of Exchange”