Hyperallergic

Hyperallergic
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News, developments, and stirrings in the art world with host Hrag Vartanian, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic.

  1. 2D AGO

    Talking a Big Game: The Art of Sports and the Sport of Art

    We’ve been taught by high school movies and pop culture at large that art and sports are diametrical opposites. You know the trope: The sporty jocks and the nerdy theater kids are all relegated to separate lunch tables, and never the twain shall meet, save the occasional High School Musical. But a recent exhibition, Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, takes this stereotype to the mat.  In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Hrag Vartanian sits down with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) curator Jennnifer Dunlop Fletcher and independent curator and former Hyperallergic Senior Editor Seph Rodney, who designed this exhibition together with renowned art historian and SFMOMA Research Director Katie Siegel. Their conversation illuminates the striking parallels between the crafts of art and sports, whether it’s the tension between talent and persistence, the grand stages of sports arenas and museums, or countless hours of hidden labor. And, of course, people in both disciplines always talk a big game. As SFMOMA’s largest show to date, Get in the Game took up an entire floor of the museum when it was installed there, with 200 works by over 70 artists and designers meditating on themes around sports and athleticism. Over a third of these artists are either current or former athletes, from former football players like Shaun Leonardo to Olympians like Savanah Leaf.  If you missed the show in San Francisco, start planning your trip to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where it will be on view later this year, or an early 2026 trip to Florida to catch it at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The unconventional catalog that accompanies the exhibition is also on sale now, replete with vivid comic illustrations by AJ Dungo. SFMOMA is also continuing its exploration of art and sports with three current exhibitions: Count Me In and When the World Is Watching, both on view through April 2, and Unity Through Skateboarding, on view through May 4. The museum’s Bay Area Walls series also features three new murals by David Huffman, Jenifer K Wofford, and Gene Luen Yang, all meditating on the topic of sports.  Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters This podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

    38 min

  2. MAR 11

    Nick Cave Is Serving You Everything

    One of seven brothers, Nick Cave grew up watching his family create magic out of scraps. His aunts would cut paper bags into patterns, and in just one day, make an entire new outfit to wear that night. Since then, the artist has been dedicated to studying how to lay ornamental patterns on the body.  Leading the way for a current groundswell of adornment in art, Cave is known for highly decorated, maximalist works, particularly in his “Soundsuits,” which are both unapologetically joyous and respond to the deep pain of police brutality against Black people. His newest body of work, on view in Amalgams and Graphts at Jack Shainman Gallery’s large space in the Clock Tower Building through March 29, pushes and pulls the forms he’s known for playing with. Introducing needlepoint and portraiture, he flattened out his meticulous collections of objects into riotous rectangles, winking at the heritage of 19th-century floral paintings. But he’s also elongated his humanoid figures, using bronze casts of 3D scans of his own body that burst into tree forms branching toward the heavens.  For this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian visited Cave at his studio in Chicago. You’ll hear them discuss how queerness informs his sensibility, his perspectives on fashion, preservation, politics, his memories of dressing in his Sunday best for church, and how the self-taught women crafters in his family planted the seeds for him to become the artist he is today. Nick Cave: Amalgams and Graphts continues at Jack Shainman (46 Lafayette Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through March 29. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters This podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

    38 min
  3. The Boys in the (Klan) Hood: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston’s Legacy

    FEB 25

    The Boys in the (Klan) Hood: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston’s Legacy

    Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, came from vastly different backgrounds. But a current show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their perspectives and sensibilities blend seamlessly. Both were maligned for their figurative, comic book-influenced styles: Guston by the elite art world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when his mother burned his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards and Dungeons and Dragons materials, believing that she was saving him from eternal damnation. In fact, when Doyle Hancock first came into contact with Guston, he had recently found the freedom he needed at college, away from his stringent home life, to explore new worlds of art. He told Hyperallergic that, at the time, he saw Guston “as another comic book artist.” As he honed his craft to become an editorial cartoon illustrator, he felt a kinship with Guston’s zany caricatures — and soon saw how he could continue his legacy of using comedic aesthetics to highlight the darkest aspects of American racism. Both also confronted white supremacy in various ways throughout their lives: Guston, a proud antifascist, lived through the KKK’s reign of terror in Los Angeles; Doyle Hancock would learn that the fairgrounds of his home in Paris, Texas, the place of many happy childhood memories, were once crowded with onlookers who craned their necks to view the lynching of a teenage Black boy. Further, both question if they themselves are complicit: Guston through his depiction of himself as an artist wearing the Klan hood, and Doyle Hancock through his host of surreal characters who are simultaneously perpetrators and victims of supremacy culture.  In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and Trenton Doyle Hancock come together with poet and critic John Yau, who has been writing about Guston for decades. With his deep knowledge of Guston’s life and work, Yau illuminates what almost seems like a cosmic connection between the two artists.  In 2020, Guston’s work came into question over whether it was appropriate to show during a period of reckoning with racist imagery. It would be far from the first time that Guston’s work has been covered up or censored, whether it was by institutions attempting to avoid liability, the Catholic Church in Mexico being wary of standing up to authoritarianism, or anti-communist Los Angeles police units destroying his antiracist paintings. With fascism on the rise in America and around the globe, Doyle Hancock’s “confrontation” with Guston’s work shows the power of addressing white supremacy head-on, with all of its vile truths in view — and then, their power deflated, through comic relief. Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston continues at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue and East 92nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 30.  Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters This podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

    1h 4m
  4. Joyce Kozloff’s Patterns of Protest

    12/17/2024

    Joyce Kozloff’s Patterns of Protest

    In 1973, gallerist Tibor de Nagy gave Joyce Kozloff a call. His voice quivered as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a searing review of her latest work. Greenberg had scoffed at the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, and said that it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that was a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor freaked out” and asked her “to take it away.” Greenberg had unwittingly dismissed the first of the artist's paintings in a major art movement of which she was a key founding member: Pattern and Decoration, also known as “P&D,” which grew out of the flowering folk revival and feminist protest era of the 1970s. Fed up with hard-edge abstraction and minimalism favored by the White men who dominated the art world, P&D leaned into lush decorative surfaces, cultural adornment, and unapologetically crafty aesthetics.  Of course, it was critics like Greenberg whom P&D was revolting against. He’s cited twice in a 1978 article Kozloff co-wrote with Valerie Jaudon, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture.” Published in the feminist art journal Heresies (of which Kozloff was also a founding member), they wrote that in “rereading the basic texts of Modern Art … we discovered a disturbing belief system based on the moral superiority of the art of Western civilization.” They “came to realize that the prejudice against the decorative has a long history and is based on hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, men’s art above women’s art.” Luckily, Kozloff’s career wasn’t up to Clement Greenberg. Kozloff went on to have dozens of shows, beautify over a dozen buildings and transit systems with public artworks over the decades, and inspire new generations of artists to unabashedly lean into ornament. Once an active member of the peace protests of the 1960s, she has also continued her political activism, which in the 21st century has become more explicit in her work. Her all-over pattern paintings have morphed into detailed maps, from Civil War battle plans exploding with viruses to aeronautical charts dotted with points that the United States has bombed.  In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, you’ll hear the interview our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian recorded with Kozloff just after the opening of With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, which the institution called “first full-scale scholarly North American survey” of the P&D movement. They talk about everything from her mother’s embroidery to her travels in Turkey and Iran that inspired her art. You’ll also hear from Hyperallergic Staff Writer Maya Pontone, who reported this past year about Kozloff’s iconic public artwork in Cambridge’s Harvard Square train station that’s currently at risk of disappearing. And if you’ve been listening closely this season, you’ll recognize some recurring characters: Columbia professor Stephen Greene; the Heresies collective; Joyce’s partner, writer Max Kozoff, and; of course, Clement Greenberg.  Works from three of Kozloff’s latest series, Uncivil Wars, Boys’ Art, and Social Studies, are on view in the Map Room at Argosy Book Store (116 East 59th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 25, 2025.  (00:00) - Intro (04:13) - Childhood (07:35) - Art School at Carnegie Mellon and Columbia University (22:04) - From abstraction to patterns (27:39) - Joining the feminist movement in California (41:01) - The Heresies collective (44:46) - First Pattern and Decoration painting (46:45) - Forming the Pattern and Decoration movement (55:42) - The 1980s and public art (57:03) - Maya Pontone on the deterioration of Kozloff’s Harvard Square Mural (01:05:01) - Paintings of maps (01:07:52) - Political activism in and outside the studio (01:18:11) - Civil War series (01:21:17) - Making work about war (01:28:46) - Advice for artists (01:32:01) - Outro Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters This podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

    1h 33m
  5. Karen Wilkin: Critiquing the New Masters

    12/10/2024

    Karen Wilkin: Critiquing the New Masters

    In the late 1950s, a Manhattan-born college student was running from an art history course at Barnard to a George Balanchine ballet practice at the storied School of American Ballet on 82nd Street and Broadway. Soon, she began to make connections between the old-school Russian ballet instructors who taught her “ferocious point class” and were constantly “aspiring to an abstract ideal,” if a ruthless one, and the extending lines of Anthony Caro’s sculptures striving toward an arabesque. These rigorous studies in dance informed the work of the leading critic and curator of 20th-century Modernism, Karen Wilkin.  Of course, Balanchine’s presence was just one instance in which Wilkin has brushed shoulders with masters of the arts throughout her lifetime. In this episode, she discusses the influence of her parents’ close friendships with New York’s prominent literary figures, from S.J. Perelman to Ruth McKenney, and artists like Adolph Gottlieb. She tells us about touring the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with Kenneth Noland, advising at the Triangle residency alongside Helen Frankenthaler, and attending the Spoleto Festival as composer Samuel Barber’s “beard.” Wilkin also reflects on the valuable lessons she learned from years working with the legendary critic Clement Greenberg, though she doesn’t shy away from illuminating his noxious mistreatment of women like herself.  The author of monographs on a litany of these artists from Stuart Davis and David Smith to Georges Braque and Giorgio Morandi, she discusses her journey in art writing with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian who once was her student at the University of Toronto and credits her with his introduction to the world of art criticism. Tune in to hear them discuss everything from the decline of MoMA to masters of Canadian abstraction to Wilkin’s beloved herd of Maine Coon cats. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Watch the complete video of the conversation with images of the artworks on YouTube. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters Become a member

    1h 31m
  6. Guantánamo Bay and the Art of Resistance

    12/04/2024

    Guantánamo Bay and the Art of Resistance

    This August, journalist Moustafa Bayoumi broke the story that the first photo of a detainee in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site had been declassified. It shows an emaciated Ammar al-Baluchi, standing shackled and naked in a starkly white room. Subjected to years of torture, according to CIA protocol, the photo of the Pakistani detainee was meant “to document his physical condition at the time of transfer.” In a recent Hyperallergic opinion piece, Bayoumi reflected on the dark history of various regimes’ use of similar “atrocity photography” — a genre of memories they create for themselves that chronicle violence, but obscure it from public view.  While this photograph epitomizes dehumanization, another image shows a different perspective. Through a vortex of colored lines and dots, al-Baluchi illustrated what he saw during a spell of vertigo, which was brought on by a traumatic brain injury caused by this torture.  No longer in the media spotlight, it’s all too easy for many to forget that dozens of people are still imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. The detention camp has incarcerated hundreds of detainees from around the world since it opened in the early 2000s in the wake of 9/11, and al-Baluchi is in the vast minority of those who have been charged with crimes connected to those events. While over half of the men still held there today were cleared for release years ago, they have not been freed, and it’s possible they never will.  Over a decade ago, a group of these men began to create art. At first, they used what little material they could find, such as soap scratched on walls or plastic forks scraped on styrofoam cups, even drawing with powdered tea on toilet paper. If these covert artists were discovered, they were punished. But starting in 2010, after Obama-era reforms, detainees were finally allowed to attend art classes. What happened was a brief flowering of the arts in one of the least likely places, and under inhumane conditions. In this episode, we speak with Erin L. Thompson, a Hyperallergic contributor, a professor of art crime at John Jay College. She curated Ode to the Sea, a groundbreaking exhibition of artwork by detainees that debuted in 2018, and recently returned from a week-long trip to the Caribbean military prison in order to view the 9/11 trials that ended up being delayed. Thompson spoke with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian about witnessing the strict policing of not only embattled art, but also how authorities maintain a tight control on photography taken by the media.  Writer and artist Molly Crabapple, on the other hand, found a workaround. She joined us to discuss her 2013 trip to the detention center, when she was granted access to draw this surreal prison and its inhabitants, both the incarcerated men and medics, guards, and other actors that keep the machine running. Her work shows us how the craft of drawing can illuminate truths that censored photographs cannot.  And finally, we spoke with writer Mansoor Adayfi, who was confined to Guantánamo Bay for almost 15 years. Like the vast majority of those imprisoned there, he was never charged with a crime. Adayfi gave us a first-hand account of hunger strikes, changes in torture tactics and confinement that came with each presidential administration, bonds formed between the men in the prison, and the flourishing of art through painting, singing, dancing, and writing among the detainees. He explains how such art became a lifeline for their survival. The author of Letters from Guantánamo and Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, he works as an activist with CAGE toward the goal of permanently closing Guantánamo Bay.  In 2022, eight current and former detainees wrote a letter urging President Biden to end a Trump-era policy that barred their work from leaving Guantánamo. Multiple men, cleared for release just that year, said that they would rather their art be freed than themselves. Adayfi told us that if given that choice, he’d say the same thing. “The art is not just art. It becomes a piece of you. You put your blood, your sweat, your memories, your time there. That art helped you to find yourself. To maintain your sanity, your humanity,” he explained. “Art from Guantánamo, we consider it one of us, like a living being. It went through the same process: the mistreatment, the abuses, the torture, the death, even. Like us, like us prisoners. It’s the same process. It went through everything we have been through.” While the Biden administration lifted the ban on art leaving Guantánamo Bay, they have not fulfilled the promise to close the prison before Donald Trump returns to office in January. His administration could usher in an expansion of similar detention camps, along with a new era of censorship and oppression in many forms. But as long as such injustices continue under any regime, stories like Adayfi’s are critical to hold on to and learn from.  Even if a detainee manages to be released from Guantánamo Bay, they still encounter significant challenges. You can donate here to the Guantánamo Survivors Fund, which seeks to provide medical care, housing, and education to those released. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Watch the complete video of the conversations with images of the artworks on YouTube. (00:00) - Intro (05:16) - Erin L. Thompson (43:33) - Molly Crabapple (01:10:28) - Mansoor Adayfi —Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters This podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

    2h 12m
  7. Lucy Lippard’s Life on the Frontlines of Art

    11/26/2024

    Lucy Lippard’s Life on the Frontlines of Art

    When Lucy Lippard left New York City for the tiny village of Galisteo, New Mexico, some were shocked: How could this giant of 20th-century art criticism, this leader in the fight for feminism and equitable representation in museums, leave the so-called “center of the art world” for such a rural area?  Lippard is renowned not only for her strident activism but also for changing the game of art criticism itself. The author of a whopping 26 books, Lippard was a co-founder of both the standby press for artist books, Printed Matter, and the legendary feminist Heresies Collective. She broke down barriers between art writers and artists, letting her writing flow free in a type of “proto-blog” that inspired publications like ours.  When we asked her what brought her to the dusty hills of Galisteo, she simply said, “Feminists.” Other legendary feminist art figures, from Harmony Hammond to Agnes Martin, had also made it their home. She refuses, however, the idea that ex-urbanites are the only source of brilliance in the town. She now writes the newsletter for what she found to be a fascinating and flourishing historic community, as well as the Indigenous genius found in the Chaco Canyon, sacred to Hopi and Pueblo peoples. While scores of artists and critics alike keep Lippard’s volumes stacked high on their shelves, she is fairly enigmatic as a figure. In this episode, she sat down with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to give a rare recorded interview about her life in art. To better understand her work, we also talked with the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Senior Curator of Feminist Art Catherine Morris, who put together a show on Lippard’s work from 2012 to 2013 entitled Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art.  We also interviewed editor, book artist, and painter Susan Bee, a member of Brooklyn’s A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first space in the city dedicated to women artists. She had a front-row seat to Lippard’s influence in the emerging 1960s and ’70s feminist art scene of which were both a part. She also spoke to a little-known part of Lippard’s legacy: her fiction. In fact, Lippard told us that she wanted to be a fiction writer first, but chose to pursue nonfiction instead, believing she “was really bad at writing the kind of fiction anybody would want to publish.” That’s no longer the case: Much of her short fiction is being published by New Documents for the first time this December in a volume titled Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions).  From our vantage point in the 2020s, it’s easy to take women’s representation in museums for granted. But, as Bee reminds us, “None of this stuff happened. It was really a fight.” Now, as women’s rights begin to slip away once again, we can learn from these stories to better prepare for the fight ahead.  A special thanks to Loghaven Artist Residency, where much of the research for this podcast was conducted with the help of the collection of the library at the University of Tennessee. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters Become a member

    1h 11m
  8. Robber Barons, Marcel Duchamp, and Big Museums’ Dirty Little Secrets

    11/19/2024

    Robber Barons, Marcel Duchamp, and Big Museums’ Dirty Little Secrets

    In 1915, Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel at a hardware store in New York City. He inscribed his signature and the date on its wooden handle. On the evening this episode is released, the fourth version of this classic “ready-made,” which he titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” will be auctioned off at Christie’s during their 20th Century Evening Sale. It’s estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million. How could a simple snow shovel be valued at such a steep price? Was  Duchamp an unmatched genius, or a product of some of the biggest museums’ dirtiest little secrets: the results of pure, unadulterated capitalism? Northeastern University professor, essayist, poet, and editor Eunsong Kim has illuminated the underlying influences of industrial capitalism and racism behind some of the most prized museum collections in her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. She traces how Duchamp was brought to prominence through the patronage of collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, heirs of a fortune wrought by the steel industry. Their family operated steel mills in the same setting as titans such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, whose wealth also underlies their own valuable art collections. And as it turns out, the “death of the author,” celebrated in conceptual art like that of Duchamp, is a convenient idea for the ultrawealthy. Devaluing labor pairs well with violent crackdowns on striking workers to deny them adequate pay. Or even Frederick Winslow Taylor's development of “scientific management,” a system that is still cited today but is based on the idealization of the slave plantation. How much of the Modernist archive was canonized by union-busting bosses? How much of conceptual art in the 20th and 21st centuries has been buoyed by the reverence of scientific management? In this episode, Editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian sits down to talk with Kim about her new volume, which challenges generations of unquestioned received knowledge and advocates for a new vision of art beyond cultural institutions. In the process, they discuss the craft of writing, how a White artist was counted as a Black artist at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and how Marcel Duchamp got away with selling bags of air. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. — Subscribe to Hyperallergic Newsletters Become a member

    58 min
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    About

    News, developments, and stirrings in the art world with host Hrag Vartanian, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic.

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    • Creator
      Hyperallergic
    • Years Active
      2016 - 2025
    • Episodes
      112
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      Explicit
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      © 2022 Hyperallergic Media
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