ArtDesk

14/08/2024

The staff of Kirkpatrick Foundation mourns the loss of Louisa McCune, who served as its third executive director from 2011 until her death on August 10, 2024.

As executive director, she was a tireless champion for the arts and culture, education, animal well-being, environmental conservation, and historic preservation.

Under McCune’s direction, the foundation established two animal well-being initiatives for the state of Oklahoma, to make the state “the safest and most humane place to be an animal by 2032” and to increase Oklahoma’s cat and dog “live release” rate to 90 percent by 2025. Both efforts are a part of the foundation’s Safe & Humane program. In 2016, McCune led a non-partisan public education initiative related to State Question 777, which was soundly defeated by Oklahoma voters.

She was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the foundation’s award-winning contemporary art magazine, ArtDesk.

Her impact and commitment to the causes and people she believed in are unparalleled.

We extend our condolences to her family which include three sons and their father, five dogs, and a cat.

Memorial donations may be directed to Red Ridge Nature Preserve, Oliver and Friends Farm Sanctuary, Enid SPCA, or the McCune Fund for Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center at Oklahoma City Community Foundation.

09/08/2024

The work of Portland-based photographer Kristina Barker, who was Green Box's artist-in-residence for the month of May. Now in its fifth year, the 2024 Green Box Artists-in-Residence Program received more than 250 applications from twenty-six countries and nearly every US state. Barker was one of eight artists selected.

“Once I get there, the people I talk to and what the land is doing will guide me to where the story ends up,” Barker said before the residency. “I will be focusing my time on creating visuals around a sense of belonging and bringing physical and non-physical spaces together in the landscape.”

The Green Box Artists in Residence program applications will open this September. For more information or to apply: greenbox.org

08/08/2024

In her late 90s, Zilia Sánchez is finally getting museum recognition for her undulating canvases with biomorphic topographies evoking the female body and the landscape of the moon. “Zilia Sánchez: Topologías / Topologies” is a survey of around 30 works dating between 1950 and 1996, chronicling how the artist expanded her practice, from using abstraction to resist conformity in Cuba to being inspired by the avant-garde community of 1960s New York. Now based in Puerto Rico, she is still experimenting with her distinctive art, which rises and falls from the walls like waves.

“Zilia Sánchez: Topologías / Topologies” is on view through October 13 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Image: Zilia Sanchez, Eros, 1976/1998. Acrylic on stretched canvas, 102 x 135 x 18 in (259.1 x 342.9 x 45.7 cm). © Zilia Sanchez. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

07/08/2024

This fall, the new Multimedia Journalism program debuts at Metro Technology Centers’ Springlake campus in Oklahoma City. Developed out of a $150,000 grant from Kirkpatrick Foundation to Metro Tech Foundation, the program offers a way to kick-start a media career. We’re excited to see the journalists who come out of this program and contribute to fact-based news and intelligent media.

Read it all here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/on-the-beat

Story: Ann Magner

THE JOURNALISM LANDSCAPE has changed, but the need for fact-based news and intelligent media has always been a hallmark of a free society. In fall 2024, the new Multimedia Journalism program will debut at Metro Technology Centers’ Springlake campus in Oklahoma City. The program offers fundamentals...

06/08/2024

More views of SHELTER by Lisa Karrer, now on view at Oklahoma Contemporary.

The exhibit features eight different stations and uses miniature ceramic structures that draw inspiration from refugee dwellings. Audio and video narratives nestle inside of the structures, inviting viewers to engage with the pieces in a multidimensional format.

Finding commonalities in globally and locally displaced communities, SHELTER invites audiences to ask themselves: What is home?

SHELTER will be on display through January 6, 2025. Learn more here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/home-work

Photos: © Lisa Karrer. Photo by Tullis Johnson, courtesy of Burchfield Penney Art Center

05/08/2024

Italian bees, sheep, chickens and more: These are the inhabitants of Mollie Spencer Farm. Our latest issue highlights one of our favorite getaways.

Learn all about it here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/farm-heaven

02/08/2024

Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center was the beneficiary of this year’s Winter Ball at the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club on January 22, 2024. The fundraiser was helmed by committee chair Susan McPherson and co-chair Leigh Bentley (pictured 2nd), featuring music by The Hunter Sullivan Band. Founded in 1957, the biennial event was originally held for the benefit of the Oklahoma City Symphony and beginning in 1978 subsequent events supported Allied Arts Foundation. The Winter Ball beneficiary is determined by a committee (pictured 3rd) vote two years in advance. Thank you to OKCGCC for making Oklahoma City’s arts life more vibrant!

01/08/2024

Heading to the East Village? We asked storied choreographer and director Seán Curran where you should go. From our 35th Issue, get Curran’s favorite spots in the historic NYC neighborhood.

Read here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/sean-currans-east-village
Story: Meredith Fages

New York’s East Village is one of the oldest neighborhoods in lower Manhattan. Well- known as the nexus for avant-garde art and the experimental theater movement in the 1950s, the neighborhood also proudly can claim to be the birthplace of punk rock in the late 1970s. Curran has strolled the stree...

31/07/2024

Artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee descent) is triumphantly representing the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale. The first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the United States Pavilion in the show’s history, his installations are bold, colorful, geometric, and inclusive.

The occasion underscores to the global art world what supporters of Indigenous art already knew: Native American artwork has been a vital part of the greater context of modern, postwar, Pop, and contemporary art.

Read the full story here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/jeffrey-gibson
Story: Pablo Barrera

Image: Installation view of the space in which to place me (Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition for the United States Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia), April 20 – November 24, 2024. From left to right: IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN (2024); The Enforcer (2024); WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024). Mural: WE ARE MADE BY HISTORY (2024). Photograph by Timothy Schenck.

30/07/2024

Firelei Báez has emerged as one of today’s most ambitious and inventive contemporary artists. From a mosaic tile mural in a New York subway station that bursts with tropical flora to a colossal installation at ICA Boston that draped a replica of Haitian palace ruins in indigo, Báez uses lush painting and sculpture to engage with issues of borders, myth, and history. Now she returns to the ICA for a sprawling survey that delves into her influences, from her birth in the Dominican Republic to her upbringing in Florida, and all the vibrant complexities of a diaspora.

“Firelei Báez” is on view at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston through September 2.



Images:
1) Firelei Báez, A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (detail), 2019. Two paintings, hand-painted wooden frame, perforated tarp, printed mesh, handmade paper over found objects, plants, books, Oman incense, and palo santo. 373 1/4 × 447 1/8 × 157 1/8 inches (948.1 × 1135.7 × 399.1 cm). The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. © Firelei Báez.

2) Firelei Báez, Fire wood pretending to be fire, February 12, 2012, 2013. Acrylic and gouache on Yupo paper. 25 3/4 × 20 inches (65.4 × 50.8 cm). Collection of Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Adam Reich. © Firelei Báez.

3) Firelei Báez, Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July (detail), 2011. Gouache, ink, and graphite on panel. 113 × 104 inches (287 × 264.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Mats Nordman. © Firelei Báez.

29/07/2024

In the 2022-2023 school year, the American Library Association recorded 4,240 unique titles targeted for removal from libraries. This was a record-breaking 65 percent increase from the year before. Our Spring 2024 issue lifts up some of those books.

Since its publication in 2006, Alison Bechdel’s widely acclaimed memoir-turned-Tony-winning Broadway show, Fun Home has been challenged repeatedly. About the author coming to terms with her sexuality in a homophobic environment, Bechdel said in 2013, “It’s sad and absurd...a book which is, after all, about the toll that this sort of small-mindedness takes on people’s lives.

26/07/2024

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” is on view at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Women’s bodies are bound, fragmented, and obscured in Ramberg’s paintings, which she began exhibiting in the late 1960s. There is a sense of some external force constantly pushing them into frames and forms.

This overdue major exhibition on the late Chicago-based artist—billed as the first in three decades—has around 100 pieces, which also display her interest in textiles and abstraction.

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” is on view through August 11, 2024.

25/07/2024

Loie Hollowell’s artistic practice has evolved in response to her own experiences with motherhood and reproductive freedom, featuring paintings, works on paper, and pieces from her personal archive.

Early works provocatively use elements of the human body based on Hollowell and her husband as abstract landscapes; later pieces evoke how she engaged with her body before and after childbirth by incorporating sculpted elements.

“When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I took a lifecast of my third- trimester belly just as a document, not with the intention of incorporating the form into my work,” Hollowell says.

When she had her second child at home during the pandemic, she found the experience so “visceral and transformative” that she decided to create a mold from this cast to make her pregnant body part of her paintings.

For our latest issue, contributor Allison C. Meier caught us up on the latest from the artist looking at American modernism from a contemporary perspective.

See Hollowell’s first museum survey, “Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years,” at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through August 11.

Read here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/bodily-light

Story: Allison C. Meier

[Images: 1) Loie Hollowell, “Standing in yellow, pink and blue,” 2019. 2: “Yellow Mountains,” 2016. 3) “Tick-Tock Belly Clock,” 2021.]

24/07/2024

Painter Loie Hollowell’s first museum survey is now on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.

“Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years” turns women’s bodies into divine entities, including through the use of life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies.

See the show through August 11, and read the full story here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/bodily-light

Story: Allison C. Meier ��

23/07/2024

More James Tapscott Artist for your Tuesday afternoon.

1: Arc ZERO Eclipse. Lake Tyrrell in Victoria, Australia (2021).
2: Arc ZERO Nimbus. Odense, Denmark (2021).

22/07/2024

Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center’s Teen Arts Council brings together teens interested in exploring contemporary art. During their academic year on the council, they are compensated for their time (and well-fed with plenty of snacks), and they also give advice to the art center’s education department on how to strengthen teen engagement within the organization.

“Routines & Rituals,” the first show from the teen group, ran from January 12 to May 6 at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. ��

Read all about it here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/young-at-art

Story: Jeanne Parkhurst
Photos: Cassandra Watson

WITH PUBLIC SCHOOL ARTS education curriculum in Oklahoma at risk, a trusted place for young and future artists becomes even more important. In addition to its Studio School, Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center’s Teen Arts Council provides exactly that—a supportive, artistic community for young peo...

19/07/2024

On March 22, 2024, the Oklahoma City arts community convened at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center to celebrate this year’s Founders Day 2024 honorees. Pictured here with ArtDesk publisher Christian Keesee: Robert and Sody Clements, Jabee, Laura Warriner, and Rand and Jeanette Elliott were all honored for their contributions to the arts center. Thank you to these fantastic individuals who make the creative life of Oklahoma City brighter!

18/07/2024

Only a few weeks left to see this one at Pulitzer Arts Foundation: Colombian artist Delcy Morelos has described herself as a sorceress who channels the beauty and power of the Earth into her art, which most strikingly includes large-scale immersive environments shaped from natural materials like soil and clay. After presenting a labyrinthine installation at the 2022 Venice Biennale and her first American solo show at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2023, she debuted another monumental work in St. Louis as part of "Delcy Morelos: Interwoven," exploring an innovative career that has also involved painting and sculpture.

"Delcy Morelos: Interwoven" is on view through August 4.

17/07/2024

Lisa Karrer’s “SHELTER” draws from fourteen different narratives, each one from a different person who has faced some sort of displacement from their community and found themselves starting over again in Oklahoma.

Now on display at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.

Read all about it here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/home-work

Story by Kaycee Chance

16/07/2024

A long overdue development: Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson is triumphantly representing the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale. He's the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the United States Pavilion in the show's history.

The 2024 Venice Biennale provides audiences with their first opportunity to experience Gibson’s work outside the United States. Read all about it here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/jeffrey-gibson

Story by Pablo Barrera

15/07/2024

In the 2022-2023 school year, the American Library Association recorded 4,240 unique titles targeted for removal from libraries. This was a record-breaking 65 percent increase from the year before. Our Spring 2024 issue lifts up some of those books.

Poverty, child abuse, grief, and friendship intersect in “Monday’s Not Coming,” a young adult novel published in 2019. The story centers on the unexplained disappearance of a Black teenager, Monday Charles, and her best friend’s attempts to find her. Banned or challenged due to claims of “sexually explicit” passages, the book’s prevailing themes of systemic racism and poverty as factors that contribute to poor mental-health outcomes are lessons some censors don’t want students to learn.

12/07/2024

In January 11, 2024, Oklahoma filmmaker Sterlin Harjo was honored with the ArtNow 2023 Focus Award. The event included a conversation with Harjo moderated by guest curator Lindsay Aveilhé at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. The award was presented in tandem with the biennial ArtNow exhibition of works by Oklahoma-connected artists, at the nonprofit arts center in downtown Oklahoma City. In addition to his groundbreaking Hulu series Reservation Dogs, Harjo’s Oklahoma-centered filmography includes documentary and narrative features like This May Be the Last Time (2014), Mekko (2015), and Love and Fury (2020), among others.

11/07/2024

Over the last two decades, movement and physical expression have become more prominent as the vehicle for advancing narrative in opera, thanks in no small part to Seán Curran (of Seán Curran Company). His specialty act is coaching artists in human behavior for the stage.

“It’s no longer park and bark!” says Robert Ainsley, artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, an annual summer-long celebration of opera and musical theater based in Cooperstown, New York.

In 2024, Curran’s work will include directing remounts of his widely lauded production of The Pirates of Penzance at Opera San Antonio and the Glimmerglass Festival, and choreographing La Bohème, Julius Caesar, and Galileo Galilei at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where he’s worked for twenty-four years as resident choreographer.

For our latest issue, ArtDesk caught up with the choreographer who's changing opera. Read it here: https://readartdesk.com/missive/making-opera-modern-sean-curran-is-changing-the-way-opera-moves

10/07/2024

In the spring of 2023, the Shirley Family Calder Collection was gifted to the Seattle Art Museum. Drawing from this acquisition, “Calder: In Motion” features more than fifty of Alexander Calder’s sculptures, prints, paintings, and kinetic mobiles that cover the breadth of the artist’s practice from the 1920s until his death in 1976.

The show kicks off a planned multi-year celebration of Calder and his artistic impact that will include workshops, performances, and more programming, offering insight into how he was captivated by movement and endlessly played with balance and motion.

“Calder: In Motion” is on view through August 11.�

09/07/2024

Coming to you live from the Green Box Arts Festival in Green Mountain Falls, CO! We’re immersed in natural beauty and arts, hoping you’re getting to do a little of the same, wherever you are. What's inspiring you today?

📸: ArtDesk Editor in Chief Louisa McCune

08/07/2024

This is where author Rick Bass writes. Bass has written more than thirty books, won numerous book awards for fiction, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

“This new desk, in a cabin we restored, was built for me by my partner Carter, who lives out on the prairie, while my home in the Yaak is deep forest. The desk replicates my work desk in the Yaak. I write by hand, so that muscle memory— cant of wrist and elbow, familiar position of forearm and shoulder, everything—is a comfort in entering the dream each day.”

Rick Bass’s new book, With Every Great Breath (2024) “offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders.” The author was born and raised in Texas and has lived in Montana’s Yaak Valley for almost forty years.

See the full new issue of ArtDesk at readartdesk.com.

05/07/2024

Less is more in the case of James Tapscott Artist, who uses simple materials to create breathtaking portals of glowing mist.

Since 2007, the Perth–born Australian has mastered the art of integrating natural or man-made phenomena into a landscape to create highly polished yet ephemeral artworks.

Now, one of his artworks—an ongoing site-responsive project he began in 2009 called Arc ZERO—is installed in the mountain valley of Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, for the 2024 iteration of the Green Box Arts Festival.

Tapscott’s Arc ZERO, which the artist calls his “man-made attempt at a perfect curved form,” has been mounted several times in various global locations, from an old Buddhist temple in Japan to the Hans Christian Anderson Museum in Denmark. The piece evolves uniquely within each site.

“The main materials for the Arc ZERO work are water and light,” Tapscott says. “I’ve been working with them for around fifteen years, and I still learn something new each time. They are so chaotic but have such a beautiful synergy.” The results of his experiments speak for themselves, and audiences cannot seem to get enough of his mesmerizing artworks.

For our latest issue, contributor Ryan Steadman caught up with the artist reimagining fire and water. Check it out here: https://readartdesk.com/feature/fire-and-water

03/07/2024

Huong Ngô frequently uses her art to illuminate how the history of colonialism shapes the present. “Huong Ngô: Ungrafting,” now on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, focuses on trees and tree grafts that were planted by the French in Vietnam. Drawing on archival resources like early twentieth-century photographs and a 1919 herbarium, she investigates this botanical legacy as another form of control, with the grafting of trees together further representing the violence of colonialism, its scars visible long after life continues to grow.

“Huong Ngô: Ungrafting” is on display through July 27.

02/07/2024

Seán Curran is largely responsible for enlivening the role of movement in the opera industry. A tenured professor at NYU and choreographer and director of his own eponymous concert dance company (Seán Curran Company), Curran excels in coaching artists in dance routines and human behavior for the stage, or what James Robinson of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis calls “Curranography.”

“I’d sing the phone book for that guy,” says Lise Lindstrom, a soprano who sang the titular role in Salome, which Curran directed at San Diego Opera in 2012. “Seán isn’t a dictator to a conceptual vision. He’s a builder of a vision. He arrives with an idea, crafts it generously and joyfully with the people in the room, and waits for the evolution. This collaborative sense is uncommon in opera leadership.”

In 2024, Curran’s work will include directing remounts of his widely lauded production of The Pirates of Penzance at Opera San Antonio and the Glimmerglass Festival, and choreographing La Bohème, Julius Caesar, and Galileo Galilei at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where he’s worked for twenty-four years as resident choreographer.

For our latest issue, ArtDesk caught up with the choreographer who's changing opera. Read it here:

OVER THE LAST two decades, movement and physical expression have become more prominent as the vehicle for advancing narrative in opera, thanks in no small part to Seán Curran. His specialty act is coaching artists in human behavior for the stage.

01/07/2024

READ. BANNED. BOOKS. Our Spring 2024 issue lifts up some of the most challenged books in the US. An essential book in the canon of modern Latino literature, “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” follows a family displaced by political unrest in the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn, New York. Censors claimed sexual content, but nationwide book defenders equated the argument to banning Shakespeare, The Bible, and several of the world’s greatest authors.

Check out the full list here: https://readartdesk.com/missives/the-book-report