X-TRA

08/12/2023

“Artists are increasingly being tapped to lead biennials in the role of “guest curator,’ a position that already indicates institutional divestiture from the advocates and creative visionaries who make successful exhibitions work. In addition to choosing works for exhibition, curators also run interference, managing conflicts between artists and between artists and the public. These tasks are doubly difficult when the institution holds the curators at such a distance. Does the reliance on contract curators—often artists with limited institutional experience hired and managed by career administrators—reflect a conflicted desire on the part of the institution to both speak freely and control speech?”

In X-TRA Volume 25, Number 2, Anuradha Vikram, contributor and member of the X-TRA Editorial Board, examines the curatorial framing and politicized media narratives that have shaped the discourse around recent global art exhibitions documenta 15 and the 12th Berlin Biennale. Vikram poses insightful questions regarding the inclusion and exclusion of artworks that depict trauma or critique political movements and leaders‚ asking, who has the authority to address these sensitive topics?








Read Vikram’s “Fear of a Lumbung Planet: Decolonization and Backlash at documenta and the Berlin Biennale” via the link in our bio. To support us further, considering purchasing a print copy through the webstore.

Images:
1: Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale, 2022. Installation view, documenta fifteen, Kassel, June 18–September 25, 2022. Photo: Frank Sperling.

2: Wajukuu Art Project, Wakija Kwetu, 2022. Installation view, documenta fifteen, Kassel, June 18–September 25, 2022. Photo: Nicolas Wefers.

07/12/2023

“This summer marked the twentieth edition of REDCAT’s annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a self-described ‘catalyst for creativity and new ideas.’ Each week featured three performances in a shared program in REDCAT’s black box theater. These works, mostly untested, were selected via an open call that encourages emerging and early-career artists, then bolstered with an artist fee, technical support, and rehearsal space. This makes NOW a relatively rare platform for brand new, experimental performance in Los Angeles.”

For the Dispatches column, Jessi DiTillio () reports on three standout efforts from the 2023 New Original Works Festival (NOW) at in Los Angeles.

Read “TV on Stage” now!

Pictured: Melissa Ferrari, Relict: A Phantasmagoria, 2020/2023. Performance, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 24–26, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.

04/12/2023

“What happens when you look down is that the perspective feels wrong. Geometric slabs of sidewalk phenomena—mounding tarmac, manhole covers, storm-drain grates—have been transposed on the interior ground at original scale but in implausible proximity.”

For the Dispatches column, Emma Kemp () crosses the psychogeography of Fiona Connor’s Continuous Sidewalk, 2023, presented in her Glendale studio by Château Shatto.

Read “Memory Arcade Dream Space or Continuous Sidewalk” now!

Images: Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.

02/03/2023

THIS WEEKEND! 💚  Visit us this at the 2nd annual Print Pomona Art Book Fair, presented by The Arts Area () and The Benton Museum of Art () at Pomona College. We are excited to join this unique publishing community of more than 50 incredible booksellers and publishers from all over California 🗺.

This event is free to attend and open to the public.

📚Make sure to check out the fair’s talks, panels, and performances planned throughout the weekend via the link in bio. 🎡

Dates:
Saturday, March 4, 11 am to 7 pm
Sunday, March 5, 11 am to 5 pm

Location:
Pomona College
Edmunds Ballroom in the Smith Campus Center
170 E 6th St, Claremont, CA

01/03/2023

Meet X-TRA! Jeff joined the X-TRA Editorial Board in early 2001. In 2002, he moved on to become the founding Chair of Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, the nonprofit dedicated to the support of X-TRA, and to serve as a Publisher of X-TRA, with Ellen Birrell & Stephen Berens. The original Project X Board was comprised of Beall, Berens, Birrell, Mike Kelley, Elizabeth Pulsinelli, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and Mitchell Syrop.

*Jeff Beall is an artist and entrepreneur, based in Santa Monica. He makes conceptually driven work that consistently uses techniques of veiling/revealing to heighten the experience of seeing. Subject matter in recent years has included a memorial to lives lost in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, watercolor flowers, and encryption technology*. *Beall’s work is included in the public collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Berkeley Art Museum, Carnegie Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Oakland Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and Portland Museum of Art.*

*In addition to his work with Project X for the past 20+ years, he has also served on the Advisory Council of Liberty Hill Foundation[link] for the same length of time. He also served as Vice Chair/Chair of the board directors for the Westside Waldorf School (2008-2015).*

——

Image details:

Slide 1: Self Portrait.

Slide 2: Jeff Beall on first learning about X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal.

Slide 3: Unsolved: 1992 LA Uprising @ 25 Years (2017), Installation view, Gallery 169, Santa Monica.

Slide 4: Unsolved Portraits 21 & 22  (2017), Photograph on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in.

Slide 5: Untitled (Two Ways), (2006), Iris print and watercolor on paper, 33 3/4 x 45 1/2 in.

Slide 6: Untitled IV (2020), Acrylic on watercolor on paper, 22 x 15 in.

Slide 7: THIS SUSPENDED MOMENT (These Are the Good Old Days), (2020), vinyl mesh banner, 54 x 300 in.

28/02/2023

NEW ONLINE! This past October, Sprüth Magers Los Angeles () recreated Nancy Holt’s a room-sized installation, Electrical System. For the Dash column, writer and curator Hannah Spears () revisits Holt’s Systems Works, which she first began in the 1980s. Spears considers the artist’s preoccupation with electrical grids and utility systems, pointing to a precarious relationship with society and the environment.

Read Hannah Spears’ column, “Dependencies and Redundancies” via the link in bio.




Slide 1: Nancy Holt, Electrical System II: Bellman Circuit, 1982. Installation view, David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada. 3/4 in. steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.

Slide 2: Nancy Holt, Pipeline, 1986. Steel, oil,  30 x 32 x 15 ft. (indoor section); 26 x 15 x 6 ft. (outdoor section #1); 10 x 31 x 18 ft. (outdoor section #2), steel duct 1 ft. (30.5 cm) diameter. Installation view, Visual Arts Center of Alaska, Anchorage. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.

Slide 3: Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76. Concrete; total length: 86 ft.; tunnel length: 18 ft.; tunnel diameters outside: 9 ft. 2-1/2 in.; tunnel diameters inside: 8 ft.; wall thickness: 7 1/2 in. Great Basin Desert, Utah. The tunnels are aligned with the sun on the horizon (the sunrises and sunsets) on the solstices. Each tunnel has a different configuration of holes corresponding to stars in four constellations: Draco, Perseus, Columba, Capricorn. Collection of the Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation. © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.

28/02/2023

NEW ONLINE! For the QxA column, writer and curator Moira Sims speaks to Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca about their collaborative filmmaking process and the fine line between authenticity and storytelling. Recently on view at the New Museum (), the duo’s solo exhibition, Five Times Brazil, invited dancers and activists to participate in their films, addressing and multiplying the complexities of authorship, whilst responding to the complex socio-political climate of Wagner's native Brazil.

Read Sims’ conversation with Wagner and de Burca, “Watch and Learn” via the link in bio. 🔗








Slide 1: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019. 2K HD video, color, 5.1 sound, 21 min. Video still. © Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca. Courtesy of Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro.

Slide 2: Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, *Fala da Terra* [Voice of the Land], 2022. 2K HD video, color, 5.1 sound, 20 min. Installation view. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil, June 30–October 16, 2022, The New Museum, New York. Courtesy of the New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

Slide 3: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, *Faz que vai* [Set to go], 2015. 2K HD video, color, 5.1 sound, 12 min. Installation view. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil, June 30–October 16, 2022, The New Museum, New York. Courtesy of the New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

22/02/2023

In the winter of 2019, X-TRA published ektor garcia’s unique artist project, “sacri-oficio,” featuring photographic assemblages taken between trips to New York, Glasgow, Basel, and Scotland. Accompanied by an introduction by artist Candice Lin, these images cluster an array of materials typically seen and used in garcia’s work: worn out leather gloves, crochet needles, and rows of handmade clay chains. The Spanish word “oficio” translates to “profession” in English, a play on words suggestive of his occupation (and sacrifice) as an artist.

View ektor garcia’s artist project, “sacri-oficio” via the link in bio. 🔗

15/02/2023

FEB 17TH AT 8-11 PM  │ X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal invites you to its first in-office event of the year! This intimate gathering marks new beginnings for the publication in its new office, located in the historic Granada Buildings. We are particularly proud to introduce the first X-TRA Editorial Fellow, chosen after a rigorous interview process of many worthy applicants. Throughout 2023, the new Fellow will embark on a year of sustained mentorship from X-TRA’s editors. We will present a one-of-a-kind selection of our archives, displaying rare print issues featuring Los Angeles artists and writers. Come mingle in our beautiful courtyard with the X-TRA community, including the Project X Foundation’s Board of Directors, members of our Advisory Council, X-TRA’s Editors, our staff, and our contributing writers.

If you have been part of the X-TRA community as a writer, artist, or editor, are in town, and would like to join us, please reach out to Nahui Garcia at [email protected] for further details on arriving. This event has limited capacity, and reservations are required. 🫶

07/02/2023

FEB 10 AT 4PM║🌱 Translated Intimacies: Un Manifiesto A**lquista 🌱

X-TRA presents an intimate conversation between Dominican Republic-based performance artist and writer Johan Mijail, the feminist queer/cuir working group, Invasorix, and the writer and poet Christopher Rey Pérez. The conversation will orbit around Mijail’s moving artist's project, Un Manifiesto A**lquista: Tra(n)splantar. Poéticas A**les y Amor Vegetal, featured in the fall issue of X-TRA. The project was published in the original Spanish and with an accompanying English translation by artist, theorist, and poet manuel arturo abreu.

Mijail, Pérez, and Invasorix will discuss the work of translation, moving back and forth between their respective practices, interests, and critical engagements with art as artists, writers, poets, curators, and critics. The discussion will foreground translation *itself* as a form of art, across an array of perspectives across the American continent—namely, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the U.S. diaspora. How might we use translation actively as a tool to deepen our understanding of a text, and invite one another into our respective cultural imaginaries?

*

X-TRA introduce Translated Intimacies: Un Manifiesto Anarquista, una conversación intima entre la escritora y performer dominicana Johan Mijail y el colectivo feminista queer/cuir, Invasorix, y el escritor y poeta Christopher Rey Pérez. Juntos reflexionarán sobre el texto “Un Manifiesto A**lquista: Tra(n)splantar. Poéticas A**les y Amor Vegetal” escrito por Johan. El texto fue publicado en español en el nuevo número de la revista X-TRA y traducido al inglés por el artista, teórico, y poeta manuel arturo abreu.

Mijail, Pérez e Invasorix compartirán sus intereses y su compromiso con el arte como artistas, escritores, poetas, curadores y críticos. La discusión pondrá en primer plano la traducción como una forma de arte, a través de una variedad de perspectivas en México, el Caribe y la diáspora multilingual en los Estados Unidos. ¿Cómo podemos usar la traducción como herramienta para profundizar nuestra comprensión textual y respectivos imaginarios culturales? Será el tópico a discutir en esta conversación.

01/02/2023

In recognition of our 25th anniversary, X-TRA is offering subscription deals that you do not want to miss!

📖 Support X-TRA with a one-year subscription for only $30

📖 And, if you love what we do, consider supporting us with a two-year subscription for $55

Every new issue is thoughtfully designed by Becca Lofchie (._.l). Slide through some recent print pieces, including Travis Diehl’s “Feminist Realism,” Jareh Das’ “Doreen Garner: On White Monumenetality and Sacrificial Aesthetics,” and Laura Brown’s “Continuous Surface.”

🔗 Subscribe to X-TRA via the link in bio 🔗

📸: Ian Byers-Gamber ()

30/01/2023

FEB 13 - 7PM │ Hosted by the ICA LA (), X-TRA presents an in-depth conversation between artist Gala Porras-Kim and Mariana Fernández, writer, curator, and author of “A Museum for the Afterlife,” published in the fall issue of X-TRA Volume 24, Number 2. In her essay, Fernández looks closely at Porras-Kim’s practice of challenging museological norms of preservation and presentation of repatriated objects, divorced from their context, stripped of their history. Porras-Kim and Fernández will discuss the responsibility of care museums have to those who have passed, and expand their discussion into the politics of taxonomy and categorization. Perhaps, in understanding the choices of labeling a museum makes, choices that construct a history, there are rich possibilities for rewriting our understanding and experience of the past.

The discussion will be moderated by Nora N. Khan, Executive Director of Project X Foundation, publisher of X-TRA.

🔖 Mariana Fernández is a writer and curator based in New York. She has held curatorial positions at Performa, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), and the Clark Art Institute. Her writing and criticism appear in publications such as frieze, X-TRA, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail.

🔖 Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language, and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history, and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms, and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. She has had solo exhibitions at Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL, and upcoming in 2023 at MUAC, CAAC, and the Fowler. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), She is currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

27/01/2023

BIG NEWS! 🌎 X-TRA is excited to announce its participation in the first edition of todo-mundo art book fair, a new initiative by Temblores Publicaciones () at Material Art Fair () in Mexico City.

During the fair, we will be presenting a conversation with Dominican Republic-based performance artist and writer Johan Mijail, expanding upon the Artist’s Project, “An A**lquist Manifesto,” published in the fall issue of X-TRA. The conversation will be framed around translation as a form of art, providing a vast array of perspectives across the American continent—namely, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the diaspora within the United States, where navigating multiple languages from day to day is the norm.

See you there! 👋

*

Johan Mijail (Dominican Republic, 1990) is the author of numerous books, including Pordioseros del Caribe, *Inflamadas de retórica. Escrituras promiscuas para una tecnodecolonialidad, Manifiesto antirracista. Escrituras para una biografía inmigrante* and *Chapeo.* She has performed in the US, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Germany, France, and Colombia, as well as written and visual work that invites a transfeminist and decolonial imaginary. She is the director of Catinga Ediciones—the first publishing house in the Dominican Republic that specializes in the publication and promotion of literature by black/Afro-descendant LGBTQI+ people—where she has published the fanzines Santo Domingo is burning and La Dominadora.

26/01/2023

In each issue, X-TRA publishes a unique Artist’s Project. For Volume 24, Number 2, we are thrilled to feature performance artist and writer Johan Mijail’s “An A**lchist Manifesto. Trans-Planting: A**l Poetics and Vegetal Love,” published in Spanish and in an English translation by artist, theorist, and poet manuel arturo abreu, with images by Eugenia Vargas-Pereira. Mijail’s writing articulates a new way to relate to the self, proposing “vegetal love” as a liberating alternative to the heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial default.

Mijail writes that “Vegetal love is a temporal discontinuity. The discontinuity of my personality, of my unstable identity, of a subjective process and transformative desire. It is a non-antagonizing feminism, an a**s opening before the force of the sun’s rays, on the strength and manic rage of the thunder, the sounds of all marine animals and plants. A train moving from the center of a city to the periphery, to Latin America: this is vegetal love.”

Read Mijail’s artist project, “An A**lichist Manifesto” in English or Spanish via the link in bio.

25/01/2023

In the spring of 2021, Ron Athey performed the most recent iteration of Ron Athey: Acephalous Monster at REDCAT, parallel to the survey exhibition, Q***r Communion: Ron Athey at the ICA LA. For X-TRA Volume 24, Number 2, April Baca examines Athey’s bodily practice through the lens of George Bataille’s writings on eroticism. Her pointed remarks posit the performing body as fungible—a metaphor for the transformative potential of self-injury, pe*******on, and bodily fluids.

Read April Baca’s review, “The Erotic Fungibility of Ron Athey” via the link in bio.








Slide 1 & 2: Ron Athey, Acephalous Monster, 2021. Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

18/01/2023

In 2003, former X-TRA editorial board member Allan de Souza reviewed the traveling exhibition, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) on view at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, among other locations. Of Cha’s creative play with words, de Souza writes:

“The repetition of the letters a-m-e-r on the stars produces the French words âme, à mer, and mer: soul, to the sea, and sea, respectively; with the sea acting as a bridge, the place between, the place that separates, and the place that connects here and there. Mer âme, sea soul, suggests on who exists as or within the sea, between, separated and connected. There is an additional conflation of mer and mére, sea and mother; a pairing with obvious symbolic significance but used by Cha to evoke migration and history, as well as the drifting diasporic self, cut loose from the mother/land.”

Read Allan de Souza’s review, “The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)” in X-TRA Volume 5, Number 3, and online. Link in bio.

13/01/2023

NEW ONLINE! For the Dash column, Mariana Fernández witnesses Yvonne Rainer’s last dance, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What About the Bees? at New York Live Arts in October 2022. The production purportedly concludes the artist’s sixty year-long career, and reflects on the United States’ relationship to systemic racism by juxtaposing dance with fragments from two films, HELLZAPOPPIN (1941) and Zero for Conduct (1933). Fernández contextualizes the artist’s numerous references to literature and cinema, unfolding the ways in which Rainer makes her own privileges visible.

Read Mariana Fernàndez' column, “Yes, Get Free” via the link in bio.





Slide 1: Yvonne Rainer, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?, October 5–8, 2022. Presented and Produced by Performa with New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova.

Slide 3:Yvonne Rainer, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?, October 5–8, 2022. Presented and Produced by Performa with New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova.

11/01/2023

We are pleased to announce X-TRA is recipient of the Grants for Arts Projects by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)! This grant is one of 1,251 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling nearly $28.8 million that were announced by the NEA as part of its first round of fiscal year 2023 grants.

We are incredibly grateful to the NEA for this opportunity and look forward to sharing more with you in the new year.

11/01/2023

Based in Kumasi, Ghana, perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR) is an interdisciplinary artist-run residency program energized by transnational exchanges rooted in social activism. For X-TRA Volume 24, Number 2, Jareh Das and pIAR’s founder, crazinisT artisT, recount the conception and trajectory of the program, greatly influenced by the city’s anticolonial history and artisT’s commitment to creating a safe space for expermentation amid ongoing discrimination against LGBTQIA people. The eight-month residency hosts public interventions and spaces for critical discourse throughout Kumasi, encouraging dialogue around gender, race, and the politics of visibility.

Read the full interview, “Interventions and Placemaking in Kumasi: Interview with crazinisT artisT” via the link in bio.






Slide 1: Sunny Pfalzer, *When the Bats Fly*, 2020. Performance. Courtesy of pIAR.

Slide 2: crazinisT artisT (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi), *reThinking-naZa*, 2014. Performance. Courtesy of the artist.

01/01/2023

Thanks to you all, we are closing in on 80% of our year-end fundraising goal. From all of us at X-TRA and Project X Foundation, thank you for demonstrating your belief in us. We are grateful for your support!

In 2022, we hired three new, amazing staff members. We expanded and diversified the Project X Board. We moved into a beautiful new office, a worthy home for our archives. This positive growth is all in support of X-TRA’s mission, and our budget has grown substantially.

In recent months, we’ve further committed to making criticism more accessible. We launched our new Editorial Fellowship program, the only opportunity of its kind in arts publishing: $12K of support for a young writer through a full year of sustained mentorship from our deeply experienced Editorial Board, with a focus on BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ applicants. We've increased the rates we pay all the editors, writers, artists – who develop X-TRA’s renowned content – by at least 250%, and in most cases, more.

Creating a more equitable arts ecosystem is one of our core values. These investments in our intellectual community are the right thing to do. Arts workers deserve to be fairly valued for their intensive labor.

This December marks the publication of 93 issues of our beautiful print journal featuring original essays, reviews, conversations, and artists’ projects. X-TRA’s online publishing showcases widely-read, responsive, experimental prose. Our rich public conversations gather a diverse community of thinkers across and beyond the arts.

As one of L.A.’s smallest arts nonprofits, we depend on your support to do this vital work. Your generous, tax-deductible contribution today will help us to:

> Support our core publishing through our print journal and our online columns;
> Extend our new Editorial Fellowship program into its second year;
> Give us much-needed administrative capacity to help mentor and develop new writers;
> Sustain the editors and writers who will produce over 50+ essays and pieces in 2023;
> and gather a wider public around X-TRA through considered, high-quality events.

Supporters like you are critical to our success! Help us close this final gap.

Share in our commitments, and help develop a brilliant, vibrant future for X-TRA and its community, today!

Happy New Year to you and yours!

$150 supports free distribution of X-TRA to classrooms of local art students.$200 goes towards support of tireless staff working our free, often at-capacity public events.$400 helps us buy necessary supplies to maintain our delicate archive of early print issues. $500 covers the fee of a writer for...

23/12/2022

NEW ONLINE! For the Lives column, Ezequiel Olvera observes inexplicable events at Hollenbeck Skate Park in Boyle Heights. Lamp posts are vandalized, prompting speculation on a possible culprit or cause. The Lina Viste Grønli clock sculptures are stolen when Olvera steps away to use the bathroom. Olvera catalogs these frustrating, beguiling moments in diaristic entries; each unplanned happening prompts a spiraling chain of epiphanies.

Read Ezequiel Olvera’s column “Rancid Clock Epiphanies” via the link in bio.

02/09/2022

For the Dash column, Gracie Hadland recaps the destruction wrought by Nikita Gale for Takers at LAXART, on view May 7–June 25, 2022. Some destruction was warranted: it was the nonprofit gallery’s final exhibition in their building on Santa Monica Boulevard, once a storied recording studio. Read the full text at X-TRA Online https://www.x-traonline.org/online/takers-will-take

Installation view, Nikita Gale: Takers, LAXART, May 7–June 25, 2022. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

31/08/2022

For X-TRA Online’s Dispatches column, Chris Murtha visited Liz Larner’s retrospective Don’t put it back like it was, on view at the Walker Art Center through September 4, 2022. Murtha considers that “Corner Basher” (1988), a machine seemingly born to destroy, might have a subtler purpose. Read the full text at X-TRA Online https://www.x-traonline.org/online/institutional-encounters

Pictured: Liz Larner, “Corner Basher,” 1988. Steel, stainless steel, electric motor, and speed control, 10 ft. high. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

30/08/2022

presents the “powder down” of the Great Blue Heron; This Is a Vulgar Age, from the Florine and Ettie Stettheimer papers at the Beinecke Library; How Do You Know If An Artist is Good Enough to Date? By Guy Richards Smit; Are there any new ways to write about Cézanne? by J.A. Koster; and as always, David Lynch’s weather report. Visit x-traonline.org/online every 24 hours to catch today’s news before it’s old news!

29/08/2022

“Bill Traylor was born into slavery in the American south. Post-emancipation, he worked as a sharecropper, had multiple families with many children, and eventually found himself down and out on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. At age 85 he began to reflect on his experience through a prolific painting and drawing practice in which the animals, people, and events from his life form a tumbling visual memoir that is both folksy and nightmarish. Traylor was able to achieve something rare for a person with his biography: he was ‘discovered’ in his lifetime, exhibited within the establishment, and eventually anointed (in spirit, if not materially) into the canon of Outsider Artists. Traylor’s life and work are as enduring as the bigoted, authoritarian system that enslaved him.”

Read more about Bill Traylor’s work in Nick Kramer’s piece for X-TRA Online, The Outsider Art Fair Made Me a Better Person. https://www.x-traonline.org/online/the-outsider-art-fair-made-me-a-better-person

Pictured:

26/08/2022

Meet X-TRA! Today we’re introducing Anuradha Vikram (she/her/they/theirs), a Los Angeles-based curator and writer of South Asian heritage, and member of X-TRA's Editorial Board.

Born in New York and based in Los Angeles, their focus is on transcultural, embodied, and posthuman practices of art as expressed by artists with historical lineages anchored in the non-western world. Their book 'Decolonizing Culture' (Sming Sming Books, 2017) addresses questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces.

“Intergenerational communication is important to me, and I find that this is often best transmitted outside of schools and other formal environments. Art presents a shared platform for connection and insight, a more active space for the consideration of history, and a way of understanding what makes us human.”

Working with institutions including Craft Contemporary, 18th Street Arts Center, UC Berkeley, they have commissioned important new works from BIPOC artists including Candice Lin, Vishal Jugdeo, Patty Chang, Postcommodity, Kenyatta AC Hinkle, and Miljohn Ruperto, and curated the first museum survey of Brooklyn-based artist Jaishri Abichandani, showcasing over 15 years of her interdisciplinary work and cultural organizing. Upcoming curatorial projects with LA Freewaves in 2022 and LACE in 2025 address the shifting nature of self-identification and cultural self-determination in a genderfluid and digitized age.

Anuradha's research with UCLA Art Sci Center for the 2024 Pacific Standard Time initiative is focused on sonic responses to the climate crisis, the effects of which are felt disproportionately by formerly colonized peoples, and by communities of color in the western world.

Pictured: Vikram; X-aMEN-ing Masculinities, LA Freewaves, LA State Historic Park, 2022; Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, 2022. 📷 by Josh Schaeder; Patty Chang: Milk Debt at 18th Street Arts Center, 2021.📷 by Brica Wilcox.

Curative Projects