Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

• Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
• Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
• Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
• BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
• Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
• A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.

Wrapping up my focus on Atlanta during my stint as guest blogger, I questioned Stuart Horodner, Artistic Director at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Lila Kanner, Executive Director of Artadia (and Art21 guest blog alum), about supporting Atlanta-based artists and the contemporary art scene here. Their responses are woven together in the following interview.

Stuart Horodner, Artistic Director, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

Horodner has held director and curator positions at art centers and universities including the Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.  He was the Founder and Co-Organizer of Affair at the Jupiter Hotel, an intimate art fair in Portland, OR between 2004-2007, and he was Co-Owner/Director of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York City from 1992-97.

Lila Kanner, Executive Director, Artadia

Lila Kanner recently wrote about the first Artadia Atlanta Awards (Fahamu Pecou, interviewed in my last post, was a recipient). Prior to serving at Artadia, Kanner was the Associate Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. From 1999 to 2002, she served as Director of Artist Services and Educational Programs at The Copley Society of Boston.

Victoria Lichtendorf: Stuart, you’ve spent time getting to know different art communities, most recently Portland, Oregon, prior to your work here in Atlanta. How would you describe the art community here compared with other cities? Have you found opportunities or challenges distinct to the area?

Stuart Horodner: Atlanta has a diverse arts ecology that operates in ways quite similar to several other cities, Portland among them. Often in these cities, there are a handful of good commercial galleries, university galleries, not-for-profit centers, community centers, artists collectives, festivals and such.

People in these cities struggle with several issues: limited criticism (one newspaper, one weekly paper) that cannot cover the various exhibitions and events sufficiently, and national art magazine coverage that rarely does more than the occasional review; the lack of significant numbers of dynamic and curious art collectors who seek out the dealers and venues for knowledge and access; limited patronage and city/state funding support; and the desire for larger and more diverse audiences.

These conditions are often frustrating to those professionals and practitioners on the ground, but the solution is found in vigilant cultivation, trying new things, contributing what you can, and producing excellence at all levels. In Atlanta, there are some of the same struggles—but that said, there are good and serious artists here who are showing locally and nationally, and there are a range of excellent and risk-taking commercial galleries. There is Atlanta Celebrates Photography (co-organized by Michael David Murphy) and Art Papers, helping to cultivate audiences. Universities and schools including Georgia State, Emory, Spellman, Agnes Scott, SCAD, and others offer solid programs in training young artists and historians. Exhibition venues including Eyedrum, MOCAGA, Spruill Art Center, Hammonds House, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and The High Museum of Art all make significant contributions while pursuing their specific missions.

People tell me that this is the South and it takes time, and that there is general conservatism around contemporary art. My sense is that we simply need to continue to be bold and ambitious and find ways to make art play a major role in the civic, social, political, and economic power of this city.

VL: Lila, can you share some reasons why Atlanta was chosen as the latest city to benefit from Artadia’s presence? What is your impression of the local arts community? How does it compare with other Artadia sites?

Lila Kanner: Artadia’s Atlanta program was in the works for several years building up to the program launch in late 2008. Artadia chose Atlanta as a program city because of its vibrant arts community and diverse and very talented population of visual artists. As one of the fastest growing cities in the US, Atlanta has terrific support systems for artists and we also saw that we could play a role in providing an open application process, critical validation through our panel review, and unrestricted awards funds through a program that would be unique to the Atlanta landscape. We never want to duplicate existing programs and [therefore we] form partnerships in order to effectively and positively impact our partner communities. Artadia’s board and national donors support all the operating funds for the program, and all awards and program funds are raised locally. After conversations with many key stakeholders in the community from both foundations—among [them] collectors, local arts councils, museums, and artists—we found that there was a unique role our organization and program could play.

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Next up, as part of my spotlight on Atlanta-based artists, is Fahamu Pecou, of “Fahamu Pecou is the Shit” fame. Known for his large-scale painted riffs on art magazines, Pecou also incorporates performance and maintains an active online presence. Playing with strategies of pop culture branding and promotion, Pecou delves into stereotypes of black masculinity and notions of fine art. Along these lines, his latest forays extend to the representation of the Obamas in the media. Here we learn about his most recent work, upcoming performances, his views on Atlanta, and what it really means to be “the shit.”

Fahamu Pecou, “The Code,” 2009. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 66 x 49 1/2 inches.

Victoria Lichtendorf: It seems like you’ve been pretty busy these past few years with solo shows in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Dallas, as well as group shows in New York, Miami, and recently, Cape Town, South Africa. You went to school here in Atlanta, but what makes you stay?

Fahamu Pecou: Atlanta has always felt like home to me. After college, I moved back to NY. Though I had a great time and was inspired art-wise, I missed Atlanta. I missed the community and trees…LOL. Atlanta is a great place to be. The city is growing and I feel like a part of the foundation, a claim I don’t think I could make in New York or L.A. For me, it’s great that I get to travel and be inspired in all these other places and then bring that energy back to Atlanta.

Fahamu Pecou, "UnAmerican Idol," 2009. Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 63 1/2 x 49 inches. Courtesy Fahamu Pecou.

VL: Diamond Lounge Creative seems like a pretty demanding day job. Are you becoming any less involved? Do you identify with them or any other artists who’ve followed a similar path from advertising, such as Andy Warhol and Barbara Kruger?

FP: I am still very much involved in Diamond Lounge, now called RED|Creative. I am the principle designer and creative director. So my days are almost endless. But it is a great environment to work in. My team is extraordinary and we all have our own creative lives outside of RED. In many ways, RED is a think tank, a place where creative minds collaborate. We don’t consider ourselves graphic designers or copywriters. We are artists first and foremost; advertising and marketing design is just another medium for us, like painting or drawing.

I do identify highly with Warhol. He was a master of bridging the commercial world and the fine art world. I can identify with that. I like to think that anyone and everyone should have access to art. It should be a part of our daily lives. It should be fun and thoughtful. It should be accessible.

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Duane Hanson, "High School Student," 1990. Bronze, polychromed with oil, mixed media accessories, 70 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 17 inches. Courtesy Emmanuel Perotin Gallery, Paris.

(Disclaimer: this Letter from London is actually from Paris.)

Paris’s gallery zone, clustered for the most part around the Marais district east of the center, is so amazingly lovely and elegant that even the most vituperative conceptual art looks like a pithy witticism at a nineteenth-century dinner party met with high, tinkling nineteenth-century laughter. In the right light, it makes London’s galleries look snarky and scruffy. As Adam Ant so aptly put it, “Young Parisians are so French/not like me and you.”

Stephane Vigny at Galerie LHK. Photo: Ben Street.

Stephane Vigny, showing at Galerie LHK (as curated by Daria de Beauvais) shows an array of apparently unaltered building materials: a great concrete cylinder supported by museum-style brackets, corrugated plastic tubing sprouting from the floor, aluminum guttering snaking below the cornice. Vigny’s frank aesthetic is leavened by a lightly held, mordant wit. A door-sized sheet of glass leans against the wall, complete with obsolete peephole; masticated chewing gum lines the inside of the gallery window, like putty; a pencil sharpener is set into the wall at the artist’s groin height, called, inevitably, Glory Hole (yowch). While Vigny’s trenchant references to minimalism’s stony-faced employment of unadulterated industrial materials is sort of funny, if a bit passé (I mean, hasn’t minimalism been parodied enough?), where it succeeds is in his eccentric enjoyment of the doggedly ugly. The dominant sculpture—a prehistoric dolmen in concrete, made to appear like polystyrene—is slapstick archaeology, dumb as a brick, and perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge.” It’s the visual equivalent of Nigel Tufnel’s explanation of the druids: “Nobody knows ‘oo they were…or what they were doin.’” Vigny’s work starts as a challenge and ends as a charm. It’s an old gag, but it still works.

Luca Francesconi at the Palais de Tokyo

Vigny’s concrete electricity pylons also feature in the new group show across town at the Palais de Tokyo. Laid as a pair in the entrance to the show Spy Numbers, they’re easy to miss around the artfully exposed concrete and laissez-faire industrial chic of the Palais (in fact, you sometimes have to double check that you’re seeing an interior design feature and not a Vigny). The Palais de Tokyo can veer towards curatorial contrivance, but Spy Numbers, which occupies a vast, split-level hall of the ground floor, holds together well, never forcing a relationship between works for the sake of a thesis. As a chronically myopic guy, I was drawn to Norma Jeane’s twin petri dishes, each containing 365 one-day contact lenses—a year’s worth of looking, crammed in like frogs’ spawn. Luca Francesconi’s To Lower the Mountains—four vaguely pyramidal chunks of rock displayed on pedestals—is actually the peaks of four Alpine mountains, lopped off by the artist on a hike and transported back down again, in a supremely quixotic act reminiscent of Hans Schabus. Willfully fruitless romanticism is ubiquitous in contemporary art, but Francesconi’s work manages to retain a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality that’s pretty rare in that particular sub-genre. Other works—cylinders playing recordings of the building’s electromagnetic activity, a complex apparatus designed to create an aurora borealis—make reference to the exhibition’s vaunted interest in mysterious radio signals and clandestine messaging systems, but that’s all for the birds. Spy Numbers brings a welcome blast of whimsy to an overserious institution.

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Artists staging their own shows is nothing new. The French Impressionists did it in with the creation of their organization of Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, as did many members of the Ashcan School, as well as William Blake, who held one of his first exhibitions in his brother’s haberdashery!

To all you artists out there, whether you are frustrated now because the gallery that formerly represented you closed, the sales of your work are just overall in a dwindle, or the file of your rejection letters outweigh those of acceptance—whatever you do, it is important to keep up the pace of continual artmaking and participation in the conversation of contemporary art in your community. Do it yourself!

I had the pleasure of interviewing Margaret Lee, director of a 4-week series of exhibitions called the Month of May at a former office building located at 179 Canal Street in New York City, as well as with Liam Everett, an artist who curated the third weekend of this month-long program. While neither sought to collaborate on this endeavor as a direct form of protest, Margaret and Liam took it upon themselves to show put together a show with the intention of being able to challenge their own ways of seeing. Here is a peek into their story.

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EXCLUSIVE: Master Printer Craig Zammiello and artist Ellen Gallagher discuss their working relationship during the process of creating “DeLuxe” (2004–05), a suite of 60 individual works employing both traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques.

Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements appropriated from popular magazines. Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these ‘narratives’ into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements as a kind of chart of lost worlds. Upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Although her work has often been interpreted as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading- from afar the work appears abstract and minimal, and employs grids as both structure and metaphors for experience.

Ellen Gallagher is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Play of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Catherine Tatge. Camera & Sound: Mead Hunt and Mark Mandler. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Ellen Gallagher. Special Thanks: Craig Zammiello of Two Palms Press, New York.

Jessica Stockholder, "Red Tube + Two", 2005

Season 3 artist Jessica Stockholder states, “What kids do with play is a kind of learning and thinking. It is a kind of learning and thinking that doesn’t have a predetermined end. I think I am involved in that.” Stockholder has spent a career exploring how disparate materials go together. After viewing the segment on Stockholder, the first graders in my art class got to explore their own unique sensibilities and create a sculpture based on intuitive thinking.

Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, defines play as “a thing of beauty best appreciated by experiencing it.” This is what makes watching first graders explore the work and ideas of Jessica Stockholder so enjoyable. Just by setting out various materials (rubber bands, pipe-cleaners, tape, popsicle sticks, paperclips, straws), students can cheerfully and expressively create works while exploring the creative process. This type of innovation and creativity is what artists and art educators have been involved with for a long time It’s also the type of thinking that everyone from Daniel Pink to Apple to the Partnership for 21st Century Thinking Skills is talking about.

In a reflective class discussion upon completion of the sculptures, we examined what makes creating these works of art different from other ways of making sculpture. Most students responded to having fun while making the sculptures (6 and 7 year-olds tend to respond like this to most projects). Some responded excitedly about how they could easily take their sculpture apart and make something different. One student even pointed out how her sculpture included sound and motion. The idea of Play allows students to make artwork without the pressure of making Art.

Nate Morgan is an art teacher at the Hillside School in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and also serves on the Art21 National Education Advisory Council.

John Lewis. Courtesy High Museum of Art.

Like many museums, traveling shows tend to dominate the exhibition schedule at the High Museum of Art. In contrast, Road to Freedom: Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, organized by Julian Cox, Curator of Photography, was generated by the museum and drew on wide-ranging regional resources and exchange with the local community. The exhibition ran from June 7 to October 5, 2008, marking four decades since the assassination of Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil rights veteran and longtime U.S. Congressman for the 5th District in Atlanta, John Lewis contributed an afterward to the exhibition catalogue and was involved in education and outreach events at the museum. While working for the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC, or “snick”) in the 1960s, Lewis shared an Atlanta apartment with photographer Danny Lyon, who at the time was a staff photographer for the SNCC.  Along with well-known photographers such as Lyon, Road to Freedom exhibited many photographers and photographs lost to history, including photojournalists working for the black press, and in some cases, evidence photos filed away decades ago.

Prior to his appointment at the High in 2005, Cox was an associate curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and also worked at the National Museum of Photography, Film, & Television in Bradford, England, and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Michael David Murphy, subject of my last interview and co-organizer of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, notes, “Julian Cox’s impact on Atlanta’s cultural scene, and on the photography community specifically, cannot be underestimated. I’ve never seen a curator who’s more engaged with the public. Road to Freedom wasn’t just a remarkable feat of curation and scholarship, it was a generous gift to the city.”

"Road to Freedom" installation detail. Courtesy High Museum of Art.

Victoria Lichtendorf: It seems astonishing that Road to Freedom is the first major exhibition of Civil Rights photography in close to thirty years. How do you account for this lapse?

Julian Cox: I think it comes down to the fact that photojournalism and documentary photography do not have much of a home in fine art museums. If you look around the country, there are only a few institutions committed to showing this kind of work. The High wanted to appropriately mark the fortieth anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination; he’s an international figure, of course, but he’s also a great Atlantan, so again, we were trying to reach different audiences in putting together a show of this kind.

Danny Lyon (American, born 1942), "Stokely Carmichael, Confrontation with National Guard, Cambridge, Maryland," 1964. Gelatin silver print. Purchase with funds from Joan N. Whitcomb. Courtesy High Museum of Art.

VL: In a talk you gave for the 2007 ARLIS conference in Atlanta, you mentioned that as a relative newcomer to the States, you initially knew little about the Civil Rights Movement. In what ways did your “outsider” status act as an asset?

JC: In an odd way, I think it helped. People wanted to know what I was up to! I always made it clear that I was on a steep learning curve in terms of learning about the history and developing a nuanced view of the cultural implications etc…. I also made a point of stressing the focus of my inquiry as being about the photography and media culture of the period. I am a photography curator and historian after all.

VL: The exhibition stemmed not only from a desire to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of MLK’s assassination but also to expand the High’s photography collection. Thus in a very concrete sense, RTF seems to have had a lasting impact on the Museum. After the show has completed its tour, will there be any special efforts made to make the photographs accessible to the community on an ongoing basis?

JC: We are looking into the possibility of sharing parts of the archive/collection with colleague institutions in Georgia (Savannah, Columbus, Albany), and we also hope to have a presence at the Center for Civil and Human Rights Partnership, which will open in downtown Atlanta in 2011. We are also in dialogue with the Woodruff library at Emory University, which has some very significant manuscript collections that dovetail with the one we’ve assembled here.

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Danish art group SUPERFLEX has been exacerbating the art world for over a decade with its irreverent style of questioning, which hits hard at the foundations of the West’s economic system. But unlike traditional critiques of economics that are rooted in 19th- or 20th-century ideology, SUPERFLEX is able to generate seemingly new explorations into our economic dysfunction with projects that delve deep into our contemporary consciousness and our evolving relationship with copyright, environmentalism, global consumerism, and the Internet.

Left: photo of SUPERFLEX by Nikolai Howalt (Courtesy the Artists). Right: my Skype conversation with Bjørnstjerne Christiansen

I caught up with Bjøernstjerne Christiansen, one third of the Danish art trio, over Skype (he was in São Paulo, Brazil) to discuss the group’s work and his own thoughts about the latest failures of our global economic system. This transcript has been edited with the permission of the artist.

Hrag Vartanian: Were you surprised by the recent economic crisis?

Bjøernstjerne Christiansen: No, that’s the nature of economic systems. There is always someone thinking that he or she can develop a perfect system but it never works. Systems are doomed to collapse and restart in other ways and forms. It is interesting for us to examine and challenge the systems; that’s part of our work.

Flooded McDonald’s from SUPERFLEX on Vimeo.

HV: Can you tell me about your Flooded McDonald’s film, where you recreated the interior of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant and videotaped it being flooded? I noticed that it went viral on the web. I also felt that it comments on the economic meltdown.

BC: The film is open to interpretation, so we don’t want to point to McDonald’s as evil or anything too obvious, but it very much has to do with mass consumerism and the responsibility to deal with that. We wanted to make a film that would have several outputs and interpretations. We chose McDonald’s because it is one of the major brands of globalism. Even if people never go to McDonald’s, they know how it looks, smells and works. We made a replica of a classical McDonald’s, and the associations people have with that are important.

One can go into many interpretations about this…when things go wrong or too high-speed in our global economy, where is the personal responsibility? Also, it touches on the environmental disaster that mass consumerism creates. The strange thing is that recently in Europe, McDonald’s announced it will hire 15,000 new employees; it doesn’t seem much effected by the downturn.

HV: Is the Flooded McDonald’s the first SUPERFLEX project to go viral?

BC: No, the Free Beer project went viral. It is an open-source beer; it is free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of “free beer.” We published the recipe and branding elements of Free Beer under a Creative Commons license (attribution: ShareAlike 2.5), which means anyone can use the recipe to brew their own and make money from it, but they have to publish their changes or improvements for others to benefit from their work. It has to do with intellectual property rights and how an idea or system from one context can be applied to another via this change—normal patterns of, in this case, production and innovation. When Free Beer was created, it was on the front pages of the New York Times, BBC, etc.

SUPERFLEX, "Free Beer," 2005. Courtesy the Artists.

Free Beer is about the battle over the system of rights. This is particularly important since it impacts the issue of people taking our rights. We look at the copyright system, the patent system, and we try to challenge all those systems because they have become too much part of our society. When someone has an idea, their first reaction is to run to the patent office and trademark the name or idea and 200 variations of it so that others have difficulty working on something similar. People haven’t been challenging this system much and we think it is a dangerous thing. We are locked into this and people aren’t thinking critically about what that means and what the consequences are.

HV: How does that viral aspect impact your work? Do you plan for it now? Does it impact the production of the work?

BC: If you are the kind of artists we are, then you have the ambition that your art is going to be discussed. You don’t have to be a populist, but you are aware of the power of global media and how issues are going to be discussed. You become aware of how to talk about it. So when you send out a press release, you talk in a different way with the media than with an art gallery crowd.

You don’t have to be political but engaged, and as an individual, you should have an interest in how our society is developing. If you have something to say, then you try to get it out there.

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Michael David Murphy, 100%. A single frame of film from 01/18/2009 in Washington, DC. Audio from Bloom. © MDM.

As part of my quest to learn more about the Atlanta art scene, I’ve been speaking with artists in the area—both seasoned inhabitants and newcomers alike. Since his arrival here two years ago from San Francisco, photographer Michael David Murphy has been busy pursuing his work while acting as the Program Manager for the annual six-week-long festival, Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Along with experimenting with digital and analog methodologies, Murphy has turned to text in his series, Unphotographable. With interests in social activism, photojournalism, and street photography, Murphy was especially affected by Road to Freedom, curated by Julian Cox, who we’ll be hearing from next.

Micheal David Murphy, "Barbers for Change," 2008. Courtesy MDM.

Victoria Lichtendorf: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, how you ended up here in Atlanta, and your involvement with Atlanta Celebrates Photography (ACP)?

Michael David Murphy: I came to photography through poetry. I have an MFA in English, and while pursuing that, picked up a digital camera and fell (back) into photography.

I didn’t know any photographers, so I learned as much I could from libraries, wrote about my process of learning, and spent my time pursuing pictures, mainly on the streets of San Francisco. I ditched digital and moved to film cameras, which offer a special kind of something that’s hard to define, but feels essential.

I’ve been trying to extend ACP’s reach both locally and internationally with our web presence and festival programming…It’s our 11th year, and we’re excited to be bringing Gregory Crewdson and Harry Shearer to our Lecture Series this fall, in addition to all the other events; portfolio reviews, public art, exhibitions, a film series, and more. ACP’s goal is for Atlanta to become a city that’s known for its photography, and it’s an honest challenge to meet and address every day.

As someone new to the South, it was remarkable to move here and discover ACP and the festival. I felt as culturally plugged-in as I could be, while still a stranger in a pretty strange land. One of my goals at ACP is to provide as much support as we can to the diversity of photographers who are here in the metro area, but also provide something significant to people who’ve just moved here and are looking to hit the ground running.

Michael David Murphy, "R.I.P. U.S.A.," 2009. Courtesy MDM.

VL: As an active observer and an activist, how would you describe Atlanta to someone who has never visited? What makes you stay?

MDM: Atlanta’s surface is high gloss, but it’s deceiving. Beneath the new sheen, there’s a reality for artists that includes the possibility of affordable studio space, or the chance to convince a building that you want to install light boxes of ice photographs on their loading dock (my friend Denise Lira did this!)

It’s a blank slate in many ways, a kind of wild west. Burglars on bicycles rob banks here.

Atlanta’s the kind of place where there’s more cooperation than competition and the majority of “culture workers” here are doing their darnedest to make a meaningful impact in the city, for the city and beyond. And there’s room for everyone.

I had two shows last fall at Opal Gallery, a small but active new space in a pedestrian part of town (the only pedestrian part of town). It’s a space where the audience is everyone: dog walkers, students, moms with their kids, guys dropping their shirts off at the cleaners. If you make work that’s politically charged, and eager to find the right audience, it’s a gift to be able to engage people “off the street” with what you’ve made, in addition to the art crowd. I loved going to Opal and being there to chat with people who had questions about the work. Every morning there were smudge-prints of faces on the gallery’s glass from people trying to look into the space, straining to see art.

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