Today marks the conclusion of our Blog Party! fundraising campaign. Many thanks to all who have contributed over the last six weeks.

As this blog approaches its fourth birthday, it has grown in leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings. From the seventeen columns we publish monthly to our biweekly guest blog (amounting to over 100 bloggers-in-residence) and ongoing Flash Points series, our writers work hard to offer original, insightful, and engaging content.

Help us encourage their important contributions and keep this site running for at least another four years. Support arts writing. Donate to Blog Party! today.

Thanks to Rebecca Leopold for her posts these last two weeks. Up next is Amy Whitaker, a writer, professor, and creative consultant.  Her great passion in life right now is teaching economics to artists, which she has done at California College of the Arts, RISD, Trade School, and other places since 2004.  Her first book, Museum Legs (Hol Art Books, 2009), was assigned to the freshman class at RISD last year, where she was invited to give the RISD orientation keynote.  Museum Legs was also recommended by the Association of Art Museum Directors and was a selection of the Authors@Google program.  Amy is at work on a new book about the lives of the creative generalists. Her current consulting projects include the new William Eggleston Museum in Memphis, and being a member of the team at Locus Analytics.

Hello, May! We’re heading into the last week and a half of our Blog Party campaign. To date, we’ve received enough donations to fund a new column for six months. We’d love to fund it for an entire year.

Got $10? Over 50,000 of you read our blog every month. If 500 donors (that’s 1%) give, we will reach our year-end goal of paying all our writers.  Please be part of the generous 1% percent!

• 6 donations of $50 will fund the other half of a new column
• 50 donations of $50 will pay for a year of guest blogging
• 50 donations of $50 will pay for a year of the Lives and Works in Berlin column
• 100 donations of $50 will pay for a year’s worth of Open Enrollment posts written by graduate students

Join the Blog Party and support arts writing! Donate here.

Thanks to our regular writer Alex Freedman for her fantastic posts for the guest blog. Look out for more from her in our Lives and Works in Berlin column.

Up next is Rebecca (Marks) Leopold, an artist and writer who resides in Brooklyn and spends an inordinate amount of time in her native Philadelphia. Producing mostly photo-based works, she is interested in the various intersections between technology, memory, history and landscape. She has exhibited work in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, as well as other former colonies. A double graduate of Bard College, she holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies. For more info go to: http://www.rebeccaleopold.com.

Thanks to Allison Glenn for her series of compelling posts on Detroit confirming that art is alive and well in the Motor City.

Up next is Alex Freedman. You may know Alex as a regular contributor to our Lives and Works in Berlin column. An independent writer, curator, and truant graduate student based in New York, Alex has studied History at George Washington University, African Literature at Harvard, and Art History at Hunter College. Her 2011 projects include Present Tense, interviewing for Look Until Blind, and collectively curating.

The Art21 Blog is turning four! From our very first post in July 2007, we have grown to a site that houses 2,100 posts and essays by nearly 200 writers, read by over 880,000 fans in over 210 countries and territories.  Help us celebrate!

In preparation for the site’s fourth birthday party, we are taking the next six weeks to raise funds and reach the goal of compensating all of our writers. We hope that you will be able to contribute with gifts of any amount.

How can my donation make a difference?

• 10 people giving $5 will pay for 1 blog post
• 10 people giving $10 will pay for a guest blogger’s honorarium
• 50 people giving $25 will pay for a full issue of our topical Flash Points series (3 months)
• 100 people giving $25 will pay for a year of guest blogging
• 100 people giving $25 will pay for a year of the Lives and Works in Berlin column
• 100 people giving $50 will pay for a year’s worth of Open Enrollment posts written by graduate students
• A single donation of $600 underwrites an entire column for a year!

Can my donation go to a particular column?
Yes! Whether your favorite posts are published in the Open Enrollment or Teaching with Contemporary Art series or in the columns on the art of London and Los Angeles, your contribution can be tagged for that content area. You may select a specific column upon making your donation.

DONATE NOW

Thank you for supporting Art21!

View the full list of Art21 Blog columns past the break

Art21 is honored to be among the recipients of the 70th Annual Peabody Awards—the premiere international prize in electronic media—for its film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible.

The Peabody board recognized William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible as “a veritable all-access pass to [William Kentridge's] mind and work process” given to Art21 by an artist whom they describe as “creativity personified” and “a one-man seminar.”

“The Peabody Awards were established with deep respect for the critical role played by electronic media in contemporary society and culture,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards. “The annual announcement of the recipients continues in that spirit to recognize work that sets the highest standards for the media industries.”

Visit the Peabody Awards site for the full list of this year’s recipients.

This is the second Peabody award for Art21. The non-profit organization received its first Peabody award for the fourth season (2007) of the biennial PBS television series, Art in the Twenty-First Century. To date, Art21 has produced five seasons of the Art in the Twenty-First Century series, featuring 86 artists in total. Art21 is currently in production for the sixth season of the series, tentatively scheduled to premiere in Spring 2012.

William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible is currently available for purchase on DVD through ShopPBS and other retailers. The film is also available to watch instantly through your browser at PBS Video and on the film site, as well as through the PBS Mobile app available for iOS-powered devices.

Thanks, Joe Grimm, for stopping by our blog for the past two weeks. Up next is Allison Glenn. Allison is a dual MA candidate in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism & Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, where she studied Photography and Urban Studies. She is currently investigating new approaches to programming exhibitions in mid-level, non-collecting contemporary art institutions, including assessing the impact of temporary and site-specific exhibitions, satellite spaces, and initiatives that reach beyond the institutional space.

Thanks to Lindsay Lawson for her thoughtful posts. Up next is Joe Grimm. Joe  (b. 1978, Safety Harbor, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with light and sound. In his performances, sculptures, videos, and constructed situations, he appropriates material from enlightenment-era metaphysics, contemporary pop music, and the troubled legacy of minimalism — insisting always on the centrality of sheer sensory pleasure.  Grimm studied philosophy at Yale University before receiving a graduate degree in experimental music composition at Brown University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His work has been shown at institutions such as CAPC Bordeaux, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Bezalel Gallery in Tel Aviv, and MCA Chicago.

Art21 is pleased to announce our latest column, Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture, penned by guest blog alum Victoria Gannon.

Art and visual culture have not always been friends. When programs in the latter began to appear in art schools and universities in the 1990s, art historians were, on the whole, threatened by the sprawling interdisciplinary discipline whose objects of study include advertising and maps, landscapes and architecture, popular movies and other representations not considered art but rich with visual signification. Many believed visual culture, as a discipline, would rob the art object of its unique historical identity, reducing it to merely one more representation in a vast universe of cultural exchanges. Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture makes no pretense of resolving this academic fissure, nor does it assert that art objects are the same as other forms of cultural production. But it does acknowledge that contemporary art and forms of visual culture often share cultural milieus and influences, and that by examining these forms of production side by side, we can learn more about their shared inspiration than if we considered them individually. In highlighting the similarities between art and visual culture, Bedfellows will ultimately reveal their distinctions and unique approaches to cultural phenomena.

Victoria Gannon was born and raised in Northern California, and she enjoys an ambivalent relationship with her home state. She currently spends her time writing and editing for Art Practical, an online journal covering Bay Area visual culture. She’s interested in art for its ability to embody abstract ideas; she enjoys writing about art for the challenge of translating those ideas into clear language. She earned a degree in English from Mt. Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass., and received a master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts, in San Francisco.

Bedfellows publishes on the first Tuesday of the month.