Swept Away: Love Letter to A Surrogate
April 22-23, 2023, 9 am-12 pm and 4-10 pm each day
Santa Monica State Beach in front of Annenberg Community Beach House
Presented by 18th Street Arts Center and Guild Hall in East Hampton, and made possible with support from Art of Recovery, a City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs initiative, and Annenberg Community Beach House.
Video by Matias Munoz-Rodriguez, Fu the Dog Productions.
“Illuminate LA: Undoing Monumental Harms Through Visual Art” with Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Paul Donald, Connie Martin Trevino, Jackie Amezquita, and Nicole Rademacher for Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (December 3, 2022). Video by Matìas Muñoz-Rodriguez.
“Illuminate LA: Artist Reflections on Monuments and Public Space” with Alan Nakagawa, Sebastian Hernandez, Carmen Argote, and Isaac Michael Ybarra for Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (October 27, 2022).
Individual artist-led audio tours of Downtown Los Angeles:
“Illuminate LA: Current State of Monuments” with Kristin Sakoda, Desirée Martinez, Dr. Charlene Villaseñor-Black, Dr. Alison Rose Jefferson, and Naomi Okayuma for Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (September 15, 2022).
My talk is based on my contribution to An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader, “Art and the Changing Human.” I will discuss how artists and curators are responding to the shift online during Covid, and bringing digital realms back into the physical world since the reopening began. Artworks by Stephanie Dinkins, James Beckett, Fred Wilson, Miljohn Ruperto, Kenneth Tam, Michael Mandiberg, Agnieszka Kurant, and Sondra Perry will be considered as they relate to questions of archives, labor, privacy, and self-determination both online and offline (September 22, 2022).
“Season of the Witch: Aesthetics of Care and Repair in Contemporary Art” delivered at Contingencies of Care symposium, OCAD/Emily Carr University (2021).
Art and Cognitive Activism
Masculinities: Conversation with Anuradha Vikram and Marcus Kuiland-Nazario. This conversation from April 2021 features artist and curator Marcus Kuiland Nazario in conversation with curator and writer Anuradha Vikram, hosted by LA Freewaves DIS…MISS series on Instagram Live.
In the fourth artist dialogue for Baik Art, Artists Elliott Hundley and Entang Wiharso discuss the commonalities in their works, which explore contemporary political, social, cultural, and religious myths. Painter Hundley explains the influence of literary references in his work and his approach to creating two-dimensional space in individual works and installations. Mixed media artist Wiharso describes the conditions of his early practice in a time of political unrest in Indonesia, and the subtle codes he developed to describe that condition in images and materials.
In a conversation from January 2021, artists Elana Mann and Jiha Moon discuss overlaps and divergences in their artistic approaches as well as their experiences as parents and educators or community organizers in the arts. They discuss the influence of their culturally rich backgrounds and everyday experiences of cross-cultural interaction on their work. Attention is paid to each artist’s distinct approach to ceramics as a medium that has extreme properties of hardness, fragility, and malleability.
In this conversation from December 2020, Los Angeles artist Shinique Smith and Yogyakarta artist Mella Jaarsma discuss overlaps in their approaches to using materials, people, and ritual in their works. Topics include learning to make and dye textiles, researching colonial histories and economic dependencies between nations, and working with the body, their own and those of others.
In November 2020 I hosted the first of four artist dialogues for Baik Art. In the first conversation in the series, New Delhi artist Mithu Sen and Brooklyn artist Jaishri Abichandani compare notes on their feminist upbringings in 1970s India. They reflect on the different contexts of their artistic training in India and in the United States, finding support for radical art practices, and choosing materials that inspire experimentation.
In December 2020, I was invited to participate in a filmed performance of Warren Neidich’s Statisticon for Germany’s Arte TV.
In November 2020, art historians Terri Cohn and Alla Efimova interviewed me about groundbreaking information artist Sonya Rapoport for their series on her work. Also featured is Heresies co-founder Sue Heinemann.
In June 2020 I spoke with Abriel Gardner for LA Freewaves’ Dis..Miss: Connecting the Dots series on Instagram Live.
In May 2020 I spoke with Patty Chang and Asha Bukojemsky (Marathon Projects) about Patty’s exhibition Milk Debt which I initiated at 18th Street Arts Center.
In January 2020 I began working with UCLA Art Sci Center on a series of LASER talks and artist residencies. The first featured artists Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Lauren McCarthy, Refik Anadol, and Jennifer Moon.
In July 2017 I spoke about my curatorial practice at Saas-Fee Institute of Art, hosted by SPIKE Quarterly in Berlin.
In June 2017, I moderated a keynote panel at the Asia Society in New York for the launch of the exhibition Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora.
Mills College Art Museum made this short about Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport which I co-curated with Terri Cohn in 2012.