About Art

Angel Otero is an artist known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience. Otero is best known for the Oil Skin works he began in 2010, an ongoing series that demonstrates the inherently transformative nature of the artist’s practice as well as his dedication to expanding the visual field of abstract expressionism. The artist’s early childhood memories are brought to the forefront in his most recent series of paintings which see a return to figuration combined with his hallmark style of abstraction. Otero paints and collages dreamlike scenes upon his vibrant structured canvases, depicting objects and spaces that are loosely based on personal memories associated with the domestic sphere. Probing the boundaries of figuration and abstraction, Otero’s most recent works continue to expand the possibilities of painting and materiality.

With Episode 106 we have changed a few things up! First, our name, we have dropped the word conversations from the podcast title.  The podcast is “About Art” so that’s what we’re now calling it! Simple and elegant.

Dara Birnbaum is a groundbreaking figure in the emergence of media art. Among the earliest practitioners working in video, among the first women to adapt the medium, and the first to focus on TV specifically.

Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, she has created a prescient body of work that in many ways prefigures our current digital realities, where anyone on social media can now “talk back” to media in ways similar to what Birnbaum has done throughout her artistic practice.  Her early works from the late 1970s took on American popular culture—Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman being among her most famous—finding homes in exhibitions at nontraditional venues such as hair salons and nightclubs in the East Village.

She and Zuckerman discuss joy, awakening to nature, Monet, how art saves lives, being a “video maker,” winning, and spiritual practice.

This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, a curator who established the Foundation in 2009 as a catalyst and advocate for the arts, not only in Sharjah, UAE, but also in the region and across the world. With a passion for supporting experimentation and innovation in the arts, Al Qasimi has continuously expanded the scope of the Foundation to include major international touring exhibitions; artist and curator residencies in visual art, film and music; commissions and production grants for emerging artists; publications and publication grants; performance and film festivals; architectural research and restoration; and a wide range of educational programming in Sharjah for both children and adults.

In 2003, Al Qasimi co-curated Sharjah Biennial 6 and has remained Biennial Director ever since. She is currently curating the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023). Under her leadership, Sharjah Biennial has become an internationally recognised platform for contemporary artists, curators and cultural producers. Her leadership in the field led to her election as President of the International Biennial Association (IBA) in 2017, an appointment that transferred IBA’s headquarters to Sharjah. In addition to her role at the Foundation, Al Qasimi also serves as the President of The Africa Institute and President and Director of the Sharjah Architectural Triennial, which inaugurated its first edition in November 2019.

She and I spoke about chance moments, the history of the place, the Africa Institute, “thinking historically in the present”, not rushing, decentralizing, doing less, telling you own history, not pursuing things that don’t work, and counting experiences!

Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, co-founders of WORKac and principals of the firm. Wood has extensive experience leading large scale and complex US and international projects. Andraos is also the dean emeritus and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. WORKac creates architecture and strategic planning concepts at the intersection of the urban, the rural and the natural. Embracing reinvention and collaboration with other fields, they strive to develop intelligent and shared infrastructures and to achieve a more careful integration between architecture, landscape and ecological systems. They hold unshakable lightness and polemical optimism as a means to move beyond the projected and towards the possible. WORKac was the #1 design firm in Architect magazine’s 2017 Architect 50 and the 2015 AIA NYS Firm of the Year. The firm has achieved international acclaim for projects such as the Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn, the Kew Gardens Hills Library in Queens, and the Stealth Building in New York. Current projects include a masterplan for 60 villas on a waterfront site in Lebanon, a new library in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and a library in Boulder, CO.

Ella Fontanals-Cisneros is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and collector of contemporary art. She began collecting art in the 1970s and her collection, which today has more than 2500 works, has an international profile with emblematic figures of modern and contemporary art with a focus on Latin American art. She is also cofounder of CIFO, a non-profit organization that fosters cultural exchange and enrichment of the arts. In this position, she recently worked to launch the CIFO-Ars Electronica Awards (in partnership with Ars Electronica) to advance the work of Latin American artists working with new media and technology, an underfunded area of production.

Dr. Salah M. Hassan is founding Director of The Africa Institute. Hassan concurrently holds positions at Cornell University as the Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Africana Studies and Research Center; in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies; and as Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM). Hassan also served as Professor of History of Art in African and African American Studies and Fine Art at Brandeis University, where he was previously awarded the Madeleine Haas Russell Professorship in the Departments of African and Afro-American Studies and Fine Art.

Cristina Iglesias is a Spanish born artist who studied Chemical Sciences at the University of the Basque Country and Ceramics and Sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art in London. Her museum exhibitions include Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She additionally has been commissioned to create major projects and installations at Bloomberg headquarters, London; Mexican Foundation of Environmental Education, Baja, California; Museo del Prado, Madrid; and Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, among many others.

This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Kate MccGwire, a British sculptor who spent her childhood growing up on the Norfolk Broads. Taking feathers as her primary medium, MccGwire goes through labour-intensive processes of collecting, sorting and cleaning her materials to create muscular, writhing forms reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology. Through her practice, MccGwire celebrates feathers, which are commonly shed or discarded, as the medium through which she articulates enigmatic anatomies that explore physical and introspective space.

She and I discuss swimming in the river, unexpected and long term collaborations, the notion of place, tracing the practice of time, being lost, looking again at what you think you know, meditative processes, what she listens to in the studio, flow, flux, patterning and energy, the power of art, and having a weird life!

Royal Salute, the master of exceptionally aged Scotch whisky, has unveiled a new platform, The Art of Wonder in partnership with celebrated British sculptor, Kate MccGwire. The Art of Wonder will invite some of the most provocative artists of today to take inspiration from the craft of whisky blending to create a lasting tribute to the transformative power of creativity. For its inaugural release, Royal Salute has partnered with British sculptor, Kate MccGwire, who has created three beautifully sculpted and sensuous pieces; Paragon, Plethora, and Protean, under a body of work named Forces of Nature. Paragon is one of 21 bespoke sculptures, that sits with a remarkable 53 Year Old blended Scotch whisky, one of the highest ages ever released by Royal Salute. Plethora, which features sustainably sourced pheasant feathers flowing through the curves of copper repurposed from silent whisky stills, will be unveiled for the first time in Shanghai, China, in November 2022. Protean, the largest installation of the three, continues the theme of Plethora and will be revealed at Frieze, London on the 12th of October 2022.

For more information, visit royalsalute.com or follow @royalsalute on social media.

@kate_mccgwire

Sandra Jackson-Dumont is the Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Tasked with leading the institution through its opening and beyond, she comes to the museum from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she has served as the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education and Public Programs since 2014. Throughout her career, Jackson-Dumont has developed programming around museum collections and special exhibitions to engage a broad range of audiences. She also served for eight years as the deputy director for education and public programs and adjunct curator in modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum. Prior to that, Jackson-Dumont held positions at the Studio Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.