Art Practical Audio

On April 11, 2018, legendary artist, activist, and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense Emory Douglas sat down with the California College of the Arts (CCA) Students of Color Coalition in a roundtable conversation. Douglas talked about his work in creating iconic images of Black liberation as a director, designer, and illustrator for the Panther newspaper, and heard from students ….

This conversation was organized by Sita Bhaumik, Scholar in Residence at CCA's Center for Art + Public Life, as part of the Art + Survival program, supported by the CCA Center for Art and Public Life, the President's Diversity Steering Group, in collaboration with Diversity Studies, CCA Students of Color Coalition, and Art Practical

We close out the third season of the podcast with a conversation with Maya Stovall, a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose work deploys choreography, long term site research, experimental ethnography, and moving and still images to unpack the complexities of community survival, institutional disinvestment, and urban planning. Her layered approach comes through in the multimodal ways she speaks about her work, shifting between dense theory as almost poetic language, to a direct revelation of the pain and frustration in seeing how her family’s neighborhood has been rendered as a food desert with only liquor stores to serve them. Stovall is perhaps best known for her ongoing project, Liquor Store Theatre, an ongoing and long term exploration of her Detroit community. In video documentation of her artistic and anthropological dialogues with residents, we see her both performing in front of the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores and interviewing patrons and passersby, a juxtaposition of footage that manages to be revelatory while still withholding some things only for the people in the city who happen to be there to witness the live events. In her process, Stovall simultaneously interrogates ethnographic traditions and the expectations of artists in public practice. In our conversation, we talk about the roots of her practice, vulnerability, and resisting having her work being pinned down to any one reading of it.

Stovall’s Under New Ownership, a solo exhibition jointly presented by Fort Mason Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, is on view through May 5, 2019. She will be enacting Theorem, no.1 a public performance winding through the streets of San Francisco on May 3rd. Click here for more information.

Maya Stovall is a conceptual artist and an anthropologist, and she has exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2017–18 F-Series. Her book, Liquor Store Theatre, arrives from Duke University Press in spring 2020. Her second book on the imprint, Writing Through Walls, co-authored with her brother Josef Cadwell, is forthcoming. She has published peer-reviewed academic articles on her anthropological field research and her contemporary art practices in Transforming Anthropology and Journal of the Anthropology of North America, as well as in publications including Detroit Research Journal and The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Anthropology News. She lives and works in Detroit where she grew up, as well as in Los Angeles County, where she is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona.

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In an age where we are inundated by a seemingly endless scroll of images and living within an economy that demands an inordinate amount of our attention, it feels necessary to ask what is the value of doing nothing? It is much more evident now than ever before that social media platforms are another tool for advertisers and corporations to learn our desires through likes and clicks encouraging us to stay glued to our screens and monitors. In 2017, Bay Area-based artist Jenny Odell gave a talk at the annual EYEO festival titled “How to do Nothing,” which resulted in a book of the same name. I have been following Odell’s artistic practice and writing since she was in graduate student pursuing her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. With a background in literature and having taught Internet Art at Stanford University for several years, her wealth of knowledge related to networked culture to free things advertised on Instagram that aren’t actually free, she has an uncanny ability to craft a stories emblematic of our digital age. In this episode, The Value of Doing Nothing, I spoke with Odell about exercises in attention, space for refusal, bonding over our experience of an Ellsworth Kelly painting at the SF MOMA, and much more. The irony of Odell’s call to action, being that of doing nothing, leads us to the multitude of ways that stepping back from time to time enables and affords us the opportunity to learn how to observe the world around us, actively listen, and fastidiously mind the details we might normally overlook.

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In this episode, I talk with Honolulu-based artist, activist, and cultural organizer Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt. Rebecca’s winding path to her current practice reflects the complex layers of intercultural analysis and research she brings to her engagements with people and materials: growing up in Chicago’s Jewish community, her study of languages and photography, creative entrepreneurship, working as an educator facilitating Las Fotos Project with youth in Tijuana, and seeking out Hawaiʻi’s Filipino community to take part in Ilokano language and cultural reclamation within the diaspora. In one of her most recent projects, Nabanglo a lamisaan, she created a tasting table of sukang ilocos, sugar cane vinegar, to enable conversations about labor history, cultural practice, and imperialism. The project emerged from a collaborative exploration with botanists at the University of Hawaiʻi--where she attempted to make her own vinegar from local sugar cane--as well as research into anti-colonial resistance in the Philippines, such as the Basi Revolt. Over the course of our conversation, we talk about the trajectory of her practice and how she approaches Ilocano cultural recovery work while on the 'āina, Native Hawaiian lands.

Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt is an artist, activist, feminist, and diasporic person engaging in place-based art-making and learning. Her current work reflects on studies and reclamation of the Ilokano language and her attempts to reconstruct connections with the land and cosmology of her ancestors which has been lost through displacement, colonization, and miseducation. Utilizing photographs, natural materials, handwritten words, as well as found images, she combines disparate information from various sites, sources, and time periods to explore how relationships to land/daga/'āina manifest in diasporic communities. Crossing into the realm of social practice, she often works in collaboration to facilitate the exchange of knowledge intergenerationally and interculturally. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu.

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Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

Virtual reality is not a new phenomenon. From dioramas to panoramas, the allure of being enveloped in a place or tableau outside of one’s reality has mass appeal considering the popularity of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Through 360 filmmaking and photography, the creation of space within the virtual realm has become commonplace. From journalism to entertainment purposes, while virtual worlds enable a new way of seeing fantastical worlds, artists and designers must consider format and aesthetics. In the second part of a two-part series, Not Your Average Playtest, I look at how artist Veronica Graham translates her drawings and paintings into digital architectures within the virtual world. She also touches upon how she must reconcile physical and digital perception to create immersive experiences.

Veronica Graham is an Oakland based visual artist primarily working in print and digital mediums. Inspired by today’s rapidly changing environment, she sees her art practice as a form of world building. Each work is the creation of place or artifact, calling attention to how fiction is weaved into our reality. In 2012 she founded Most Ancient, a design studio focused on small press and digital production. Her books have been collected by SFMoMA, MoMA, The New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, Stanford University, Yale University, and other public and private collections. Graham has received grants from Kala Art Institute and Women’s Studio Workshop. She is now designing virtual worlds and her first VR project called “The Muybridge Mausoleum” was completed in 2017 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift platforms. In addition to her own practice, Graham is an active member on SFMoMA’s Games Advisory Board and an arts educator who has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, Southern Exposure, and Creativity Explored.

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Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

(un)making | Ep. 38: Leland Miyano by Art Practical

I collect treasures. To some people, I collect junk. But one object I own that has never lost its luster is the View-Master. Even as an adult, the sensation of looking at reels ranging from visuals showing vintage Disney cartoons to 1960s New York cityscapes, the View-Master has served up a type of visual immersive space since the late 1930s. From dioramas to panoramas, the allure of being enveloped in a place or tableau outside of one’s reality has mass appeal considering the popularity of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Through 360 filmmaking and photography, the creation of space within the virtual realm has become commonplace. From journalism to entertainment purposes, while virtual worlds enable a new way of seeing fantastical worlds, artists and designers must consider format and aesthetics. In the first part of a two-part series, Not Your Average Playtest, I scratch the surface of the history of virtuality from analog to digital formats and examine how contemporary artists are using virtual reality as a medium.

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Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

In this episode, I talk with Los Angeles artist Carolina Caycedo. Caycedo’s multilayered projects weave together archival, site, and community research, long term support of grassroots social movements, drawings, performance, documentary video, educational engagements, and the work of many collaborators. Through this array of tactics, she investigates the impact of extractive economies and hyper development on communities, local systems of knowledge, and the environment. While the art objects generated through her practice are not necessarily the endpoint of her work, they have a presence and depth that unfolds across a variety of contexts. For instance, her Serpent River Book--an expansive accordion fold artist book that explores the stories of communities in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico grappling with the impact of privatization and industrialization of their rivers--is as much at home as a museum installation piece, pedagogical tool for village organizers, or performance prompt for a company of dancers. In our conversation we talk about the embodied knowledge of what she calls “geochoreographies,” navigating--and sometimes haunting--institutions, and working with ethical rigor.

Carolina Caycedo has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogota, Quezon City, Toronto, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, San Juan, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Mexico DF, Tijuana, and London. Her work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows at Vienna Secession, Intermediae-Matadero Madrid, Agnes B Gallery Paris, Alianza Francesa Bogotá, Hordaland Kunstsenter Bergen, 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and DAAD Gallery in Berlin. She has participated in international biennials including Sao Paulo (2016), Berlin (2014), Paris Triennial (2013), New Museum (2011), Havana (2009), Whitney (2006), Venice (2003) and Istanbul (2001). In 2012, Caycedo was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin resident. She has received funding from Creative Capital, California Community Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Harpo Foundation, Art Matters, Colombian Culture Ministry, Arts Council UK, and Prince Claus Fund.

Artist’s site: http://Carolinacaycedo.com

Exhibition at the Huntington: https://www.huntington.org/rituals-of-labor

Palm Springs Art Museum project: https://www.psmuseum.org/events/pop-up/carolina-caycedo

Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio

Check us out on Instagram at @un_making

Thursday, Nov 8, 2018, Art Practical hosted an evening of conversation between Constance Hockaday and Laurel Braitman, who will be speaking about how their respective practices are influenced by each other’s work and processes. This conversation was recorded live at the Curatorial Research Bureau.

Between You & Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible yet play a significant role in the generative space of artmaking.

This program is organized as part of an editorial column published online by Art Practical with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing quality of life by championing and sustaining the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease.

Constance Hockaday’s work is about creating portals that get people closer to the water and nature, and closer to that feeling of belonging in a place (preferably the place where they live). Hockaday has most often looked to water as a place for hosting social sculptures and immersive experiences. She believes the shoreline is a place where many human and non-human interests collide.

Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Medicine & the Muse Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine where she's busy helping physicians tell better stories--for themselves and their patients. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT, is a Senior TED Fellow and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine, a live magazine the New York Times has called a “Sensation.” Her work and collaborations with musicians and artists have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists.

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Tuesday, October 2, 2018, Art Practical hosted an evening of conversation between Ana Teresa Fernández and Julio César Morales, who spoke about how their respective practices are influenced by each other’s work and processes. This conversation was recorded live at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Between You & Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible yet play a significant role in the generative space of artmaking.

This program is organized as part of an editorial column published online by Art Practical with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing quality of life by championing and sustaining the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease.

Ana Teresa Fernández, born in 1981 in Tampico, Mexico, lives and works in San Francisco. Her work explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures, translated into masterful oil paintings, installations and videos. Within her work, performance becomes a tool for investigation as strong feminist undercurrents flow together with post-colonial rhetoric. Through her work, the artist illuminates the psychological and physical barriers that define gender, race, and class in Western society and the global south.

Fernández has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Humboldt State University, Eureka, CA; the Tijuana Biennial, Tijuana, Mexico; Snite Museum at Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA and The Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA. Her work has been collected by institutions such the Denver Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and Kadist Art Foundation.

Julio César Morales

By deploying a range of media and visual strategies, Julio César Morales investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’ practice employs multifarious mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, reenacted a famous meal, all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives.

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Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch more episodes! Check us out on Instagram at @artpracticalsf. #APaudio