Fresh Art International

On Miami Beach, we meet American writer Kurt Andersen to talk about the role of creativity in the Trumping of America. Besides writing novels, he has opined on America’s political landscape for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and his own Spy Magazine. Kurt Anderson is host and co-creator of Studio 360, a New-York based culture magazine show. His latest books explore a certain peculiarity in America’s DNA: a deep passion for fiction and fantasy. He delves into the complexities of this unshakeable character trait in Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and You Can't Spell America Without Me, a book he co-wrote with actor Alec Baldwin, our favorite Trump impersonator. Read these books and you will understand the United States in the age of the country’s 45th president.

What does it mean to be a contemporary art curator in the 21st century? Perhaps subconsciously, it's about living up to the legacy of Harald Szeemann, a legendary art historian—acting on the impulse to experiment and introduce new ways of engaging with art. Follow us to Norway, where you'll meet a few of the curators gathering for the 2017 Congress of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, also known as IKT (Szeemann was a founding member in 1973). In conversations on how the environment, design technology, consumer culture and geopolitical histories inspire art, they reveal a shared interest in exposing artists’ site specific perspectives through collective exhibitions and publications.

Thale Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen, the two Norwegian artist curators of Locus Publishing in Oslo tell us about a collective artist book project that investigates how we relate to nature. They introduce their newest venture: “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” Freek Lomme, director of Onomatopee Projects explains why he stages public interventions in the shopping district of Eindhoven, in The Netherlands. The sonic thread that connects these voices is the sound art of Norwegian artist Margrethe Pettersen.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis | Special Audio: Margrethe Pettersen, Living Land—Below as Above 

Come with us to explore Prospect New Orleans, the Crescent City’s triennial of contemporary art. Titled The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, the fourth iteration evokes the musical character of New Orleans and the surrounding natural environment—the bayous, lakes and wetlands near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Voices in this episode: Prospect.4’s artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker, former executive director Brooke Davis Anderson, artists Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Boyce, Rusty Lazer, Darryl Montana, Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters, and more!

Today, we take you to South Florida, for a conversation about public art with Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone. Miami Mountain is the latest in his iconic Mountain series. The North American Badlands inspire the towering stack of five brightly colored neon stones that he designed to hold sway over the palm trees in Collins Park on Miami Beach. The Bass Museum of Art’s 2016 public art acquisition arrived in pieces. The boulders came from a quarry in Nevada, making their way to the beachfront park on flatbed trucks. A professional installation crew was ready and waiting. With industrial lifts and cranes, they erected the stone monument in a carefully calculated process that took just over 13 hours.

Today, we take you to South Florida, for a conversation about public art with Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone. Miami Mountain is the latest in his iconic Mountain series. The North American Badlands inspire the towering stack of five brightly colored neon stones that he designed to hold sway over the palm trees in Collins Park on Miami Beach. The Bass Museum of Art’s 2016 public art acquisition arrived in pieces. The boulders came from a quarry in Nevada, making their way to the beachfront park on flatbed trucks. A professional installation crew was ready and waiting. With industrial lifts and cranes, they erected the stone monument in a carefully calculated process that took just over 13 hours.

On this live streaming radio program, we consider how artists, curators, architects and writers are responding to climate change in South Florida. King tides, flooding and eroding beaches are now part of everyday life. Our guests reveal how the rising sea has inspired two artist residency programs and an upcoming exhibition.

Natalia Zuluaga, Artistic Director at ArtCenter/South Florida, introduces the Center’s new Art in Public Life residency, a year-long opportunity for the selected artist to participate in shaping in the City of Miami Beach resiliency plan. She also talks about the exhibition Intertidal that imagines Miami's intertidal zone future, as a city above water at low tide, and flooded at high tide. 

 Also in studio, Ombretta Agro, Simon Faithfull, Will Rey, and Gustavo Oviedo share their roles in ARTSail, an ArtCenter residency exploring the Miami waterways, the South Florida coastline and the Keys. Our field recordings with recent ArtSail residents Blanca de la Torre and Mark Lee Koven to complete the picture of the floating residency's first year.

Special audio features: Archival Feedback, Stormtrack and Gustavo Oviedo, Boatski Tours

Artist Dara Friedman and curator Rene Morales talk about Perfect Stranger, Friedman's mid-career survey at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. The exhibition features seventeen major film and video works shot in Miami, New York, and Germany. Intertwined with our conversation, you’ll hear some of the sonic encounters that lie waiting behind thick velvet curtains in the multi-chambered show. It’s through these curtains that you enter Dara Friedman's Theater of the Mind.

Today we take you to the intersection of nature, art and technology to meet Amsterdam-based artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneka Gordjein of Studio Drift. They design their creative applications of new technology to make us question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. Presented during Miami Art Week 2017, Studio Drift's flying sculpture made of 300 lighted drones was especially provocative and poetic. The artists leave us believing in the unexpected potential for technology to feel natural.

Piano solo: Joep Beving