Hyperallergic Reviews editor Dessane Lopez Cassell and Documentary associate editor Dan Schindel join me to discuss our favorite films from 2019.

We discuss Parasite, The Farewell, America, High Life, Midnight Traveler, the new frontiers of documentary, including Syrmor, The Giverny Document, and more. We also discuss the recent boom in superhero movies, how they dominate conversation about film, Martin Scorsese’s problems with the genre, and what it tells us about movies today. We also talk about Schindel's newly published essay, "What Is a Documentary These Days?"

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A special thanks to Kill the Alarm for providing the music for this episode. The track you’re hearing is “Chemicals” from the album Sleeping Giant.

This and more in the current episode of our weekly Art Movements podcast.

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The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was founded by women over a century ago, and it continues to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. Its current president, Rosanne Somerson, who is also an accomplished furniture designer, stopped by to talk about the institution and how it has pivoted to stay on top of the field, while serving an increasingly diverse student body.

We also discuss the RISD Museum and its recent attempt to repatriate an item in its collection, the financial realities that face students, and how arts education can help us solve some of the challenges of today.

A special thanks to musician Sophie Hintze for allowing us to use her unreleased song “Coffee in the Rain.” You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

This and more in the current episode of our weekly Art Movements podcast.

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Joan Kee is the rare combination of art historian and lawyer, and she's shared her skills in her new book, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America, which examines the legal issues major contemporary artists (from Tehching Hsieh to Felix Gonzales-Torres) have confronted in the past 60 years.

Kee's research shows that since the 1960s, as artist projects have become more expansive and expensive, the world of lawyers and laws is becoming a bigger part of the equation. From discussions of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Running Fence" land art project (they actually had offers to place the project elsewhere, which would've been a lot easier) to Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates micro-real estate project (there is no evidence the artist did or did not want to present this as an artwork), Kee's research demonstrates that the history of art has increasingly been intertwined with its legal realities.

A special thanks to Brooklyn-based musician SunSon for providing the music to this episode, and you can check out his website sunson.band. You can also follow him on Facebook or Instagram.

This and more in the current episode of our weekly Art Movements podcast.

Subscribe to Hyperallergic’s Art Movements on iTunes, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Born in 1923 in Pennsylvania to Lebanese parents, Helen Khal would go on to become an important presence in the modern art world of Lebanon as a prominent art critic and artist. A new exhibition at Beirut’s Sursock Museum tells the history of that period through her friendships and relationships with a coterie of artists and writers who would become some of the most important artist voices in the region.

Commissioned by Ashkal Alwan for the Sursock Museum's biennial Home Works gathering of lectures, performances, exhibitions and events — most of which, with the exception of the exhibitions, has been indefinitely postponed because of the recent nationwide protests in Lebanon. The exhibition is titled At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance and includes work by Chafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Simone Fattal, Farid Haddad, Helen Khal, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Aref Rayess, and Dorothy Salhab-Kazemi.

Curators Carla Chammas and Rachel Dedman spoke to me about this incredible art historical show that combines paintings, ceramics, furniture, letters, publications, videos, and other primary source materials from the "Golden Era" from before the infamous Lebanese Civil War. We’ve included an assortment of images in this post to give you a flavor of the exhibition, and we’ve included the items the curators selected as personal favorites, which they also discuss on the podcast.

For this episode we’ve used the sounds from the recent streets protests in downtown Beirut, which were sparked by decades of growing corruption and new taxes that were proposed and since rescinded.

This and more in the current episode of our weekly Art Movements podcast.

From nine weeks of protests to an exhibition that was more ethnically and racially diverse than previous years, this year’s Whitney Biennial has a lot to unpack.

I asked our associate news editor Jasmine Weber, editor and critic Seph Rodney, and reporter Hakim Bishara to join me to reflect on months of controversy and offer their opinions on the exhibition itself. We discuss favorite works, what may have been accomplished, and duds. You’ll want to hear this.

A special thanks to Wanderraven, who provided the music to this week’s episode. The song is called “Here Into The Dark”. Listen to more at wanderraven.com.

Last week, Hyperallergic published a five-part series, titled The Danger Epidemic in Art Handling, on the realities facing art handlers in the United States. The story generated a lot of debate and shocked many who were never forced to think about the conditions workers are forced to endure when assembling and transporting art of all types.

This conversation with Hyperallergic Senior Writer Zachary Small and Associate News Editor Jasmine Weber explores the contours of the topic, the difficulties of reporting on contentious art world issues, and how investigative reporting is crucial for change. We also discuss the Sotheby's lockout of art handlers, which we covered extensively in 2011 and 2012.

A special thanks to Peter Gabriel's Real World Records for allowing us to play a special live track by world music legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The label is celebrating its 30th anniversary of Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records and they marked the occasion by announcing the release of a previously unheard recording by the legendary qawwali singer. The recording includes Khan’s performance at WOMAD Festival in 1985, which was the first time the singer had performed in front of a mainly non-Asian audience. As a longtime fan of Khan's genius, I'm honored to include his music in this episode.

This and more in the current episode of Hyperallergic’s Art Movements podcast.

Subscribe to Hyperallergic’s Art Movements on iTunes, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

On the first floor of the Gardiner Museum, in the Art of the Americas gallery, there is a large Maya plate dating to the 6th to 7th centuries CE. It features a large deity in the center of the orange and black earthenware object with a band of glyphs around the edge of the dish. This object is well-known to Maya specialists, not only for the mastery of the design, but because of the inscription that not only mentions the name and location of the donor but also explains that it was a plate used to serve white venison tamales.

In this episode, we talk to four experts in the field, Gardiner Museum educator and curator Siobhan Boyd, Metropolitan Museum curator James Doyle, cultural historian Margaret Visser, and Popti storyteller Maria Monteja to peel back the layers of history in this wondrous artifact from ancient times to learn about Maya traditions and culture through the lens of today.

A special thanks to SunSon for providing the music to this special series, which is produced by Hyperallergic in conjunction with the Gardiner Museum.

Joseph Pierce wants you to question everything, but especially queerness.

The Cherokee citizen and Stony Brook University assistant professor believes the moment has come for queer academia to seriously question the roots of their discipline, and ask how the field can expand to include more voices outside the Euro-American canon of Judith Butlers and Jack Halberstams.

"When we think about queerness," Pierce explains, "it's seen as a universal theory that can be applied everywhere. But often what that does is maintain a framework based on coloniality and white supremacy. What we want to do is question how queerness circulates."

Accordingly, the young researcher has teamed up with scholars from across the Western hemisphere to produce a special edition of GLQ, an important journal of lesbian and gay studies published by Duke University Press. The forthcoming issue intends to address the limits of queerness outside normative white contexts, and how decolonization and the schema of radical liberation might provide new context to how LGBTQ culture operates in regions like Latin America and the Global South.

An erstwhile contributor to Hyperallergic, Pierce has also written a new book that will release this November, called Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910. The result of extensive archival research, the book is a study into Argentina's turn-of-the-century crisis of modernity, and how political and economic changes in the country opened up new ways of conceptualizing family.

For a discussion about the relationship between queerness, decolonialiality, culture, and politics, we invited Pierce onto the Hyperallergic Art Movements podcast to share some insight into how he and other academics are trying to evolve queer studies into a more open field of inquiry.

The music for this episode is available under the Creative Commons 0 license.

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There's a curious collection of 18th-century porcelain figurines displayed on the second floor of the Gardiner Museum. Set amidst an impressive display of European ceramic table wear and figurines, this small assortment of Harlequin sculptures don dark masks that stand out for contemporary audiences. One of the colorful sculptures is by Wenzel Neu and hails from the Kloster-Veilsdorf Porcelain Factory in Germany, c. 1764–65, and beside it is a sign that asks, "Is Harlequin in blackface?"

In this episode, we talk to Professor Cheryl Thompson, anti-racist educator Rania El Mugammar, and the Gardiner's Chief Curator Sequoia Miller about this figurine that portrays a character from the Commedia dell'Arte that was a precursor to the more violently racialized images of blackface in 19th and 20th-century minstrel shows. We explore the long history of blackface in Canada, and how one museum is adapting to tell the stories that its collection provokes with contemporary audiences.

A special thanks to musician SunSon for providing the music to this special series, which is produced by Hyperallergic in conjunction with the Gardiner Museum. Check out their website sunson.band for more information.

This and more in the current episode of Hyperallergic's Art Movements podcast.

Subscribe to Art Movements on iTunes, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

hyperallergic.com

Canadian artist Shary Boyle is known for her incredible ability to transform clay and ceramic into feats of delicate wonder, using the human body and the history of the material to delve into the undercurrents and meanings often overlooked by contemporary viewers.

In the second in a four-part podcast series produced by Hyperallergic in conjunction with the Gardiner Museum's Community Arts Space: What we long for initiative, she reminds us: "Let us not let the art world homogenize us when we all individually as young people might have chosen to become artists."

She continues, "I chose to become an artist to try to pursue a life of true questioning and subversion and an alternative position to what I saw as a common drive towards capitalist values of growth and progression and I want to just to continually have access to watching and observing and questioning that."

In this episode, I speak to the artist about her relationship to a material that has been having a renaissance in contemporary art, and she shares her insight into a material that appears in almost every culture in history.

A special thanks to Brooklyn-based musician SunSon for providing the music to this episode, and you can check out his website sunson.band. You can also follow him on Facebook or Instagram.