Interviews by Brainard Carey

Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017  by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, June 2019) and curator of "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner, NY (February 21 - April 13, 2019). 

"The Young and Evil" press release from David Zwirner;

David Zwirner is pleased to present The Young and Evil, a group exhibition curated by Jarrett Earnest, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. The exhibition will feature significant works from the first half of the twentieth century by Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Jensen Yow, and their circle. This group of artists and writers looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models—classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques. What might be seen as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver was made in the service of radical content—endeavoring to depict their own lives.

Drawn from important public and private collections, key works include a painting from Paul Cadmus’s infamous sailor trilogy, Shore Leave (1933), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art; a major canvas by Pavel Tchelitchew featuring vignettes of George Platt Lynes at work; rare paintings by Margaret French and works on paper by Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein; and never-before-seen erotic drawings and photographs from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. On the occasion of the exhibition, a fully illustrated, comprehensive catalogue featuring new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Both images - George Platt Lynes, c. 1930, silver gelatin print. courtesy David Zwirner and Vincent Cianni/Monroe Wheeler Archive, Newburgh, NY.

Linus Coraggio invented a genre of street art in 1982 called 3-D Graffiti - “outstalling” many examples around New York City on ‘’no-parking’' signposts. He was the founder of the Rivington School Sculptors Group and welded a massive post-apocalyptic sculpture garden of rusted metal that rose menacingly above Forsyth and Rivington Streets on New York’s Lower East Side. He was also the architect of the Gas Station (the performance space, after hours club and sculpture garden) that sat on Second Street and Avenue B well into the 1990s. These seminal downtown art spaces were the vanguard of wild autonomous art activism in the face of rapid gentrification. Coraggio is known for his abstract sculpture, his sculptural furniture, woodcut prints, expressionist graffiti paintings and his reimagined motorcycles (utilizing cellphones, barbie dolls, metal, bamboo, and plastic mixed with any other urban or country detritus imaginable).

A self-confessed ‘’odd kid’’, Coraggio was always drawing and making stuff. One entire summer was engulfed by building a 36’’ high pyramid of 15,000 toothpicks carefully glued into the giant configuration. When it was done he asked his mother what to call such an object and she replied “sculpture’’.  The die was cast.

The son of avant-garde composer Henry Brant, with whom he often collaborated, Coraggio grew up accompanying his mother Pat Brant on her trips across the rust belt as she photographed abandoned industrial sites for her Village Voice column. This experience informed his later choice of “used” metal as his medium when he discovered welding at Purchase College. Using materials that could be found in vacant lots or pilfered from building sites across lower Manhattan and the city’s outer boroughs, Corragio’s richly graphic street art provided a 3-D counterpoint to the 2-d spray paint  graffiti practiced by such contemporaries as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat. 

Despite his lifelong immersion in making and showing art, Coraggio has been somewhat hidden or marginalized within the recognized historical canon of the major artists of the past 35 years. Yet he has received sporadic attention by the art press and inclusion in several important books, catalogues and shows about street art or the downtown 1980’s/1990’s art scene. As more documentation emerges and Coraggio’s activities coalesce, it is likely his maverick work will be better known in his lifetime.

Corragio attended the Whitney Museum Studio Program in 1986 and has done  sponsored  large scale public art in Helsinki Finland, Rotterdam holland,, Lintz Austria,Nagoya and Osaka japan . He continues to make art and live on the Upper West Side of New York City, which has been his main base for over 50 years.

Linus Coraggio, WTC III, Photo Jonathan Shorr

linus/samo colab #1 8/2018, ink and zerox on paper,17 1/2'' x 23''

Margaret Keller works in related series using installation, drawing, digital media, painting, mixed media, 3D printing, and screen prints to examine the relationships between nature, contemporary culture and technology, along with their effects on our lives.

Current series look at surveillance, natural disasters, gender, and our experience of nature and the landscape in this digital/virtual age.  She also focuses on the curatorial and critical aspects of contemporary art, with many published reviews, including in Delicious Line, Art in America, All the Art and temporaryartreview.

Her exhibits include galleries, museums and collections in Berlin, Chicago, Atlanta, California, Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Arkansas, New York, Beijing and others.  Her art has been shown at over 50 galleries and museums, such as Quadratfuß/NX2-Annex Art Berlin, The Arkansas Art Center Museum in Little Rock, the RAC gallery in St. Louis, The Mitchell Museum in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, The Center for Contemporary Art, and Gallery 210 in St. Louis.  In 2018, she was commissioned to create the public artwork Riverbend, a 105-foot-long aluminum representation of the navigable Missouri River, at the Gateway Arch National Park.  In 2019, her one person exhibit The Space Between is at The William and Florence Schmidt Art Center Museum, Illinois.

From 1993-2018, Keller taught full-time as Professor of Art in drawing, painting, design and art history at St. Louis Community College-Meramec; she was also a Visiting Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and in Florence, Italy. She has also worked as a Historic Preservation Consultant, a Fiscal Analyst for the Missouri State Legislature, a cake decorator, and in a box factory.

The book mentioned in the interview was Augustus by John Williams.

The Space Between series, 52 foot-long x 14’ wall installation, detail, paintings and mixed media on 30 round panels, from the exhibition at The William and Florence Schmidt Art Center, Belleville, Illinois, by Margaret Keller, 2019

Riverbend, 105 feet-long, aluminum substrate, The Gateway Arch National Park, St. Louis, a public art commission by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts’ Public Works Project, 2018 by Margaret Keller, a representation of the navigable Missouri River.

photo by Lani Trock.

Catalina Ouyang has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Selena Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Make Room (Los Angeles, CA), Trestle Projects (Brooklyn, NY), PLUG Projects (Kansas City, MO), the Millitzer Gallery (St. Louis, MO) and fort gondo compound for the arts (St. Louis, MO). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Kravets Wehby Gallery (New York, NY), ART021 Fair (Shanghai, China), Helena Anrather (New York, NY), the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), Anonymous Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), fffriedrich (Frankfurt, Germany), like a little disaster (Polignano a Mare, Italy), projects+ gallery (St. Louis, MO), SPRING/Break Art Fair 2018 (New York, NY), Make Room (Los Angeles, CA), No Place (Columbus, OH), Rubber Factory (New York, NY), Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL), COOP Gallery (Nashville, TN), and Field Projects (New York, NY).

She has attended residencies at the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), OBRAS (Evoramonte, Portugal), Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), Mary Sky (Hancock, VT), and North Mountain (Shanghai, WV).

Her writing has appeared in River Teeth, Cura Literary Magazine, the Blueshift Journal, and Little Fiction, with two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is a 2019 MFA candidate in Sculpture at Yale University.

The books mentioned in the interview were Ghostly Matters and Salt Fish Girl.

DEATH DRIVE JOY RIDE, 2018

Warlord in a Minivan, 2017

Daniel Wiener, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, grew up in Los Angeles but has lived in  NYC for thirty-eight years. A professional artist since 1977, Daniel’s first show was at the Stephen Wirtz gallery in San Francisco, held shortly after his graduation from University of California at Berkeley. In 1982 Daniel was awarded a fellowship for an unusually long stay at Yaddo, which inspired his exodus to the East Coast. Daniel’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in both group and one-person shows, notably at Bravin/Post Lee Gallery in New York and Acme Gallery in LA. Though he is known primarily for his intense and viscerally-arresting sculptures, Daniel also works in watercolors, pen and ink drawings, and animations. Recently, he has been included in numerous shows, including Studio 10 in Bushwick, and the BRIC Biennial in Brooklyn. Daniel is presently affiliated with Lesley Heller Workspace, where he will have a one-person exhibition in the September of 2019. He is currently working on a series of pressed apoxie-sculpt paintings based on a technique he developed at Dieu Donne. Daniel lives and works in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

An Ellipse Between Vowels, 18” x 20” x 1”, Apoxie-Sculpt, 2018

Out of The Rolling Ocean, The Crowd, 100” x 93” x 144”, Apoxie-Sculpt and Wire, 2017

Richard Miller, cultural gadfly, poet, publisher and soon to be designer sculptor, escaped from England and settled in NYC. He was part of the late ‘70s NYC downtown art world. It was a charged environment that expanded the parameters of art making.  He was also a founding member of Colaborative Projects. The quirky-themed shows were not curated and took place in venues outside of galleries and museums. He participated in many Colab shows including the Times Square Show for he created the infamous sculpture “Man Killed by Air Conditioning”.. He and his wife, Terise Slotkin, produced Spanner NYC, a magazine of art.  The then unknown artists were encouraged to use the print medium as a creative resource.

Rejecting the art world party line of the 80’s he relocated to rural Pennsylvania when he makes objects that are inspired by functional consumer products.

Cactoid Slate Lamp with Singled Styled Mirror Shade

Slate Base Vortex Lamp with Mirco Suede Shade

Worker Writers School workshop (with Mark in the center)

Mark Nowak is the author of Revenants, Shut Up Shut Down (a New York Times Editor’s Choice”), Coal Mountain Elementary (which Howard Zinn called “a stunning educational tool”), and Social Poetics (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He is a Guggenheim fellow (2010), a Lannan Literary Fellow (2015), and recipient of the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry and Activism. A native of Buffalo, Nowak is the founding director of the Worker Writers School, currently in its eight year of collaboration with PEN America, and a professor at Manhattanville College.

WWS member Seth Goldman reading workshop poems outside NYTWA City Hall protests to cap Uber & Left (which passed the next day)

Tanka Workers Collective chapbook release party at Berl’s Poetry shop

Photograph by Michael Zagaris

Anastasia James is a curator and editor based in Los Angeles where she is currently a curator at the Lucas Museum of Art.

Her scholarly research focuses on both under-recognized and popular figures in the American avant-garde from 1930-present. Previously, James was curator of exhibitions and programs at The Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz where she curated exhibitions with Linda Mary Montano, Angela Dufresne, and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. At SUNY she also taught advanced courses on museum history and theory and exhibition studies. As a curator, she is known for my innovative and inclusive approaches to exhibition making and programming and her projects have been referred to by The New York Times as “celebratory,” “strident,” and “remarkable.”

In 2017, she curated the traveling retrospective of Cary Leibowitz’s work and has also curated solo exhibitions of Allison Smith, Brigid Berlin, Billy Name, Ray Johnson, Stanley Kubrick, and Andy Warhol.

In addition to curatorial work, James is the co-editor (with her husband Dagon James) of two book length monographs of Warhol associates Billy Name and Brigid Berlin and the editor of Cary Leibowitz: Museum Show. James has held curatorial positions at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and The Queens Museum and provided research support for the development of large exhibitions both in the States and abroad at institutions including The Andy Warhol Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Wurtembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, and the Dia Foundation for the Arts. She received her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College where her thesis focused on Ray Johnson's work ca. 1947-1960.

Installation View of Linda Mary Montano: The Art Life Hospital, 2019, photograph by Bob Wagner

Installation View of Cary Leibowitz: Museum Show, 2017, photograph by Gary Sexton

Tracy Rector is a mixed-race Choctaw/Seminole filmmaker, curator, and arts advocate based in Seattle, Washington. She is the executive director and co-founder of Longhouse Media, an indigenous media arts organization and home of the nationally acclaimed program Native Lens. She has worked as an education consultant at the Seattle Art Museum, as a native naturalist for the Olympic Sculpture Park, and has developed curriculum for IslandWood, an environmental education center.

She currently serves as a Seattle Arts Commissioner and is the 2017 curator of the Seattle Theatre Group’s Re:definition Gallery.

yәhaw̓ is a year-long Indigenous community-based project culminating in the inaugural exhibition at Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s ARTS at King Street Station from March 23August 3, 2019. The exhibition is accompanied by a mentorship training cohort, satellite shows, residencies, youth empowerment, vendor opportunities and partner programs. yәhaw̓ will feature the work of 200+ Indigenous creatives at over 20 sites across Seattle and beyond. Curated by Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole), Asia Tail (Cherokee), and Satpreet Kahlon, yәhaw̓ celebrates the depth and diversity of Indigenous art made in the Pacific Northwest. Learn more at yehawshow.com.

She has also directed and produced over 400 shorts and other films including the award-winning Teachings of the Tree People, March Point, Clearwater, and Ch'aak' S'aagi, and is currently in production of her fifth feature documentary Outta the Muck. As an impact

producer, Tracy currently serves on the team for the feature documentary Dawnland,

which aired on the 2018/2019 Independent Lens season. Her work has been

featured on Independent Lens, Cannes Film Festival, ImagineNative, National

Geographic, Toronto International Film Festival, and in the Smithsonian’s

Museum of the American Indian.

Tracy’s Longhouse Media has trained over 3,000 young people and focuses on

galvanizing the Indigenous and local community through film production. Tracy is

a 2016 Stranger Genius, has received the National Association for Media

Literacy award for outstanding contributions made in the field of media education,

is a Firelight Media Fellow, WGBH Producer Fellow, Sundance Institute Lab

Fellow, Tribeca All Access Grantee, and is the recipient of the Horace Mann

Award for her work in utilizing media for social justice. Tracy’s first major

museum installation opened June 14, 2018 at the Seattle Art Museum. Tracy is

in her second term as a Seattle Arts Commissioner.