BAD@SPORTS Podcast: EXPO Chicago Roundtable

Tune in to the divine KT Hawbaker, me, and the cast of Bad@Sports as we review the highs and lows of this year’s EXPO Chicago, the international fair of contemporary and modern art.

Lecture and Workshop: “Burnaway’s Art Writers Mentorship Program”

Thrilled to be a Mentor for Burnaway’s Art Writers Mentorship Program this spring. I’ll be in Atlanta May 17-19, where I will give a public talk “Peripheral Visions: Sightlines for Today’s New Arts Journalism,” and then work with program participants to hone their critical writing skills.

Panel and Workshop: “Muralla Alta/High Wall”

Please join me at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, January, 12, 2018, at 6pm, where I’ll be hosting a brief panel and workshop, as part of Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours, part of the MCA’s new Commons Artist Project space. Entitled “Muralla Alta/High Wall,” audiences are invited to meander through a visual experience that includes a narrative installation of 35-mm slide projections, co-organized by Soto and Daniel Hojnacki, and to create their own written and visual responses.

Panel: “Women Writing about Art”

Join me and colleagues Barbara Jaffee, Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, Joanna Frueh, and Leslie Bellavance, for the panel “Women Writing about Art,” 12:45-2:15 pm on Friday, November 3, part of the symposium Transforming Culture and Society: Midwest Women Artists, 1960s-1980s, November 2-3, 2017, at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.

For the Birds: Reimagining the Future with Jenny Kendler

Chicago is part of the Mississippi Flyway zone, one of the largest bird migration corridors in North America. It follows the Mississippi River some 2,500 miles from its most northern point in Minnesota southwards to the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Audubon Society, more than 325 bird species use the Mississippi Flyway. Growing up in the Midwest, these migratory patterns always defined the seasons: dark flocks flew south for winter; warbling swarms returned each spring.

Public Encounters in St. Louis

What is a public? According to theorist Michael Warner, “a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse,” a self-defined social space of dialogic interactions and interplays. For Warner, a counterpublic is similarly discursive but assumes a “conflictual relation to the dominant public,” by creating its own audiences and idioms through alternative forms of address. (1) The idea of the “discursive public” forms the basis for Counterpublic, a new art triennial that reclaims the spatial environment of St. Louis as a body of distinct yet overlapping publics, each with their own cultural identity.

To Belong: Narratives on Citizenship and Migration

Loss takes many forms. Within the last two years, I lost both my parents and a sister. Their passings were followed by much personal grief, of course, as well as an existential rethinking about the meaning of absence and belonging. What binds us to place, to each other, to the larger world? And while loss is inherent to the cycles of life that define who we are as human beings, catastrophic loss – whether by violence, poverty, social oppression, climate change, or environmental disaster – plagues our political present, rupturing the ties that connect us to home and to the earth beneath our feet.

Forgotten Forms

The exhibition Forgotten Forms at the Chicago Cultural Center pairs the works of Edra Soto and Yhelena Hall, whose transformations of architectural elements of the everyday interrogate narratives of place to configure new urban landscapes marked by traces of memory.

From the Front

An American City, the inaugural edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, is an experiment in urban development: a cultural laboratory that hopes to reshape the image of this post-industrial city by positioning itself as a “heartland documenta.”