art angle

The Art Angle Podcast: How Art Basel Did (and Didn’t) Change After a Two-Year Hiatus


Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Midnight Publishing Group News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

 

 

An art industry ritual returned after an unprecedented hiatus—on a Monday evening last week, art advisors, dealers, and collectors ceremoniously filed into the formidable fairgrounds of Switzerland’s Art Basel.

The premier art fair’s 50th edition was set to take place across a balmy week in June 2020, but it slid back nearly a year and half, its plans marred by a raging public health crisis, limitations on travel, and restrictions on events and gatherings. After so much uncertainty about the state of the art market, more than 270 dealers calculated their risks and ultimately took a leap of faith and brought the best of their rosters to the Rhine. It seems the gambit really paid off—by the late afternoon on preview day, gallerists seemed to really exhale for the first time in months or even a year.

Was it business as usual? Yes and no. The event ran with incredible smoothness, with no issues save for a few spats on Twitter over whether the absence of U.S. collectors was a boon for European deal-making or not. Restaurants were booked out across town for lavish dinners, but being on the guest list wasn’t the only prerequisite—proof of vaccination was required. Sales were strong, but not quite like the old days. And NFTs made a flashy debut.

On the whole, everyone seemed deeply relieved to be back in their booths or perusing the aisles. On this week’s episode, Midnight Publishing Group News’s European Editor Kate Brown was joined in Basel by European Market Editor, Naomi Rea, and Senior Market Editor, Eileen Kinsella to take the temperature of the scene.

 

Listen to Other Episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: Writer Roxane Gay on What Art Can Teach Us About Trauma and Healing

The Art Angle Podcast: Keltie Ferris and Peter Halley on the Mysterious Joys of Making a Painting

The Art Angle Podcast: How Facebook and the Helsinki Biennial Share a Vision for the Art World’s Future

The Art Angle Podcast: Artists in Residence at the World Trade Center Reflect on 9/11

The Art Angle Podcast: Genesis Tramaine on How Faith Inspires Her Art

The Art Angle Podcast: The Bitter Battle Over Bob Ross’s Empire of Joy

The Art Angle Podcast: How Britney Spears’s Image Inspired Millennial Artists

The Art Angle Podcast: How the Medicis Became Art History’s First Influencers

The Art Angle Podcast: How Two Painters Helped Spark the Modern Conservation Movement

 

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The Art Angle Podcast: Keltie Ferris and Peter Halley on the Mysterious Joys of Making a Painting


Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Midnight Publishing Group News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

 

 

Artists Peter Halley and Keltie Ferris first met sometime in the mid-2000s, at the height of the abstract painting revival. Halley, a pioneering Neo-Conceptualist renowned for his disciplined grids, was head of painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art; Ferris, a graduate student with a knack for wielding fluid materials like spray paint.

Nevertheless, their work had a lot in common: a love of color, especially jangly fluorescents; an embrace of digital influences; and a desire to release painting from both its figurative and abstract forebears. Through the course of the teaching relationship, each found a respect for the other’s practice, and the conversation has continued—even if the two artists don’t actually talk as much as they once did.

To pit their paintings against each other today is like seeing estranged cousins reunite: time has changed them, but you can’t deny the shared DNA.

As New York’s first IRL art fair kicked off last week with the Armory Show, both Halley and Ferris presented new works at Independent Art Fair, known in certain circles as the “thinking person’s fair,” which debuted at the Battery Maritime Building in downtown Manhattan. Ahead of the fair, the teacher and his former student reunited to catch up and exchange ideas in a virtual chat moderated by Midnight Publishing Group News reporter Taylor Dafoe.

What followed was a rare glimpse at two artists talking shop, in a freewheeling conversation about about color, working methods, and what it means to make non-figurative painting in a time when figuration reigns supreme.

Listen to Other Episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: How Facebook and the Helsinki Biennial Share a Vision for the Art World’s Future

The Art Angle Podcast: Artists in Residence at the World Trade Center Reflect on 9/11

The Art Angle Podcast: Genesis Tramaine on How Faith Inspires Her Art

The Art Angle Podcast: The Bitter Battle Over Bob Ross’s Empire of Joy

The Art Angle Podcast: How Britney Spears’s Image Inspired Millennial Artists

The Art Angle Podcast: How the Medicis Became Art History’s First Influencers

The Art Angle Podcast: How Two Painters Helped Spark the Modern Conservation Movement

The Art Angle Podcast: The Hunter Biden Controversy, Explained

The Art Angle Podcast: 18-Year-Old NFT Star Fewocious on How Art Saved His Life, and Crashed Christie’s Website

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The Art Angle Podcast: How Britney Spears’s Image Inspired Millennial Artists


Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Midnight Publishing Group News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

 

I’m sure you’ve heard it: For the past few months, the U.S. news media has been following the saga of pop star Britney Spears and the unusual conservatorship arrangement that prevents her from controlling her own finances or life decisions, put in place more than a decade ago after a very public breakdown. In June, Spears spoke out for the first time in court, asking for the conservatorship to be terminated. On the eve of this episode’s release, in fact, Britney is stronger than yesterday… yes, her father Jamie has agreed to step down from controlling his pop star daughter, after months of public pressure.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with art?

It turns out that long before the #FreeBritney movement had people poring over her Instagram for clues, or the New York Times documentary Framing Britney revisited what her story said about the media and misogyny, she’s been a surprisingly potent symbol for artists—in fact, maybe more than any other recent pop star. They’ve used her image to talk about sexism, about fame, about consumerism, and about the dark side of the 2000s.

Why Britney in particular? And does today’s reckoning with the recent past change the way that pop art takes on pop music? In a recent essay for Midnight Publishing Group News, LA-based art journalist Janelle Zara looked at artists’ fascination with Britney Spears, asking these questions and a lot more. This week, Zara joins senior writer Sarah Cascone to discuss the cult of Britney, and how she has become an unwitting inspiration to international artists.

 

Listen to Other Episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: How the Medicis Became Art History’s First Influencers

The Art Angle Podcast: How Two Painters Helped Spark the Modern Conservation Movement

The Art Angle Podcast: The Hunter Biden Controversy, Explained

The Art Angle Podcast: Legendary Auctioneer Simon de Pury on Monaco, Hip Hop, and the Art Market’s New Reality

The Art Angle Podcast: 18-Year-Old NFT Star Fewocious on How Art Saved His Life, and Crashed Christie’s Website

The Art Angle Podcast (Re-Air): How Photographer Dawoud Bey Makes Black America Visible

The Art Angle Podcast: Tyler Mitchell and Helen Molesworth on Why Great Art Requires Trust

The Art Angle Podcast: How High-Tech Van Gogh Became the Biggest Art Phenomenon Ever

The Art Angle Podcast: How Much Money Do Art Dealers Actually Make?

The Art Angle Podcast: What Does the Sci-Fi Art Fair of the Future Look Like?

The Art Angle Podcast: How Kenny Schachter Became an NFT Evangelist Overnight

The Art Angle Podcast: How Breonna Taylor’s Life Inspired an Unforgettable Museum Exhibition

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Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Art Dealer Marianne Ibrahim on Fostering the Right Relationships


Welcome to Shattering the Glass Ceiling, a podcast from the team at the Art Angle where we speak to boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond about how art has shaped their lives and careers.

 

In the final installment of our mini-series Shattering the Glass Ceiling, Midnight Publishing Group News’s art and design editor Noor Brara spoke with pioneering gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, founder of her eponymous gallery. Ibrahim opened her first outpost in Seattle, later launching another outpost in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. Now, as the last year’s turbulence begins to level off, Ibrahim is taking another giant leap—this time, overseas—to open a location in Paris.

Ibrahim is known within the industry for nurturing an exceptional roster of artists, all of whom she retains a fiercely close relationship with. Though many consider her to be a dealer of African artists, Ibrahim told Midnight Publishing Group News in 2019, “I don’t see artists as ‘African artists,’” adding that reducing individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds would be “very dangerous and opportunistic.”

This dedication is evident in the strength of the exhibitions and near-universal acclaim that follows in the wake of many artists she introduces to the market and continues to represent, from Amoako Boafo to Clotilde Jiménez.

Below, read an excerpt from their conversation. 

Installation view, "Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest" Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

Installation view, “Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

You were born in Nouméa, the capital city of New Caledonia, which is not so far from Brisbane in Australia. You moved to Somalia when you were five and moved again, three years later, to France. I’m curious how you feel your childhood experiences and navigating so many different cultures has informed your appreciation of the arts?

All I remember during my childhood in Somalia is all of the love, and also that the society over there was more matriarchal. I was surrounded by a lot of feminine energy, which as a little girl gives you a lot of confidence because I was really raised in an environment that truly appreciated and put women in a place that often is stereotyped within an African Muslim country, women over there were educated, liberated, and an inspiration.

I used to follow a group of girls as they walked to school, chatting and marching like a little girl army. I remember I would wake up early and grab a book and just follow them until they got to school.

In that place I felt visible and invisible at the same time; visible through my personality because I was always a very funny kid, but invisible in the sense that I didn’t have to deal with any issues relating to my identity.

When I came to France is when I felt a total disruption. I felt a disconnect from my childhood, as if something was taken and stolen from me. It was a turning point, where you lose that innocence, and once it’s broken there’s no point in fixing it, you have to accept it and move on, to be fluid. The detachment allowed me to be more free and creative, and lead me to different paths that I wouldn’t normally look at if I’d stayed there.

You had total immersion and then the complete opposite of that right away—as you said it can be both stark and freeing at the same time. Can you tell me if you can recall your earliest memories of being exposed to art?

I grew up in the surroundings of Bordeaux, which is an interesting place—very rich in the transatlantic slave trade history! There are really great attributes in the French education, the first being that public schools over there are probably better than private schools. So that equal opportunity of accessing education was something I immediately recognized and valued. I understood that education was probably the tool I had to get out of a situation, because it is up to my performance.

Mariane Ibrahim is opening a new gallery in Paris on Avenue Matignon. Image courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

Mariane Ibrahim is opening a new gallery in Paris on Avenue Matignon. Image courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

It’s within your control.

Right, in school, we used to go into the streets and try to figure out what era the buildings were from, what periods they were built, ornamented, decorated, and I think the first encounters that I had was really with all of those public spaces, which made me realize there was a very strong dedication and beauty in making, and that beauty and craft coexist within the same space. So today if you take me on the street I can tell you what is from the 18th, 19th, 20th century!

Also, when I was there it was the bicentennial of the revolution in 1989, so there was a lot of interest in the country, and its history of liberty and equality, especially through the French classical paintings.

So it was not necessarily through my family, environment, or friends, but school that gave me a great introduction to the museums and history of France, and that led me to be more curious about the role of museums in constructing identity, both on a national level and also how people would look at other cultures.

Ayana V. Jackson, The Self-forgetfulness of Belonging Would Never Be Mine, 2019. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

Ayana V. Jackson, The Self-forgetfulness of Belonging Would Never Be Mine, 2019. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

You were able to see it from a sort of remove, being a kind of outsider looking in?

I think that perception of the West to other cultures, such as African or Oceanic, it’s pretty linear. They’re actually having you juxtapose two different continents and have the same gaze on these two opposite cultures. That was the first time that I was confronted with my identity, seeing it through the Western canon and how it looks at universal history.

I remember standing in the gallery, and on the one end the Oceanic exhibition and on the other the African art, and I’m standing in the middle, within the same room where you have the same artifacts and textiles from these two places right next to one another. And you know, I remember the trip was very long from Nouméa to Somalia! So that also really revealed the disconnection that I had, understanding the way people would look at the places where I grew up. I didn’t identify with any of these objects! So from that moment I started to realize that something was off in the storytelling.

 

Listen to the other episodes of Shattering the Glass Ceiling, a podcast miniseries from the Art Angle, below.

Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Curator and Author Legacy Russell on Rebuilding Art Institutions From Within

Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Art Collector and Media Executive Catherine Levene on Empathetic Leadership

Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Curator Lauren Haynes on Working to Forge a Fuller Story of American Art

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Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Curator Lauren Haynes on Working to Forge a Fuller Story of American Art


Welcome to Shattering the Glass Ceiling, a podcast from the team at the Art Angle where we speak to boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond about how art has shaped their lives and careers.

 

 

In the first episode of this four-part podcast mini series, Midnight Publishing Group News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to Lauren Haynes, the director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas. In June, she will take on the role of Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasser senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Haynes, who was born in East Tennessee and grew up in New York, has worked in museums including the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, curating distinctive and influential shows on artists like Alma Thomas and Stanley Whitney. She has worked at Crystal Bridges since 2016, where she helmed the first U.S. presentation of the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” (2018), which traveled from the U.K.

Below, read an excerpt of their conversation.

What is your earliest memory of encountering art? Was that in New York?

If we think about art in the widest sense, it would be watching my sister dance. She was part of the dance company in our town in Tennessee and was very good. I was not good. I tried to take dance lessons and got kicked out because I didn’t follow the rules.

What about your first museum experience?

My first museum experience honestly didn’t happen until I got to college. I went to Oberlin with the intention of becoming a lawyer. I had visited and sat in on some constitutional law classes and fell in love with it, but when I got to school I needed a work study job and found one at the Allen Memorial Art Museum on campus.

The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Photo: Ricky Rhodes.

At the time, I didn’t know, but it’s an amazing museum, and I ended up working as the director’s assistant. At the time, Sharon Patton was the director of the Allen, and Sharon was an African-American woman who literally wrote books on African-American art history, so my first experience was seeing a Black woman running the place. That’s when I first was like, “Okay, this is a space that people who look like me can be in.”

At what point did you decide to pursue art as a career?

It was fairly quickly actually, because I continued to take art history courses, and through an Oberlin alum I was able to work at the Charles Cole art gallery in New York, which no longer exists. So I had that experience and quickly learned that I wasn’t necessarily going to work in a gallery, but having more exposure to art helped me realize that there are jobs in this field.

What have you learned about what makes a nurturing environment for creative thinking?

Very early in my career I was blessed with amazing bosses. My first boss was Terry Carbone, who at the time was the curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum and she sort of took me under her wing and helped me learn the job, but also learn the museum itself and what it meant to even be close to watching the curatorial process.

Christine Y. Kim and Thelma Golden in New York City. Photo by David Xavier Prutting/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.

That experience was very brief. I was there for around nine months and then a job at the Studio Museum opened up and I started there as a curatorial assistant working with Christine Y. Kim and Thelma Golden, who of course was chief curator and director. Staying at the Studio Museum and working with Thelma more closely I learned that you need an environment—particularly when you’re working in a creative field where you’re trying to sell people on your ideas, and get people excited—where it’s okay if your idea isn’t fully formed, but you have people to bounce ideas off of in a way that doesn’t feel competitive. It’s important to also have people around you who will say, “No, that’s not quite it.” You need a place where you can be vulnerable and where not every idea has to be a winner, because that’s just not possible.

Can you think of an idea that you developed that was either received as a “No, not now,” or rerouted in a way that ended up existing in another reality?

One project that comes to mind was the Alma Thomas exhibition that I worked on at the Studio Museum. I co-curated that with Ian Berry at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, and worked closely with the collection to get to know some of the works there.

Installation view, Alma Thomas at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich.

Installation view, Alma Thomas at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich.

I was obsessed with some of the small works in the collection but could never really pinpoint what the right thing was, and so having conversations with Thelma and with the team, it was always, “Maybe, but not quite yet.” Pairing up with Ian who was having similar conversations and wanted to do an Alma Thomas exhibition, it really just struck us as the right moment for both institutions. It takes timing, but also being persistent about ideas, not just with your institution but also with yourself.

You’ve spoken about a couple of different women that you’ve worked under when you were getting into this field and I wonder if you could pull out one or two mentors who have really shaped the way you think and what you took away from these experiences.

Consistently, for at least the past 10 years, Thelma Golden has stood out for me, and for many others in this field, particularly Black female curators and curators of color, as an inspiration.

Thelma has given me a lot of advice over the years, but one of the things she said that stood out was, “Lauren, there’s no one way to be a curator. You very much have to find your own path and it doesn’t necessarily have to look like someone else’s.” And that is advice I give to my own team, to my colleagues. It seems simple, but having someone who is established in the field and has carved a path for themselves and carved space for others, saying that makes a difference.

State of the Art 2020 curators (left to right), Allison Glenn, Lauren Haynes, and Alejo Benedetti at the Momentary, courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Are there choices in your career that empowered you to make different choices?

It’s less about specific choices and more about being open to different opportunities. Thinking for example, what does it mean to be a curator who’s not based in New York City, or what does it mean to think about working at larger institutions in scale compared to what the Studio Museum was when I left there and moved somewhere much bigger, like Crystal Bridges.

If I felt like I had to be on a strict path of working at certain institutions in New York, and only work with certain artists and do certain things then that would’ve been a very different career. For me, it was exciting to think about other opportunities and places where I could continue to do the work I’m interested in.

Former first lady Michelle Obama (L) talks with Studio Museum director and chief curator Thelma Golden during a tour of the museum in Harlem. Photo by Chuck Kennedy/The White House via Getty Images.

For people who may not know, can you describe the difference in size and approach between the Studio Museum and Crystal Bridges?

The Studio Museum was founded in 1950 is a museum that is dedicated and committed to artists of African descent and work inspired by Black culture. It is currently physically closed, but will reopen in a few years with a beautiful new building designed by David Adjaye. It’s located in Harlem and is really the place that many think of as the center of the Black art world in the United States, because of either the artists that have been through the program or the artists shown in the museum’s residency program, which is a core part of its mission. At the time I left there were around 50 people.

Crystal Bridges is a museum founded in 2011, so it’s approaching its 10th anniversary. It’s in Bentonville, Arkansas, and is an American museum, so more expansive in the artists that it shows but still focused on American art across time periods. It just opened a new space last year called the Momentary which focuses on contemporary visual art, but also performing arts and culinary arts. Across both Crystal Bridges and the Momentary there are around 400 people working. So there are big differences both in scale and in mission.

The exterior of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Photo by Chris Hildreth/Rooster Media.

I want to ask you about your new job, which is at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, at Duke University. That is a museum with a record for really excellent scholarly shows, particularly of contemporary art. So I wonder what drew you there and what you anticipate being able to do at the Nasher that you couldn’t otherwise?

My first real experience with museums was, as I said, at Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Museum, so I’ve always been interested in what college and university art galleries and museums can do and the work that comes out of there. I think that having students as an audience, and having a community as an audience is really something that is fascinating to me because of the formative experiences I had in that institution.

Very early in my time at the Studio Museum we put on the Barkley L. Hendricks “Birth of the Cool” show that the Nasher’s director, Trevor Schoonmaker, curated, and so I was able to work as a curatorial assistant and that was another formative experience for me.

Installation view, “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” at the Nasher Museum.

And can you explain who Barkley L. Hendricks was?

Hendricks was an African-American artist who painted members of his community, much of it based in Philadelphia, in the 1960’s and ’70s, that really speak to the Black experience. He was also a photographer, and if you ever saw him he always had a camera, or sometimes multiple cameras, around his neck, because that’s really how he experienced the world.

Being able to work on the show and meet this artist and get to know the team at the Nasher even when I was in such a junior position, really cemented for me the Nasher as an institution that made exciting and important shows.

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