Fresh Art International

How Jason Moran Amplifies Art and Jazz

American virtuoso Jason Moran is a genius jazz pianist known for performing experimental compositions in collaborative projects with visual artists—among them, Joan Jonas, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper. For the 56th Venice Art Biennale, artistic director Okui Enwezor invited Jason to stage and animate two sound environments. The multi-faceted artist brings the full range of his creative practice into play for his first museum show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this year. In our conversation, Jason Moran shares the discoveries he made while realizing recent collaborations with artists Julie Mehretu and Kara Walker.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio courtesy Jason Moran: Summon, Katastrof Karavan, Three Deuces, He Puts on His Coat and Leaves

Women Writers on Cuba in Film

Today, we invite three women writers to talk about Cuba as a character in newly released films. Our portal to the Cuban psyche is the 35th Miami Film Festival that brings diverse cultural perspectives to the big screen in theaters across Miami, Florida. Sharing their expertise and personal knowledge of Cuba's socio-political landscape are two sisters born in Miami, to Cuban parents: writer and filmmaker Carmen Peláez and food writer Ana Sofia Peláez. New York based journalist and filmmaker Michelle Memran joins us to remember her own encounters with the culture while making a documentary film with Cuban American playwright María Irene Fornés.

In this conversation, we consider the value of creativity, resilience, family and friendship in Cuba. The country’s historic relationship and chaotic rupture with the Soviet Union is the backdrop for the three stories we introduce. (The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union catapulted Cuba into a life-changing economic crisis from which Cubans around the world are still recovering.) The films: Cuban Food Stories, director Asori Soto; The Rest I Make Up, director Michelle Memran; and Sergio and Sergai, director Ernesto Daranas.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Featured Sound Tracks courtesy of Miami Film Festival:  Cuban Food Stories, The Rest I Make Up, Sergio and Sergai

Kurt Andersen on How America Got Trumped

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.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Featured audio track, You Can't Spell America Without Me via Penguin Press 

Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti

In this conversation, we talk about how the island country of Haiti has long inspired contemporary art, books and films and how the cultural complexity of immigrant communities is a creative force in South Florida. Come with us to the heart of Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood for a walk about with Carl Juste, a local cultural activist, photojournalist and artist whose family comes from Haiti and Cuba. Haitian-born writer Edwige Danticat introduces Foreigner's Home, a new film to premiere at the 35th Miami Film Festival. Miami-based curators Marie Vickles, Edouard Duval-Carrié and Tosha Grantham (with family ties to Greece and Africa, Haiti, Asia and America, respectively) talk about connecting cultural history to contemporary art in exhibitions at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex and share what sparked Visionary Aponte: Art & Black Freedom, the traveling exhibition that recently premiered in Miami. Cuban-born Lissette Mendez and Carl Juste share some of the stories behind the collective exhibition and book project Havana, Haiti and the annual Little Haiti Book Festival.

Curating Art in a Time of Global Change: IKT Norway

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