Cathy Byrd channels conversations about creativity in the Fresh Art International Podcast. Since 2011, we’ve amplified the voices of contemporary artists, curators, architects, writers and filmmakers from the center and fringe of creative communities across six continents.
Episodes
Monday Sep 24, 2018
Monday Sep 24, 2018
We meet Los Angeles based artist Mark Bradford—known for connecting art with the real world—when he represents the United States in the 57th Venice Art Biennale. While preparing for Tomorrow is Another Day, an exhibition of his signature layered abstractions, he launched a small business venture with members of the island city's hidden prison culture.
His six-year collaboration with Venice social cooperative nonprofit Rio Terà dei Pensieri offers employment opportunities to men and women incarcerated in Venice. Prisoners create artisanal goods and other products to support their re-integration into society. Titled Process Collettivo, Bradford’s relationship with this marginalized community raises awareness of the penal system and introduces a new business model. The project reveals the artist's strength as a culture maker; he acts on his belief that contemporary artists have the power to reinvent our world.
Tomorrow Is Another Day comes to the United States in September 2018, with an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art and a project engaging with the city's Greenmount West Community Center.
Sound Editing: Jonathan Pfeffer | Photos courtesy U.S. Pavilion in Venice 2017
Related Episodes: Monument to Decay: Israeli Pavilion in Venice; Lisa Reihana on Reversing the Gaze; Samson Young on Songs for Disaster Relief; Sounds of Venice Art Biennale
Related Links: Mark Bradford: Venice 2017; Baltimore Museum of Art
Monday Sep 17, 2018
Monday Sep 17, 2018
In 2018, Locust Projects invited the Detroit-based design duo known as root of two to bring three headless chickens to roost in Miami. For six months, Cezanne Charles and John Marshall embellish the Magic City skyline with their public art and digital engagement project.
Previously presented in France and the United Kingdom, Whithervanes translate the traditional weathervane into a 21st century radio transmitter. Mounted on rooftops in downtown, the Design District and Biscayne Boulevard, the four-foot tall birds change colors and direction in response to the climate of fear propagated by the media. These are tech-savvy chickens. They scan the Internet for alarmist keywords, collecting information on topics from violence to economic crises to natural disasters. You can follow their “neurotic, early worrying system”, or N.E.W.S. on the Whithervanes Twitter account.
Connecting art with streaming social media and news technology, Whithervane designers Cezanne Charles and John Marshall invite us to think about the emotional impact of the digital information that controls our view of the world.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photographs courtesy root of two and Locust Projects
Related episodes: Art of the Everyday, Art and the Rising Sea, Report from Miami Art Week 2017
Monday Sep 10, 2018
Monday Sep 10, 2018
In 2018, seventy-five artists from thirty-three countries came together for the contemporary African art biennial known as Dak’Art. The offsite program featured more than 200 autonomous artist-organized exhibitions and events across Dakar and on the island of Gorée.
The projects we share in this episode explore ideas of freedom and responsibility as they investigate colonial histories, politics, and the economy, migration and the environment. Often achieved collectively and always emphasizing process, experimentation and action, they animate the legacy of legendary Senegalese artist Joe Ouakam and Agit'Art, the revolutionary creative movement he co-founded in 1974.
Voices: Simon Njami, Glenda León, Guy Woueté, Marcos Lora Read, Magdi Mostafa, Tori Wraånes, Marisol Rodriguez, Moataz Nasreldin, Pascal Traoré, Michel Amadou Gué
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related Episodes: Magdi Mostafa Turns Analog Tech into Sound Sculpture, LIVE from Dak'Art 2018, SITElines, Unsettled Landscapes 2014
Related Links: Dak'Art 2018, Simon Njami, Glenda León, Guy Woueté, Marcos Lora Read, Magdi Mostafa, Tori Wrånes, Marisol Rodriguez, ZAM ZAM, Moataz Nasreldin, DARB1718, Issa Samb, Agit'Art, Pascal Traoré, Island of Gorée
Monday Sep 03, 2018
Monday Sep 03, 2018
What does it mean to be Black in 21st century America? The expression of Blackness in art has a history of intricate connections to civil rights and social movements. In the United States and abroad, painting and drawing, filmmaking and photography, performance and protest have long represented diverse creative perspectives on the volatile subject of race and identity in this country.
Today, we hear from curators and artists whose work directly engages with race and American identity. Individually and collectively, they generate “freestyle” expressions of Blackness—revealing that no matter how history influences the Black cultural space, identity remains a fluid form in the hands of contemporary artists.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photos courtesy of featured artists and the Renaissance Society
Featured Audio: Thelma Golden at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Hamza Walker, Black Is, Black Ain't Symposium, Renaissance Society, Johanne Rahaman field recordings in South Florida, Theaster Gates at Katzen Arts Center, American University, Theaster Gates performs at Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, for documenta 13, Sanford Biggers, BAM (For Michael), Fahamu Pecou, All that Glitters Ain't Goals, Amy Sherald at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Related Episodes: Modern Black Portrait of Florida, Jefferson Pinder on Symbols of Power and Struggle, Theaster Gates on Meaning, Making and Reconciliation, Sanford Biggers on Time and the Human Condition, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Fahamu Pecou on Art x Hip-Hop
Related links: Thelma Golden, Studio Museum of Harlem, Freestyle, Hamza Walker, Black Is, Black Ain't, Johanne Rahaman, Jefferson Pinder, Theaster Gates, Sanford Biggers, Amy Sherald, Fahamu Pecou, Deborah Roberts