Episodes
Wednesday May 05, 2021
I Wish to Say—with Sheryl Oring
Wednesday May 05, 2021
Wednesday May 05, 2021
Today’s story takes place at the intersection of art and the First Amendment. This vital element of the United States Constitution protects our right to freedom of expression, by prohibiting lawmakers from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.
Artist Sheryl Oring took up this cause célèbre in 2004. In conversations across time, we trace her synthesis of art and free speech in a public performance project that quite naturally, has no end in sight. As long as there is democracy in the United States, there will be opportunities to voice opinions about the U.S. presidency, about social justice, the economy, public health, globalization, climate change, education, and more.
What would YOU wish to say to the U.S. President?
Let us know on Instagram: @freshartintl #iwishtosay
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, 2004; Sheryl Oring at Washington and Lee University, 2018; I Wish to Say with University of Michigan and Wayne State University students, 2020; Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, 2020
Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Activism, Topical Playlist: Art and Politics, Charles Gaines on Philosophy and Politics in Conceptual Art, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens
Related Links: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, Activating Democracy (the book), The First Amendment Project, Oakland, CA, Creative Capital Foundation, W&L Quick Hit: Sheryl Oring Performs I Wish to Say, Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, I Wish to Say Archive, University of Michigan, Democracy & Debate Theme Semester, Stamps Gallery, Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, Mauer Broadcast with Lisa Bielawa, The Berlin Wall
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
Art in Miami, Then and Now—with FeCuOp
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
In 2019, we recorded the first part of this story about the history of Miami's contemporary art scene inside Locust Projects, the longest running alternative art space in the city. Locust Projects director Lorie Mertes and artists from a collaborative known as FeCuOp—Jason Ferguson, Christian Curiel, Brandon Opalka, and Victor Villafañe, remember the raw energy of the 1990s. When we meet, the collective is in the midst of building out an immersive environment for Antenna, their first major project in Miami since 2003. The performative and interactive installation aimed to create a social experiment around communication.
In early 2021, we reach out to FeCuOp to talk about how much has changed since they collaborated on the highly interactive, live, and in-person experience at Locust Projects. Only months after they realized Antenna, the global coronavirus pandemic shut down the world for most of a year, profoundly altering how we encounter art.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound featured with permission of FeCuOp
Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Sand and Social Behavior, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity
Related Links: Locust Projects, FeCuOp, Christian Curiel, Jason Ferguson, Brandon Opalka, Victor Villafañe, Miami Light Project
FeCuOp is a contemporary art collaborative established in Miami in 1997, by Jason Ferguson, born in Trinidad and Tobago, lives in South Carolina; Christian Curiel, born in Puerto Rico to Cuban parents, lives in New Haven, CT; Brandon Opalka, born in Virginia, lives in Colorado. The name constitutes an amalgam of the three founding artist’s names. FeCuOp along with new Miami-based member Victor Villafañe, are like the periodic table of elements; each member’s unique characteristics bring a unique variable property to every collaboration.
Locust Projects is an alternative art space founded by artists for artists in 1998. The arts incubator produces, presents, and nurtures ambitious and experimental new art and the exchange of ideas through commissioned exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, summer art intensives for teens, and public programs on contemporary art and curatorial practice.
Wednesday Feb 17, 2021
Puerto Rico Rising—Resilient Artists
Wednesday Feb 17, 2021
Wednesday Feb 17, 2021
In 2018, two years after Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Croix, Art in America published an exposé by San Juan born and based curator Marina Reyes Franco. Journalists were “comparing Puerto Rico to Greece, Detroit, and New York of the 1970s,” she wrote, “prompting myriad articles about its economic woes and the population’s resilience.” Central to many of these stories were inspiring narratives about artists and entrepreneurs responding to the crisis. In 2019, we journey to the island to record voices from the cultural scene.
The artists we meet in San Juan convey the promise and pathos of this Caribbean island. In this segment of our Puerto Rico Rising series, four Puerto Rican creatives offer insight into how art can join forces with the strength of community to contemplate beauty and the paradoxes of everyday life.
Voices in the episode: Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio in Order of Appearance: Fabián Wilkins Vélez, Listening Session, 2019; Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Celaje (2020); Florian Dombois, Triple Instrument, 2019; Llaima Sanfiorenzo, Let the Beast Breathe, 2020 and 1 sq foot of freedom, 2007
Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Resisting Paradise, Puerto Rico Rising—Radical Leaders, The Awakening, Juan Botta Makes One-Minute Movies in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto on the Architecture of Connecting Communities, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies
Related Links: Beta-Local, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo/Self Portrait Factory, Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Marina Reyes Franco, ATLAS SAN JUAN: TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Art in America, Oct 1, 2018.
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Musical Manifesto vs. Contested Monument
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Today, we’re talking about symbolic statues and monuments. In this moment, many are demanding the removal of memorials believed to perpetuate a legacy of systemic racial and ethnic injustice. Recent acts of violence against Blacks in the United States have brought these memorials to the center of a nationwide debate.
On Memorial Day, in the year 2020, Minneapolis police killed a Black man named George Floyd. The public incident ignited the resurgence of a 21st century civil rights movement known as Black Lives Matter. In 2013, with use of the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, thousands responded on social media to the acquittal of a white man, George Zimmerman. He had been charged with the shooting death of Black teen Trayvon Martin.
Black Lives Matter is now the leading force behind massive protests across the U.S. and abroad. Crowds are toppling statues honoring colonizers, slaveholders, and Confederate heroes. The controversial figures have become a cultural flashpoint.
Social justice advocates have contested these iconic sculptures for decades. Let’s look back to 2014, for one example, when artist william cordova and his collaborators staged an unannounced public declaration of liberty and justice. They chose to make their statement at the site of a towering statue of confederate leader Robert E. Lee in New Orleans.
Born in Lima, Peru, and based in Miami, New York and Lima, cordova is known as a cultural practitioner. We call him to hear the story behind this prescient intervention.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: silent parade, 2014
Related episodes: Black in America, Modern Black Portrait of Florida, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Sanford Biggers on Time and the Human Condition, Fahamu Pecou on Art x Hip-Hop, Theaster Gates on Meaning, Making and Reconciliation, Jefferson Pinder on Symbols of Power and Struggle
Related links: silent parade, The Soul Rebels, william cordova, now's the time:narratives of southern alchemy, Perez Art Museum, Miami, 2018, Prospect New Orleans, Headlands Center for the Arts, Black Lives Matter
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
Filming Rhythm, Stories and Soul in the Toronto Subway
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
The Toronto-made film RISE embodies the creative force of a local youth-led spoken word movement known as RISE Edutainment. A subway station serves as the set where the collective’s poets, rappers, and musicians voice their experiences as first and second generation immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.
Emelie Chhangur, curator of The Art Gallery of York University, sparked the film project in 2017, by inviting Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca to Toronto. Based in Recife, Brazil, the two artist filmmakers are known for examining cultural change in the making. Through film and photography, they document popular performance genres as they adapt to post-colonial economies and geographies.
The experimental film that Wagner and de Burca created with the RISE community in Toronto hybridizes fiction and documentary to establish a third language-territory—a space where rhythm and poetry are employed as catalysts to explore the complex diasporic and multi-cultural city.
RISE challenges us to consider what might constitute the creation of new traditions in and for Toronto. The story demonstrates how creative expression empowers the past, present and potential future of an extended, evolving community. By showcasing the film in the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, artistic director Candice Hopkins and her collaborators follow through on their commitment to showcase local culture and history.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio from the film RISE, in order of appearance: Randell Adjei, Borelson, Kevin Braithwaite, Shahadda Jack, Laurette Jack-Ogbonna, Kwazzi, Michie Mee, Duke Redbird | RISE Audio Track, courtesy Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca Studio
Related Episodes and Posts: Views of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Art and Film Illuminate the Black Imagination, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity
Related Links: RISE Edutainment, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto Biennial of Art
Monday Sep 16, 2019
Artist Playlist—Regina Frank Listens to Joan Jonas
Monday Sep 16, 2019
Monday Sep 16, 2019
This episode is part of our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to share favorites from the archive.
Based in Lisbon, German born artist Regina Frank has shown her work in New York, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, among other cities globally. In recent projects, she explored environmental issues in performative installations at the Museum of Art Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, and BioArt 2018, Seoul, South Korea.
Here, Regina Frank introduces our conversation with renowned video and performance artist Joan Jonas, an episode first released on June 5, 2012.
Revisiting this episode is a moment to celebrate the latest chapter in Joan Jonas’s remarkable career. She represented the United States at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. In 2019, Jonas returns to Venice with an immersive, multimedia installation. Moving Off the Land II is the first public project in Ocean Space, a new global oceanic center in the restored Church of San Lorenzo.
Regina Frank writes: I have been listening to Fresh Art since Cathy Byrd launched the podcast in 2011. One episode that I love features Cathy’s conversation with artist Joan Jonas. In 1991, I met Joan Jonas for the first time. She gave a lecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. What a wonderful artist! I am fascinated and inspired by her creative approach to combining video, performance and drawing. She saw my work and suggested that I speak to the new museum of contemporary art in New York. They gave me their window and the cover of their newsletter and catalogue a few months later, which marked the beginning of my own career, in 1992. While I was in Venice for the 58th Art Biennale, I spent hours exploring Joan Jonas’s great project in the Church of San Lorenzo. I watched every video from beginning to end.
Sound Editor 2019 Anamnesis Audio | 2012 Leo Madriz
Special Audio: Jason Moran, “He Takes His Coat and Leaves”
Feature photo: Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, Ocean Space, Venice, 2019, courtesy TBA21 Academy
Related Episodes: Joan Jonas on The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, Art with a Sense of Placed, Part One, Regina Frank on Performing at the Intersection of Art and Technology
Related Links: Joan Jonas, Ocean Space
Monday Jul 15, 2019
Studio Drift Sends Up Swarming Ode to Apollo at 50
Monday Jul 15, 2019
Monday Jul 15, 2019
To honor the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this July, we introduce you to Studio Drift, two artists whose poetic work points to the moon and stars. During NASA festivities, a special edition of their airborne art will lift off from the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center.
Amsterdam-based Lonneka Gordijn and Ralph Nauta work at the intersection of nature, art and technology. Their complex creative applications of new technology invite us to question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. In 2017, we meet the artists to talk about two of their curious experiments—an enormous concrete block hovering inside New York City’s Armory art fair, and 300 illuminated drones that swarmed in the night sky over Miami Beach during Art Week.
In 2018, after the South Florida premiere of Studio Drift: Franchise Freedom, the artists brought their drone starlings to sky watchers in Amsterdam, during their retrospective exhibition at the Stedlijk Museum, and to the Burning Man festival, in the northwest Nevada desert. This week, there’s a chance that millions of people watching the NASA celebration from afar will become virtual witnesses to the wonder of Studio Drift’s flying sculpture.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Apollo 11 sounds via NASA website, Franchise Freedom music composed and played by Joep Beving for Studio Drift, Franchise Freedom live performance, Miami Beach, Florida, 2017, courtesy Fresh Art
Related Episodes: Drone Starlings in the Night Sky: Studio Drift on Nature and Culture, Steve Brown and Jesse Deeter Capture Burning Man on Film
Related Links: Studio Drift, National Air and Space Agency, Stedelijk Museum, Burning Man, Miami Art Week
What Studio Drift says about their July 16, 2019, ode to the NASA moon landing:
Lonneke Gordijn: The moon landing made us think about our lives here on earth more than life on the moon. That’s what our work Franchise Freedom is about, human behaviour on earth.
Ralph Nauta: The Apollo 11 moon landing exemplifies how technology can have a positive effect on humanity. Let’s take this as an example of what amazing possibilities we have if we put our minds together. It is our responsibility to use technology to build a sustainable future.
Monday Jun 03, 2019
Sounds of the 57th Venice Art Biennale Revisited
Monday Jun 03, 2019
Monday Jun 03, 2019
Venice is proven as a top destination for international contemporary art. The 58th Venice Art Biennale opened on May 11, 2019, and will be on view for the next six months. Thank you to Philadelphia-based art historian Deborah Barkun for contributing views from Venice on Instagram. Follow her encounters @freshartintl.
Today, we revisit a selection of sonic encounters at the 57th Venice Art Bienniale, when Italy was the first stop on a six-week Fresh Art International field expedition. In May 2017, preview days for the global exhibition presented an ephemeral opportunity to record the voices of curators, artists, and sounds of installations, performances and events. This episode features our experiences in the pavilions of France, Germany and Nigeria, and our walk through Egyptian artist Hassan Khan’s outdoor sound environment. Artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was honored with the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 57th Art Biennale. In her memory, we share the conversation we recorded with Schneemann just days before we watched her accept the prestigious award at the opening ceremony.
Sound Editor Guney Ozsan | Special Audio: French Pavilion—pianist Federico Tibone, vocalist Farrah el Dibany, experimental media artist duo My Cat is an Alien; German Pavilion—Vernissage TVfield recording, Billy Bultheel's musical composition for Faust; Nigerian Pavilion—performance by choreographer and dancer Qudus Onikeku; Hassan Khan, Composition for a Park, ambient recordings by Andrew Russeth and Fresh Art International
Related Episodes: Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief, Lisa Reihana on Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Monument to Decay: Israeli Pavilion in Venice, Mark Bradford Connects Art with the Real World
Related Links: Venice Art Biennale, Fresh VUE 57th Venice Art Biennale
About the 57the Venice Art Biennale: Christine Macel curated the main exhibition Viva Arte Viva, described as a “Biennale designed with artists, by artists and for artists.” Macel called it an Exhibition inspired by humanism. For her, direct encounters with the artists assumed a strategic role. Of the 120 invited artists, 103 were participating for the first time.
About Carolee Schneemann: Starting as a painter in the 1950s, in the 1960s, the artist began using her own body as material in experiments with film, music, poetry, dance, and performance. Her fearless artmaking explored body, narrative, sexuality and gender, in ways that challenged cultural and political taboos.
Monday Apr 29, 2019
Public Art Meets Poetry in O, Miami
Monday Apr 29, 2019
Monday Apr 29, 2019
Public art meets poetry in the month-long festival known as O, Miami. We sit down with visual artists Najja Moon and Michelle Lisa Polissaint and O, Miami's managing director Melody Santiago Cummings to talk about their work and introduce the spectrum of site-specific projects that bring poetry to communities.
Who’s The Fool? How To Patch A Leaky Roof: Moon and Polissaint create a Little Haiti Cultural District version of the blue umbrellas distributed for free in the Design District, a burgeoning retail development that is rapidly reducing the footprint of a community established by thousands of Haitian immigrants beginning in the 1950s. The artists imagine a dual role for the 1,000 bright red umbrellas they had fabricated. Mobile shelters from the rain and shields against the impact of urban development, the Little Haiti umbrellas feature a Creole proverb alluding to the false promise of urban development in the district. As if placing a flag on the moon, or drawing a line in the sand, Moon and Polissaint proclaim the identity of the community they call home and construct a monument to those fighting to preserve the district. The artists will go door to door with their gifts, inviting their neighbors to join in addressing the larger issue of gentrification in Miami.
O, Miami projects introduced in this episode: Who's the Fool?; Chiquita Poemas; The Last Ride of José Martí; The Beach is a Border; The Sunroom, poetry in schools
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Michelle Lisa Polissaint, Moonlight Moanin'; O, Miami: Ivan Lopez, The Last Ride of José Martí; Mia S. Willis, "hecatomb;" Sandra March, with Jose Olivarez, The Beach is a Border; The Sunroom
Related Episodes: Poetry, Art and Community Justice, Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti
Related Links: O, Miami, Najja Moon, Michelle Lisa Polissaint
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Art with a Sense of Place - Part Two
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space.
Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own exhibition sites (Agnes Denes brought a Wheatfield to a New York City landfill). Some flaunted the rules of museum installation with live interventions (Joseph Beuys lived in a Soho gallery with a live coyote).
Our series of episodes on site sensitivity brings a broader range of cultural production into the conversation, exposing new ways of seeing place, space, and site in contemporary art.
Art with a Sense of Place, Part II, highlights conversations featured in the second issue of the Fresh Art International Smart Guide. We produce the guide as a series of downloadable pdfs. Each issue delves into a different theme—through select episodes, transcriptions and links to research that informs our podcast.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related episodes: Agustina Woodgate, Louis Grachos, Adam Schreiber, Tania Bruguera
Related link: Smart Guide, Issue 02 Art with a Sense of Place