Fresh Art International

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 

Art and Our Uncertain Future

Are we the last real humans? We consider this question in a conversation about art as a speculative science. Join us to ponder our uncertain future.

 

Laura Randall, scholar in residence at the Rubell Family Collection, shares the dark side of the exhibition Still Human, introducing artists who imagine a world where we never die and wonder if mayonnaise is alive. With curator Joey Orr (now at the Spencer Museum of Art), artist Andrew Yang contemplates our place in the cosmos and talks about how much sand it takes to build an homage to Carl Sagan inside the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Listen for the sound of your possible future in audio tracks from projects by artists Jon Rafman, Cécile B. Evans and Andrew Yang.

 

Related exhibitions: Post Human, 1992, Deitch Projects; In the Holocene, 2012, MIT List Center, What Absence Is Made Of, 2017-2018, Hirshhorn

 

Featured Sound: Jon Rafman, Poor Magic, courtesy the artist and the Rubell Family Collection; Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Andrew Yang, White Noise, courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

 

Prospect 4 New Orleans—The Lotus In Spite of the Swamp

Come with us to explore Prospect New Orleans, the Crescent City’s triennial of contemporary art. Titled The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, the fourth iteration evokes the musical character of New Orleans and the surrounding natural environment—the bayous, lakes and wetlands near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Voices in this episode: Prospect.4’s artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker, former executive director Brooke Davis Anderson, artists Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Boyce, Rusty Lazer, Darryl Montana, Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters, and more!

 

Making a Mountain in Miami: Ugo Rondinone's Bright Boulders

Today, we take you to South Florida, for a conversation about public art with Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone. Miami Mountain is the latest in his iconic Mountain series. The North American Badlands inspire the towering stack of five brightly colored neon stones that he designed to hold sway over the palm trees in Collins Park on Miami Beach. The Bass Museum of Art’s 2016 public art acquisition arrived in pieces. The boulders came from a quarry in Nevada, making their way to the beachfront park on flatbed trucks. A professional installation crew was ready and waiting. With industrial lifts and cranes, they erected the stone monument in a carefully calculated process that took just over 13 hours.

Art and the Rising Sea

On this live streaming radio program, we consider how artists, curators, architects and writers are responding to climate change in South Florida. King tides, flooding and eroding beaches are now part of everyday life. Our guests reveal how the rising sea has inspired two artist residency programs and an upcoming exhibition.

Natalia Zuluaga, Artistic Director at ArtCenter/South Florida, introduces the Center’s new Art in Public Life residency, a year-long opportunity for the selected artist to participate in shaping in the City of Miami Beach resiliency plan. She also talks about the exhibition Intertidal that imagines Miami's intertidal zone future, as a city above water at low tide, and flooded at high tide. 

 Also in studio, Ombretta Agro, Simon Faithfull, Will Rey, and Gustavo Oviedo share their roles in ARTSail, an ArtCenter residency exploring the Miami waterways, the South Florida coastline and the Keys. Our field recordings with recent ArtSail residents Blanca de la Torre and Mark Lee Koven to complete the picture of the floating residency's first year.

Special audio features: Archival Feedback, Stormtrack and Gustavo Oviedo, Boatski Tours

Dara Friedman On The Theater of Your Mind

Artist Dara Friedman and curator Rene Morales talk about Perfect Stranger, Friedman's mid-career survey at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. The exhibition features seventeen major film and video works shot in Miami, New York, and Germany. Intertwined with our conversation, you’ll hear some of the sonic encounters that lie waiting behind thick velvet curtains in the multi-chambered show. It’s through these curtains that you enter Dara Friedman's Theater of the Mind.

Studio Drift on Nature and Technology

Today we take you to the intersection of nature, art and technology to meet Amsterdam-based artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneka Gordjein of Studio Drift. They design their creative applications of new technology to make us question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. Presented during Miami Art Week 2017, Studio Drift's flying sculpture made of 300 lighted drones was especially provocative and poetic. The artists leave us believing in the unexpected potential for technology to feel natural.

Piano solo: Joep Beving

Report from Miami Art Week 2017

In our report from Miami Art Week 2017, Tanja Hollander, Nancy Davidson, Tania El Khoury, Sara Driver and Amy Sherald talk about the roles that social media art, inflatable sculpture, interactive performance, documentary film and figurative painting played during Miami Art Week and Art Basel 2017.

Tanja Hollander is an artist who lives and works in Auburn, Maine. No need for a ticket to an art fair or a museum to experience her social media project Are You Really My Friend? during Art Week. You could participate by visiting a small pavilion inside the Botanical Garden on Miami Beach. The vast archive of the project is currently on view in its entirety at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

For the multi-media installation Per Sway that she presents at Locust Projects in Miami, Nancy Davidson created inflatable symbols of power and control that mirror the bizarre and horrifying political climate in the world today. Based in New York, Davidson is an interdisciplinary artist known for anthropomorphic weather balloon sculptures that explore the architecture of the body.

Miami Dade College Live Arts program invited artist Tania El Khoury to share a dozen haunting stories from the Middle East. Based in London and Beirut, Tania choreographed two intimate interactive performances for venues on Miami Beach. As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a one-on-one encounter inside a small room at the New World Center. Gardens Speak is a theatrical experience for groups of ten at the Fillmore Theater.

New York based filmmaker Sara Driver takes us back to a seminal time in New York City history with her new documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sara was part of the independent film scene in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Besides making her own feature films, she’s recognized for producing early film projects by her partner Jim Jarmusch. After screenings at the 2017 Toronto and New York festivals, Magnolia Pictures plans the film's release in theaters for 2018.

Joining us Live on UNTITLED Radio, Baltimore based painter Amy Sherald talks about her work and the impact of recent art news. This year, her figurative paintings came to the world’s attention and doubled in value when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Sherald to paint the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Our conversation leads to Naima Green's writing on the subject in the New York Times.