ROUND-UP February 13-March 4, 2020

Hello all! As I begin my second semester in earnest, the last few writings I did over the break/before classes began are being published! Here you go!

• "Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s 50 Year Career Photographing the Body Surreal." Humble Arts Foundation blog, February 13, 2020.

"Apart from the awe they inspire, there are elements of comedy, charm, and even horror in these photographs. It all depends on the degree to which Minkkinen absorbs the human body into the outdoor landscape or setting. In Praça de Comércio, Lisbon, Portugal (2015), for example, a slightly blurry pair of hands at the top of the image frame a high-angle looking down onto a crisp, gridded plaza. At first glance, it looks like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoons, as if a stop-motion animated God figure will descend from the parting clouds and deliver a sarcastic proclamation. It’s an unexpected work in the context of what initially appears to be a serious set of glossy black-and-white images. Placed in the first of two gallery rooms, Praça de Comércio and its Modernist evocation of a flat pictorial surface catches the eye immediately and sets the tone for a much more playful and inventive exhibit that one might expect."

• "On the politics of loitering, a look into ‘Loitering is Delightful’." Philly Artblog, February 27, 2020.

"As an arts space with free admission that is operated not as a commercial gallery, but by the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery was in a strong position to unpack the differences between lingering in a space and loitering in a space, acknowledging right off the bat that the idea of loitering is deeply politicized and racialized in the United States. And within an art world that is overwhelmingly white and wealthy, where visitors of color often feel targeted for not fitting the profile of someone who seems to naturally belong in a museum, it’s clear that the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, with shows like Loitering is delightful, was throwing its hat into the ring to be that “third space” for all Angelenos."

• "The Art Houses of Naoshima Island." Artillery Magazine, March/April 2020 issue.

"Since the late 1990s, contemporary artists and architects from Japan and elsewhere have taken over a number of structures, all located within about a seven-minute walk from one another, and completely transformed them. These sites are interwoven into the everyday pathways and rhythms of the streets of the village of Honmura on the island, rendering the spaces at times indistinguishable from the residences and businesses surrounding them. The art houses deliberately play with the boundaries of museum, sacred space, public place, house and home, often blurring them together in uncanny and disorienting ways."