Shelley Niro's 500 Year Itch

In the late 1950s, a Manhattan-born college student was running from an art history course at Barnard to a George Balanchine ballet practice at the storied School of American Ballet on 82nd Street and Broadway. Soon, she began to make connections between the old-school Russian ballet instructors who taught her “ferocious point class” and were constantly “aspiring to an abstract ideal,” if a ruthless one, and the extending lines of Anthony Caro’s sculptures striving toward an arabesque. These rigorous studies in dance informed the work of the leading critic and curator of 20th-century Modernism, Karen Wilkin. Of course, Balanchine’s presence was just one instance in which Wilkin has brushed shoulders with masters of the arts throughout her lifetime. In this episode, she discusses the influence of her parents’ close friendships with New York’s prominent literary figures, from S.J. Perelman to Ruth McKenney, and artists like Adolph Gottlieb. She tells us about touring the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with Kenneth Noland, advising at the Triangle residency alongside Helen Frankenthaler, and attending the Spoleto Festival as composer Samuel Barber’s “beard.” Wilkin also reflects on the valuable lessons she learned from years working with the legendary critic Clement Greenberg, though she doesn’t shy away from illuminating his noxious mistreatment of women like herself. The author of monographs on a litany of these artists from Stuart Davis and David Smith to Georges Braque and Giorgio Morandi, she discusses her journey in art writing with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian who once was her student at the University of Toronto and credits her with his introduction to the world of art criticism. Tune in to hear them discuss everything from the decline of MoMA to masters of Canadian abstraction to Wilkin’s beloved herd of Maine Coon cats. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Watch the complete video of the conversation with images of the artworks on YouTube.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

This August, journalist Moustafa Bayoumi broke the story that the first photo of a detainee in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site had been declassified. It shows an emaciated Ammar al-Baluchi, standing shackled and naked in a starkly white room. Subjected to years of torture, according to CIA protocol, the photo of the Pakistani detainee was meant “to document his physical condition at the time of transfer.” In a recent Hyperallergic opinion piece, Bayoumi reflected on the dark history of various regimes’ use of similar “atrocity photography” — a genre of memories they create for themselves that chronicle violence, but obscure it from public view. While this photograph epitomizes dehumanization, another image shows a different perspective. Through a vortex of colored lines and dots, al-Baluchi illustrated what he saw during a spell of vertigo, which was brought on by a traumatic brain injury caused by this torture. No longer in the media spotlight, it’s all too easy for many to forget that dozens of people are still imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. The detention camp has incarcerated hundreds of detainees from around the world since it opened in the early 2000s in the wake of 9/11, and al-Baluchi is in the vast minority of those who have been charged with crimes connected to those events. While over half of the men still held there today were cleared for release years ago, they have not been freed, and it’s possible they never will. Over a decade ago, a group of these men began to create art. At first, they used what little material they could find, such as soap scratched on walls or plastic forks scraped on styrofoam cups, even drawing with powdered tea on toilet paper. If these covert artists were discovered, they were punished. But starting in 2010, after Obama-era reforms, detainees were finally allowed to attend art classes. What happened was a brief flowering of the arts in one of the least likely places, and under inhumane conditions.In this episode, we speak with Erin L. Thompson, a Hyperallergic contributor, a professor of art crime at John Jay College. She curated Ode to the Sea, a groundbreaking exhibition of artwork by detainees that debuted in 2018, and recently returned from a week-long trip to the Caribbean military prison in order to view the 9/11 trials that ended up being delayed. Thompson spoke with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian about witnessing the strict policing of not only embattled art, but also how authorities maintain a tight control on photography taken by the media. Writer and artist Molly Crabapple, on the other hand, found a workaround. She joined us to discuss her 2013 trip to the detention center, when she was granted access to draw this surreal prison and its inhabitants, both the incarcerated men and medics, guards, and other actors that keep the machine running. Her work shows us how the craft of drawing can illuminate truths that censored photographs cannot. And finally, we spoke with writer Mansoor Adayfi, who was confined to Guantánamo Bay for almost 15 years. Like the vast majority of those imprisoned there, he was never charged with a crime. Adayfi gave us a first-hand account of hunger strikes, changes in torture tactics and confinement that came with each presidential administration, bonds formed between the men in the prison, and the flourishing of art through painting, singing, dancing, and writing among the detainees. He explains how such art became a lifeline for their survival. The author of Letters from Guantánamo and Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, he works as an activist with CAGE toward the goal of permanently closing Guantánamo Bay. In 2022, eight current and former detainees wrote a letter urging President Biden to end a Trump-era policy that barred their work from leaving Guantánamo. Multiple men, cleared for release just that year, said that they would rather their art be freed than themselves. Adayfi told us that if given that choice, he’d say the same thing.“The art is not just art. It becomes a piece of you. You put your blood, your sweat, your memories, your time there. That art helped you to find yourself. To maintain your sanity, your humanity,” he explained.“Art from Guantánamo, we consider it one of us, like a living being. It went through the same process: the mistreatment, the abuses, the torture, the death, even. Like us, like us prisoners. It’s the same process. It went through everything we have been through.”While the Biden administration lifted the ban on art leaving Guantánamo Bay, they have not fulfilled the promise to close the prison before Donald Trump returns to office in January. His administration could usher in an expansion of similar detention camps, along with a new era of censorship and oppression in many forms. But as long as such injustices continue under any regime, stories like Adayfi’s are critical to hold on to and learn from. Even if a detainee manages to be released from Guantánamo Bay, they still encounter significant challenges. You can donate here to the Guantánamo Survivors Fund, which seeks to provide medical care, housing, and education to those released.Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Watch the complete video of the conversations with images of the artworks on YouTube.(00:00) - Intro (05:16) - Erin L. Thompson (43:33) - Molly Crabapple (01:10:28) - Mansoor Adayfi —Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersThis podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

When Lucy Lippard left New York City for the tiny village of Galisteo, New Mexico, some were shocked: How could this giant of 20th-century art criticism, this leader in the fight for feminism and equitable representation in museums, leave the so-called “center of the art world” for such a rural area? Lippard is renowned not only for her strident activism but also for changing the game of art criticism itself. The author of a whopping 26 books, Lippard was a co-founder of both the standby press for artist books, Printed Matter, and the legendary feminist Heresies Collective. She broke down barriers between art writers and artists, letting her writing flow free in a type of “proto-blog” that inspired publications like ours. When we asked her what brought her to the dusty hills of Galisteo, she simply said, “Feminists.” Other legendary feminist art figures, from Harmony Hammond to Agnes Martin, had also made it their home. She refuses, however, the idea that ex-urbanites are the only source of brilliance in the town. She now writes the newsletter for what she found to be a fascinating and flourishing historic community, as well as the Indigenous genius found in the Chaco Canyon, sacred to Hopi and Pueblo peoples.While scores of artists and critics alike keep Lippard’s volumes stacked high on their shelves, she is fairly enigmatic as a figure. In this episode, she sat down with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to give a rare recorded interview about her life in art. To better understand her work, we also talked with the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Senior Curator of Feminist Art Catherine Morris, who put together a show on Lippard’s work from 2012 to 2013 entitled Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. We also interviewed editor, book artist, and painter Susan Bee, a member of Brooklyn’s A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first space in the city dedicated to women artists. She had a front-row seat to Lippard’s influence in the emerging 1960s and ’70s feminist art scene of which were both a part. She also spoke to a little-known part of Lippard’s legacy: her fiction. In fact, Lippard told us that she wanted to be a fiction writer first, but chose to pursue nonfiction instead, believing she “was really bad at writing the kind of fiction anybody would want to publish.” That’s no longer the case: Much of her short fiction is being published by New Documents for the first time this December in a volume titled Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions). From our vantage point in the 2020s, it’s easy to take women’s representation in museums for granted. But, as Bee reminds us, “None of this stuff happened. It was really a fight.” Now, as women’s rights begin to slip away once again, we can learn from these stories to better prepare for the fight ahead. A special thanks to Loghaven Artist Residency, where much of the research for this podcast was conducted with the help of the collection of the library at the University of Tennessee.Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

In 1915, Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel at a hardware store in New York City. He inscribed his signature and the date on its wooden handle. On the evening this episode is released, the fourth version of this classic “ready-made,” which he titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” will be auctioned off at Christie’s during their 20th Century Evening Sale. It’s estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million.How could a simple snow shovel be valued at such a steep price? Was  Duchamp an unmatched genius, or a product of some of the biggest museums’ dirtiest little secrets: the results of pure, unadulterated capitalism?Northeastern University professor, essayist, poet, and editor Eunsong Kim has illuminated the underlying influences of industrial capitalism and racism behind some of the most prized museum collections in her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. She traces how Duchamp was brought to prominence through the patronage of collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, heirs of a fortune wrought by the steel industry. Their family operated steel mills in the same setting as titans such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, whose wealth also underlies their own valuable art collections.And as it turns out, the “death of the author,” celebrated in conceptual art like that of Duchamp, is a convenient idea for the ultrawealthy. Devaluing labor pairs well with violent crackdowns on striking workers to deny them adequate pay. Or even Frederick Winslow Taylor's development of “scientific management,” a system that is still cited today but is based on the idealization of the slave plantation.How much of the Modernist archive was canonized by union-busting bosses? How much of conceptual art in the 20th and 21st centuries has been buoyed by the reverence of scientific management? In this episode, Editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian sits down to talk with Kim about her new volume, which challenges generations of unquestioned received knowledge and advocates for a new vision of art beyond cultural institutions. In the process, they discuss the craft of writing, how a White artist was counted as a Black artist at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and how Marcel Duchamp got away with selling bags of air.Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

The sports world may be on the edge of their seats as we draw close to the 2024 Olympics in Paris. But the “Olympics of the art world” is already well underway in Italy: Hundreds of thousands of art lovers are flocking to the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 24. This massive exhibition has been held every two years with very few exceptions since 1895, when it was inaugurated as the world’s first art biennial. Visitors who devote a whole week of their time will still only be able to take in a sliver of the art on display, whether it’s at the central exhibition, the collateral events, or the dozens of storied national pavilions in the Giardini and around the city. But that’s not all the exhibition has in store. The politics of the art world are also on full display, whether in the form of protests or the curators’ decisions about how their countries — with all their past and present controversies — will be represented. This year's included Russia offering its pavilion up to Indigenous artists from Bolivia, Brazil renaming its pavilion “Hãhãwpuá” after the Indigenous Patxohã term for the land, Poland welcoming an art collective from Ukraine, the United States featuring Jeffrey Gibson as the first Native American artist to have a solo exhibition at the pavilion, and Israel canceling its exhibition … which perhaps wasn't really canceled after all. Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and longtime contributor AX Mina sat down to reflect on the aesthetic successes, political failures, and long-awaited representation they saw displayed at the world’s biggest contemporary art show. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.(00:00) - Intro (04:24) - First Impressions of the Biennale and the Main Exhibition (06:33) - India: Aravani Art Project (07:48) - Singapore: Charmaine Poh (08:58) - Lebanon: Omar Mismar (09:42) - “Italians Everywhere” (11:06) - Morocco: Bouchra Khalili (13:16) - The National Pavilions (14:21) - Benin Pavilion (16:12) - Lebanon Pavilion (18:19) - Italy Pavilion (20:14) - UK Pavilion (22:44) - US Pavilion (25:29) - Israel Pavilion (28:51) - Saudi Arabia Pavilion (30:07) - Nigeria Pavilion (32:11) - Egypt Pavilion (34:07) - Taiwan Pavilion (35:57) - Australia Pavilion (38:16) - Mongolia Pavilion (40:06) - “South West Bank,” collateral event (42:23) - Outro —Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

Shelley Niro (Kanien’kehaka) grew up watching her father craft faux tomahawks to sell to tourists who flocked to her birthplace, Niagara Falls. In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, she reflects on how witnessing him create these objects planted the seeds for her brilliant multidisciplinary art practice spanning film, sculpture, beading, and photography. She joined us in our Brooklyn studio for an interview, where she reflected on growing up in the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Native artists she discovered on her dentist’s wall but rarely encountered in a museum before the mid-’90s, and her latest obsession with 500 million-year-old fossils.An expansive review of her work is currently featured in a traveling retrospective, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, which was organized by Canada’s Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH), with support from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). The exhibition was co-curated by Melissa Bennett, senior curator of Contemporary Art at AGH; Greg Hill, an independent curator who is a former senior curator of Indigenous Art at the NGC; and David Penney, associate director of Museum Scholarship, Exhibitions, and Public Engagement at the NMAI).When this interview was recorded, the show was on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. It was on display from February 10 to May 26 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and will be exhibited next from June 21 to August 25 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. The music and sound effects in this episode are from the films “Honey Moccasin” and “Tree” by Shelley Niro, courtesy of the artist. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.(00:00) - Intro (03:02) - Beginnings of “500 Year Itch” Retrospective (04:18) - About “Honey Moccasin” (06:47) - Early Life (08:42) - The Six Nations of the Grand River (12:12) - Going to Art School and Native Representation in Museums (19:12) - Work in Painting (22:32) - Work in Photography (24:53) - On Niagara Falls (26:29) - History Behind Grand River Reserve (27:58) - The 1990s and Institutional Perspectives on Native American Art (31:12) - “Mohawks and Beehives” Series (34:51) - Why “500 Year Itch”? (39:47) - Art Schools Today (42:54) - Humor (47:27) - “In Her Lifetime” Series (49:57) - The Grand River (53:52) - Newest Works and Ancient Fossils (57:05) - Outro —Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

Anyone who remembers New York City’s “golden age” of graffiti in the late ’70s and early ’80s knows about the lion spray-painted on the handball court at Corlears Junior High School, roaring next to metallic blue letters spelling the word “Lee.” In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, we speak with its creator, Lee Quiñones, whose paintings of dragons, lions, and Howard the Duck on over 120 MTA train cars were part of the movement that brought light and color to the otherwise dingy, dark, and drastically underfunded subway system. Quiñones’s paintings caught the attention of art collectors and gallerists. By the time he was 19, he was showing his work at Galleria La Medusa in Rome, alongside fellow graffiti writer Fred Brathwaite, also known as “Fab 5 Freddy.” Among other writers, the following years would bring his graffiti art to more shows, both at home in New York City and in the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and even Documenta 7 in 1982 in Kassel, Germany. Quiñones is the rare graffiti writer from this era who maintained a successful career in the gallery space. Today, he continues to experiment through paintings, drawings, and collages in an ever-changing range of styles. His art is in the collections of several major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. In this episode, Quiñones reflects on the monster movies that inspired him as a kid, running the tracks as a graffiti-writing teen, making art alongside Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jenny Holzer in the 1980s East Village scene, and much more. He also discusses the new book documenting his life and work, Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, which was published by Damiani on April 30. A solo show of his recent work, titled Quinquagenary, will be on display at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles until May 25, 2024. The music in this episode is courtesy of Soundstripe.Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.(00:00) - Intro (03:04) - Early life and work (08:06) - Cinema (19:43) - “Howard the Duck” (27:17) - Lee is “WANTED” by the police (28:58) - “Lion’s Den” (38:57) - The East Village scene (47:29) - “The buff” in the 80s (53:03) - The 21st century (57:00) - Outro —Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

Since 2009, Hyperallergic has published tens of thousands of articles about art. But who are the writers behind these posts? And what drives them to write about art of all things?Many of the authors who have passed through our virtual hallways have gone on to do incredible things, including publishing books on topics that they first wrote about or more fully developed through articles in Hyperallergic. In 2022, we held an event called “From Blog to Book” at Brooklyn’s pinkFrog cafe, where our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian asked three of our writers to tell us about the journeys that took them from 140-character tweets to 1,200-word posts to full manuscripts. Erin L. Thompson, who holds the title of America’s only art crime professor, is the author of dozens of articles that brought looted artifacts from around the world to light. Her adventures have brought her from the Confederate monument etched into the side of Stone Mountain, Georgia, which she wrote about in Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (2022), to a rededication ceremony of a repatriated object in Nepal.AX Mina, who wrote Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power (2019), describes how they first explored the topic of memes in Hyperallergic — which they termed “the street art of the social web” before “meme” became the mainstream — and their function as a tool to circumvent internet censorship in China. And Michelle Young, author of Secret Brooklyn: An Unusual Guide (2023), tells us about her trajectory from working in fashion to playing in the band Kittens Ablaze to discovering so many hidden gems while aimlessly wandering the city she calls home that she founded the brilliant website Untapped New York. It was only in her time off reading World War 2 nonfiction that she found a new trail, which led her to uncover the stories of stolen Nazi loot. They’ll reflect on finding focus by retreating to a mountaintop in China, unearthing the legacy of forgotten World War II heroes, and even seamlessly forging Picassos — which, as you’ll hear in the show, is not nearly as hard as you’d think. The music in this episode is by Famous Cats and Cast Of Characters, courtesy of Soundstripe.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

We are thrilled to be back with a new episode of the Hyperallergic podcast. For our one hundredth episode, we spoke with legendary collage and mixed media artist Tommy Lannigan-Schmidt. His works, made from crinkly saran wrap and tin foil, emulate the gleam of precious metals and jewels in Catholic iconography. They reference his upbringing as a working class kid and altar boy in a Catholic community in Linden, New Jersey, where tin foil was an expensive luxury they could rarely afford. But they also hold memories of where he found himself as a teenager: the LBGTQ+ street life and art community of New York City, which led to his participation in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Lanigan-Schmidt is as much a visual artist as he is a storyteller. We climbed up to his fourth floor walk-up in Hell's Kitchen, where, surrounded by teetering piles of books and artwork, he regaled us with tales about artists like Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, his decision to leave his hometown as a penniless teenager, his steadfast identity as a working class artist, his conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity, what changed for gay artists in New York between the 1960s and today, and of course, his recollection of that historic night at the Stonewall.We know you’ll enjoy this artist’s sparkling humor and singular vision as he shares reflections on his life and this critical moment in history.We also talked with Ann Bausum, author of Stonewall, Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, about the significance of the uprising. She also shared some of her own first-hand recollections of segregation in 1960s America. The music in this episode was written by Garen Gueyikian, with the exception of one track by Dr. Delight, courtesy of Soundstripe. A selection of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s work will be on display at a show titled Open Hands: Crafting the Spiritual at Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art until May 19, 2024. (00:00) - Intro (02:31) - Ann / Hrag (13:58) - Intro to Tommy (15:49) - Tommy / Hrag (01:30:05) - Outro Related Links:Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's 2012-2013 solo show at MoMA PS1, Tender Love Among the JunkLanigan-Schmidt's work at Pavel Zoubok Fine ArtGay and Proud, the 1970 film which documented a demonstration on Christopher Street on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, excerpted in this episode starting at 14:39Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann BausumWatch Flaming Creatures by Jack SmithDr. Wendy Schaller on Feast of St. Nicholas by Jan SteenAndy Warhol's portrait of Holly SolomonMario Banana, an Andy Warhol film with Mario Montez—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a member

If you’ve been online, and especially on Twitter, then you probably know the name Eli Valley and his brushy drawings that use the grotesque and absurd to make larger points about life, culture, and politics. But it wasn’t until the Trump administration that the New York City-based cartoonist was propelled into the public spotlight. Valley was attacked by a wide range of politicians, particularly Republicans, including Meghan McCain, who called the comic he drew of her “one of the most anti-Semitic things I have even seen.” McCain is not Jewish, and Valley is, not to mention that his father is a rabbi.In this conversation, I asked Valley to tell us about how he got his start in comics, how he builds on the long history of satire and graphic humor in the Jewish American tradition, and how he copes with the public spotlight while he struggles to survive as a full-time artist. This podcast is accompanied by scholar Josh Lambert’s article, which explores the art historical roots of Valley’s art. Lambert writes, “Valley comes naturally by his most pressing and recurrent theme: lies told and violence committed in the name of Jewish safety and security. His cartoon jeremiads can easily enough be fit into a long history of Jewish protest, from the Biblical prophets who excoriated the sinners of Israel to modern novelists who, like the criminally under-appreciated late-19th-century San Francisco writer Emma Wolf, wrote about Jews, as she put it, ‘in the spirit of love — the love that has the courage to point out a fault in its object.’”The music for this episode is “A Mineral Love” by Bibio, courtesy Warp Records.---Subscribe to the Hyperallergic NewslettersBecome a Member