Beyond Heroine-ism: “The House We Built: Feminist Art Then and Now” and the Cindy Sherman Retrospective
By Christina Schmid
Arguably, “The House We Built: Feminist Art Then and Now” is an important show. It brings together the work of 70 artists who happen to be women and whose work was touched, moved, and propelled by the feminist movement. The oldest pieces in the show date back to the early seventies, the most [...]
The Art of Experience: Marjorie Schlossman’s Paintings
By Christina Schmid
I
In the land of creatures and critters, squibbles and squaggles, nothing is for sure.
Marjorie Schlossman, 1994.
Bulbous, periwinkle-blue forms emerge from a pale background. Luminous, biomorphic, and tinged with gold, they seem to undulate gracefully in a quiet ebb and flow. Like underwater creatures in slow motion, they reach and hover mindlessly, advancing and [...]
Before Flickers Fuse
By Christina Schmid
“In all mammalian eyes, rods and cones make electrical activity out of light waves by means of a change in the pigment in the cells. The change takes time—a very small amount of time. But in that time, a cell processing light from the world cannot receive more light to process. The rate [...]
Earest Erica, Stop Making Sense
By Christina Schmid
We were in a café, drinking coffee together, and talking about philosophy, and I said,
Wittgenstein said, the limits of language are the limits of my world.
And she said, Derrida said there is nothing outside of the text.
And I said, the [...]
Of Landscape and Place: Megan Vossler’s “Overlook: Landscape Studies.”
By Christina Schmid
Places not only are they happen.
—Edward Casey
The forest is awash in hues of green: spring leaves on beeches, elms, and birches, interrupted by the occasional conifer or a cherry tree in bloom. The scene could be idyllic, were it not for the terrible legacy this forest harbors: [...]
A Bean Story or Art, Accused of Trying to Teach.
By Christina Schmid
On my kitchen counter, looking out into the yard, sits a mason jar that holds about two large handfuls of beans. They are a curious shade of purple, with markings in even darker purple centered around what I think of as their navels—although I’m sure a botanist would be [...]
“We All Live in the Opera:” Negotiating Resistance and Nationality at the Venice Biennale
I did not expect to like the Venice Biennale; but I did.
Much maligned as yet another tourist trap, the Biennale of my imagination revolved around nauseating crowds and sensationalist, market-driven art. Instead, the range of work on view, the plethora of questions this very range sparked, made for a fascinating, multi-facetted experience. And, of course, [...]
Color Me Nostalgic
By Christina Schmid
A few days ago, the news became official: electronic book sales have topped those of paper books. Does this mean that the era of the book as a material object is over? No longer economically profitable, no longer needed for the proliferation of ideas, questionable in light of the environmental terms of its [...]
Art’s Outsides: A Reflection in Six Parts
Investigating the idea of outsides when art is concerned might seem like a futile endeavor at best, a hare-brained waste of time at worst. But that initial insight should not stop us from entering this particular fray: the cycle of outsides becoming part of what happens on the perceived inside, the push and pull between [...]
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From Project to Practice: Imagining Communities
by Christina Schmid
Public art’s role in addressing a community’s concerns, bringing communities together, and being created for—or with—a particular community in mind has been much discussed by proponents of relational aesthetics, dialogic aesthetics, and relational antagonism.[i] Rather than treading this already well–trodden ground, I want to explore a different take [...]