Hyperallergic

As a child, Alan Michelson often rode the T past sculptor Cyrus Edward Dallin’s “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (1908) outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). He was riveted by the statue’s grand horse and the powerful yet melancholy figure wearing a striking Plains Indian war bonnet. It was only in his 20s that the artist learned that he had been separated through adoption from his own Native heritage and Mohawk birth family in the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. He soon learned that the Dallin sculpture he marveled at in childhood symbolized the nefarious “Vanishing Indian” myth, which cast Indigenous peoples as doomed to extinction. Last year, after four decades of reconnection with his Indigenous community, deep historical research, and the development of a highly acclaimed practice in video, installation, and public art, Michelson returned to the MFA to install his answer to the 1908 sculpture: two platinum-guilded bronze sculptures of living Native leaders who are Indigenous to the land now known as Boston. The gleaming forms of Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and activist Julia Marden and Nipmuc artist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. stand proudly on the two large plinths on either side of the MFA’s entrance, resolutely toppling the myth that Indigenous peoples have disappeared from this land and honoring the vitality of Native communities today.In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Michelson joins Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to discuss the process and inspiration behind this pair of works, titled “The Knowledge Keepers” (2024). They also discuss the dinosaur tracks on Mt. Holyoke that inspired the artist as a child, the reasons George Washington is known as a “Town Destroyer” in many Native languages, and how Michelson sees the land as a silent witness to history. We also talk with Ian Alteveer, the chair of Contemporary Art at MFA Boston, who walks us through the fascinating process behind “The Knowledge Keepers,” which is the inaugural installation in a series of monuments that will greet visitors at the museum’s main entrance. 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. Support this podcast and our journalism as a Hyperallergic Member.https://hyperallergic.com/membership

At Hyperallergic, we take pride in covering protesting museum workers who take to the streets. But few realize that these workers are taking part in a practice that’s as old as some of the ancient artifacts in their institutions. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, we’re joined by professor, public historian, and Hyperallergic contributor Sarah E. Bond, who shares her knowledge on labor organizing in the ancient world, which stretches back to the earliest recorded strike, which took place in 1157 BCE in the Ancient Egyptian artisan’s village of Deir el-Medina. We learn that it’s not just the overwhelmingly White and male field of Classics that is to blame for the lack of attention paid to the everyday workers of Ancient Egypt and Rome, but also the fact that the very authors they study, who tended to be extremely wealthy, often recorded striking workers as “rioters.” As Bond recently wrote, new studies are showing that the great artistic accomplishments and economic abundance of the ancient world were “heavily reliant on the collective contributions of the millions of enslaved persons laboring across the Mediterranean” — in fact, 20–25% of the Roman population at the height of the Roman Empire was enslaved. Some of America’s founding fathers would even quote philosophers like Aristotle, who supported this system, as justification for continuing slavery themselves. Bond joins Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to talk about the stories that fill her new book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire, from women textile workers staging a walkout in Ancient Egypt, to the emperor and empress who slaughter tens of thousands of protesters in the Constantinople hippodrome — and even how Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with Ancient Roman stoicism (or rather, “bro-icism”) informs technocrats’ inhuman sense of the value of human labor.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.Read more by Sarah Bond on Hyperallergic.Support this podcast and our journalism as a Hyperallergic Member. https://hyperallergic.com/membership

The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) holds what is arguably the most important collection of early graffiti art and ephemera, amassed by Martin Wong, a queer Chinese-American self-taught painter who wore cowboy hats and, for a time, paid for his lodging in a dingy Lower East Side hotel room by working as a night porter. Drawn to the bustling art scene of late 1970s New York, Wong developed a tight network of friends in what may have seemed like an unexpected community at the time: graffiti writers, who would eventually be recognized as creating an entirely new style of art, emulated in every corner of the globe. At a time when society reviled graffiti artists as petty criminals, Wong began collecting their drawings, sketchbooks (or “blackbooks”), and eventually, paintings on canvas. He also painted moving,intimate portraits of the artists themselves. This was just one avenue he explored in his sprawling body of work, which ranges from detailed urbanscapes bustling with the life of the city, to surreal ceramics and scrolls influenced by traditional Chinese calligraphy. Before his death due to complications related to AIDS in the 1990s, Wong donated his beloved graffiti collection to the MCNY. Many of its prized pieces by renowned graffiti artists including Futura 2000, Keith Haring, Lady Pink, Rammelzee, DAZE, and others are on view now in the exhibition Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection. This episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast was recorded during a live panel at the MCNY on March 10 celebrating Wong’s collection and life. Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian moderated the discussion between Wong’s longtime friend and roommate Lee Quiñones, PPOW Gallery Co-Founder Wendy Osloff, and curator Sean Corcoran, who organized the exhibition. In front of a crowd of some 100 Hyperallergic Members and their friends, the panelists shared stories of the singular artist, his love of collecting, and his extravagant storytelling. As Quiñones recalls, Wong once said, “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection continues at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through August 10. Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersThis podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

One of seven brothers, Nick Cave grew up watching his family create magic out of scraps. His aunts would cut paper bags into patterns, and in just one day, make an entire new outfit to wear that night. Since then, the artist has been dedicated to studying how to lay ornamental patterns on the body. Leading the way for a current groundswell of adornment in art, Cave is known for highly decorated, maximalist works, particularly in his “Soundsuits,” which are both unapologetically joyous and respond to the deep pain of police brutality against Black people. His newest body of work, on view in Amalgams and Graphts at Jack Shainman Gallery’s large space in the Clock Tower Building through March 29, pushes and pulls the forms he’s known for playing with. Introducing needlepoint and portraiture, he flattened out his meticulous collections of objects into riotous rectangles, winking at the heritage of 19th-century floral paintings. But he’s also elongated his humanoid figures, using bronze casts of 3D scans of his own body that burst into tree forms branching toward the heavens. For this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian visited Cave at his studio in Chicago. You’ll hear them discuss how queerness informs his sensibility, his perspectives on fashion, preservation, politics, his memories of dressing in his Sunday best for church, and how the self-taught women crafters in his family planted the seeds for him to become the artist he is today.Nick Cave: Amalgams and Graphts continues at Jack Shainman (46 Lafayette Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through March 29.Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersThis podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

In 1973, gallerist Tibor de Nagy gave Joyce Kozloff a call. His voice quivered as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a searing review of her latest work. Greenberg had scoffed at the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, and said that it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that was a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor freaked out” and asked her “to take it away.”Greenberg had unwittingly dismissed the first of the artist's paintings in a major art movement of which she was a key founding member: Pattern and Decoration, also known as “P&D,” which grew out of the flowering folk revival and feminist protest era of the 1970s. Fed up with hard-edge abstraction and minimalism favored by the White men who dominated the art world, P&D leaned into lush decorative surfaces, cultural adornment, and unapologetically crafty aesthetics. Of course, it was critics like Greenberg whom P&D was revolting against. He’s cited twice in a 1978 article Kozloff co-wrote with Valerie Jaudon, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture.” Published in the feminist art journal Heresies (of which Kozloff was also a founding member), they wrote that in “rereading the basic texts of Modern Art … we discovered a disturbing belief system based on the moral superiority of the art of Western civilization.” They “came to realize that the prejudice against the decorative has a long history and is based on hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, men’s art above women’s art.”Luckily, Kozloff’s career wasn’t up to Clement Greenberg. Kozloff went on to have dozens of shows, beautify over a dozen buildings and transit systems with public artworks over the decades, and inspire new generations of artists to unabashedly lean into ornament. Once an active member of the peace protests of the 1960s, she has also continued her political activism, which in the 21st century has become more explicit in her work. Her all-over pattern paintings have morphed into detailed maps, from Civil War battle plans exploding with viruses to aeronautical charts dotted with points that the United States has bombed. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, you’ll hear the interview our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian recorded with Kozloff just after the opening of With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, which the institution called “first full-scale scholarly North American survey” of the P&D movement. They talk about everything from her mother’s embroidery to her travels in Turkey and Iran that inspired her art. You’ll also hear from Hyperallergic Staff Writer Maya Pontone, who reported this past year about Kozloff’s iconic public artwork in Cambridge’s Harvard Square train station that’s currently at risk of disappearing. And if you’ve been listening closely this season, you’ll recognize some recurring characters: Columbia professor Stephen Greene; the Heresies collective; Joyce’s partner, writer Max Kozoff, and; of course, Clement Greenberg. Works from three of Kozloff’s latest series, Uncivil Wars, Boys’ Art, and Social Studies, are on view in the Map Room at Argosy Book Store (116 East 59th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 25, 2025. (00:00) - Intro (04:13) - Childhood (07:35) - Art School at Carnegie Mellon and Columbia University (22:04) - From abstraction to patterns (27:39) - Joining the feminist movement in California (41:01) - The Heresies collective (44:46) - First Pattern and Decoration painting (46:45) - Forming the Pattern and Decoration movement (55:42) - The 1980s and public art (57:03) - Maya Pontone on the deterioration of Kozloff’s Harvard Square Mural (01:05:01) - Paintings of maps (01:07:52) - Political activism in and outside the studio (01:18:11) - Civil War series (01:21:17) - Making work about war (01:28:46) - Advice for artists (01:32:01) - Outro Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube.—Subscribe to Hyperallergic NewslettersThis podcast is made possible by the support of our members. Join us today at hyperallergic.com/membership.

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.

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

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

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

Eli Valley is one of the best American cartoonists and the political elite can’t stand his viral comics that pack a punch.

In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, Lanier talks about her continuing quest for justice that includes the return of the daguerreotypes depicting her enslaved ancestors.

For over 70 years, Flack has been making art in New York and boy does she have stories to tell.

The unorthodox program will gather together a group of thought leaders for 10 months to reflect and advise on happenings in the art community.