Episode 351: David Salle
May 21, 2012 · Print This Article
Episode 337: Tom Friedman
February 13, 2012 · Print This Article
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This week: The Amanda Browder Show vs. Tom Friedman. As a sculptor myself, I find his work to be some of the most interesting and innovative of the last 20 years. This is an interview that has been on our wish list for a long time! Yay NYC bureau!
Tom Friedman was born in St. Louis, MO in 1965 and received his B.F.A. at Washington University, St. Louis, MO and his M.F.A. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Tom Friedman’s art has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. The quirky, and flawlessly executed work tends to defy categorization. While his art is often linked to 1960s Conceptualism and Minimal art, Friedman invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail and his striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected. He uses common household materials such as aluminum foil, spaghetti, fishing line, hair, Styrofoam, and Play-Doh to create works that rearrange the viewer’s perceptions of the everyday environment. Often humorous and always inventive, Friedman’s work raises questions about the making and seeing of art.
Episode 328: Buzz Spector
December 12, 2011 · Print This Article
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This week: This week we talk with artist, writer, and WhiteWalls co-founder Buzz Spector!
Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose artwork has been shown in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Spector’s work makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. He has issued a number of artists’ books and editions since the mid-1970s, including, most recently, Time Square, a limited edition letterpress book hand altered by the artist and published in 2007 by Pyracantha Press and ABBA at Arizona State University in Tempe. Among his previous publications are Between the Sheets, a limited edition book of images and text published in 2004 by The Ink Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, NY, Details: closed to open, an artists’ book of photographic details from images in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, (List Art Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2001) and Beautiful Scenes: selections from the Cranbrook Archives (Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 1998).
Spector was a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a magazine of writings by artists, in Chicago in 1978, and served as the publication’s editor until 1987. Since then he has written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed reviews and essays to a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner. He is the author of The Book Maker’s Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists’ books (Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue essays, including Conrad Bakker: untitled mail order catalogue (Creative Capital, Inc., 2002) and Dieter Roth (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999).
Spector’s most recent recognition is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA Fellowship. In 1991 he was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and in 1982, 1985, and 1991 he received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards. He is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Episode 326: Jim Campbell
November 28, 2011 · Print This Article
Episode 311: David Hoffos and the Fulton Street Collective
August 15, 2011 · Print This Article
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This week: We talk to artist David Hoffos. Next, we talk with Joe Lanasa about the Fulton Street Collective.
About David:
In 1994, David Hoffos received a BFA with great distinction from the University of Lethbridge. Since 1992 Hoffos has maintained an active exhibition schedule – with over 30 solo exhibitions, including Catastrophe, 1998 (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga) and Another City, 1999-2002 (Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Trépanier Baer, Calgary; Joao Graça, Lisbon; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Museé des Beaux-Arts, Montréal). In 2003 Hoffos (with Trépanier Baer) launched the first phase of Scenes from the House Dream, a five-year series of linked installations. The entire series is set to begin its cross-Canada tour in the fall of ’08. His single-channel work has been shown in festivals in over twenty countries, and he recently represented Canada at the 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany. A survey of his installation work debuted at the Edmonton Art Gallery in December, 2003. His first theatre piece – Hoffos/Clarke Conspiracy (with Denise Clarke/One Yellow Rabbit) – debuted at Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo in 2006. He has just completed scenic and visual effects design for the Decidedly Jazz Danceworks production wowandflutter. Hoffos has been invited to several residencies, including three at the Banff Centre. The artist has received awards including 2nd place in the inaugural Sobey Art Award, December 2002; the 2004 York Wilson Endowment Award; Images Grand Prize, 2007; and a Long-Term Visual Arts Project Grant, 2008. David Hoffos lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta. He is represented by Trépanier Baer, Calgary.
About Fulton Street Collective: In the early 1990s, Anna Fermin and I were struggling singer-songwriters on the northside of Chicago, rehearsing in a corner room of a print-shop business owned by Don and Janeen (who also managed our budding musical careers). We were the epitome of poor, downtrodden, and struggling artists. One day Don and Janeen decided they wanted to leave the stress of Chicago, and relocated to the Pacific Northwest coast of Washington state. They gave their business to a “collective” of printers.
The printers business didn’t do very well and one day they informed Anna and I that we had to leave the very next month. By this time Anna was developing a popular fan base in Chicago with her unstoppable talent, in alt-country bands (AnnaBoy and Trigger Gospel), and I was turning my angst-ridden, heart and soul-wrenching songs into rock anthems and road-house dance parties (Fulton St. Saints, JLB).
We didn’t want to jinx anything by leaving our sacred practice venue, so we put our heads together to figure out how to keep the space. We negotiated with the building owners (Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago), which provides small businesses incubator environments in the neighborhood.
Anna suggested that we could create an environment geared towards artists and other creative people by purchasing the 2nd and 3rd floors. So we did. We worked, mostly by ourselves, to completely gut the 2nd floor of the building (we whitewashed the walls with a spray painter that left us spitting out white paint still to this day). We then put an ad in the newspaper for artists, and before long, the 2nd floor filled up, and so we expanded to the 3rd floor, which is now very active as well.
