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This week: We talk with, writer, giant of consciouness, and Chief Curator at the ICA in Boston Helen Molesworth.

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This week: The second installment of our pirate radio sessions, recorded live from NADA 2011! We are joined by local heroes The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago curators Michael Darling and Naomi Beckwith.

Naomi Beckwith is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Beckwith joined the curatorial staff in May 2011. A native Chicagoan, Beckwith grew up in Hyde Park and attended Lincoln Park High School, going on to receive a BA in history from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She completed an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, presenting her master’s thesis on Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems.

Afterward, she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Beckwith was a fall 2008 grantee of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and was named the 2011 Leader to Watch by ArtTable. She serves on the boards of the Laundromat Project (New York) and Res Artis (Amsterdam).

Prior to joining the MCA staff, Beckwith was associate curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Preceding her tenure at the Studio Museum, Beckwith was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, where she worked on numerous exhibitions including Locally Localized Gravity (2007), an exhibition and program of events presented by more than 100 artists whose practices are social, participatory, and communal.

Beckwith has also been the BAMart project coordinator at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a guest blogger for Art21. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at New York alternative spaces Recess Activities, Cuchifritos, and Artists Space.

Beckwith curated the exhibition 30 Seconds off an Inch, which was presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem November 12, 2009 – March 14, 2010. Exhibiting artworks by 42 artists of color or those inspired by black culture from more than 10 countries, the show asked viewers to think about ways in which social meaning is embedded formally within artworks.

Michael Darling (born 1968) is the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Darling joined the MCA staff in July 2010.

Darling received his BA in art history from Stanford University, and he received his MA and PhD in art and architectural history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Darling has worked as an independent writer and curator, contributing essays on art, architecture, and design to publications including Frieze, Art Issues, Flash Art, and LA Weekly. Darling frequently serves as a panelist, lecturer, and guest curator on contemporary art and architecture.

Prior to joining the MCA, Darling was the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he was awarded SAM’s Patterson Sims Fellowship for 2009-10. In 2008, Darling began the program SAM Next, a series of contemporary art exhibitions presenting emerging or underappreciated artists from around the globe. Artist Enrico David, who exhibited as part of SAM Next, has since been nominated for the Turner Prize.

Darling curated the SAM exhibitions Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (June 25 – September 7, 2009), and Kurt (May 13 – September 16, 2010). Target Practice showcased the attacks painting underwent in the years following World War II. Kurt explored Kurt Cobain’s influence on contemporary artists.

Darling was associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before joining SAM. He co-curated The Architecture of R.M. Schindler (2001), which won the International Association of Art Critics “Best Architecture or Design Exhibition” award. The exhibition also won merit awards for interior architecture from the Southern California American Institute of Architects and the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.

Good news for long time friend of Bad at Sports, Anthony Elms, he is heading to Philadelphia to curate for the Institute of Contemporary Art!

We say Hell Yes!

Anthony’s departure will be a major loss to this community but our loss, is there gain and it is nice to know that the Philadelphia recognized what we had. We are sure that this is just the beginning of some fabulous things for our friend and regular contributor, Anthony.

Well done.

Photo: Erin Leland

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART APPOINTS

ANTHONY ELMS AS NEW CURATOR  

PHILADELPHIA, PA

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, is pleased to

announce that Anthony Elms will be joining the ICA as Associate Curator. Anthony

has worked as an independent curator and writer, and he was Assistant Director

of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago for six years. He edits and is

the curator of WhiteWalls, an alternative space for artists’ publication projects

founded in the 1970s. Anthony is just completing work as part of the organizational

team behind this year’s PERFORMA visual art performance biennial in New York.

“It is common to think of museums like the ICA as non-collecting, but that isn’t true,”

Anthony said. “They do not have art objects, but they collect histories and

experiences with the artists that have exhibited. In that sense, I could not be

happier to join a museum with the distinguished and energetic collection of the ICA.”

“I am looking forward to having Anthony’s vision, and his passion for publications,

enrich the work of our stellar curatorial team,” says Robert Chaney, Interim Director.

“We met Anthony when he co-curated the Sun Ra exhibition that ICA hosted,

organized by Hyde Park Art Center,” adds Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. “This is a

wonderful outcome to our first collaboration,” adds Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner.

Anthony’s recent projects include Blast Counterblast; More Alive Than Those Who

Made Them; Glenn Ligon / A People on the Cover, and Unicorn Basking in the Light

of Three Glowing Suns. He was a co-curator of Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun

Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-1968, which enjoyed

enormous success when it traveled to ICA in 2009. His writings have appeared in

Afterall, Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Artforum, May Revue, Modern Painters, New

Art Examiner, and Time Out Chicago, and he has also written essays for numerous

catalogues. He received a BFA in painting from Michigan State University and an

MFA from the University of Chicago, and he continues to exhibit as an artist. In

addition, Anthony is an enthusiastic drummer and record collector. He is also

interested in ghosts. 

Who’s the most interesting art critic in the country right now? Nope, not Jerry Saltz.  I might change my mind tomorrow, but today I’m pretty damn sure it’s Hennessy Youngman. Okay — Hennessy’s not actually an art critic. He’s not an art writer. He’s a thinker of Art Thoughtz who has described himself as “just an American nigga at the cross section of dissonant worlds, and I’m the chaos of those conflicting cultural spheres unresolved in all their wonderful madness.” His stuff takes the form of direct-address video monologues performed by Youngman himself, who sits in a white-walled “alabaster alcove” and proceeds to break down art world rhetoric into its constituent bullshit parts. Have a look at Hennessy’s latest, on Relational Aesthetics:

It’s a truly blissful feeling when someone says straight out loud what you’ve been thinking but were too cowed by your peers to say yourself, no? Youngman spreads this kind of bliss with each new episode of Art Thoughtz. But what he does is not exactly about speaking truth to power – it’s a bit more irony-laced than that. Check out this episode on Curators, for example. It’s pretty sexist (although the observation about Velma hair  was frakkin’ brilliant), and I think Hennessey might be confusing, or at least conflating, curator with dealer here….

I love how in my YouTube stream, this episode is followed by a promotional interview with Rhizome executive director and New Museum curator Lauren Cornell (Free). This coincidental juxtaposition sums it up for me: at the same time that the young, blonde, attractive Cornell seems to exemplify the type of curator Youngman is caricaturing, she’s also one of the few out there who is actively thinking-through the social media practices that Hennessey himself is engaging. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornell wanted to include Youngman in one of her next shows.

Point is, Hennessey Youngman is taking the piss out of everything and everyone; the layers of irony are too thick to fully pry apart and as a result we’re forced to assume a different posture, as it were, in our reception of Hennessy’s Thoughtz. If you read it straight, you’re going to get defensive or pissed off and thus totally miss the point, but if you think it all boils down either to comedy or simply an outsider’s attempt to take a giant shit on the art world, you’re not listening carefully enough. It’s one of those both/and kind of things that pushes us into areas that make us feel uncomfortable. And in my book, that is always a good thing.

Henessey is already something of an internet phenomenon, yet there’s surprisingly little out there about who this guy actually is, where he comes from, etc. I like that he’s a man of mystery and hasn’t yet been included in one of Ms. Cornell’s exhibitions. The dominant culture always manages to absorb its critics, though, so I don’t hold out much hope that he won’t be, sooner or later. I do know that in this interview Hennessy Youngman had the balls to respond to the question “Can you be successful if you’re a Muslim artist?” thusly:

Are you serious? Have you ever heard of this artist collective known as Al-Qaeda? They did this performance piece called 9-11. That was absolutely jaw dropping. They only performed it once, but luckily it was very well documented and can be seen pretty much anywhere on the internet. Highly recommended. Way better than anything them Fluxus or Dada motherfuckers could come up with.

So I’ll hold out just a little bit of hope that Hennessy never cleans up his act enough to grace the museum’s white walls.

Tomorrow students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will unveil four new exhibitions in the Sullivan Galleries, including Having and Being Had, a show that explores “the ritual of curatorial practice and meaning-making in museums.” The latter exhibition also includes a website featuring Q&As on curatorial practice with Chicago curators, cultural practitioners, and me, whose ‘practice,’ such as it is, falls into neither category. All four shows look really interesting – an opening reception for them all will take place tomorrow evening, Friday, December 11, from 4:30-7:00 p.m. in the Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor. Read on below for details on Having and Being Had, along with descriptions of the three other shows on view.  All shows run through January 22nd (note that the galleries will be closed for the holidays from December 24 – January 2nd).

Having and Being Had

Having and Being Had stages a performance on the ritual of curatorial practice and meaning-making in museums. As the title suggests, curators and audiences are as much authors of a legitimizing narrative as they are framed by it. The curators of this exhibition complicate our expectations of museum display by inviting the dynamic participation and active imaginings of the viewer. Having and Being Had invites audiences to reconsider the ways in which language, collections, object value, and display technique seduce audiences with illusions of access and objectivity. Art exhibitions educate and entertain, but do they also mislead and deceive the viewer? Having and Being Had exposes curatorial hierarchy, dismantles curatorial voice, and manipulates display space to engage audiences in the power of their own experiences. On display are the ethics of curatorial practice and the viewers’ imagination.

All the best,

This exhibition features new work by the artists and writers in Text Off the Page 2010, including collaborative projects, performances, installations, and language-based projects.
Featured artists: Shanita Bigelow, Troy Briggs, Annette Elliot, Sarah Jones, Nazafarin Lotfi, J.M. Lowe, Joel Parsons, David Scheier, Corkey Sinks, Jillian Soto, Hurmat Ul Ain, and Colin Winnette.
An evening of Readings/Performances in response to works in the exhibition will be held on Saturday, December 11 at 6:00 p.m. in the Sullivan Galleries.

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The eight artists participating in the Video Installation course attempt to investigate, analyze, and confront various aspects of this practice by focusing on issues of separation and contact. Their work tackles formal questions emerging from constructing multichannel installation, as well as from the intersection of a single-channel, time-based medium with a given space and performed actions.

Featured artists: Emilie Crowe, Lindsay Denniberg, Marco Godoy, Mikey McPariane, Brianne Milder, MZL, Wang Ye-Feng, and Courtney Bird Ziegler.

Stories of Relativity

How do we relate to one another? The nine artists in this exhibition explore the complex nature of human connectivity, considering how time, identity, and interpersonal tensions shape our relationships and affect our interactions.

Featuring recent work by: Hope Esser, Jang soon Im, Je Je Je Jiyeon Lim, Zihan Loo, Cheryl Pope, Casilda Sanchez, Chryssa Tsampazi, Andrew Norman Wilson, and Wei-Hsuan Vicky Yen.

Curated by Amelia Love (MA 2013), Curatorial Assistant, Department of Exhibitions