Issue May/June 2023 - Art in America (2024)

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Art in America, the world’s premier art magazine, delivers in-depth coverage of the global contemporary art scene. Published 11 times per year, every issue contains profiles on respected and rising talents, critical essays and reviews of current exhibitions around the world, written by today’s leading artists, curators and historians.

in this issue

DEPARTMENTSNew TalentWelcome to a brand-new Art in America. With this year’s edition of our annual New Talent issue, we’ve given the magazine a reboot, with new features, a spirited and stylish design, and a unique approach to our cover.The issue kicks off with an expanded Datebook section of exhibitions and events we’re sure you’ll want to know about in the coming months, with some books and films and other things thrown in. We’re introducing fun and thought-provoking new sections, like Battle Royale, which pits one art world fixture against another (in this case, Chelsea and Tribeca, New York’s most-trafficked gallery districts), and Object Lesson, in which we explore a single artwork by an esteemed artist (first up is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who has a retrospective on view now at the Whitney…2 min

DEPARTMENTSCONTRIBUTORSBarry SchwabskyBarry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2020) and two collections of poetry, Feelings of And (2022) and Water from Another Source (2023). He has taught at Goldsmiths College in London, Hunter College in New York, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also co-director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. In these pages, Schwabsky offers an essay on the geometric abstract painter Leon Polk Smith.Eva DíazAn associate professor of contemporary art at Pratt Institute in New York, Eva Díaz is the author of the volume The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (2015). Her writing has appeared in such publications as Aperture, Artforum, New Left…2 min

DEPARTMENTSDATEBOOKGwangju BiennaleA notable destination on the art world map since its founding in 1995, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea has taken “soft and weak like water” as the title for its 14th edition, organized by Tate Modern senior curator Sook Kyung-Lee. Since its opening in April, the Biennale has already awarded its inaugural $100,000 Park Seo-bo Award—named after the painter whose foundation endowed it—to the Seoul-based artist Oum Jeongsoon. The winning work: Elephant Without Trunk, an installation that engages notions of elephants via experiences of people with visual impairments.Through July 9Brian Belott, Sound ScribblesA painter and sculptor who ventures into wide-ranging varieties of performance and other art, Brian Belott also conducts experiments using his mouth and ramshackle recording equipment. Sound Scribbles gathers sounds that many listeners might hesitate to…15 min

DEPARTMENTSHouston, We Have a ProblemOver the past few years, tech bros have been counting on artists to generate hype—and ROI. It can be hard to get people to understand, or care about, something as impenetrably technical as the blockchain. But once Beeple’s $70 million NFT made headlines two years ago, the blockchain was all anyone could talk about. Now, the same thing is happening with private space exploration. This new sector is creating cheaper rockets and building a whole new economy far, far away, using satellites to monitor everything from nuclear facilities to deforestation and to bring the internet to remote locales. They’re enlisting artists to draw attention to their innovations, and to make all that’s happening up there more relatable here on Earth.The more gimmicky the space art, the more headlines it generates.…9 min

DEPARTMENTSTribeca vs. Chelsea*According to the Artforum “Artguide”Sanders: Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Vassell: Courtesy Nicola Vassell Gallery; 56 Leonard: Grant Smith/View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Lantern House: Courtesy Heatherwick Studio, London; Artists Space: Courtesy Artists Space, New York; Dia: Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York; Kapoor: Photo Roy Rochlin via Getty Images; Beuys: Photo Bill Jacobson Studio, New York/Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York; Young: Photo Jung Hee Choi/©Jung Hee Choi, 2017; Sugimoto: Photo Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images…1 min

DEPARTMENTSVideo ArtMUST READVideo/Art: The First Fifty YearsIf you read one book on video, make it this 2020 memoir by Barbara London, a former MoMA curator who was an early supporter of the medium. When video shook up the art world in the 1960s, life was more affordable and art was less professionalized. London tells hilarious, era-defining stories about downtown New York, at a time when artists “passed cameras around like joints.” She shows how chance encounters can come to form canons, such as the time she first met a charming man named Nam June Paik, who would become the so-called “father of video art,” on a city bus. She also explains how MoMA came to own many of the medium’s greatest hits after she lobbied tirelessly from her office, a former…3 min

Issue May/June 2023 - Art in America (2024)

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