MFA Art Writing, SVA

#NewOnDegreeCritical Though politically involved, Smith does not feel that activism and art are smoothly cognate. Instead, she has asserted her interest in using ‘the tactics of activism in service of ecstatic social space and contemplation,’ rather than finding the need for dogma and didacticism in art. In its culminating images, Sojourner presents a kind of micro-body politic: an adorned nation of young artists and activists drawing from spiritual ancestors that have traversed the mundane and forged their own personal realms. Student David C. Shuford (Class of 2021) reviews Cauleen Smith’s Mutualities on view at the Whitney until Jan 31, 2021. Read here: https://bit.ly/2V967VJ

#FallbackFriday "The experience felt like entering one of her canvases." Thirteen years ago, alumna Christine Licata (@clicatabx, Class of 2008) reviewed BYOF-Bring Your Own Flowers, Ei Arakawa’s interpretative performance of Amy Sillman’s (@amyandomar) artistic process. Managing editor Lune Ames looks back at how this improvisational frenzy mimed a now bygone era, punctuated by Trumpism and the Covid-19 pandemic, and how Sillman’s own process seemed to foreshadow this ...impending liminality. As we are tasked with reimagining what collaboration and process can look like virtually or socially-distanced, the language around this very question of process comes forth in a book of Sillman’s own words: Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings. In the Oct 29 virtual conversation with department chair David Levi Strauss (see recording on department website), Sillman describes this process of being in-between things. As things go awry, they change, too; Sillman calls this metabolizing. Metabolization offers a way through by being with the material unknown as we grieve, mortified by our own species. Though our bodies are limited or prohibited in sharing physical space, language has a way of transporting, so may this reconsideration of BYOF-Bring Your Own Flowers become some kind of a vehicle! Read here: https://bit.ly/3pPiV1y

Tune in tomorrow (Thurs, Oct 29) @ 6:30 PM for editor and writer Seph Rodney’s virtual talk on beautiful art, followed by a conversation with chair David Levi Strauss. Details here: https://bit.ly/32W4nU9 This conversation and talk will focus on Rodney's encounters with that which he considers beautiful in art, thinking about the challenges these encounters present, how such beauty might provoke to jealousy or to shrink in our own estimations of ourselves, or might make us wo...nder at our capacities to honor beauty and give it a place in our lives. Seph Rodney, PhD, is the opinions editor and managing editor of the Sunday Edition for Hyperallergic and has written for the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and other publications. He is featured on the podcast The American Age. His book The Personalization of the Museum Visit was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize. Find him at sephrodney.com.

#FallbackFriday Writing on the eve of Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day nearly four years ago, alumna Tara Stickley (class of 2013) lamented that a Barbie Doll-esque image of women perpetrated by events like the Miss USA Pageant (owned by Trump for nearly 20 years) would soon also infiltrate the White House, where reductive imagingof women into a sleek, airbrushed, and anonymous formality is one of the ways femininity is leveled and power is taken. And the past several years under President Trump’s regime have seen Stickley’s prediction come to pass. Now, with the impending ascendancy of Joe Biden to the Presidency, Editor-in-Chief Jessica Holmes revisits Stickley’s review of Alike Cooper: Wet Suits." Read here: https://bit.ly/32KHByx

Tune in THIS Thurs Oct 29 @ 6:30 PM to the conversation between painter Amy Sillman and chair David Levi Strauss about Sillman’s newly released book, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings (After 8 Books, 2020). Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book. Zoom details here: https://bit.ly/34yc9ot