ART SPEAKS

Photo:
Steve Locke — Ross Collab
LaToya Ruby Frazier — Luigi De Palma

Art Speaks is delighted to present a conversation between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Steve Locke

Drawing on their recent exhibitions—LaToya Ruby Frazier’s at MoMA and Steve Locke’s at MASS MoCA—these two politically engaged American artists will reflect on how in their works they negotiate racial, social, economic, and artistic structures of power.  With shared interests in history, justice, racism, systemic violence, education, queer rights and health care, both consider their works as platforms from which to speak to the issues in the world that demand our attention.

The conversation will move from the macro to the micro, evoking their personal backgrounds, as well as the role of the artist, the writers that inform their thinking (James Baldwin in particular), their quite different relationships to portraiture, and their respective memorials for Breonna Taylor and Freddie Gray. By investigating labour conditions or the violence and policing enacted upon Black or queer people, Ruby Frazier and Locke lament injustices, acknowledge the victories gained in spite of continuing oppression, and examine the complex social relationships resulting from shared histories of marginalization, oppression and solidarities.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work documents American post-industrial cities and their intersecting narratives of labor, gender, and race. A consummate activist and storyteller, her intimate photographs make visible the lives and resistances of working people in the face of environmental racism. Growing out of the legacy of Social Documentary, Frazier’s work reclaims dignity for her collaborators, offering insight into the human cost of industry. She teaches us how art is a powerful tool for social transformation.

LaToya Ruby Frazier has received numerous awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the ICP’s Infinity Award for Best Publication in recognition of her first book The Notion of Family. Her work is shown and collected globally, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Museum of Modern Art in New York where she just just closed a extensive survey exhibition titled Monuments of Solidarity.

Steve Locke is an artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. His practice critically engages with the western canon to interrogate the connections between desire, identity, violence and memory. His practice asks us to confront and critically engage with a complicated present and painful past by reexamining relations between and among men, or how racism is intertwined with American culture.

Locke’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and most recently at MASS MoCA, where, in August, he opened an expansive survey show titled The Fire Next Time. His works are collected by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, AKG Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among others.

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ART SPEAKS is dedicated to presenting a platform of international artists and thinkers to provoke and stimulate thought.

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ART SPEAKS is proud to sponsor the panel discussion Charting an Inflection Point in Art
Criticism and Publishing presented by Momus at the 2024 Plural Art Fair.
Momus editors and critics Merray Gerges, Jessica Lynne, and Catherine G. Wagley will come
together from their respective coasts to discuss the significant inflection point at which we
find ourselves in art criticism and publishing. The conversation, moderated by Momus’s
founding publisher Sky Goodden, will touch on the new existential threats to art writing
(boycotts, closures, and conglomerations!) but largely focus on the regenerative and
redirecting potential of this moment, especially for independent art publishers and
historically underrepresented art writers.

Moderator: Sky Goodden, Publisher, Momus
Panelists: Merray Gerges, Associate Editor; Jessica Lynne, Associate Editor; and Catherine G.
Wagley, Managing Editor.

About Momus
Momus is an online platform for art writing and criticism. Led by founding publisher Sky
Goodden, Momus is headquartered in Montreal, with an international team based in Brussels,
Los Angeles, New York, Newfoundland, and Dubai. They are committed to a model of
discourse that is plural and rigorous.

Launched in 2014, Momus has published over 750 texts, many of them by emerging critics.
Their editors provide sensitive and in-depth editorial support to writers at every stage of their
career and across all stages of a text. Momus provides above-industry-average writer’s fees,
while ensuring all of their content is available to readers for free. In 2017, they began Momus:
The Podcast, co-hosted by Director of Programs Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden, in their
effort to bring criticism into a conversational register.

In 2019, Momus established a series of mentorship initiatives for emerging writers, editors,
journalists, and publishers. Momus Programs (including residencies and fellowships) are
designed to support historically underrepresented art writers through professional
development and peer networking, transparently charting new challenges and offering
opportunities in the field.

In all of their activities, Momus strives to build an arts writing infrastructure that is responsive
and collaborative. They’ve developed valued partnerships with other industry leaders
including Forge Project, Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, and Critical Minded, and
continue to grow their network. In both the long and short term, they aim to serve
underrepresented art writers and under-addressed readerships. Momus works with the
conviction that art writing is integral to our cultural ecosystem. They value criticism as
essential, imaginative, and a craft in itself.

Momus Talks is an ongoing series of public events hosted my Momus, often with their
colleagues and collaborators internationally. Ranging in format from artist talks and critics in
conversation events, to book launches and live podcasts recordings, Momus Talks aims to
galvanize communities around a model of art writing and criticism that is plural and rigorous.

David-Wallace Wells photo : Beowulf Sheehan
Amitav Ghosh photo : Ivo van der Bent

This fall Art Speaks will address the most definitive issue of our times, the climate crisis. Join us on September 27 to listen to two of our most impactful writers on this subject. Following an unprecedented summer during which the most extreme weather events have occurred in the Global North, the authors’ deep knowledge in the field will bring insight into our understanding of the environment and our future within it. As uncontrollable wildfires continue to burn across Canada, this talk could not be more timely.

Amitav Ghosh is the author of many award-winning books including The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. Gun Island, was released in September 2019 and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, was released in October, 2021. Amitav Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates.

David Wallace-Wells is a writer for New York Times Opinion, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and the author of the international best-seller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, which the Guardian called “an epoch-defining book” and the Washington Post called “the Silent Spring of our time.” He was previously deputy editor of New York Magazine and, before that, the deputy editor of the Paris Review.

Image credits: Helen Molesworth photographed by Brigitte Lacombe. Jarrett Earnest photographed by Jonathan Grassi.

Art Speaks is proud to present a conversation between Helen Molesworth and Jarrett Earnest, which will focus on Molesworth’s impressive career and trajectory in the art world as a thinker, writer and curator.

Helen Molesworth is a writer and a curator based in Los Angeles. She recently hosted Death of an Artist a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. She was the originating host of the podcast “Recording Artists” with The Getty. She is also the host of PROGRAM, streamed interviews with artists and writers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Jarrett Earnest is a writer and curator living in New York City. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and editor of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (2020), Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980-1993 (2021) and Devotion: today’s future becomes tomorrow archive (2022). His criticism has been published in magazines and exhibition catalogs around the world, and appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. His new collection of photographs and writing,Valid Until Sunset, will be out this fall.

Image credits:
(left) Manuel Mathieu, The Prophetess 2, 2020, acrylic, chalk, and tape on canvas, 110 x 90 1 1/2 in.
(right) Curtis Talwst Santiago,Saint Monix Mumala to the Lost and in Need, 2020, paint, spray paint, and charcoal on canvas, 32 x 32 in.

Art Speaks is delighted to present flow / form, a new online conversation platform launching on the @artspeaksmtl IGTV channel on Tuesday, September 14, 2021, at 8pm with a conversation between multidisciplinary artists Manuel Mathieu and Curtis Talwst Santiago. In this program, the two artists share the foundations of their artistic practices, what drives them to create and the spiritual convictions that shape their lives and work. The dialogue offers a unique window into the artists’ worlds and reveals a moment of genuine connection.

Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) holds a graduate degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2020, both the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and The Power Plant, Toronto presented solo exhibitions by the artist. Mathieu was one of the artists recognized by the 2020 Sobey Art Award. His work is part of the collections of the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Curtis Talwst Santiago (b. 1979, Edmonton, Canada) studied as an apprentice of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The artist recently presented the solo exhibition Can’t I Alter at The Drawing Center in New York, NY (2020) curated by Claire Gilman and is currently presenting the site-specific installation LIMING as part of the multi-location art exhibition THE GATE presented in Hamburg’s district of HafenCity. His work is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, NY.

‘サモアについてのうた (Samoa ni tsuite no uta) | A song about Sāmoa’(2019–) detail by Yuki Kihara.
Funding received from Creative New Zealand – the national arts development agency of the Government of New Zealand. Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand.

ART SPEAKS is a proud sponsoring partner for the keynote lecture of the Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX 2019) in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) on the theme of Asian indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art.

In this keynote presentation, Yuki Kihara discusses her new body of work, whose title is adapted from a popular Japanese song entitled ‘サモア島の歌 (Samoatou no uta)’ meaning ‘A song from Samoa.’ Music textbooks for elementary school students in Japan feature the song. The lyrics describe the Samoan archipelago situated in the Moana — an Indigenous pan-Polynesian name for the Pacific continent — as a paradise on earth settled by ‘noble savages’ — a typically romantic, Orientalist imagining of neighbouring Island nations held by Japan dating back since the Edo period in the 17th century.

The work serves to subvert the colonial gaze by shedding light on the lived experience in the Moana while reframing the relationship between Japan and the Moana, specifically Sāmoa. The work takes an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Moana identity, gender and history, while referencing the interracial Samoan and Japanese heritage as a point of conceptual departure.
This lecture explores the conceptual threads behind the work’s first five of 20 ‘Indigenized’ kimono presented across five iterations — from 2019 until 2023 — and created by the artist with the Indigenous audience in mind.
A launch of her book, Samoan Queer Lives (Little Island Press, NZ) co-edited by Kihara and Dan Taulapapa McMullin, will follow the keynote lecture.

About Yuki Kihara

A native of Sāmoa, Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist whose work seeks to challenge dominant and singular historical narratives through visual arts, dance and curatorial practice, engaging with postcolonial history and representation and how they intersect with race, gender, spirituality and sexual politics. Kihara lives and works in Sāmoa. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured Kihara solo exhibition, Living Photographs, in 2008, and subsequently acquired her works for their permanent collection.

Kihara’s works are also in other major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum and Giorgio Armani, as well as in numerous exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial (2002 and 2015), Auckland Triennial (2009), Sakahàn Quinquennial (2013), Daegu Photo Biennale (2014), Honolulu Biennial (2017) and Bangkok Art Biennale (2018). Kihara is a research fellow at the National Museums of World Cultures in The Netherlands.

This Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) event is co-presented as part of the international 2019 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange, entitled “GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal: Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art,” from June 11-15.

The CISSC is working in collaboration with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU GAX Network; NYU Global Research Initiatives; the Office of the Provost; the Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories; Art Speaks; and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art.
Check out the complete program or email GAX2019Montreal@gmail.com.

photo credit Celeste Sloman

“Art tells you things you didn’t know you needed to know.” – Jerry Saltz

Art Speaks is pleased to present leading art critic, JERRY SALTZ for its upcoming talk.

Jerry Saltz’s witty, provocative writing portrays art and the shifting art market with sharp insight. He has been dubbed the “people’s critic” for his ability to bring art to a broader audience, and for his notable role in stimulating energetic debates on art and politics through social media.

Since 2007, Saltz has been the senior art critic at New York magazine, and has formerly held the same position at the Village Voice from 1998 to 2007. He is the recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, as well as the 2015 National Magazine Award for Columns & Commentary. He has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has written for Frieze, Parkett and Art in America, among many other publications.

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As a dynamic thinker and successful social entrepreneur, ZITA COBB has inspired many around the world with her visionary approach to creating meaningful change in her home of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. Zita’s initiatives have helped build a new leg on the Island’s economy that had been left bereft by the collapse of the cod fishing industry. Her first project, Fogo Island Arts, is a world-class artist-in-residence program that brings Canadian and international artists, curators, writers and thinkers to live among the island’s communities and work in architect-designed studios placed on bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Alumni of the program include artists Jumana Manna, Abbas Akhavan, Brian Jungen and Janice Kerbel. 

Through Shorefast, the charity she founded with two of her brothers, Cobb has added numerous initiatives that admirably accomplish her goal of creating resilience for her community. Her powerful story and her commitment to philosopher Dr. Gill Chin Li’s belief in “creating a global network of intensely local places,” will be at the heart of her talk in Montreal. Zita Cobb’s exemplary approach to rural renewal has earned her global praise, an honorary doctorate from Mcgill University as well as the 2016 Order of Canada. 

The talk will be followed by a conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen (Strategic Director) and Alexandra McIntosh (Director of Programs and Exhibitions) of Fogo Island Arts. 

ART SPEAKS is dedicated to presenting a platform of international artists and thinkers to provoke and stimulate thought.

artspeaks.ca
#artspeaksmtl

Frances Stark is a mid-career, interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Using text, images and literary sources, she mines the complexities of everyday life for her provocative subject matter. Celebrated for her unabashed approach, she reveals herself in her work — utilizing the personal to speak to complex concerns related to the broader public, in the manner of literature.

Osservate, leggete con me, currently on view at La Biennale de Montréal will be a jumping off point for Stark’s discussion on the important role dialogue has played in her work.

Stark’s most recent solo exhibitions include Intimism at the Art Institute of Chicago (2015) and Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991-2015, a traveling survey exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was the 2015 recipient of the Absolut Art Award.

The historical transition from modern to contemporary art has lead to a change in the way artists use the support of paper and, often, a change in the manner of displaying these works in museum spaces. Museums dedicated to contemporary art are currently confronted with a choice regarding the consolidation of these historical periods in the conservation of works on paper. A panel of invited curators will discuss their various approaches and the place of historical works in their collections.

Moderator: Jean Gagnon,director of preservation and access to collections,Cinémathèque québécoise

Guests: Stéphane Aquin, chief curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
John Zeppetelli, director and chief curator, MAC Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal