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The Conversation Art Podcast

A podcast that goes behind the scenes and between the lines of the contemporary art worlds, through conversations with artists, dealers, curators, and collectors--based in Los Angeles, but reaching nationally and internationally.
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The Conversation Art Podcast
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Now displaying: May, 2016
May 28, 2016

Milwaukee-based artist and multi-hyphenate (curator, professor, art reviewer, artist-run gallerist) Michelle Grabner talks about:

Being essentially a life-long Midwesterner, and how for her Chicago was her big-city experience, and she appreciates that city much more now that she no longer lives there, and yet she recommends that all young artists get out of the cities, and certainly towns, that they're from to experience different cultural environs; the scripts that young artists (including her students) are given for when they move to X new city out of grad school (and I offer to doctor the script she gives to her students heading to L.A., suggesting that they head to Milwaukee or Cleveland or NY instead); the way that, post-9/11, the 'Hot Mess' sensibility has been playing out in art, and what that says about the state of the art world and its surroundings; how her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, combined with her curating the 2014 Whitney Biennial, led to a bit of a gold rush on her work, particularly in being picked up by the James Cohan Gallery in NYC; her co-curating of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, from soup to nuts: how institutions, including the Whitney in particular, don't like to be declarative, as in saying that Michelle was 'the first artist-curator of a major museum exhibition,' though in fact she essentially was; the steps leading up to her getting the job; the process of selecting artists, including doing 130 studio visits in preparation (from which 53 artists were included), and how weird and freaked out artists got, compared to prior visits, because it was a 'Biennial studio visit'; how transparent she was with artists about the studio visits, in saying that she was 'doing research' for the Whitney Biennial; the richness of that one-hour studio visit as an exchange of ideas rather than just a 'you're in or you're out'; the controversy around her inclusion of Donelle Wooldford, the fictional African-American artist – invented by artist Joe Scanlon and played/acted by Jennifer Kidwell – and how that played out, particularly with the departure of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? that Michelle had curated into the video portion of the show; how the importance of representation in the art world, through that piece, is a conversation that both stirred up a lot of heat but remains a difficult conversation to have and especially to maintain having; on the back end of the show, how frustrating it was that there were hardly any critical reviews that addressed the work in the show, but instead were about the biennial as a whole, the politics around it, etc.; her current preparation for curating the Portland Biennial, opening this July 9th; and finally, she attempts to answer the admittedly charged question: does she have it all?

May 21, 2016
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http://theconversationpod.com/ Please subscribe to The Conversation on iTunes, and leave a positive review: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/conversation-artist-podcast/id481461646 New York gallerist Emma Hanley, associate director at her father Jack Hanley's Lower East Side gallery, talks about: Growing up in the Bay Area with two artist parents, and a collector grandmother, and her experiences hanging around and eventually doing small jobs at her dad's gallery in the Mission district of San Francisco; her stints working at Sotheby's and, more recently, Christie's, where she worked up until switching to her post at Jack Hanley Gallery, where she's been a little over a year; how a comment from Jerry Saltz led her to start working for her dad; the challenges of working with artists, including when they get approached by big New York galleries (when the gallery was based in San Francisco); how being a middle child is serving her well in being able to handle artist personalities, and to remain unemotional in their various moments of stress and freaking out, by taking herself out of the equation; how often what the artist is freaking out about is the fact that they need to address any unresolved issues with their work on their own, a reality they typically don't want to face head on, hence the acting out; and how, thanks to having had a lot of strong personality types in her family, she gets along well with both artists and collectors, perfect qualifications for her job. The Conversation on Stitcher (the alternative to iTunes): http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wwwstitchercompodcasttheconversation/the-conversation-art-podcast?refid=stpr The Conversation on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Conversation-An-Artist-Podcast/254884424579431 http://instagram.com/artistpodcast Twitter: @artistpodcast Your support of the podcast is very much appreciated- donations can be made via the website, and help keep the show going.
May 15, 2016

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http://theconversationpod.com/ Please subscribe to The Conversation on iTunes, and leave a positive review: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/conversation-artist-podcast/id481461646 Los Angeles-based artist and witch (yes, you read that right) Amanda Yates Garcia, along with co-host Deb Klowden Mann, talks about: Her great craftsman home in the West Adams neighborhood, and how she got in before the gentrification race that's going on now; how she answers the question of what she does by saying that she's a witch, and the ensuing conversation around that, including being a provocateur even when she doesn't feel like being one; artists and witches through the ages, and how the meaning of being a witch can be as diverse as the meanings of being an artist; how a big part of being a witch, for her, is examining authority- who gets to make the rules; how to invoke your spirit figure, whether it's a name that's been invoked many times, from your own culture ideally, or more one of your own created entity; how magic, not unlike art, is not about belief, believing in magic, or believing in art; how she was raised in a Wiccan household with a feminist mother, but who also had a lot of patriarchal ideas; the failings of patriarchy today, and what happened in her "Devouring Patriarchy - Healing the Wounds of the Father" workshop; how, in addition to representing for witches, she's also representing for 'healing,' a maligned word in the context of contemporary art, but she doesn't give a f*ck—it's desperately needed in our world now (that and love); her performance "Capitalism Exorcism;" the subtle distinctions between objects used in performance/ceremony as ritual objects, and becoming art objects; how she is able to sustain herself as a witch, but not an artist; how she's no longer attached to the idea of being known as 'an artist,' an identity that she (and many) was especially attached to out of grad school; and she offers a magical financial tip, having to do with getting (buying) the thing that you yourself are selling. The Conversation on Stitcher (the alternative to iTunes): http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wwwstitchercompodcasttheconversation/the-conversation-art-podcast?refid=stpr The Conversation on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Conversation-An-Artist-Podcast/254884424579431 http://instagram.com/artistpodcast Twitter: @artistpodcast Your support of the podcast is very much appreciated- donations can be made via the website, and help keep the show going.

May 8, 2016
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http://theconversationpod.com/ Please subscribe to The Conversation on iTunes, and leave a positive review: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/conversation-artist-podcast/id481461646 Ben Davis, National Critic for ArtNet News and author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, talks about: His time in Australia at the (x) conference, and his meetings with artist Ben Quilty (also a social activist work); art and activism, and art & politics; the mutually incompatible art tribes that exist among the different 'art worlds;' how the fact that all the different complaints from various factions of the art world(s) can all be true at once, and how disorienting that can be (for Ben); how outside of the cities where there's a market, the conversation is almost always about social aesthetics (what Ben calls "social practice") instead, and how that's where government arts support tends to gravitate; how some of the most interesting art – art that's 'underground and weird' - is being made outside of the art world bubble, among them Fee Plumley, an artist based in Adelaide; sections from his book "9.5 Theses on Art and Class" -- the title and also a specific chapter of his book which was originally written as a pamphlet and intervention of an art show in NY on art and class – including trickle-down theories of both economics and art; and art education, and particularly what for Ben was a profoundly moving article: A Eulogy for Hope: The Silent Murder of Gallery 37 ; what explains the fact that grad schools are made up of 2/3 women, but galleries represent 1/3 women…what happened in between?; what the mechanisms are that make up the art world/how it works; his piece "Do you have to be rich to make it as an artist?"; how the conversation about the art market is a complete dead end; how cities with much smaller art markets, but much cheaper housing, are better for artists; and how without the writing, without the intellectual circulation around the production of art, art's just an overpriced piece of decoration. The Conversation on Stitcher (the alternative to iTunes): http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wwwstitchercompodcasttheconversation/the-conversation-art-podcast?refid=stpr The Conversation on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Conversation-An-Artist-Podcast/254884424579431 http://instagram.com/artistpodcast Twitter: @artistpodcast Your support of the podcast is very much appreciated- donations can be made via the website, and help keep the show going.
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