Top Picks for Art Online Week of November 15th
Talk: Nick Cave and Friends
November 17, 2020 / 12pm CT / free w/registration
Has anyone seen Nick Cave's current exhibit down at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas? I've been weighing the COVID risk weekly as I deeply want to see this exhibit but am trying to be hella responsible ...sigh...Either way, I always find Cave's work to be more than moving, from his video installations, to dance performances, to his intricately conceived textile machinations-- he can do it all-- each work moving outward into an ecstatic, emotional vibration. I love Cave's work even more since learning that he went to high school in the city I currently live in in Missouri- go Kewpies? Yes. I said Kewpies. This talk will feature Cave, dancer Damita Jo Freeman, musician Nona Hendryx, and publisher Linda Johnson Rice-- each equally as prolific and awe-inspiring in their own right!-- as they talk about Cave's inspiration and key cultural turning points "from Soul Train to Ebony."
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Black Music in America: 16mm screening
Fresh Produce w/Greg Hamilton / fb live November 18, 2020 / 9-9:45pm CT / free
Deep from the basement of Greg Hamilton, another 16mm screening will run its reels for all to enjoy! This time, the film will be the rare 25 minute documentary Black Music in America featuring jazz and blues performances from such greats as Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson and Sly & the Family Stone (and many others!). This particular film is soon to leave Greg's unique library so catch it while you can! We're all lucky that this cinephile is giving all of us who don't have a projector on hand a chance to share in the wonder and grainy beauty of cinema together. xox
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True Crime and the Case for Abolition Documentary with Pooja Rangan and Brett Story
November 18, 2020 / 12-1 pm ET / free
The wildly popular True Crime documentary is a genre that I find problematic...but naturally tend to enjoy due to its inherent narrative thrill. As an audience we lust after the misfortune of others, seeking justice, resolution, some sense of shared normalcy or ethics while also hoping to be wildly entertained...and it's only been on the rise thanks to streaming platforms that seem to see it as easy/cheap content. This lecture will discuss the relationship between true crime and documentary, looking for a future in which these films can be more than lurid storytelling as the event notes: "We discuss the collaboration between true crime and documentary, the socio-legal construction of criminality, and the false promises of reform, to argue for an abolition documentary that relinquishes, once and for all, its investments in guilt, innocence, and the category of crime." Side note: I've seen Pooja Rangan speak before and she was phenomenal and Brett Story's most recent film, The Hottest August, made my 2020 Top Ten List: don't miss this!
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One Day Geology Bootcamp
November 19, 2020 / 10am-2:15pm / free w/registration
Nov 19th Geology Bootcamp Rutgers
The co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere is the focus of this online course brought to you by Rutgers University & NASA's joint ENIGMA (Evolution of Nanomachines In Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors) team aimed at promoting and researching the field of astrobiology. Some topics that will be discussed in this event include the development of the Earth's crust, how rocks are dated, and the origin of minerals & their cycles through geologic time. It will also explain to me what "Isotopic Fractionation Work" is. Even though the event is being hosted by space bio-geo-logists (or something?), it is geared at an undergraduate level so don't be intimidated.
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In Performance: Leila Josefowicz + George Condo. Internal Riot
November 20, 2020 / 2pm EST / free w/registration
George Condo's paintings freak me out. As does the fact that he dated an Olsen twin. Regardless, his paintings evoke something bulbous and evil-- like geometrically possessed Picassos-- that feel at home with equally as irksome Carroll Dunham or maybe corporeal Philip Guston's? However, the unease about them is somewhat fitting to the times I guess. His current show, Internal Riot, is on display at Hauser & Wirth and, in conjunction with the exhibit, violinist Leila Josefowicz will perform a new piece by composer Matthias Pintscher. I just listened to a piece by Pintscher titled "Whirling tissue of light," a piano solo with an eerie air that seems all too fitting to the garish paintings and the isolated viewing of art during pandemic times. I like this multidisciplinary approach and live-experience share, especially from a space that so often feels shrouded in exclusion: more of this please art world!
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Picturing Pandemics: From the Distant Past to the Recent Present
Princeton University, Princeton Art Museum / webinar via zoom November 20, 2020 / 2pm ET / free w/registration
How will this current pandemic manifest in visual art? Will it be a digital hellscape of zooms? Or maybe someone out there is going in the opposite direction, some feral sculptor turning sticks into COVID molecules or drawing with forest fire ash, outside in the free, safe breaths of nature? Naturally, pandemics throughout the ages found their way into the symbolic world of art, some renderings of which are on display in a Princeton Art Museum exhibit titled Images of Illness. From the bubonic plague to the AIDS crisis, the images brought together serve as representations of life, death, emotion and history each with a differing perspective and media. Bryan Just, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas, Laura Giles Curator of Prints and Drawings, Veronica White Curator of Academic Programs, and graduate student in Molecular Biology Robbie LeDesma will discuss the ancient to contemporary ways artists visualize the effects of the seen and unseen worlds of collective disease.
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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com
