The Brooklyn Rail

FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA
Seeing Édouard Glissant in Miami

The Pérez Art Museum in Miami’s (PAMM) current exhibition, Poetics of Relation, is ambitiously conceived. “Inspired by the writings of author and philosopher Édouard Glissant, [it] responds to Miami as a site defined culturally by its diasporic communities and it looks to place these local dynamics in dialogue with more distant contexts that share similar histories.”1

In Conversation

COCO FUSCO with Laila Pedro

Cuban-American artist and scholar Coco Fusco has explored the dynamics of art, bodies, and culture for more than thirty years. She has performed displayed in a cage as an invented primitive character (The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992 – 1994)) and as Dr. Zira, Planet of the Apes’s“ animal psychologist” (Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (2013)), and undertook training in military interrogation techniques to create A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006).

In Conversation

YOKO ONO with Laila Pedro

Over the course of a prolific and inventive career, Yoko Ono has continually challenged the meaning, structure, and limits of art. Since the 1950s, she has been a pioneer of avant-garde and experimental culture, with a multimedia practice that encompasses music, performance, instructions, writing, and film.

In Conversation

INGRID ELLIOTT with Laila Pedro

Curator Ingrid Elliott collaborated with Galerie Lelong on Diálogos constructivistas en la vanguardia cubana [Constructivist Dialogues in the Cuban Vanguard], an exhibition that offers an alternative take on modern art in Cuba.

In Conversation

ANDREA ZITTEL with Laila Pedro

The American sculptor Andrea Zittel has spent over three decades developing, refining, and expanding a multifaceted practice grounded in the details and actions of how life is lived.

In Conversation

PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL with Laila Pedro

The Indian-born artist Prabhavathi Meppayil creates nuanced, rigorous paintings that reveal their structural and chromatic complexities only upon close examination and after long observation.

In Conversation

JAUME PLENSA
with Laila Pedro

In some ways, we all need a poetical shelter to stay within ourselves and protect our own silence. It’s a very loud time. We never know if our words are from us, or just the echo of somebody else.

In Conversation

Heide Hatry with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve and Laila Pedro

Heide Hatry is an artist who grew up on a pig farm in the south of Germany and studied art history at the University of Heidelberg. She has shown her work in galleries and museums in the United States, Germany, and Spain; curated numerous exhibitions; produced over 200 artist’s books; and spent seventeen years running a rare-books store in Heidelberg.

In Conversation

YOKO ONO with Laila Pedro

Over the course of a prolific and inventive career, Yoko Ono has continually challenged the meaning, structure, and limits of art. Since the 1950s, she has been a pioneer of avant-garde and experimental culture, with a multimedia practice that encompasses music, performance, instructions, writing, and film. By turns playful and visceral, violent and witty, Ono’s highly conceptual works are also informed by a profound commitment to peace activism.

In Conversation

CARMEN HERRERA with Laila Pedro

In recent years, Carmen Herrera (b. 1915) has become as renowned for her elegant, geometric abstract paintings as for her unflagging productivity during the decades in which the works were overlooked.

In Conversation

YOAN CAPOTE with Laila Pedro

Yoan Capote is a Cuban artist living in Havana who brings a powerful conceptual focus, a profound grounding in art history, and a multilayered, tactile execution to a body of work that spans installation, sculpture, and painting. Cerebral and deeply psychological, Capote’s work displays a compelling individual vocabulary of materials and themes that is as distinctively situated in a contemporary Cuban vernacular as it is universally evocative.

In Conversation

BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS with Laila Pedro

Since the 1960s, Barkley L. Hendricks has been creating powerful images of intense formal sophistication. Engaging and reworking conventions of portraiture, fashion, and iconography, Hendricks’s work reveals an intense visual focus and a concern with the tactile, technical, and chemical effects of of paint, pigment, and surface.

In Conversation

JOAN SEMMEL with Laila Pedro

Although she started out as an abstract painter, Joan Semmel’s career has come to be understood primarily in terms of the radical figurative paintings she has been creating since the 1970s.

In Conversation

RASHAAD NEWSOME with Laila Pedro

For years, Rashaad Newsome has engaged with Vogue as a dance form and a community. As a participant, producer, and documenter of this complex and vitally important tradition, his work has encompassed video, collage, and dance. Newsome has also spoken frequently and eloquently about the complexities of autonomy, authority, and appropriation around voguing and other modes of cultural production by people of color.

In Conversation

A Space for Everything to Happen
Franklin Sirmans with Laila Pedro

I went to school on 96th Street and 5th Avenue, which is right across the street. The real experience, the more subconscious thing, would be the Studio Museum. It originally was in Harlem and my father had been going there. Because of that experience, it’s always something that’s there and accessible.

In Conversation

HOUSE OF LADOSHA with Laila Pedro

For the past several years, the relentlessly multi-tasking, reinventing, genre-blending House of Ladosha has drawn on a seemingly endless lineage of references and influences to produce immersive nightlife, performance, and installation experiences. Working across and beyond intersections of gender, race, humor and politics, House of Ladosha has created a world of meaning and connection that is fully embodied by its members even as it transcends its own social context.

In Conversation

JOSÉ PARLÁ with Laila Pedro

“For most of my life,” writes José Parlá, “I have experienced being in transition and migration.” As he moves through a layered world of multiple cultures and geographies, Parlá’s intensively textured works move between spaces and mediums: they encompass painting and sculpture, wall fragments brought inside gallery spaces or installed in public, and the polymorphous influence of the underground art scene of the 1980s.

Threads of Fire and Water and Gold

The roving art space We Buy Gold, which Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels opened in Bed-Stuy in March, is successfully managing a tricky balancing act: it is seriously and coherently embedded in its space and moment, even as it resists barricading itself into a particular corner.

Threads of Fire and Water and Gold

The roving art space We Buy Gold, which Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels opened in Bed Stuy in March, is successfully managing a tricky balancing act: it is seriously and coherently embedded in its space and moment, even as it resists barricading itself into a particular corner.

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,the Met’s inaugural exhibition at its new space in the Breuer-designed building the Whitney occupied before its move downtown, sprawls by design.

In Conversation

JOHN E. SCOFIELD with Laila Pedro

In 1975, Robert Motherwell bought a chair from a young sculptor and designer named John E. Scofield. The two developed a friendship and Scofield became Motherwell’s studio assistant.