“The whole thing got weird the weekend before spring break,” Tim Portlock begins. He’s on the phone in Philadelphia, where his wife lives and where they cohabit during the summer. Portlock is a 2020 Great Rivers Biennial (GRB) award winner and the head…
Amy Sherald is an American artist known for her photograph-based portraits. While she is perhaps most known for her painting of former first lady Michelle Obama, Sherald has been creating portraits of individuals from the African American community for decades. Sherald’s body of work is unique in that…
The following interview took place prior to the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
Rachel Youn was “in the final stretch” of preparation for their Great Rivers Biennial (GRB) exhibition, slated for May 8. “This was the first time I worked on a project…
The following interview took place prior to the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
What is different now? Are not the racial divisions within our society just more deeply outlined than before? How are attitudes toward stay-at-home mandates based on privilege? Isn’t the expectation of…
Growing up, Mickalene Thomas was conscious of the lack of depictions of black people in art history and even in the media of her time. As a result, she drew particular inspiration from black celebrities such as singer/actress Eartha Kitt and black characters such as Whoopi Goldberg’s Celie in…
Bethany Collins moved from one part of Chicago to another in March. “Moving day during a pandemic is definitely worse,” she tells me. But her new neighborhood offers a more walkable part of the city and a daily walk has become part of the quarantine regimen. Collins and I laugh…
Upon first glance, British-born artist Nicola Tyson’s portraits may call to mind words like ‘ghoulish’ and ‘child-like.’ While viewers may be able to discern a human figure, the bodies and features are so distorted that it’s impossible to determine what the subjects look like. This is because Tyson…
Even though CAM has been closed since March, a conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya makes me think even more about exhibitions without an audience. Sepuya’s summer survey in St. Louis is now documented in a gorgeous monograph, a selection from thirteen years of the artist’s photographic explorations within…
Sanford Biggers’s work has long focused on African and African American material culture and history. Biggers’s interest in quilting is rooted in the rich tradition of African American quilting, especially those produced by the women of Gee’s Bend—a small, isolated Black community in Alabama. Although each quilter has…
Tim Youd knows what he’ll be doing for the next month of COVID. “For me,” he says from his Los Angeles home, “it’s a compulsion to make art, and I’m very grateful to have a chance to devote myself to my compulsion—re-typing one novel for a month.”