This essay concerns the “south of the south, the south of South America,” written from the north of the north, the north of North America. Drafted from a position of physical distance between author and subject, and troubled by the power dynamics of north gazing south, this selection…
Aktualní umêní (Contemporary Art), a rare, hand-assembled magazine by the Czech artists’ group of the same name, began production in late 1964. Here, the first two issues are reproduced in their entirety for the first time, along with a unique prototype for the second issue, which offers an exceptional opportunity to compare plans and the final realization.
Czech artist Běla Kolářová was a key figure in Prague’s intellectual circles in the decade of the 1960s, a time of great optimism in Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia, one of both relative political freedom and cultural searching. The home she shared with her partner, the artist and poet Jiří Kolář, was the center of a progressive artistic…
We live in a world of unedited images. Pictures are present in our most private chambers and on the most public social-media platforms. Photography is without question the lingua franca of our time, even if the nature and ubiquity of photographs have been marked by a turn toward digital means of capturing and storing images.…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition.
Chen Zhen’s death in 2000 did not stop his art from living on, thanks to the hard work of Xu Min—Chen Zhen’s widow, who continues to organize his solo shows and also to restore his artworks. Xu was trained as an artist in Shanghai, but she has dedicated herself to supporting Chen’s art since the couple…
In this interview conducted during a C-MAP research trip to Belgrade in the spring of 2012, Vučićević speaks to Jon Hendricks and Gretchen Wagner about both art and life.
Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
The book Striptease by Sonia Švecová (Czech, born 1946) is one of many little-known gems within the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at MoMA . Švecová was born in 1946 in the former Czechoslovakia and was a central figure in Aktualní Umeni (also known as Aktual Art or simply Aktual), a small group of artists based in…
Renowned Chilean critic Adriana Valdés visited the Museum in April 2015 to speak to the C-MAP Latin America group about the Chilean art scene and the work of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she generously agreed to record a video interview and share her thoughts and memories of the Chilean art world before and after…
As museums move to put more geographically inclusive displays on view, a tension in emphasis–between cross-geographic correspondences and local particularities–is necessarily at stake. We convened a conversation between art historian, Alexander Alberro; curator, Doryun Chong; and museum director, Edit Sasvári, each with their own regional focus, to discuss the possibility of “the global museum,” what…
