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Winter 2007 |
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Spotlight: Dialogue with Curator, Stephanie Smith and Artadia Founder & President, Christopher E. Vroom |
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The Artadia Awards are selected through a rigorous two-step juried review which begins with an open application process and culminates in studio visits to the short-listed artists and the selection of the awards. Curators and artists serve as jurors and they play a critical role in making both the awards and the process itself constructive for the artists involved. Stephanie Smith, the Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum in Chicago, recently helped make our Artadia Awards in Chicago a success. Her deep knowledge of both the local art scene and the art-historical context within which the artists operate proved invaluable while her passion for investigating artistic practice is emblematic of the very best critical inquiry happening in America today. Over the past dozen years, Ms. Smith has established a curatorial record centered on bringing process-based and/or politically and socially-engaged art practices into the gallery space, to great effect.
CEV: Stephanie, I'm amazed by the breadth of your curatorial work. Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to contemporary art? SS: I fell into it in a way. I was studying history and art history and a bit of studio art as an undergrad at Rice University and took internships at first the Menil Collection and then at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (CAM). I enjoyed having behind-the-scenes access to the museum. That's when I fell in love with contemporary art and when I began incorporating it into my studies. A full-time curatorial position opened up at the CAM and I had the opportunity to work with fantastic curators who gave me the opportunity do my own curating fresh out of school. I realized that I loved working with artists to help bring new art and ideas into the world CEV: Do your exhibitions generally begin with an artist or an idea? SS: It varies from project to project but I always try to incorporate the temperament and needs of the institution. “Beyond Green: Toward A Sustainable Art" (2006), for example, was a hybrid project that made sense for the Smart. I realized that a lot of great work was being produced in the US and Europe around issues of sustainability, and it wasn’t getting serious attention in museums. I went back and forth between the artists and the ideas until it all settled into a show, a book, a set of programs. (The show is currently touring through a partnership between the Smart and Independent Curators International.) The response has been fantastic: sustainability is a topic that’s gaining traction within cultural conversations and I’m glad the Smart helped bring it forward. CEV: Could you contrast working in an academic environment like the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago and a Kunsthalle like the CAM? SS: Both have their benefits. I really love being part of the university in part because a place like the U of C has an amazing intellectual and creative fervor. That offers a fertile community within which to test ideas, a resource for living artists, and a backdrop for their work. It's also a relatively safe space within which to experiment and risk failure. CEV: I've noticed that in some of the exhibitions you've worked on at the Smart you've collaborated with professors at the university. That must be an interesting dividend from working at the Smart. SS: It's incredible and happens not only in the contemporary program. We actively seek out collaborations with faculty members and think about ways that our projects can reach into the broader community at the university, in Chicago, and beyond. That has led to thoughtful and engaging projects like our thematic, collection-based Mellon projects that would be harder to realize in other contexts. CEV: When I look back at the history of your curatorial practice, there is a very strong social/political thread to it. SS: That’s true. One show I'll highlight is "Critical Mass” (2002). It was a show organized with a lot of input from the exhibiting artists and then-education director Jacqueline Terrassa that dealt with activist practice in Chicago. It included public programs, a phone “hotline” that gave instant access to artists and curators, and a gallery exhibition that included new commissioned projects that were all interactive or collaborative in nature. We programmed an accompanying freeform "anti-symposium" to encourage contact and discussion among viewers, participating artists, and a number of invited critics. Trying to address social issues is delicate and I haven’t always gotten it right. You can destroy some kinds of art by bringing it into a museum setting, so you have to think carefully about the implications of that shift. But, if you care about it you’ve got to try. With shows like “Beyond Green” I’ve tried to make a case for the importance of this work and to do it within the very places where art history is being written. It’s also about providing opportunities for the audience and resources for the artists. By working within museums, artists who address social issues have opportunities to experiment or to work on a metaphoric level without necessarily having to demonstrate the more concrete results that they might demand of themselves in another context. That can be generative and can extend their own thinking as well as provide a spur or spark to the people who are experiencing the work. You also want the visitors to enjoy the experience: it’s important to me to make exhibitions that look good and feel hospitable. Museum presentations can also be a counterpoint or complement to a practice that inhabits what we'll call "the real world". Take someone like Dan Peterman, for instance. He's making visually and contextually rich objects that are meant to live in the space of "fine art" but also public art projects that foster a different kind of experience and social exchange. Years ago he made a picnic table for Grant Park in Chicago using post-consumer reprocessed plastic. It was a great object but it was also meant as a place where people from different backgrounds might end up sitting next to one another having lunch on a summer's day. And in turn there is a much more direct community development angle at his non-profit, the Experimental Station. All three of those activities are interconnected but they fulfill different aims. |
CEV: What was the inspiration for the "Drawing as Process" show? SS: It was in part a response to all the hype in recent years around drawing as the next big thing and as a self-sufficient medium. I wanted to show some of the work that I’d seen recently that extended a more traditional use drawing in relation to works in other media. It also connects in a way to exhibitions like “Critical Mass.” There we tried to integrate creative process into the show and programs so it was more than just an exhibition of discrete art products. “Drawing as Process” also tried to offer some transparency to the public. One of the great pleasures and privileges of being a curator is getting to go into studios to see what artists are making and how they're thinking. It’s not often possible to make that available within a gallery space. Bringing political or socially engaged art into the gallery space is a parallel challenge, but in this case the toughest part was to reveal work-in-progress without creating a kind of reductive presentation: "this sketch plus that sketch equals that painting." Sorting that out involved a lot of communication with the artists and a lot of meditation in the gallery space. For instance, Julia Fish makes these wonderfully precise works that hover between precision and intuition. They are fairly minimal in feel and she has a particular touch with her mark making. In one group of pieces that addressed her living space, she has developed a language of forms that indicate light and movement through the space. We showed drawings from different moments in her initial process of working out that language. One of the works that she let me bring into the exhibition is this great little drawing, a set of offhand almost cartoonish images of the light fixtures in her house. These doodles were part of her process of figuring out what she was doing with this series. But anybody who knows Julia's work would be surprised by this drawing: it has quirkiness that goes against the grain of her practice. She was generous enough to include it in this context and it helped open up another window into her processes of thinking through making. CEV: Tell us what's ahead. SS: Well, generally the Smart presents thematic shows but we just opened a little monographic show on Robert Heinecken’s altered magazines, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. I got to dig around a cache of Heinecken's magazines and pull out a number of new works to complement those already in the Smart's collection. The work is fresh: there’s a real currency and potency to the ways he combined images of sex and war and commerce and in his interest in circulating art both within and without the usual channels of distribution. Some of the altered magazines were put back into circulation so that unsuspecting consumers would come across them; he was doing that in the late 1960s and that gesture certainly resonates with other work we’ve been showing at the Smart but also has a weight on its own. It was also really fun to focus on one artist and one body of work and to think about the pleasures of this format: a highly focused micro-exhibition. CEV: And upcoming... SS: I'm working on an exhibition that will open a year from now called "Adaptation" where I am taking into account the university context very specifically. The idea is to focus on just a few works by artists who have all created time-based work using material from other arenas as source material for their own creative gestures. Three artists adapt classic works of art---painting, novel, film, music---and the fourth uses everyday behavior as the point of departure. The Smart has co-produced Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s epic new work, loosely based on David's painting "The Intervention of the Sabine Women." Arturo Herrera will show his first time-based work and it's going to be amazing: a video installation based on a Stravinsky ballet that will surround viewers with a series of choreographed animated images. It continues his investigation into the history of modernism and of the line between abstraction and representation. Guy Ben-Ner will show several videos, including one in which he condenses “Moby Dick” into about 5 minutes of video with himself and his family playing all the parts. And we’re thrilled that Catherine Sullivan is going to be making a new work in collaboration with University of Chicago students. These four artists are at different points in their careers and have different artistic interests and visual languages but I think the works will circle nicely around the core idea. I hope it will be interesting to people who are attuned to contemporary art practice but that also there will be ways for those who are coming from other places to access it. CEV: How did you conceptually bring together such an interesting group? It sounds amazing. SS: Research, intuition and chance. I had been interested in Catherine, Eve, and Arturo's work for some time. Then at the Contemporary Art Center in Cinncinati I saw a show of Guy's videos and I was completely drawn into each of the pieces. So I started to think about whether I could find an appropriate context for them at some point and the rough outlines of the show fell into place pretty quickly. The topic is one that several of my university colleagues are interested in as well; they can make use of it in their own teaching. Its appealing to have these potentially really juicy projects that can open up conversations. CEV: Stephanie, thank you so much for your dedication and thoughtful approach. Chicago is lucky to have you.
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Programming News |
Artadia Artists News |
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Artadia Awards in Boston 2007 update Artadia Awards Announced for Chicago 2006 From November 16 through November 18, 2006 three nationally prominent curators conducted studio visits with the fifteen visual arts finalists in Cook County, Illinois. Jurors Lydia Yee (Senior Curator, Bronx Museum of Art), William Stover (Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Stephanie Smith (Director of Collections and Exhibitions, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago) selected three artists for $15,000 grants and seven artists for $1,500 grants in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. Three Artadia Awards of $15,000 were awarded to Nick Cave, William O'Brien, and Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer). Robert Davis and Michael Langlois, Ken Fandell, Jason Lazarus, Cecil McDonald, Julia Oldham, Steve Reber, and Melanie Schiff were awarded Artadia Awards of $1,500. On October 13, 2006 an initial jury convened in New York City to review the applications of more than 460 artists from Cook County , Illinois . The fifteen finalists for the Artadia Awards in Chicago were selected by Gilbert Vicario (Assistant Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston), Robert Lazzarini (artist), and Stephanie Smith. The Artadia Awards in Chicago are funded in part by The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and The Joyce Foundation.
Artadia Events Artadia Awardees Gathering in New York Bongo Artadia at DiverseWorks... Reprised DiverseWorks Spring 2007 Artadia Awards Application Applications will be open online for the Artadia Awards in the San Francisco Bay Area in late spring 2007. A formal announcement this spring will be distributed for the May 1, 2007 opening of the awards cycle. Applications will be only available online via Artadia’s website between May 1 – July 31, 2007.
Artist Spotlight
The Armory Show We are pleased to announce that the following Artadia artists will present their work at the 9th Annual Armory Show taking place February 23 - 26, 2007 at Pier 94 in New York City: |
Michael Arcega The Art Guys Marie Krane Bergman Rosana Castrillo Diaz Liz Cohen Santiago Cucullu Francesca Fuchs Angelina Gualdoni Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS Carrie Gundersdorf 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, CA PIEROGI Leipzig, Germany Robert Pruitt Clare E. Rojas Sigrid Sandstrom
Soody Sharifi Scott Short Allison Wiese | |
ABOUT ARTADIA Supporting artists through direct grants and professional development is Artadia's mission. Building a dynamic national network of arts support is Artadia's vision. Please help us support artists directly by becoming a member or by subscribing now! © 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue/The ArtCouncil, Inc. 210 Eleventh Ave., Suite 503, New York, NY 10001 | (212) 727-2233 | www.artadia.org |
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