The sports world may be on the edge of their seats as we draw close to the 2024 Olympics in Paris. But the “Olympics of the art world” is already well underway in Italy: Hundreds of thousands of art lovers are flocking to the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 24. This massive exhibition has been held every two years with very few exceptions since 1895, when it was inaugurated as the world’s first art biennial. Visitors who devote a whole week of their time will still only be able to take in a sliver of the art on display, whether it’s at the central exhibition, the collateral events, or the dozens of storied national pavilions in the Giardini and around the city. 

But that’s not all the exhibition has in store. The politics of the art world are also on full display, whether in the form of protests or the curators’ decisions about how their countries — with all their past and present controversies — will be represented. This year's included Russia offering its pavilion up to Indigenous artists from Bolivia, Brazil renaming its pavilion “Hãhãwpuá” after the Indigenous Patxohã term for the land, Poland welcoming an art collective from Ukraine, the United States featuring Jeffrey Gibson as the first Native American artist to have a solo exhibition at the pavilion, and Israel canceling its exhibition … which perhaps wasn't really canceled after all. 

Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and longtime contributor AX Mina sat down to reflect on the aesthetic successes, political failures, and long-awaited representation they saw displayed at the world’s biggest contemporary art show. 

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:24) - First Impressions of the Biennale and the Main Exhibition
• (06:33) - India: Aravani Art Project
• (07:48) - Singapore: Charmaine Poh
• (08:58) - Lebanon: Omar Mismar
• (09:42) - “Italians Everywhere”
• (11:06) - Morocco: Bouchra Khalili
• (13:16) - The National Pavilions
• (14:21) - Benin Pavilion
• (16:12) - Lebanon Pavilion
• (18:19) - Italy Pavilion
• (20:14) - UK Pavilion
• (22:44) - US Pavilion
• (25:29) - Israel Pavilion
• (28:51) - Saudi Arabia Pavilion
• (30:07) - Nigeria Pavilion
• (32:11) - Egypt Pavilion
• (34:07) - Taiwan Pavilion
• (35:57) - Australia Pavilion
• (38:16) - Mongolia Pavilion
• (40:06) - “South West Bank,” collateral event
• (42:23) - Outro

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Shelley Niro (Kanien’kehaka) grew up watching her father craft faux tomahawks to sell to tourists who flocked to her birthplace, Niagara Falls. In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, she reflects on how witnessing him create these objects planted the seeds for her brilliant multidisciplinary art practice spanning film, sculpture, beading, and photography. 

She joined us in our Brooklyn studio for an interview, where she reflected on growing up in the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Native artists she discovered on her dentist’s wall but rarely encountered in a museum before the mid-’90s, and her latest obsession with 500 million-year-old fossils.

An expansive review of her work is currently featured in a traveling retrospective, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, which was organized by Canada’s Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH), with support from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). The exhibition was co-curated by Melissa Bennett, senior curator of Contemporary Art at AGH; Greg Hill, an independent curator who is a former senior curator of Indigenous Art at the NGC; and David Penney, associate director of Museum Scholarship, Exhibitions, and Public Engagement at the NMAI).

When this interview was recorded, the show was on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. It was on display from February 10 to May 26 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and will be exhibited next from June 21 to August 25 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. 

The music and sound effects in this episode are from the films “Honey Moccasin” and “Tree” by Shelley Niro, courtesy of the artist. 

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (03:02) - Beginnings of “500 Year Itch” Retrospective
• (04:18) - About “Honey Moccasin”
• (06:47) - Early Life
• (08:42) - The Six Nations of the Grand River
• (12:12) - Going to Art School and Native Representation in Museums
• (19:12) - Work in Painting
• (22:32) - Work in Photography
• (24:53) - On Niagara Falls
• (26:29) - History Behind Grand River Reserve
• (27:58) - The 1990s and Institutional Perspectives on Native American Art
• (31:12) - “Mohawks and Beehives” Series
• (34:51) - Why “500 Year Itch”?
• (39:47) - Art Schools Today
• (42:54) - Humor
• (47:27) - “In Her Lifetime” Series
• (49:57) - The Grand River
• (53:52) - Newest Works and Ancient Fossils
• (57:05) - Outro

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Anyone who remembers New York City’s “golden age” of graffiti in the late ’70s and early ’80s knows about the lion spray-painted on the handball court at Corlears Junior High School, roaring next to metallic blue letters spelling the word “Lee.” In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, we speak with its creator, Lee Quiñones, whose paintings of dragons, lions, and Howard the Duck on over 120 MTA train cars were part of the movement that brought light and color to the otherwise dingy, dark, and drastically underfunded subway system. 

Quiñones’s paintings caught the attention of art collectors and gallerists. By the time he was 19, he was showing his work at Galleria La Medusa in Rome, alongside fellow graffiti writer Fred Brathwaite, also known as “Fab 5 Freddy.” Among other writers, the following years would bring his graffiti art to more shows, both at home in New York City and in the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and even Documenta 7 in 1982 in Kassel, Germany. 

Quiñones is the rare graffiti writer from this era who maintained a successful career in the gallery space. Today, he continues to experiment through paintings, drawings, and collages in an ever-changing range of styles. His art is in the collections of several major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

In this episode, Quiñones reflects on the monster movies that inspired him as a kid, running the tracks as a graffiti-writing teen, making art alongside Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jenny Holzer in the 1980s East Village scene, and much more. He also discusses the new book documenting his life and work, Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, which was published by Damiani on April 30. A solo show of his recent work, titled Quinquagenary, will be on display at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles until May 25, 2024. 

The music in this episode is courtesy of Soundstripe.

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (03:04) - Early life and work
• (08:06) - Cinema
• (19:43) - “Howard the Duck”
• (27:17) - Lee is “WANTED” by the police
• (28:58) - “Lion’s Den”
• (38:57) - The East Village scene
• (47:29) - “The buff” in the 80s
• (53:03) - The 21st century
• (57:00) - Outro

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Since 2009, Hyperallergic has published tens of thousands of articles about art. But who are the writers behind these posts? And what drives them to write about art of all things?

Many of the authors who have passed through our virtual hallways have gone on to do incredible things, including publishing books on topics that they first wrote about or more fully developed through articles in Hyperallergic. In 2022, we held an event called “From Blog to Book” at Brooklyn’s pinkFrog cafe, where our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian asked three of our writers to tell us about the journeys that took them from 140-character tweets to 1,200-word posts to full manuscripts. 

Erin L. Thompson, who holds the title of America’s only art crime professor, is the author of dozens of articles that brought looted artifacts from around the world to light. Her adventures have brought her from the Confederate monument etched into the side of Stone Mountain, Georgia, which she wrote about in Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (2022), to a rededication ceremony of a repatriated object in Nepal.

AX Mina, who wrote Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power (2019), describes how they first explored the topic of memes in Hyperallergic — which they termed “the street art of the social web” before “meme” became the mainstream — and their function as a tool to circumvent internet censorship in China. 

And Michelle Young, author of Secret Brooklyn: An Unusual Guide (2023), tells us about her trajectory from working in fashion to playing in the band Kittens Ablaze to discovering so many hidden gems while aimlessly wandering the city she calls home that she founded the brilliant website Untapped New York. It was only in her time off reading World War 2 nonfiction that she found a new trail, which led her to uncover the stories of stolen Nazi loot. 

They’ll reflect on finding focus by retreating to a mountaintop in China, unearthing the legacy of forgotten World War II heroes, and even seamlessly forging Picassos — which, as you’ll hear in the show, is not nearly as hard as you’d think. 

The music in this episode is by Famous Cats and Cast Of Characters, courtesy of Soundstripe.

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We are thrilled to be back with a new episode of the Hyperallergic podcast. 

For our one hundredth episode, we spoke with legendary collage and mixed media artist Tommy Lannigan-Schmidt. His works, made from crinkly saran wrap and tin foil, emulate the gleam of precious metals and jewels in Catholic iconography. They reference his upbringing as a working class kid and altar boy in a Catholic community in Linden, New Jersey, where tin foil was an expensive luxury they could rarely afford. But they also hold memories of where he found himself as a teenager: the LBGTQ+ street life and art community of New York City, which led to his participation in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. 

Lanigan-Schmidt is as much a visual artist as he is a storyteller. We climbed up to his fourth floor walk-up in Hell's Kitchen, where, surrounded by teetering piles of books and artwork, he regaled us with tales about artists like Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, his decision to leave his hometown as a penniless teenager, his steadfast identity as a working class artist, his conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity, what changed for gay artists in New York between the 1960s and today, and of course, his recollection of that historic night at the Stonewall.

We know you’ll enjoy this artist’s sparkling humor and singular vision as he shares reflections on his life and this critical moment in history.

We also talked with Ann Bausum, author of Stonewall, Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, about the significance of the uprising. She also shared some of her own first-hand recollections of segregation in 1960s America. 

The music in this episode was written by Garen Gueyikian, with the exception of one track by Dr. Delight, courtesy of Soundstripe. 

A selection of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s work will be on display at a show titled Open Hands: Crafting the Spiritual at Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art until May 19, 2024. 

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:31) - Ann / Hrag
• (13:58) - Intro to Tommy
• (15:49) - Tommy / Hrag
• (01:30:05) - Outro

• Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's 2012-2013 solo show at MoMA PS1, Tender Love Among the Junk
• Lanigan-Schmidt's work at Pavel Zoubok Fine Art
• Gay and Proud, the 1970 film which documented a demonstration on Christopher Street on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, excerpted in this episode starting at 14:39
• Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum
• Watch Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith
• Dr. Wendy Schaller on Feast of St. Nicholas by Jan Steen
• Andy Warhol's portrait of Holly Solomon
• Mario Banana, an Andy Warhol film with Mario Montez

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If you’ve been online, and especially on Twitter, then you probably know the name Eli Valley and his brushy drawings that use the grotesque and absurd to make larger points about life, culture, and politics. But it wasn’t until the Trump administration that the New York City-based cartoonist was propelled into the public spotlight. Valley was attacked by a wide range of politicians, particularly Republicans, including Meghan McCain, who called the comic he drew of her “one of the most anti-Semitic things I have even seen.” McCain is not Jewish, and Valley is, not to mention that his father is a rabbi.

In this conversation, I asked Valley to tell us about how he got his start in comics, how he builds on the long history of satire and graphic humor in the Jewish American tradition, and how he copes with the public spotlight while he struggles to survive as a full-time artist. 

This podcast is accompanied by scholar Josh Lambert’s article, which explores the art historical roots of Valley’s art. Lambert writes, “Valley comes naturally by his most pressing and recurrent theme: lies told and violence committed in the name of Jewish safety and security. His cartoon jeremiads can easily enough be fit into a long history of Jewish protest, from the Biblical prophets who excoriated the sinners of Israel to modern novelists who, like the criminally under-appreciated late-19th-century San Francisco writer Emma Wolf, wrote about Jews, as she put it, ‘in the spirit of love — the love that has the courage to point out a fault in its object.’”

The music for this episode is “A Mineral Love” by Bibio, courtesy Warp Records.

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Artists Tali Hinkis and Daniel Temkin have been at the leading edge of digitally informed contemporary art that explores the boundaries of programming, digital aesthetics, and the handmade. Their work is certainly unique, but they also share some commonalities around media-based art, glitch, and how their work in the gallery and online is circulated and experienced. I invited them to join me for a conversation to hear the thoughts of two intelligent artists who are fully engaged with the new wave of thinking around digital practices in the arts. Hinkis and Temkin are both participating in various “Digital Combine” exhibitions curated by artist Claudia Hart, who coined the term based on artist Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier “Combines” concept that intersects sculpture and painting. In this new incarnation, the digital and analogue are in dialogue.

I also invited both artists, who are of Jewish descent, to reflect on their cultural heritage and how it manifests and informs their larger bodies of work. This conversation is part of a continuing series we’ve been doing over the last year with the help of CANVAS, a foundation interested in fostering new Jewish creativity in the 21st century.

Hinkis and Temkin are both exhibiting together in Digital Combines at Bitforms gallery in San Francisco until January 11, 2023.

The music for this episode is “Ultra (Yung Sherman Mix)” by Evian Christ, courtesy Warp Records.

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Last year, we published a dossier of statements by leading scholars supporting the fight of Tamara Lanier to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her ancestors from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Lanier, who lives in Norwich, Connecticut, had long heard stories through her family about an ancestor named Papa Renty, a learned man from Africa who was enslaved and brought to the United States under inhumane conditions. Those stories about Renty were important to her family and to the memory of their heritage that they kept alive. 

Then one day, Lanier discovered that there were photographs of her relative, and they were deposited at Harvard University because of a 19th-century racist academic named Louis Agassiz. Agassiz had commissioned them to "prove" his White Supremacist ideas about race and they lay in a trunk at the Peabody Museum until a researcher resurfaced them in the 1970s.

In this podcast, I speak to Lanier about the continuing fight to reclaim her family heritage by asking Harvard to accept her right to the ownership of the images. She discusses a fascinating visit to the home of descendants of the Taylor family, enslavers who claimed Lanier's ancestors as property, and some surprising discoveries she made along the way.

This is a must-hear episode, and I would highly recommend reading Valentina Di Liscia's excellent article, which was part of our special dossier, that summarizes the history of the court case and the larger fight to "Free Renty."

Lanier has also allowed us reproduce some of the photographs she took at the Taylor family home, which includes various items of furniture created by her ancestors when they were enslaved.

Related Links:

• The Continuing Fight to #FreeRenty
• Legal Precedents or Reparations? Lawsuit Against Harvard May Decide Who Owns Images of Enslaved People

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Something incredible happened a few months ago. After Oklahoma lawyer Brett Chapman (Pawnee) started tweeting about the tomahawk of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, which is currently in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the revered object may actually be going home.

His short messages asked why the tomahawk was in the care of that institution and not with one of the two federally recognized Ponca tribes. The questions raised eyebrows, and as Cassie Packard reported for Hyperallergic, the museum later posted a statement on its website explaining that the museum and the Ponca tribe are “in active discussion about the homecoming of Chief Standing Bear’s pipe tomahawk belonging to the Ponca people.”

Chapman, who has Ponca heritage, joins me for this podcast to explain the history of the tomahawk and why the return of the heirloom is important.

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A painter who may be best known for her contribution to the Photorealism movement, Audrey Flack has been a working artist for roughly 70 years. Now at age 90, Flack reflects on the art world, from her days as part of the New York School of artists in the 1950s and 60s; her rise to fame as the only prominent female Photorealist; her embrace of sculpture and public art in the 1980s and 90s; and her return to painting only a few years ago. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Flack also shares her experiences in college with renowned modernist Joseph Albers; a strange and unnerving experience with renowned painter Jackson Pollock; how she coped raising children through all of this; and much more. We’re joined by artist Sharon Louden, who is a mutual friend of Flack and myself.

This is Flack's first-ever podcast, and I'm excited for you to hear the story of this incredible artist who continues to push us to see the world anew. I hope you enjoy this epic interview with the talented artist.

The music in this episode is Ultra (Yung Sherman Mix) by Evian Christ, courtesy of Warp Records.

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Tim Kang started his career as a software engineer for Deutsche Bank and invested a year of savings in Ethereum in early 2016, and let’s just say it’s paying off. The North Carolina native, who is known online as “illestrater,” is now a digital art collector and purchased works by Murat Pak and Beeple before all the recent auction sales and press coverage propelled them into the spotlight. 

He’s founded other artist platforms, including CUE Music and Universe.XYZ, and his latest organization, Sevens Foundation, is offering “Sevens Genesis Grants” for emerging and underrepresented artists to mint their first NFT. Kang calls himself a “champion of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists” in the NFT space.

I spoke to him to learn more about his interest in NFTs and collecting digital assets and his thoughts on the future of the field. 

This is a continuation of a series of podcasts we’re publishing on the evolving terrain of NFTs and their impact on artists and the arts community.

The music for this episode is “Autowave” by Kelly Moran from the album Ultraviolet, which is available from Warp Records.

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