Relational Art

A multidisciplinary artist addresses personal and collective experience.

Making and not making art.

“I want the people I collaborate with to understand that they can move a way from the realities they’ve been placed into, that they can create a reality.”

Artists generally fall into two groups: the makers (of objects) and doers (of activities). They survive, more or less, on the largesse of the art world. 

Martin Wilner is an artist and psychiatrist. For his ongoing Case Histories—a series of portraits each completed over the course of a month—subjects send him daily dispatches that are woven into the drawings. Novelist Francis Levy calls the process “a mini analysis of sorts.”

The Polish artist recently mounted a new participatory installation on Hydra Island in Greece, where Nell McClister prompted him to talk about the core of his collaborative projects: community, experimentation, and spirituality.

Before I met Abraham Cruzvillegas, more than once I’d heard curator Clara Kim mention in passing that he was a special person. This piqued my curiosity.

Visionary artist and poet Gyula Kosice on how he has tried to reconcile “the language of the diction” and “the language of form, volume, and the kinetic.”

Adrienne Truscott’s … Too Freedom …, performed at The Kitchen this last December, is a multilayered meditation on social (inter)action. 

When I meet Oscar Murillo for the first time, it is in Central London. Murillo lives and works in East London.

Jenn Joy is confronted by the distorted anatomy and face of Heather Kravas’s Kassidy Chism.

This fictional site operates simultaneously with our everyday lives. It is a place where relationships unfold in time, and structures unfold in space; lying together they suggest the abstract material of sociability. These formations are the relatives of architecture, the turf of Andrea Blum’s work.

In the summer of 1977, Suzanne Lacy traveled the great monuments of Europe and Latin America with a paint-by-numbers picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which she gradually colored en route. 

One of the most difficult parts about moving to New York City is finding a community.

The peripatetic conceptualist (Where’s Al?) talks with artist Cheryl Donegan about Ginsberg’s Howl, the reanimated past, and the overlooked poetry of authorless signage.

Sebastián Patané Masuelli once answered an asinine question of mine about his influences with the quip, “If we had planned to arrive in this country we would have done certain things in advance, like learn the language.”

An artist on artists text on Laura Lima by Cabelo, accompanied by several photographs of sculpture pieces by Laura Lima, the first titled Gala Chicken.

Contrary to some strains of popular belief, collectivism is artmaking not only with many but for many.

We generally expect our artists to be more interesting people than those from other walks of life, and we reward them for their special abilities to help the rest of us find complexity of meaning, beauty and even grandeur in the world around us. 

“I like to work very hard,” Theaster Gates remarks in the following conversation, which just might be the understatement of the year.