GLORIA PACIS

GLORIA PACIS

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Artist

I just feel there is already a connection, something I have to come to, but that I'm trying to search it out or see what's already there. I feel that we are truly connected as a world. And I'm just trying to make people aware of an existing connection we already have, to send that message out there. And I like to do it in the form of...I guess you'd call it a mundane image, where it's not really about bells and whistles, but it's about something in it makes you want to look, and you want to know why. And it's because you've been there before, regardless of whether you are a dancer or that particular guy in the subway, you know you've been in his head in that mood that he's experiencing.

ANTHONY WHITE

ANTHONY WHITE

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Artist

I think it is a job for artists, not all artists, but I think it's a job for artists to acknowledge that culture can make a difference towards these things and can hold people more accountable. Australians, myself included, grow up in this state of amnesia because what happened is that the British stole the land from the Aboriginal people. We made up a fiction, the fiction of Terra nullius. And then we basically disclaimed any relationship that the Aboriginal people had to the land. The National Day in Australia is the day marked by colonization, which is shameful. So that's another long conversation. And I think that, whether things are better or worse in the United States, but I do know that is the conversation that has only just begun in Australia. And there's a new openness that never has been before.

Curatorial Visions

Curatorial Visions

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Conversation with Director & Curator of Greg Kucera Gallery

​My curatorial vision lies somewhere between beauty and politics. The art I most admire gravitates between those poles and sometimes touches both. Beauty is harder to pin down because many works I admire may not seem lovely to others.  I am drawn now to art that is increasingly formal and spare. Art that makes a powerful statement of contemporary commentary often has the power to move me.

LISA EDELSTEIN

LISA EDELSTEIN

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Actress · Artist · Director · Producer · Writer
House M.D. · Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce · Little Bird · The West Wing · The Kominsky Method

I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things, because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view. I think part of the beauty of being in a long-running television show is that, in season one, you're playing the role they wrote. By season two, they're writing the person you're playing. You start to build your voice, and they start to merge, and so by the time you get to season three, you're much more like full human beings having this dialogue.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
STEVE MILLER

STEVE MILLER

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Artist & Environmentalist

I have this idea art should be in the world in as many forms and ways as possible, and I love communicating with skate decks… It partially started out in Brazil because what I was doing in Brazil is x-raying animals in the Amazon and I thought there was this idea in the old days that you’d go to the Amazon, you’d kill an animal, stuff it, bag it, and then you’d have this trophy of your kill. The alligators that we x-rayed were alive. I got them from a zoo in a town called Belem, which means Bethlehem in Portuguese.

Museum of Arts and Design

Museum of Arts and Design

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Conversation with Elissa Auther
Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs & Chief Curator

So the Museum of Arts and Design historically, for me, is part of a New York avantgarde scene. It's just that it was dedicated to artists working in these historically-marginalized materials. And it continues to do that. That mission has never changed.

CLAUDIA BUENO

CLAUDIA BUENO

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Artist in Light, Sculpture & Sound

Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.

Design Museum of Chicago

Design Museum of Chicago

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Conversation with Executive Director Tanner Woodford

Tanner Woodford is founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and paints large scale typographic murals across public spaces. As a designer, educator, and entrepreneur, he has taught, lectured, and led workshops on design issues, social change, and design history in classrooms and at conferences. He is happy to be scrappy, irrepressibly optimistic, and believes design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition. He lives and works in Chicago, Ill.

Herakleidon Museum · Athens

Herakleidon Museum · Athens

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Conversation with General Manager ELENI NOMIKOU & Communications Director & PANTELIS MITSIOU

The Museum Herakleidon was founded in 2004 by Mr. and Mrs. Firos and extends to two buildings in the historic district of Thissio, next to the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus. The first building is located at 16 Herakleidon str. and the second one 150 meters further, at 37 Ap. Pavlou str., one of the busiest pedestrian streets of Athens.

Guild Hall Museum · East Hampton

Guild Hall Museum · East Hampton

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Conversation with CHRISTINA MOSSAIDES STRASSFIELD
Museum Director & Chief Curator 2002-2023

I think that what you're doing is definitely offering a service to so many people and letting them explore various forms of creativity and how you can use that creativity to enhance the world. I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I think that art does influence the world on many different levels. On a daily level, but on a more global level.

JONAH BOKAER

JONAH BOKAER

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Choreographer & Media Artist

Choreography is always, also, a Visual Art…
The etymology of crisis is very productive and constructive because krísis in the Greco-Roman etymology is what happens when there is a germ in the body, so this heat from the krísis creates fever, and fever and the breaking of fever tends to flush out the germ. Healing the germ through crisis is the etymology. And crisis gave birth and rebirth to criticism. Criticism and crisis have the same root word.

Yves Winkin

Yves Winkin

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Yves Winkin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Liège and Honorary Professor at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. He proposed an "anthropology of communication" based on an ethnographic approach. He was deputy director of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, director of the French Institute of Education and director of the musée des Arts et Métiers. He is the author of several books, most recently Réinventer les musées?

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Sophie Mackin. Digital Media Coordinator was Yu Young Lee.

The Art and Life of Sam Francis
JEREMY DENNIS
Dorothea Rockburne

Dorothea Rockburne

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Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.

But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.

ROCKBURNE

Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?

ROCKBURNE

It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.

Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.

It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator was Yu Young Lee.

 
Wendy Morris

Wendy Morris

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Artist and Researcher

It has always seemed to me that as a South African and Namibian artist that there was not a choice to not explore colonial migrations, apartheid histories and white privilege. The past shapes the present and I have always wanted to better understand how South African society has been formed.

Cité Internationale des Arts

Cité Internationale des Arts

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Conversation with Bénédicte Alliot · Director General

The Cité Internationale des Arts was founded in 1965. It welcomes artists from all over the world, including France, and it's been doing that ever since, on a regular and growing basis since 1965. It hosts 326 artists, writers, curators, filmmakers, musicians, etc. 326 people at the same time on two sites.

JOHN MARCIARI

JOHN MARCIARI

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Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints
The Morgan Library & Museum

So that idea of what the drawings tell us about the artist is another thing that's constantly interesting to me. You, maybe more so than a finished painting, get a sense of what problems an artist is trying to work out along the way.

MARVELOUS UTOPIA

MARVELOUS UTOPIA

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19th International Surrealist Exhibition, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

Surrealism was born in France in the wake of the First World War. An artistic, poetic, and philosophical investigation of the unconscious and the irrational, it aims to free the mind from convention and moral constraint in the pursuit of revolutionizing human experience. Contrary to popular opinion, the movement has never been part of the avant-garde. Far from an aesthetic of the bizarre, with which it is often conflated, Surrealism remains today what it was at its inception: a way of life.