Hilary Irons finds a major theme of empathy and connection in the work of seven graduates from Maine College of Art’s MFA program, highlighting how artists are responding to the precarity and isolation of the world and setting out to change it.
performance
Grant Wahlquist reflects on Michael Figueroa’s commissioned dance work for SPACE and Portland Dance Month and asks, when is too much too much?
Katie Vida suggests a multidisciplinary way of understanding photographer Tad Beck’s three series of work in Technique/Support at Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Zanele Muholi uses the performativity of photography to rewrite a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa.
“I am a fourth-generation quilt maker”: artist Gina Adams talks with critical ethnographer Myron M. Beasley on archaeology, archive, and the arts.
In advance of Myron Beasley’s performative dinner on Malaga Island, Jessica Lynne reflects on trauma and the heartwork it takes to heal.
Yoshua Okón’s multi-channel video blurs the lines between documentary, reality, and fiction, asking participants and viewers to engage in sociological experiments that reveal discomforting questions.
Gordon Hall, a New York-based artist, on ideas that surfaced around the creation of The Number of Inches Between Them, a sculpture and performance in multiple locations in mid-coast Maine.
Bloodlines counters heteropatriarchic narratives of fluid and the body with work meditating on the reproductive body, emotional labor, and power. by Andy Johnson
Emily Mae Smith’s art historical and illustrative paintings summon Marxist interpretations of the performativity of gender. by Frances Barker
Eden Osucha speaks with filmmaker Natalie Bookchin about the phenomenon of video self-portraiture in the internet age, and what it means for resistance and identity.
Ann Hirsch will probably defy most expectations of a feminist artist thinking about gender, social media, and the implications of shame and display.
PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS positions Julie Poitras Santos as artist-as-curator, who has included fifteen artists and practitioners who’ll be leading walks, giving lectures, discussing readings, and presenting video works through August 14.
Lia Wilson reviews the site-specificity and flattening of time of S P E C T A C U L A R B L A C K D E A T H as part of the series A Long Wait.
Ken Ueno’s Fortress Brass employs the musical and architectural languages of wartime to imagine a friendlier, more beautiful alternative.