As a curator you have to be conscious of who you are showing and why you are showing that artist. It is not enough to say that you are showing women artists, because different groups of women struggle differently. Furthermore, the most important criterion for showing any artist’s work, according to Evelyn Hankins, Associate Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is that the work is interesting and engaging.

For several years now I have had the pleasure of watching the evolution of Kim Celona’s work as a visual artist. I first started to follow Kim’s work when she was a graduate student and it is fascinating to see how some things about her work have changed, while others have remained the same.

Ashton Page and Claire Fredrick are community artists based in Baltimore, a city known for having more than its fair share of violent crime. With violent crime comes, of course, people who have been traumatized. Both artists have decided to embark on a unique quilting project that will create spaces of peace and healing in the city.

Lhouceine, tell us a little bit about how your interest in photography developed? For a long time photography was not something celebrated in Morocco. Photography, until the coming of digital photography and cameras on cell phones, was something out of reach for most people, because there were not that many cameras around and furthermore, even if you had a camera you had to develop the film.

Over this past summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (ICA at MECA) in Portland, Maine exhibited a survey of Kate Gilmore’s artwork, bringing together videos from 2004 until the present.  In conjunction with her solo show at the ICA, Museum Director, Daniel Fuller commissioned a new performance staged in Portland’s Monument Square.   

The hyper-mediated work of Christopher P. McManus is a barrage of visual information.  Paper mache puppets, hand-drawn animations, live action video and computer-generated filters are interwoven into short narrative or interactive pieces; the cumulative effect heightened by the characteristically saturated palette of 8 bit graphics.  His over-the-top approach to art reveals a Do-It-Yourself mentality without the ‘homespun’ connotations.

In the spring of 2012, Brooklyn native Joseph Ficalora brought together a small group of street artists to paint some murals at the intersection of Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.  Having grown up in Bushwick, and still running his family business near this intersection, Ficalora decided that it was time to infuse the drab, industrial blocks that dominate the area with a sense of color and life. 

...more artists, more murals, and a healthy dose of inspiration....

..light saturates and obscures these fluidly painted images...

...objects point to how we investigate both our technological and natural surroundings...