"This Week in Art" on Art21

The structure of the Art21 Magazine is changing in 2018 and will be unveiled in the coming weeks. While I will no longer be writing content for the online magazine's themed issues, I will be contributing to the "This Week in Art" column for the next few months. 

You can read the first weekly roundup here.

Abigail DeVille, MidSummer Event Horizon, 2014. Credit: United States Artists.

The feature story this week is the announcement of the 2018 United States Artists Fellows. The United States Artists, a Chicago-based foundation devoted to supporting the arts across nine disciplines, has named Dread Scott, Abigail DeVille and Pepón Osorio among the 45 artists and collectives comprising the 2018 fellows. A $50,000 grant accompanies the fellowship, which recognizes contributions to fields such as craft, dance, writing, and the visual arts, among others.

Meriem Bennani's Holiday Headscarf

Meriem Bennani’s new artwork, Your Year by Fardaous Funjab, features the most recent hijab in the artist’s fictional line of high fashion headscarves. This thirty-second video, part of the Public Art Fund’s Commercial Break series, features an ever-evolving hijab that can be worn throughout the year. One head covering commemorates various Islamic holidays as well as secular events. As the seasons change, the hijab morphs on the Barclays Center’s “Oculus” screen into eight distinct versions, ranging from generic autumnal attire to a headscarf for Ramadan. The functional fashion of the rotating hijab offers a jocular take on the media’s portrayal of the Muslim head covering.

Read the full text on Art21 here. 

Meriem Bennani: Your Year by Fardaous Funjab will continue at the Barclays Center, playing on the “Oculus” screen (620 Atlantic Ave. at Flatbush Ave.) as part of the Public Art Fund’s Commercial Break series. The video screens once an hour on Saturdays through March 5.

Meriem Bennani. Promotional still from the video Your Year, 2017. Courtesy Meriem Bennani. © Meriem Bennani.

"Is there Racism in Heaven?"

JG: How does the question, “Is there racism in heaven?” connect to the show’s title, Until?

NC: The title comes from the phrases “innocent until proven guilty” or “guilty until proven innocent.” Both are linked to police brutality in America. This morning, the Chicago crime stats came out for the month of October. Seventy-two people were shot and killed in October. Five hundred eighty-two people have been killed so far this year. I feel called to action, and I’m trying to find a way, as a visual artist with a specific sense of responsibility, to be proactive. How can I create a project that will reach hundreds of thousands of people and raise their level of consciousness about these issues?

READ MORE from my interview with the artist Nick Cave in the "Momentum" issue of the Art21 Magazine here. 

Nick Cave, Until (2016) installation view, MASS MoCA. Photo by James Prinz, courtesy of MASS MoCA