Here's what I'm looking at right now

This page is an active (nonlinear, nonchronological) collection space of inspiration, research, and references for my future curatorial and artistic endeavors. Take a look! Get your gears turning :)

She's a Knockout

These pieces were part of the show "She's a Knockout: Sport, Gender, and the Body in Contemporary Art" at the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum. Here is Lowe's description of the exhibition:

"This exhibition features works by eleven contemporary artists from around the globe to explore how these individuals engage with topics such as resilience, strength, labor, women’s rights, and queer aesthetics through athletic imagery. It also queries preconceived notions of femininity through a range of conceptual approaches, be they celebratory, humorous, or critical." 

Here's a link to a review by Douglas Markowitz from Artburst Miami that has some good install photos and interpretations :)

ART IN BLOOM

Unfortunately, neither of these works are credited on the Westmoreland's webpage for their yearly exhibition "Art in Bloom". However, the concept of the exhibition helped me form a more concrete idea for one of my potential thesis ideas. Each year, the Westmoreland invites several floral arrangement artists to "compete" in creating floral compositions inspired by pieces in the museum's collection. These are two of the entries from the 2024 Art in Bloom event.

120 year-old photos found in a time capsule 

I was scrolling on Instagram and came across a reel showing photographer Mathieu Stern developing these photos of a cat (and kitten and dog!). In the caption, I learned that these were from film he had discovered in a 120 year-old time capsule. Similarly to the two cat photos in the Tate's Pet Corner, I  got a little emotional thinking about how someone over a century ago had gone through all the effort to take photos of these cats. What were these animals' names? Who was their family? Did the original photographer ever believe that 120 years later, someone would find these photos, develop them, then share them with countless people on the internet (Would they have even anticpated that something like the internet would ever exist)? I wonder what these animals' personalities were.

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story

While we were exploring the rest of the museum, we saw the entrance to this special exhibition. It was a ticketed exhibition which sucked, but it was so so worth it. This ended up being way better than pretty much anything else we saw that day. This was a retrospective on the artist due (and twin brothers!) known as "OSGEMEOS". They originally started their artists career as B-boys, graffitti artists, and DJs. As their name became more and more renowned, they moved into "fine" art and immersive installations (we can unpack later why I think it's stupid to label it as fine art when the grafitti art they were making originally was just as fine to me. But I digress). Curatorially, I was THRILLED to see another exhibition demonstrating the power of what I call "The Pink Wall Theory": in my opinion, anything looks more vibrant, more engaging, and more alive when shown against a pink wall. I spent easily two hours just in this one exhibition. It opened with a video and timeline component, which caused a bit of a bottleneck, so I opted to skip ahead to the next space, which consisted of 6-8 loooong display cases showing sketches and sketchbooks, trinkets and tokens, and other memorabilia showing the process behind OSGEMEOS' work. The exhibition did an amazing job visually demonstrating the chronological progression of their work, with each new era occuring in a different room. The whole experience was vivid and comforting. This exhibition further solidified my goals to incorporate color and density into whatever curatorial projects I tackle in the future. 

To be continued...