State Of The Art

As we approach the end of the year, SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year in production. Today, we revisit Andrew's first episode as a host on State of the Art featuring Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media at SFMOMA.

-----

In a city where the tension between artists and techies is palpable, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has pushed exhibitions, programs and projects that bridge the two spheres, like their inventive video series ARTIST CRIBS, their seamless museum app, and their experimental PlaySFMOMA initiative. Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media at SFMOMA and a working artist in her own right, shares her thoughts on tech's place in the museum and the "art world" at large.

-About Erica Gangsei-

As Head of Interpretive Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Erica Gangsei leads a team of multimedia storytellers to create award winning digital resources such as audio tours, video interviews with artists, in-museum interpretive gallery spaces, games, and the podcast Raw Material. As a multidisciplinary artist, she is heavily involved in the Bay Area arts community, and has volunteered her time for organizations such as the Lab, Root Division, Headlands Center for the Arts and Adobe Books. Erica also has a passionate interest in games, and is the founder of the museum's PlaySFMOMA initiative, which presents pop-up arcades, game jams, lectures, workshops, and a game designer-in-residence series. She studied Philosophy and Fine Arts and Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Follow Erica @ericagangsei

Tweet her @ericagangsei

Continuing our exploration into the umbrella of environmental art, in this episode Andrew speaks with artist, Aviva Rahmani, who creates public, site-specific art to fight off land developers. Focusing on her series, Blued Trees Symphony, Aviva explains how her approach incorporates community, creativity and legal theory to protect natural landscapes. She also touches upon her belief of our community being in a time of "eco-suicide," and where she identifies her art in the umbrella of "environmental art."

-About Blued Trees Symphony-

The Blued Trees Symphony is an ongoing, site-specific land art project wherein Aviva Rahmani and collaborators convert threatened lands into art pieces. The hope is that by having them protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), Aviva can the prevent the use of eminent domain to seize lands for pipeline construction where the artworks are situated.

The first iteration of Blued Trees Symphony emerged on, June 21, 2015 in Peekskill, New York. It is now installed over many miles of proposed pipeline expansions, and each 1/3 measure of those miles has been copyrighted for protection. Visually, Blued Trees Symphony presents stretches of trees painted with musical movements using an environmentally friendly ultramarine pigment. Together, these movements form a score which can be read and performed.

Learn more about Blued Trees Symphony here

-About Aviva Rahmani-

Aviva Rahmani began her career as a performance artist, founding and directing the American Ritual Theatre (1968-1971), performing throughout California. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts and received a PhD from Plymouth University, UK, Rahmani has presented workshops on her theoretical approach to environmental restoration and her transdisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally including in The Independent Museum of Contemporary Art (IMCA), Cyprus with the National Centres of Contemporary Art (NCCA), Ekaterinburg and Moscow, Russian Federation, KRICT, Daejeon, Korea, the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO. Her work has been discussed and covered in books, essays, and in art magazines such as Art in America, Art News, The Huffington Post and Leonardo. Rahmani’s video documentation Gulf to Gulf sessionshave been viewed on line from over eighty-five countries. “Trigger Points/ Tipping Points,” a precursor to Gulf to Gulf, premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2002, her pioneering community action project, Blue Rocks, helped restore degraded wetlands on Vinalhaven Island, Maine a USDA investment of over $500,000. The Blued Trees Symphony (2015 - present) has received numerous awards and been extensively written about and exhibited internationally. A Mock Trial is scheduled for the project at the Cardozo Law School, NYC on April 25, 2018.

Learn more here

This month we welcome guest host, MegZany who will be taking our mobile recording studio for a fierce ride bringing you a fantastic lineup of women artist's embracing sex positivity at the core of their work. Before we drop her first episode this Thursday (March 7, 2019), Andrew talks with Meg about her journey from corporate America to full-time street artist, feminism, and why she decided to focus on sex positivity this month as State of the Art's second guest host.

Guest hosting is a new project we're exploring on SOTA in 2019 as part of our initiative to be more inclusive, bring on diverse voices better suited to discuss certain topics, and to build community. Guest Hosts are invited to take full-ownership of their chosen theme, inviting artists, curators, collectors, influencers they believe will add a strong voice to the platform and their selected topic of discussion. If you are interested in guest hosting or have a theme suggestion, please comment on our Instagram @StateoftheArt.

-About MegZany-

From selling humans legally in the corporate world as a recruiter to installing art in the streets illegally, MegZany is leaving her mark on the world through street art.

MegZany is a Los Angeles-based street artist best known for her “Courage Has No Gender” campaign. Zany began putting up work in the streets in 2016 starting with her biplane + banner image and has quickly evolved her practice and expanded her reach from the streets of Los Angeles to cities including Brussles, Wynwood, Miami, Montreal, London, Kraków, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boise, Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Memphis, New Orleans, and Austin.The nature of Zany’s work is a celebration of contrasts, for instance, bold, assertive text paired with figures that connect with viewers on a different level, often evoking childhood nostalgia. Furthermore, an enthusiast herself from an early age, Zany celebrates the trope of flight and often utilizes images that depict aviation in her projects. One of Zany’s most iconic stencils is of Amelia Earhart paired with the mantra, “Courage Has No Gender” intended to generate awareness regarding societal gender disparity and encourage viewers to create an optimistic future. As a female street artist actively working in a male-dominated field, Zany herself is a modern iteration of Earhart as she fearlessly shares her hopeful message.

You can learn more about MegZany here

Or follow her @MegZany

We speak with Jesse Cory, co-founder and CEO of 1xRUN, a limited edition art print publisher, and Murals in the Market, dedicated to reinvigorating cities with murals by local artists. As an active member of the street art art scene, Jesse has seen his share of copyright infringement cases brought to him by artists he has worked with personally, and continues to fight for artists to maintain and enact their rights over their creations when threatened by brands and media companies.

In this episode, Jesse recounts cases he's seen and been involved with, gives us the quick and dirty of VARA and its applications in a few scenarios, the basic rights artist retain over their work on the streets and as prints or originals, and touches upon how social media has become both a blessing and a curse for artists around the world.

Helpful links:

A Guide to the Visual Artists Rights Act, Cynthia Esworthy, NEA Office of General Counsel, JD Washington & Lee Law School 1997

-About 1xRUN-

Based in Detroit, Michigan, 1xRUN ("one-time run") is the world's leading publisher of fine art editions and online destination for original art. We pride our curation on showcasing limited edition prints, original artwork, books and exclusives from some of the best-known and emerging names in the new contemporary movement. With collectors in over 100 countries, we have published more than 1,300 editions since 2010. Every day, we drop a new batch of time-released, limited edition runs. Since we're always looking to the future, editions are only available for a limited time — when they are gone, they're gone! The artists we collaborate with never rest, and neither do we. 1xRUN is also host to Detroit's Inner State Gallery, a world-renowned exhibition space. Both 1xRUN's studio and Inner State Gallery are proud to call Detroit's historic Eastern Market district home.

Learn more here

-About Murals in the Market-

Murals in the Market continues to enhance the Eastern Market experience and the district’s transformation into a must-see destination for arts, as well as food, in Detroit. For the past six years, 1xRUN and the company’s fine art gallery, Inner State, have curated and produced over 100 murals in Eastern Market alone, and over 200 murals throughout the city of Detroit. With the creation of these murals, each area has seen a significant visual impact on the surrounding neighborhood as well as increased traffic, additional economic development, and increased safety.

In addition to creating new murals, Murals in the Market also hosts many events during the festival including panel discussions, artists dinners, meet and greet opportunities, site-specific installations, block parties, nightime events that coordinate with Eastern Market After Dark, and more! Murals in the Market is more than an international mural festival, it’s a creative platform that inspires and encourages community engagement using public art as a vessel.

Learn more here

As an artist, academic, and a cofounder to an art technology company called Monograph, Kevin McCoy brings a unique perspective to the idea of authorship & ownership in its application to the digital and internet art scene. Established in 2014, Monegraph aimed to solve issues of provenance and legitimacy artists and collectors face when selling and buying digital art works. In this episode, we speak with Kevin about how Monegraph was received in its initial years, why provenance matters in the art world, and what some of the hurdles are facing digital and new media artists today.

-About Kevin McCoy-

His artworks take many diverse forms including video sculpture and installation, photography, long-form film, curatorial practice and performance, kinetic sculpture and software-driven on-line projects. Thematically, his work explores changing conditions around social roles, categories, genres and forms of value. His primary research questions ask 'What counts as new,’ 'How is meaning established,' and 'How are cultural memories formed'. He has worked collaboratively with Jennifer McCoy for many years to try to answer what it means to speak together, often finding that experience outstrips available modes of presentation and discourse. To these ends their work has adopted many methodological approaches: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently remote viewing and speculative modeling.

In New York City, his work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, and Smack Mellon. International exhibitions include projects at the Pompidou Center, the British Film Institute, ZKM, the Hanover Kunstverien, the Bonn Kunstverein, and F.A.C.T. (Liverpool, UK). Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Art News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek. Residencies include work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

His artwork is represented by in New York by Postmasters Gallery and in Geneva by Gallerie Guy Bartschi and can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM in Luxembourg.

In 2014 he co-founded monegraph.com a platform that uses the technology underlying Bitcoin to provide a mechanism for validating, owning and trading digital media assets. The project was presented at The New Museum as part of Rhizome's seven on seven conference and at Tech Crunch Disrupt in New York.

His teaching engages both undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and related arts professions and addresses practical and theoretical uses of digital media technology together with surveys of related theoretical and philosophical texts. The current semester's coursework can be found at mccoyspace.com/nyu.

Learn more at:

auxillaryprojects.com

monegraph.com

corespace.com