SEATTLE Museum of Museums Energy Drink, an extensive, immersive installation by the artist team of Brian Sanchez and Neon Saltwater (on view through August 29, 2021), presents a number of possible interpretations: a gay dystopian environment for a “happy” couple; a hallucinatory fun house revolving around domestic symbols; a series of discrete activity areas for upscale urbanites who require access to gyms, spas, art galleries, sculpture studios, bars, and lounges.
LGBTQ+
Speaking My Business: A Conversation with Jay Critchley
Multidisciplinary artist/activist Jay Critchley, who is based in Provincetown, Massachusetts, uses humor and satire to touch on serious ecological, cultural, and political themes.
Body of Work: A Conversation with Young Joon Kwak
Young Joon Kwak, a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture, performance, and video, reimagines the form, function, and materiality of objects in order to propose alternative ways of seeing and understanding bodies, as well as physical and social spaces.
What Remains In a Person’s Soul: A Conversation with Vanessa German
Visual and performance artist and activist Vanessa German might also be described as a full-time resident artist. Her Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood is the driving force behind her work; it is also home to the ARThouse, a community arts initiative that she founded in 2009 to bring art to local children.
Beyond Physicality: A Conversation with Adejoke Tugbiyele
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Nigeria, Adejoke Tugbiyele now lives and works in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, exploring a practice “charged with symbolic meanings.” As an artist and advocate, she bridges multiple cultures and synthesizes stubborn oppositions—masculine/feminine, dark/light, nature/culture.
Chiachio & Giannone: Love is in the Air
Familia “queer,” tal como ellos mismos se definen, Daniel Giannone y Leo Chiachio son una pareja de artistas argentinos unidos no solamente por el amor que se profesan el uno al otro sino por su amor al arte, llevando a cabo hace décadas una obra conjunta que los tiene como protagonistas—juntos a sus tres “hijos mascotas”—donde la pintura deviene bordado.
Nicole Eisenman: Walking Together
Until recently, Nicole Eisenman was best known as a figurative painter. Crafted with thick painterly brushstrokes, the bodies in her paintings oscillate between representation and abstraction, bright colors intertwined with neutrals and, more often than not, the pallid yellow skin tones we associate with seasickness.
States of Flux: A Conversation with Jes Fan
Jes Fan’s work unspools complexities, unifies diversities, and creates new forms of beauty. His unique vision includes abstract systems that allude to gender and racial distinctions as well as to outer/inner structures, merging art, science, philosophy, and cultural histories.
Roni Horn: Great Doubts
The thing that’s so appealing about “the sublime” is that it’s indefinable and without boundaries. All markers are missing; there are no indicators, no specificities, no fixed framework in which to embed meaning. Instead, there is awe and universality, consisting entirely of experience and sensation culminating in metaphor.
David Wojnarowicz
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art Assuming familiarity with Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre, his obsession with his dreams, and his deep involvement with AIDS activism, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” prompts two related questions: First, how does someone dream when they cannot sleep? And second, what are dreams to a person who, like Wojnarowicz, a victim of AIDS, knowingly has no future?
