Matthew Higgs

Matthew Higgs

interviewed by

Jen Delos Reyes

(listen)

Matthew Higgs (b.1964. Wakefield, England) is a curator, critic and artist currently living and working in New York. Since the early 1990s he has sought to develop a practice that considers the intersections and overlaps between these disciplines. A primary facet of this approach has been the development of an ongoing, inter-generational dialogue amongst artists – through his exhibitions, projects and publications. Over the past fifteen years he has organized more than one hundred and fifty exhibitions and projects in Europe and North America. His writings have appeared in more than fifty books, catalogs and periodicals, including Artforum, and Frieze. In the past two years he has contributed to publications for artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, John McCracken, Christian Marclay, Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Ken Price, Marilyn Minter, and Kay Rosen, amongst others. Higgs is currently the Director and Chief Curator of White Columns, New York's oldest non-profit art space. Since his arrival at White Columns in the fall of 2004 he has organized more than seventy-five individual exhibitions and projects, showing the work of more than 400 international artists of all generations. He has taught extensively over the past ten years and was a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London and the Royal College of Art, London.

Stephanie Smith

Stephanie Smith

(listen)

Stephanie Smith is Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. Her recent exhibitions at the Smart include Heartland (2008-2009, coorganized with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and co-curated with Charles Esche and Kerstin Niemann), Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation (2008 + tour), Drawing as Process in Contemporary Art (2006), and Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (2005 + tour, coorganized with iCI), as well as the intimate archival exhibition Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being (2006). Her upcoming project Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (2011) received one of three 2008 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Awards.

Prior to joining the Smart's staff in 1999, Smith held curatorial positions at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and the Rice University Art Gallery. She is an affiliate member of the University of Chicago's Department of Visual Arts and a founding member of its Open Practice Committee. She speaks and writes widely about art and sustainability. Other current research include feasting, hospitality, independent cultural infrastructure, and the American Midwest.

(Please enjoy this archive of Stephanie Smith's Lecture at Portland State University)

Reggae!

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Please enjoy this super-secret, all reggae version of Art Talk AM on the Radio!

Courtney Fink

Courtney Fink

(listen)

[Interview conducted by Cyrus Smith]

Courtney Fink is the Executive Director of Southern Exposure in San Francisco, a nonprofit visual arts organization founded in 1974 that supports emerging artists and youth in a dynamic environment in which they can develop and present new work and ideas. Prior to Southern Exposure, Fink worked at the California College of the Arts and Capp Street Project in San Francisco, and Franklin Furnace in New York. For almost 15 years, Courtney has been committed to developing the capacity of visual artists and the systems that support them.

Fink is also a curator and writer and publishes books under the small press she founded, Art Workers Press. She recently co-developed SoEx Off-Site, a major yearlong series of public art projects and the acclaimed exhibitions Practice Makes Perfect: Bay Area Conceptual Craft and The Way We Work all at Southern Exposure. She is also working on co-developing several national arts field-building projects to develop new networks connecting visual arts organizations locally and nationally in partnership with the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture and the Warhol Foundation. She has served as a juror for Creative Capital, Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco International Film Festival among many others, and has lectured locally and nationally. Originally from Los Angeles, California, Courtney holds a B.A. in art history and fine arts from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Darren O'Donnell

Darren O'Donnell

(listen)

[Interview conducted by Cyrus Smith]

Darren O'Donnell is a Canadian novelist, essayist, performance artist, playwright, director and actor. He is the artistic director of the performance company Mammalian Diving Reflex, self proclaimed as "Ideal Entertainment for the End of the World." In 2006 Darren published "Social Acupuncture," which shares it's name with a wing of Mammalian Diving Reflex where he creates work that engages the public, in order to prove the "generosity, abundance, and power of the social sphere."