RECOMMENDED FEATURES recently published content from around the web, recommendations from Culture Type worth taking the time to explore:
“Gary Simmons” by Jodie Bass | BOMB Magazine
For Prospect 3 in New Orleans (open through Jan. 25), Gary Simmons built “Recapturing the Memories of the Black Ark,” a site-specific “sculpture activated by live musicians.” Jodie Bass talks to the Brooklyn-based artist about the installation, a sound system housed in discarded wood that can be transformed based on the desired set up of the various musicians performing in the vacant venue in the Treme. “Music has always been a big influence on me and my work. I was in Dallas, Texas like 1992 or something, and I saw Nice and Smooth perform. I was in a room of maybe twelve people, and I was standing right next to Greg Nice. I’d never get that close in New York, and they didn’t care. They were like, We’re having as good a time as we would if we had packed twenty thousand people in a concert hall,” Simmons says. “That’s awesome, and that’s what I want to happen. If there are twelve people here and they remember the show and they go and tell somebody, then it has a resonance after the actual performance.”
“Music has always been a big influence on me and my work.”
— Gary Simmons, BOMB Magazine
“Peggy Cooper Cafritz: Everything in a Big Way” by Penelope Green | New York Times
More than five years ago a fire destroyed the home of Washington, D.C. art collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz and she lost 300 prized works by El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Jacob Lawrence, Hank Willis Thomas and Kara Walker, among many others. The Times reports on how she has weathered the material setbacks, family tragedy and a series of formidable health challenges and re-callabrated her life with a new home in a new neighborhood and a fresh collection of works by emerging and established artists including Sanford Biggers, Iona Rozeal Brown, James Dicke Prize winner Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Kristine Mays and William Villalongo and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
“El Anatsui said he’d make replacement work. A lot of artists had that response. I haven’t followed through because that feels very awkward to me. The artists have been very, I would almost say, loving, and some of them have been downright sweet.”
— Peggy Cooper Cafritz, New York Times
“The Digital Creator” by Rachel Small | Interview magazine
Much of Jacolby Satterwhite’s practice is consumed with animated 3-D video—erratic, otherworldly presentations that are drunk with color. Rachel Small introduces her conversation with Satterwhite, one of the magazine’s 15 faces of 2015, by describing his videos as “pure fantasy, not unlike Surrealist dreamscapes.” The artist visited the offices of the magazine twice, the second time bringing his laptop so he could talk through and explain his work. “My practice is rooted in observation. How do I take forms and live action performance and recreate them in a virtual space? Whether you see shopping carts and I’m shopping in this space, or there’s a trash bag and you will see a big-breasted trash bag morphing monster woman…everything is rooted in how to recycle [elements from the real world into animations],” says Satterwhite. “So for me, it’s a network of being a poet with data and being a surrealist and using language and spaces to kind of generate my own convoluted narratives.” CT
IMAGE: GARY SIMMONS, Installation View, “Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark,” 2014 at Tremé Market Branch for Prospect.3 New Orleans | via Metro Pictures
