“Poke fun in a way that makes you feel optimistic”: A Conversation with Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman, Marie-Laure de Noailles in Her Paris Salon, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Projects 

By Loney Abrams

Illustrator, author, and beloved BAM artist Maira Kalman generously partnered with Julie Saul Projects and BAM to release a new edition to benefit BAM’s artistic and educational programs; it’s available online through Artspace. Signed and numbered by the artist, the print was produced in an edition size of 75. Artspace’s Loney Abrams sat down with Maira Kalman to discuss Kalman’s most fascinating multi-disciplinary projects, where she finds inspiration, and her newest BAM benefit edition. Condensed highlights from their conversation are shared below.

Larry Ossei-Mensah & Glenn Kaino: A Conversation

Larry Ossei-Mensah (Left) and Glenn Kaino (Right) in front of Blue

Larry Ossei-Mensah, Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic, is guest curator of The Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong, BAM’s first dedicated visual art space. Larry sat down with the inaugural gallery artist, Los Angeles-born conceptual artist Glenn Kaino, to talk about the exhibition.

Artist Christopher K. Ho’s Take on First Love

Visual artist Christopher K. Ho brings his site-specific carpet installation Dear John to the Peter Jay Sharp Building Feb 8—Feb 24, just in time for Valentine’s Day. We spoke with Ho about his approach to art-making, the inspiration behind this sprawling work, and his love of Taylor Swift.

In Context: Interpassivities

Classical ballet dancers and migrant workers walk alongside the crowd in this shape-shifting ballet by Danish artist and filmmaker Jesper Just. A modern experience inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, this performance rethinks the meaning of maps, who makes them, and the artificial borders we create. Context is everything, so we’ve provided some articles to read and videos to watch. After you’ve attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #Interpassivities.

Uniforms Transform into Paper

This week, My Lai—Jonathan Berger and Kronos Quartet's fevered character study featuring tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân Ánh Võ—comes to the BAM Harvey Theater from Wed, Sep 27—Sun, Sep 30. Reflecting on a decisive moment when breaking rank in the name of human decency forever changed the public perception of a war, the piece interrogates the ethics of disobedience in the face of atrocity. During the development of My Lai, the show's creators worked with artist, veteran, and creator of Combat Paper Drew Cameron to generate new visual work inspired by the performance. Below, Cameron describes his process—and what first inspired this transformative creative practice.

Drew Cameron in Iraq, 2003

By Drew Cameron

I am a veteran of the war in Iraq. I entered the military not because of effective advertisements or hero films, not even college money or idealized patriotism. No, I feel that I entered the military because our society needs soldiers and has always found ways to force or entice us into service. I ran guns in the war, I occupied and criminalized strangers and wondered in the summer of 2003 if the people in Iraq would be better off after all of our invasions. Returning from the war I found other veterans and artists and began to make paper from our old uniforms.

DanceAfrica Visual Art: Omar Victor Diop's The Studio of Vanities

by Holly Shen

While DanceAfrica is anchored in the tradition of dance, the festival is also an opportunity to celebrate other vital components of African culture and diaspora, including visual art. In 2014, BAM Visual Art began an initiative to bring fine art into the DanceAfrica mix, inviting artists to create a new piece or exhibit work during the festival weekend. This year, BAM is thrilled to present a series of four recent photographs by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop.

Aminata, 2013, from the Le Studio des Vanités series, 35.4 x 35.4 inches, pigment inkjet print
© Omar Victor Diop / Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris.

Initially working in commercial photography and fashion, Diop established himself as a fine artist with his first major series, Project Diaspora, a collection of striking self-portraits that explore personal identity and collective narrative in African history Diop’s latest project, The Studio of Vanities, is an attempt “to portray a generation which endeavors to showcase the African urban universe and its blossoming art production and exchanges.” Four portraits from The Studio of Vanities series will be on view in the Dorothy Levitt Lobby of BAM's Peter Jay Sharp Building (30 Lafayette Avenue) during this year’s festival.

In Context: Refuse the Hour

William Kentridge’s phantasmagoric investigation of time, Refuse the Hour, comes to BAM on October 22. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #WilliamKentridge.

Refuse the Hour—Time, Indulgent Muse

Dada Masilo and William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodges

By Susan Yung

Refuse the Hour, like artist William Kentridge’s production of The Magic Flute (2007 Winter/Spring), can be referred to as opera, but it sits restlessly within one genre. This multilayered performance by Kentridge is a collaboration with composer Philip Miller, choreographer Dada Masilo, video artist Catherine Meyburgh, and dramaturg Peter Galison. Unpacking the layered, engaging work (October 22—25, Harvey Theater)—in which a running monologue by Kentridge alternates with sections of music, song, dance, and film—is a rewarding experience.

Introducing the BAM + NADA Portfolio

by Jessica Goldschmidt

In 1987, BAM began commissioning artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Barbara Kruger to create limited-edition benefit prints. Now, we’re creating a benefit portfolio for the 21st century in collaboration with NADA—New Art Dealers Alliance—which is most definitely not nothing. It’s something. It’s a big deal, actually.

NADA was founded in 2002 as an alternative, nonprofit collective of contemporary art professionals. Together, BAMart—the visual art component of our organization—and NADA commissioned 12 of today’s most exciting visual artists to create a limited-edition print portfolio to benefit both organizations.

The portfolio itself is a work of art, housing prints in a variety of media in a beautiful archival linen folder. Check out the website to learn more about the project and the artists (in alphabetical order): Joshua Abelow, Sascha Braunig, Sarah Crowner, Alex Da Corte, Michael DeLucia, Christian Holstad, Zak Kitnick, Margaret Lee, Sam Moyer, Ulrike Müller, Zak Prekop, and Michael Williams.

To offer a glimpse into the process of these up-and-coming artists, we asked two of the portfolio’s participants (Zak Prekop and Sascha Braunig) to introduce themselves and their work to the BAM community. They graciously complied:

The Labors of Silence

Obie award-winner Ain Gordon’s new work, Not What Happened, fills a historical void by imagining what happened in a woman’s quotidian 19th-century existence. Forrest Holzapfel, a photographer and Gordon’s collaborator, also explores our forgotten history through stark images of obsolete objects and rural landscapes. These photos are imbued with memory due to Forrest’s keen eye and dedication to local history, and, as the backdrops in Not What Happened, give the main character, Silence, a greater voice. Below Forrest elaborates on his images, their relationship to Ain’s work, and his own personal search for what happened. A selection of Forrest’s photos will be on display as part of Next Wave Art in the Fisher Lower Lobby through December 22. He will also take part in a post-show discussion with Ain Gordon on September 27. 

Kin & Cup

The Labors of Silence
by Forrest Holzapfel

Inhabiting the mind of another person is a leap of imagination which demands empathy.

Silence is pregnant with meaning: a character from Ain Gordon’s theater work Not What Happened, a woman worn from the labor of existence and from the convolutions of her heart.

Silence is also our constructed, remembered sound of 1804. Feeling the character Silence’s place in the world however yields more: the scrape of iron on hot brick and the popping of split beech in the cavernous fireplace. The slide of a bead of sweat down the bridge of nose, crunching the lees of the woodpile underfoot, a gasp of crisp winter dawn air in the dooryard.

A Russian-English Glossary for Irina Korina’s Chapel

by Brian Droitcour

Irina Korina's Chapel. Photo by David Harper

Irina Korina’s sculptures address the bitter undercurrents of faith and nostalgia—the frustration that comes with longing for things that can never be seen or touched. She uses monumentality to conjure the grandness of collective belief, but she emphasizes the imposing inhumanity of monuments by making walls without openings and blocked lines of sight. Korina’s Chapel mimics the shape of a church but she has broken the church into components and replaced them with rhyming forms from everyday life, to locate the germ of transcendent belief in the ordinary, material experience of space and time.

While Korina intentionally makes confusion and frustration a part of the viewer’s experience, she also depends on her audience’s familiarity with her visual and formal references. Since many of them are particular to the Russian context, we offer this glossary to remove at least one layer of opacity from Chapel.

Artist José Parlá on "Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture"

Photo: Michael Appleton

Listen to Brooklyn artist José Parlá discuss his mural "Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture," commissioned by BAM for the Fisher Building.

Brooklyn Shelf Life: Preserving Print in the Digital Age

by Cory Bracken

BAM has a new addition to the evolving façade of the Peter Jay Sharp Building at 30 Lafayette Ave, along with David Byrne’s typographic bike racks. Round the corner onto Ashland and you will be greeted by the latest BAMart: Outdoors installation, a series of three surreal sculptures by a coalition of street artists from Brooklyn’s DIY community.

Be advised: these sculptures serve a purpose beyond their ornate and arresting strangeness. In response to the quotidian nature of newspaper boxes, SHOWPAPER proposed an ambitious project for the BAMart: Outdoors initiative called Brooklyn Shelf Life that would introduce a radical twist to periodical distribution in the BAM neighborhood. Throughout the coming year, these sculptural repositories will house a revolving series of independent print publications from Chelsea-based Printed Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to the creation and promotion of artist-made publications, as well as SHOWPAPER, a free biweekly print-only comprehensive listing of all-ages shows in New York that features full-color prints from young underground artists.