Commissioned for After the Plaster Foundation, or, “Where can we live?” an exhibition at Queens Museum (Fall 2020).

“In 1969, Jack Smith moved into a loft on the corner of Grand and Greene Streets in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan. By the time he arrived, he was widely known as the director of Flaming Creatures (1963)—a film fewer people had seen than had heard about, as the public trials over its ostensible obscenity dragged on well into 1968. As the poster child for freedom of speech and sexual expression, Smith had the cultural cachet to join the ranks of the avant-garde of Soho which, at the time, was something of an artist haven—even if he didn’t quite have the money. [read more]

Commissioned for Nick Mauss, Transmissions, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press (March 2020).

“In 1967, audiences arrived at the School of Visual Arts in New York for what was advertised as an event by the artist Elaine Sturtevant only to find a sign reading ‘Sturtevant’s Relâche’ on the locked auditorium doors. Relâche, a French colloquialism for a canceled performance, turned the viewers away at the precipice of the theater, denying them the spectacle of dancing bodies. Flagging Sturtevant’s position within a Dadaist legacy of aesthetic negation, dancer and critic Jill Johnston described the work as ‘cancellation art.’ [read more]

in Spatial Practice a special issue of Movement Research Performance Journal, no. 54 (Summer 2020).

“A viral image is circulating. It is composed of juxtaposed photographs: one shows the Trumps (Donald, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka) as they break ground at a development site, the other features an aerial perspective of a mass grave on Hart Island being filled with white coffins holding corpses currently accumulating from COVID-19. Its caption reads, “First Family photograph.” As a meme, the image indexes the callously criminal behavior of the so-called “First Family,” whose management of the pandemic has consistently placed profits over people, allowing market forces to trump care for human lives. [read more]

in “Deep Cuts,” Millenium Film Journal, No. 69 (Spring 2019).

“Entering Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis—the recent survey of Jack Smith’s work at Artists Space curated by Jay Sanders and Jamie Stevens–one is greeted by Smith’s iconic hollow-throated voice reading one of his many diatribes about the plight of artists against art’s institutions (and their scions). On the wall are a series of Smith’s headshots hung in pyramidal formation. They form something of an alter—like the many Smith made to the “Technicolor Goddess” Maria Montez, his muse, whose star-quality Smith’s work attempted to embody, eventually in his later years casting a stuffed penguin named Yolanda La Penguina in Montez’s place. [read more]