Outlet shoppes at El Paso. (Credit: KFOX14/CBS4)
Hearts to be Healed to unveil art exhibit and sculpture at El Paso’s Outlet Shoppes
Debunking Photography Myths: A Realistic Look at the Profession |
Photography as a profession is often met with skepticism and discouragement, overshadowed by warnings of financial instability and market saturation. Such pervasive negativity can deter aspiring photographers from pursuing their passion, despite the evolving opportunities within the industry.
Coming to you from Scott Choucino with Tin House Studio, this insightful video addresses common misconceptions and challenges facing those aspiring to turn their passion for photography into a profession. Choucino methodically debunks the myth that professional photography isn’t financially viable, sharing personal experiences and comparing the unpredictability of freelancing with the apparent security of traditional 9-to-5 jobs. He argues that awareness and adaptability in managing finances can offer a level of control rarely found in conventional employment, where job security is often illusory.
Furthermore, Choucino tackles the claim that the photography industry is declining. He provides compelling arguments against the backdrop of technological advancements and the digital age, illustrating how these factors have expanded rather than contracted opportunities for photographers. By highlighting the constant demand for fresh content across various media platforms, from traditional print to dynamic online spaces, he reinforces the vitality and relevance of the profession.
Addressing the concern that monetizing one’s passion for photography might dilute its joy, Choucino presents a nuanced view of professional creativity. He discusses the balance between commissioned work and personal projects, emphasizing how a successful photography career affords the freedom to explore creative passions alongside commercial assignments. This balance, according to Choucino, not only enhances a photographer’s skill set but also broadens their artistic vision, making the profession as rewarding financially as it is creatively. Certainly, it isn’t an easy career, but it’s worth hearing Choucino’s perspective. Check out the video above for the full rundown.
If you would like to learn more about the business of photography, check out “Making Real Money: The Business of Commercial Photography With Monte Isom!”
Christie’s launches buy now, pay later scheme for art up to $1mn
Christie’s has invested in Art Money, a US lender that launched in 2016, and will offer a buy now, pay later scheme on art bought in its sales for less than $1mn. Would-be buyers receive a preapproved limit to bid from the lender and, if successful, can pay in instalments over a maximum of 10 months. Art Money takes a fee from the buyer of up to 10 per cent of Christie’s total invoice, including its buyer’s premium (26 per cent at that level).
As with all payment plans, it increases the overall cost of buying, but the point, says Art Money’s founder and chief executive Paul Becker, is that “there is so much friction around buying art, we just want to apply current business practices [from other industries] to help grow the market”. He notes that most of the existing loans available against art, including through the auction houses, start at $1mn.
The Christie’s partnership launches at its prints and multiples auction in New York on April 16. All 173 works, with estimates ranging from $800-$1,200 for a print by Ann Hamilton to $600,000-$800,000 for an edition of Henri Matisse’s “Jazz” portfolio (1947), are eligible for Art Money.
Christie’s has made the investment through its Ventures fund, headed by Devang Thakkar. He says the company has invested in 10 businesses since 2022 and, while its financial commitment is not disclosed, this was set between $250,000 and $2mn per company at launch. Becker describes Christie’s stake in Art Money as “minority, non-controlling and non-exclusive”.
For now, the initiative is only available to buyers in the US and Australia, but Becker says Art Money is working towards regulatory approval across all countries. Thakkar says the April 16 auction will provide “a road map to understand consumer appetite” and he hopes to roll out the offering to more sales and buyers, particularly in the UK.
Frieze’s owner Endeavor remains tight-lipped on its plans for the fair group and other companies in the entertainment conglomerate since it agreed to be taken private by the investment company Silver Lake on April 2. The transaction, which at $27.50 per share, valued the group at $13bn ($25bn including debt), marks one of the biggest private equity deals in the past decade.
While the overall strategy points to slimming down an unwieldy group of companies and events, which range from the fairs to sports tournaments and a global marketing company, as well as its core talent agency business, a source briefed on the Silver Lake acquisition says that “there are no decisions or announcements with regard to businesses within the Endeavor network”. The deal is expected to complete in the first quarter of next year.
In a statement, Ari Emanuel, who stays on as chief executive of Endeavor, said: “We are excited to continue to unlock and invest in the growth opportunities ahead as a private company.” He is in line for a $25mn “asset sale transaction bonus”, payable once certain, unspecified businesses are sold, according to a regulatory filing.
This week is the first edition of Expo Chicago under Frieze’s ownership (April 11-14, Navy Pier) while the 12th in-person edition of Frieze New York runs next month (May 1-5, The Shed).
The art world moves to Venice next week for the opening of the Biennale. Beyond the formal programme and national pavilions are plenty of gallery shows, taking advantage of the number of art-hungry visitors in town. At one end of the contemporary art spectrum is Marisa Bellani, whose gallery Roman Road now runs exhibitions nomadically. She brings a show of eight works by the self-taught Thai painter Channatip Chanvipava, now studying at London’s Royal College of Art.
The artist investigates queer sensibilities including, in his painting “Future Fertile” (2024), parenthood in the gay community. The works, which Bellani says chime with the Biennale’s theme of “Foreigners Everywhere”, are priced at between £3,500 and £30,000. She adds, though, that the showing is less about sales and “more about creating visibility” while the art world’s luminaries are in town (Dimora Ai Santi, April 17-May 27).
Another adviser-curator, Max Levai, who runs The Ranch art space in Montauk, Long Island, New York, brings a show of 11 paintings by Frank Auerbach, winner of the Biennale’s Golden Lion prize in 1986. The works, which span 1969-2016, are conceived as a “succinct survey”, Levai says, and take on a range of subjects. Like Bellani, Levai plays down any commercial goals — something of a Biennale tradition — though he concedes that “when you bring pictures together and create moments like this, opportunities might be pursued” (Palazzo da Mosto, April 18-June 28).
Levai says the title of the Venice show, Starting Again, refers to the artist’s process and in no way relates to his own experience at Marlborough Gallery, which was co-founded by his father’s uncle, Frank Lloyd. Levai worked there and was briefly its president until, in 2020, he said he was “effectively terminated”. (Marlborough’s trustees disagreed with his representation of events.) Last week, the board of the 78-year old gallery announced that it was closing for good.
Healthy sales, made mostly under $100,000, were reported from the 16th edition of the Dallas Art Fair (April 4-7). As at other such events this year, the mood was “a bit more subdued than in previous editions”, says Texas-based Nick Campbell, founder of Campbell Art Advisory.
A loyal base of wealthy local collectors has long supported this fair and, says its director Kelly Cornell, the next generation is gradually continuing their passion. “We have an established community, which are big shoes to fill, but people are stepping up to the plate,” she says. Campbell agrees that “the younger generation is interested and engaged and is continuing Dallas’s rich collecting tradition”.
Sales reported from the 91 exhibitors included to the Dallas Museum of Art, through an acquisition fund organised with the fair since 2016. This year, the museum spent its $100,000 grant on three large-scale works for its collection: a tapestry by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain (Kerlin Gallery), a painting by JooYoung Choi (Inman) and an embroidery by Thania Petersen (Nicodim).
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Remembering Richard Serra, 1938–2024 | Magazine
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Misan Harriman photographs people ages one to 100 in Quaker’s ‘100 Reasons to Rise’
A black-and-white portrait series explores the beauty of everyday heroes and their morning routines.
In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, the calm of morning holds a special significance. It’s a time of new beginnings, of hope and of preparation for the day ahead.
Quaker, an iconic brand synonymous with wholesome breakfasts, unveils today a unique campaign, ‘100 Reasons to Rise,’ to celebrate the simple beauty and humanity of morning routines. At the heart of this project is a stunning collection of black-and-white photographs by Misan Harriman, an Academy Award nominee known for documenting important social movements, including Black Lives Matter protests and climate strikes.
Harriman’s lens has artfully immortalized the intimate moments of 100 everyday heroes, spanning the ages from one to 100, as they sit down for breakfast on significant days in their lives. Each photograph is also accompanied by an audio interview, allowing each subject to communicate their own thoughts and feelings.
Whether it’s a one-year-old boy preparing for his role as a ringbearer or a 61-year-old man eagerly anticipating meeting his grandson for the first time, the images showcase the universal truth that how each of us starts our day can profoundly impact the rest of it.
Quaker’s decision to spotlight everyday heroes is rooted in the belief that stories of triumph and perseverance have the power to inspire and uplift. The brand’s own research revealed that mornings are often viewed as the most hopeful part of the day by over 40% of people around the world. Moreover, a staggering 70% find hope in the people around them and nearly two-thirds draw strength from stories of overcoming challenges.
It’s Harriman’s visual storytelling capabilities that help the brand connect with consumers on a personal level.
“Misan Harriman’s photography adds a deeply personal touch to ‘100 Reasons To Rise,’ making it the perfect avenue for connecting with individuals,” Ciara Dilley, Quaker’s global vice-president of marketing, told The Drum. “It was important to the brand that the campaign felt genuine and reflected the world today, the diverse range of subjects photographed was essential to capturing that authenticity, allowing anyone and everyone to relate to these moments that are truly universal.”
To bring ’100 Reasons to Rise’ to life, Quaker has launched an interactive digital experience (via 100ReasonsToRise.com) that allows viewers to immerse themselves in the individual stories behind each image.
Quaker’s commitment to connecting with audiences goes beyond the digital realm; the brand transformed ’100 Reasons to Rise’ into a captivating in-person exhibit, complete with interactive pods where visitors can delve deeper into the photo series while hearing narration by Harriman himself.
The exhibit kicks off in Toronto, with a one-day showcase at The Harbourfront Centre on April 10, followed by a three-day stint at Union Station from April 17 to 19. These locations, bustling with morning activity, provide the perfect backdrop for Quaker to tell the stories of these humble heroes.
The creative will also be used for out-of-home work in cities that have yet to be disclosed.
Harriman also reflected on the project, saying: “This project recognizes individual stories of how we start the day and demonstrates that, regardless of what life throws at us, we have fortitude and hope. For Quaker to be bold enough to allow us to go to people’s homes and really observe them as they live, that adds a layer of authenticity that always comes through in the lens. Quaker is one of the few brands in the world with whom it makes sense to do something like this. It was lightning in a bottle.”
Notably, Quaker’s ‘100 Reasons to Rise’ is part of Quaker’s first-ever global platform, ‘You’ve Got This,’ which celebrates the greatness of common people.
Quaker partnered with the ad agency Uncommon Creative Studio to bring the campaign to fruition.
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In photos: What it’s like to be young, fun and full of dreams
Gracie Brackstone’s Life’s a Parade (2023) was a joyful, chaotic photo book documenting her friendships, flatmates and nights out in Manchester. Made during a time of bereavement, Brackstone’s project was intended as much to inspire her younger sister in the wake of their mum’s death as it was to chronicle the emerging photographer’s daily life – a clarion call for better times ahead.
The Dazed Club member’s latest series, Shared Dreams, picks up when Life’s A Parade left off. “Life’s a Parade ended with a letter to my sister, encouraging her to have a parade too, after losing our mum,” she tells Dazed. “Shared Dreams is my next chapter, it’s living a life I dreamed about.” Despite life seeming to throw “every obstacle” at her and, after losing her job and having to leave her home in Manchester, it’s been a golden period in which her ambitions and friendships have been galvanised. Oftentimes forgoing food in favour of camera roll, Brackstone has continued to revel in her community of friends and creatives.
“Although the last six months have been quite surreal, I’ve been the most free I have ever been,” she explains. “I am so grateful for my friends because they really helped me during this time, letting me stay on their sofas, making me food – even if they had stolen it.” The portraits in her latest series tell the story of this picaresque life – the highs and the lows. “In the past few months, I have soaked up everything, dressed up all the time for no real reason, and had so many spontaneous nights and days.”
She tells us, “My community means so much to me and the idea of Shared Dreams stemmed from us planning our futures together. Everyone I’m friends with is creative to some degree. We all hear about each other’s dreams, we pray for them and work on them together. We all hope that it will be a knock-on effect, one of us gets an opportunity and the whole friendship group thrives.”
While some of the photographs in her latest book depict Brackstone realising some of her dreams (“Editorials, my first book launch, fashion week, a trip to Paris…”), the main narrative to emerge is of leaving her beloved Manchester to take her chances in London. “I’m not sure what part three has in store quite yet. It may predominantly be set in London, I think? I need to push myself to discover worlds beyond my own and what’s comfortable. The last two books have been about seeing the beauty in everyone around me, the next part should probably be about seeing the beauty in me.”
Visit the gallery above for a closer look.
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German art gallery fires employee for hanging his own work
There are a few tried-and-tested shortcuts to art world celebrity. You could seduce an elderly Swiss billionaire who is owed a few favours by the board of the Whitney. You could get really ripped and post yourself posing topless next to your abstract paintings on Instagram. You could shoot Andy Warhol. But a 52-year-old man in Germany has come up with a new and even more daring scheme: get a job in an art gallery and simply hang your work up next to the Picassos and the Dalis.
The man in question (who hasn’t been named) drilled two holes in the walls of Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, where he was working as a technician, and mounted one of his own paintings. This would have been funnier if he had thought he was going to get away with it, that the gallery simply wouldn’t notice. But – unfortunately – it turns out this was yet another art world “stunt”, the kind of situationist prank which has long been exhausted of its power to delight and surprise.
The Pinakothek’s supervisors noticed almost immediately, and the man has since been fired from job and banned from the gallery. According to Munich’s local media, he orchestrated the stunt in an effort to launch his artistic career: the story has certainly attracted a lot of media attention, but the fact he hasn’t been named – and no outlets are including an image of the painting – must be a disappointment.
This isn’t the first time someone has pulled off a similar prank: earlier this year, a member of the public mounted one of her own paintings into a gallery in Bonn, Germany, after smuggling it underneath a giant hoody. After discovering the painting, the gallery tweeted, “We think it’s funny and we want to get to know the artist. So get in touch! There’s no trouble. Word of honour.”
The Pinakothek der Moderne doesn’t seem to find its former employee’s antics quite so funny. Maybe the lesson here is that faking it till you make it will only get you so far. Here’s a “stunt” idea for any budding art-world provocateur: get a job!
Indigenous Artifacts Should Be Returned to Indigenous People
In January 2024, the American Museum of Natural History in New York closed its Hall of the Great Plains and Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and visitors to the Field Museum in Chicago and other museums across the country are seeing covered display cases and signs explaining that these exhibits “have been covered in consideration of ongoing legal and ethical reviews.” These closures are overdue corrections by museums that have long misrepresented and misused Indigenous history. But more than a subtraction, they are a sign of an important shift in where and how Americans learn Native American history.
It’s easy to see covered cases and closed exhibits as a loss, even if an understandable one. Most of the news coverage has explained the shift as an unavoidable sacrifice for Native rights and sensibilities, a zero-sum game in which museum-goers and school field trips are the necessary losers. Headlines proclaim closures and removals and show pictures of empty cases or the final rush of visitors before the items were taken from public view. Stories quote disappointed visitors who interpret the closures as keeping them from learning about Native Americans.
Yet this focus misses the fact that there has never been an easier time to learn about Native American histories and cultures and to see Native American art and artifacts. A field trip that may be diminished by the closures at the American Museum of Natural History can simply head to lower Manhattan to visit the NYC branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. It’s time to stop expecting Native history at museums of “natural history” and start learning it from museums and cultural centers that are run by any of the hundreds of Native nations in the United States or with their collaboration. And it’s time to start learning the quite different stories that they tell.
Until recently, exhibits about Native Americans were in museums of “natural history” because white Americans saw them as part of archaeology and anthropology rather than history. At its opening in the 1960s, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History had nothing about Native Americans, who instead were in the National Museum of Natural History alongside early primates and dinosaurs. The message was clear: Native Americans—perceived of as a monolithic culture—were primitive and destined for disappearance, fitting more with displays of animals than with the American History Museum’s message of technology and progress. In the early 20th century, the Yahi man known as Ishi was displayed as a living exhibit at the University of California Museum of Anthropology following the genocide of his people. In 1968, a group of Miwoks (Yosemites) visited the National Museum of Natural History and read in one of the exhibits that their tribe had gone “extinct” in the 19th century. And until the closures that happened in January, visitors at the American Museum of Natural History could see generic mannequins of Native men and women stoically conveying timeless primitiveness.
The latest changes are responding to new federal rules on the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) regarding the rights of Native nations over sacred and funerary objects of their ancestors. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., founded as part of implementing NAGPRA, was a way to responsibly deal with the large collection of Native American skeletal remains and sacred burial objects held by the Smithsonian. But the NMAI has become far more than that. Its Indigenous designers, curators, and administrators, in part with funding from Native nations, have built a public space with locations in D.C. and Manhattan where everyone can learn about Native peoples—in all their diversity—as continuing nations with living cultures, as real human beings in the past, present, and future.
The return of objects, funds from casinos and other tribal businesses, and an ongoing renaissance in tribal politics and culture have enabled Native nations across the country to build and renovate their own museums and cultural centers. In spite of their fraught histories with museums, some Native nations have embraced and changed museology. As Native scholar and founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center, Amanda Cobb-Greetham, explained to me, Native peoples have “turned an instrument of colonization and dispossession … into an instrument of self-definition and cultural continuance.” They portray their own specific peoples as a living history. Executive Director of the Museum of the Cherokee People Shana Bushyhead Condill explains of her museum, “We preserve and perpetuate the history, stories and enduring culture of the Cherokee people.”
There are hundreds of examples, including the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Mashantucket, Connecticut; the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma; and the Himdag Ki: Tohono O’odham Nation Cultural Center and Museum in Sells, Arizona. These museums all teach the diverse histories of their peoples, from the distant past to the present, to Native and non-Native visitors. As Mohawk scholar Scott Manning Stevens puts it, in these Indigenous cultural centers, “living cultures are as much a part of the fabric of the institution as the artifacts still displayed in exhibits.” Many have research centers too, where tribal and non-tribal scholars can work on a more respectful and accurate study of the past.
Read More: Without Indigenous History, There Is No U.S. History
Beyond tribal museums, other museums are being built or creating exhibits with participation by Native Americans. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has become a leader in incorporating Native artists and curators into its definition of “American Art.” The Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania does not need to cover artifacts in its “Native American Voices: The People — Here and Now” exhibit because tribal representatives helped to create it. At the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, funded by the Chickasaw Nation in addition to Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma, Native nations collaborated on the architectural design, the exhibits, and the programming. And wherever you are, you can access online exhibits and teaching resources created by hundreds of Native nations on their own past and present.
Some of the items that have now been taken out of view may come back once they have gone through the NAGPRA consultation process, but much more important is the shift away from anthropological museums being the place to see Native American historical artifacts. Native American histories are not being lost or papered over, but the location as well as the style of their presentation is shifting to a more human, forward-looking one. This is a gain for everyone. Ideally, the covered cases and closed halls will prompt visits to new places and spark new understandings of the long and continuing history—and future—of Native America.
Bucharest Sculpture Days kick off with exhibitions, workshops
Bucharest Sculpture Days, an event dedicated to contemporary sculpture, returns for its fourth year with a program of exhibitions, workshops, and various other activities focused on sculpture and visual arts. The event begins with the opening of the contemporary sculpture exhibition #syzygy,…
