Melanie Schiff, Neil Young, Neil Young
In this era of slashed curatorial travel budgets, it’s pure fantasy to speculate that curators of any of the next few Whitney Biennials might have the initiative to take an out-of-pocket car trip around America, visiting artist studios and trying to make the Biennial reflect the state of American art, rather than engaging in an art world version of 1990s hip-hop East Coast/West Coat feuding. The last biennial was comprised almost entirely artists living in New York, L.A. and San Francisco, and that’s when foundation dividends were good (Melanie Schiff was one of two artists living and working in Chicago.)
So I’m all for a sort of fantasy-football type game where we, the MWC community, try to come up with a list of names of artists working outside of those few metropolises where curators dare to travel; artists who really reflect art in this country today, artists who really deserve to be in a premier exhibit of contemporary American art.
I’m thinking that a list of up-and-coming unkowns would be good and also maybe a few older artists, whose influence or relevance may be under-recognized would be nice to come up with as well. Vote early, vote often. I want to get some responses here. I’ll feel bad if you guys just leave me hanging. Maybe some of you lurking masses can shake loose and say something.
MW Capacity 
I’ll start. I’m taking a stand for hometown artists. My first three votes are going for:
Marcie Miller Gross: http://www.marciemillergross.com/
Jaimie Warren: http://www.dontyoufeelbetter.com/
and Andrzej Zielinski: http://www.andrzejzielinski.com/work/
voting with a KC bias:
brendan meara (kc): http://tinyurl.com/dmw444
jonathan dankenbring (idiana): http://jdankenbring.com/
ryan thayer (stl): http://www.ryanthayer.net/
daniel reneau (kc): http://danielreneau.com/
Can I counter your Marcie Miller Gross with Mariah Johnson?
http://mariahjohnson.com/
My hometown artists:
William Hundley – http://williamhundley.com/stream.html
Eric Zimmerman – http://ezimmerman.org/
And others:
Buster Graybill – http://www.flickr.com/photos/buster_graybill/
Jared Steffensen – http://jaredsteffensen.com/home.html
Sabrina Raaf – http://www.raaf.org/
Good links. Expect to see some of those folks showing up on the front page here.
But.
If Texas secedes, those artists can all have their own room. Otherwise I do like the Marcie Miller Gross/Mariah Johnson idea. Could work a themed room around what those two have going on.
We already have our own biennial: http://www.texasbiennial.com
i vote for (among older folks)
jim lutes
frank piatek
george liebert
ok, so both lutes and piatek were in the whitney biennial back in the day (lutes in 1987, piatek in 1967, but to me they’re influential and have a strong presence. lutes has a pretty wide national base of appreciation from what i understand and see – less so for piatek, and that’s a shame because he’s a really interesting man (and his teaching is really amazing).
liebert is really one of the least known and least appreciated artists in the midwest art world, but to my mind he has been one of the most influential – particularly as the director of ox-bow from 1987 until 2003.
AND for youngsters…
burtonwood and holmes, no doubt!
all of these clearly have a personal bias-
anne potter
http://www.annedrewpotter.com/
beth cavener stichter
http://www.followtheblackrabbit.com/
khalif kelly
http://www.thierrygoldberg.com/artists/kelly/kelly01.html
anne harris
http://www.artnet.com/artist/7848/anne-harris.html
if the biennial could include non-visual art (in a perfect world):
amanda silbernagel
http://zonefornone.blogspot.com/2007/07/six-new-poems-from-amanda-silbernagel.html
-why include this? cause i can.
international artists that we should be looking at and might not be…
johannes heisig
http://www.johannes-heisig.de/
shani rhys james
http://artinwales.250x.com/ArtistsJam.htm
some Texas artists for your viewing pleasure: most of these people are midcareer
Bill Davenport
I can’t believe he hasn’t been in the Biennial yet
http://www.billdavenport.com/gallery/galleryindex.html
(scroll down to the bottom for paintings)
Francesca Fuchs
http://www.francescafuchs.com/
Michael Miller
http://www.michaelcmiller.com/
David Aylsworth
http://www.hollyjohnsongallery.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=2&testing=true
and a favorite non-US artist: Ruud van Empel
http://web.ruudvanempel.nl/works.html
It’s great to me how obvious it is that I’m not the only one who goes around playing this game. In fantasyland here, I’m kind of interested in seeing which artists would fit well in to the Biennial as we expect it, and which ones would start to re-imagine the whole idea of contemporary art, and the little unofficial hierarchies that exist. Jen’s list probably goes that way more than mine or others.
“playing this game”?
This is serious business here : ]
I’ve been doing this for over a year:
http://en.wordpress.com/tag/curatorial-idol/
And I’m even producing one for real this summer in San Antonio!
http://salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/i-wanna-be-curator-curatorial-idol-2/
I hope more people play along, so I won’t feel guilty about throwing out more names/links
Jen, do have any idea, is there any connection between Johannes Heisig and Bernhard Heisig? (wish I could find a better web resource on Bernhard. The MU libraries had an awesome recent monograph which I had checked for most of the time I taught there.)
hey Chris,
i’m actually not sure if there is a connection. i’ve been looking at heisig for years. anthony ragucci at IU introduced him to me. but, bernhard heisig is amazing as well, and does look to be related to heisig in more than just name. wow! great work!
It is always interesting to notice the continuities and also the differences that exist among artists. there is a huge continuum, though non-linear in its perceived pattern of growth and extension, and there are certainly analoguous pockets of work in dialogue and cross dialogue without existing at cross purposes.
when i was an undergrad at Mt. Holyoke, i took a women’s lit. class in which we read primarily african american women writers. we read an essay by Alice Walker called ‘Saving The Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life’. Later, in grad school, Barry Gealt and I also talked about this same essay, and it was introduced into one of our seminar-style classes at some point.
In the essay, Walker speaks about finding models (meaning, in her mind, finding communities that enable the extension of concepts). This is similar to influence, but it pertains more to the ways in which we become part of things that contribute to and affirm the particular aesthetic dialogues and languages that we find consonance with in our own minds/work and studios, and the ways in which need these to enable individual and communal forward momentum toward newness and reinvention. Walker sites this in her relation to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.
At one point in the essay she speaks of being approached at a conference by someone who wants to attempt to qualify the differences between the writing of white women authors and that of black women authors. While Walker does attempt to note disparities that she sees in a large sense as being pertinent to character development between the two groups, she more firmly states the belief that both groups of authors are somehow simultaneously contributing to both sides of a larger meta-narrative, the differences themselves being more subterranean and evident only when being purposely unearthed (as being in opposition to one another) by their respective readerships. In other words, we arrive at knowledge through knowledge: through the reading of old and new theory, and through very established causeways of thought. The vestiges of these things are the things most salient and noticeable on the surface: they are like that hinge in a bifurcated space… the provision which enables avenues to go in their respective directions and to still remain intact in a communal domain.
I think when we envision art and artists coming together in the public eye, as an embodiment of experience, voice, and aesthetic, we are also participant in the translation of shared information. We simultaneously recognize ourselves as the teller, the audience, and even the subject of a much larger narrative. Sure beats spending a million hours in the studio, tunneling away with your thoughts alone in isolation.
hey salvo, i think you should throw out more names. i wish other people would as well…
my final contribution to my own list is another non-visual. i’d include my grandmother’s body of work. she’s a 97 year old luthier. i basically grew up spending my summers in her woodshop/studio. and when i think of art and its importance in my identification with the world at large, she’s the cornerstone.
…this would be a whole new biennial
carleen hutchins
http://www.hutchinsconsort.org/index.php
I’ll jump in and add:
Tom Huck: https://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/tom-huck/
Michael Krueger: https://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/michael-krueger/
Anne Thompson: https://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/anne-thompson-addendum/
Archie Scott Gobber: https://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/q-a-with-archie-scott-gobber/
I’ve got to believe that there are more people out there with really radical ideas for alternate reality biennials. I am totally in support of all underdog biennial fantasies. All-fibers biennial. I think a curator really out for a challenge could try to put together an all still life biennial. Also someone trying looking for reasonable, but atypical connections like a room with Nozkowski and Gee’s Bend quilts, or Eve Mansdorf and Cecily Brown together.
Someone throw something else out.
Speaking of still lifes, what about Tom Gregg?
Sunny Belliston:
Check these out, including the groovy 3D objects,
http://www.sunnybellistonart.com/
Adam Bateman:
http://www.adambateman.com/
Josh Winegar:
http://www.joshwinegar.com/index.html
Jared Latimer:
http://www.latimerart.com/
UTAH in da HOUSE!!!
My comment is awaiting moderation….”all things in moderation,” I guess…..
Jen,
Those Khalif Kelly’s are phenomenal…so vividly real, and un-touchably existing solely as image simultaneously.
Sorry, Matthew. I’ve had to moderate almost every comment in this thread. WordPress seems to be suspicious that every one of these long lists of links is potential spam.
hey Matt,
Khalif is amazing! a wonderful person as well as painter. i’ve had a couple of students contact him over the past two years and he has been more than willing to send them lots of extra images upon request.
Jill Pangallo (site down) some vids:
Dan Sutherland http://www.dansutherlandstudios.com/
Janene Nagy http://www.jenenenagy.com/
Christine Gray http://www.christinegray.com/
Guerra De La Paz http://www.guerradelapaz.com/
Mark Creegan http://www.markcreegan.com/
Like that Guerra de la Paz.
I got Melanie a mother’s day present from Anthropologie, and I have to admit that, walking around that store for a while, it kind of dilutes the potency of Mark Creegan’s work and the above-listed Mariah Johnson’s.
Christine Gray’s work is nice, too. I think she was on my list of artists to eventually post that I lost when my computer crashed back in March. She’s definitely going on the list that feels like artists doing something Biennial-worthy, not necessarily Biennial-style.
Denver’s in the house:
Besides being completely self-serving and saying ME, I also think these artists from my home town are supremely worthy:
Dave Seiler http://www.daveseiler.com
Tsehai Johnson: http://www.plusgallery.com/artists/johnson/
Terry Maker: http://www.terrymaker.com/
Susan Meyer: http://www.susanmeyerinstallation.com/
I love your blog post, and you are so right: come on, Whitney, reflect AMERICAN art, not just coastal art!
I’m responding to all four of those artists’ work. Maker’s book piece Jawbreakers, is one that may settle down into some nook or cranny in my subconscious. It’s so simple, but those circles all over and around the book make me really react to it as though it were an animate object.
Always happy when we expand the geographic boundaries in the comments. I need to get a big map to put pins in. Thanks for the comments.