On day three of Miami Art Week, all the press previews and openings are over, but the fair perusals don’t stop here. Back when this art extravaganza was first organized, these first three days were key. Folks would flood to the openings and previews (or vernissage for those in the know), see the works at a few fairs, make their art purchases and/or sales, then take the weekend off. Today, it’s a much different game. Not only are there more buyers than ever, but each gallery owner and, in some cases, the artists who accompany them, have to remain present and working until late in the evening Sunday.

First up for us on this third day of holy art fair perusals is one of the longest running art fairs in Miami and the last big Miami Beach art fair we haven’t visited; PULSE.

Katelijne De Backer, the newly anointed director of PULSE, says the fair seeks to create more accessibility around the kind of works being presented at Art Week. “Even for those who cannot collect, the fair offers an opportunity to meet and talk with artists you would never otherwise have access to. I think this kind of generosity is important, especially now,” she told the New York Times.

William Baczek, owner at William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampon Massachusets, agrees that the fair is more accessible not only for folks who aren’t art collectors, but for smaller galleries that are essentially locked out of the larger Art Basel scene. Baczek presented paintings by Jaq Chartier and Jana Burke as well as sculptures by Anne Lilly. By the time we caught up with him, Baczek had already made a few sales.

After leaving PULSE, it was time to see a good Take Magazine pal — one of our 2017 Artists to Watch, Tanja Hollander. We met Hollander in the swanky VIP collectors’ lounge at Art Basel, easily the largest and most talked about fair at Art Week Miami. MGM Resorts Art & Culture presented her work as a participatory installation where attendees, much like at her past Mass MoCA installation, can add to her growing collection of sticky notes where people write their definition of a “true friend.” The folks at MGM Resorts Art & Culture chose to include one of Nick Cave’s sound suites in the suite, making the interactive exhibition felt like a spiritual continuation of her work with Mass MoCA since her installation there was positioned immediately before the entrance to Cave’s sullen yet sparkly meditation Until (both shows curated by Denise Markonish). 

One of two interactive installations by Tanja Hollander at Art Basel | Presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture

Though most of the fairs are populated by galleries from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco (and all the other art hot spots across the world), there’s still much to explore in terms of New England artists, galleries, and their intimate connections to the broader art world.

Check in with us tomorrow for more coverage of Art Week in Miami when we chat with Auerus Contemporary of Providence Rhode Island and Mary Sky of Hookset, Vermont. 

Top photo interior of the collectors’ lounge at Art Basel featuring Nick Cave’s sound suite and Tanja Hollander’s interactive exhibition entitled Are You Really My Friend presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture.

The post Miami Art Week Day 3: Tanja Hollander, PULSE & More appeared first on Take Magazine.

For the month of June, LGBTQIA* folks and allies across New England come together in thoughtful reflection and celebration of Pride, which highlights progress since the Stonewall Riots. While much progress has been made, it is also an important time to reflect on what work our LGBTQIA* communities need to do in order to promote inclusivity, safety, and basic civil rights in the face of a hostile political system. We at Take want to acknowledge this important month by highlighting the artists whose work engages with LGBTQIA* themes and issues, as well as the creatives who claim these sexuality, minority, and gender non-conforming identities. All the folks featured on this list enlivened our editorial by challenging normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity in general through their unique work.

The following stories are about all kinds artists: previously pregnant butch dykes, rural drag queens of color, cis gay Asian-Americans, trans femmes, lesbian separatists, non-binary babes, and many individuals and groups of people whose identities aren’t as easily summarized. This diversity in our editorial exists because that is the diversity of our region. Though it’s true that we live in a society that constantly works to erase and delegitimize the existence of LGBTQIA* people, we’re still finding artists and cultural leaders who boldly embrace this sometimes fraught, yet always beautiful, spectrum of existence.

While we are proud to present our highlighted list of artists we’ve covered since January 2015, we’re not so naive to think that these are the only LGBTQIA* folks we’ve featured. While some artists openly share their identities with our staff and contributors, other artists have asked us to keep their identities off the record, or choose to never disclose for privacy and safety concerns.

Take is proud to feature these artists and our team will work harder to bring you more creative voices from the LGBTQIA* community as we expand our web edition and return to print this fall.

Massachusetts

Car Wash

Wading In

This Ain’t No Game

Comfort & Discomfort

Catastrophe in Provincetown

The Insider’s Take: Eternal Slumber Party

Come Closer

Tender, Forever

Becoming The Gold Dust Orphans

Facebook-to-Face

The Kids Are Alright

Cave and the Art of Community

Connecticut

Women of Abstraction

Gender Bender

Feminine Mystique

BL&D Interview – Arien Wilkerson

From Clay to Catastasis

Life is Gross

Sacred Stones

Crossing Equators with Arien Wilkerson

Maine

Portland’s Cherry Lemonade

Notes from an Expat: Where Are You From

Not-so-Little Women

Take Q&A: Crystal Williams—Writer, Advocate, Advisor

Slow Boat to Iceland

The Simple Power of the Cup

New Hampshire

Manchester’s “Sexy Industrialist”

Hood is Downtown…For Now

Rhode Island

Kitty Eyes & Spandex

Taken: Todd Oldham at RISD

Rachel Blumberg Sees And Hears More Than You

Hustler of Providence

Aurora Catalyzes Variety and Community in Providence

ART/Crush: J.R. Uretsky

Meet Rhode Island’s Newest City Boy

Nine Months in Drag

Vermont

The Rainbow Cattle Co.

Make Some Time for Angus McCullough

What Happened Before Homosexuals?

New England

Artists to Watch 2017

10 New England Tattooers You Need to Follow on Instagram

7 New England Niche Film Festivals You Can’t Miss

The post Take Magazine Pride Month Round-up appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ascending the stairs to the second floor of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, I see Tanja Hollander on her phone, head tilted in that familiar position while bathed in the glittering light from Nick Cave’s nearby installation Until. I’m accompanied by curator Denise Markonish, one of Hollander’s IRL friends. We arrive at a table in front of one of her self-portraits; Hollander is still on the phone. I’m not offended or annoyed. In fact, as a digital native who’s lived much of my social life through a cell phone for almost eight years, I feel quite content. I’ve always believed that friends should be able to silently sit together while on their personal smart devices without it being an issue.

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Travel Ephemera Still Lifes, 2011-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in. | Photo courtesy Mass MoCA

In her exhibit Are you really my friend?, which opens at Mass MoCA on February 18th, it’s not this feeling of momentary kinship that Hollander seeks to unpack so much as the idea of true friendship—and how that’s changing in our digital age. The show features formal portraits of Hollander’s Facebook friends taken in their homes, the Maine artist traveling across the United States and Europe for nearly six years to capture as many of her 626 friends as she could. Adjacent to several of the resulting 430 portraits, Hollander also shows thoughtfully arranged and curated bits of ephemera from those travels: everything from a flattened Plan B box to personal notes left for her.

“My data is relevant, and your data is relevant. . .our data is relevant,” says Hollander, gesturing at the scanned bits of ephemera cropped square and arranged in a grid-like pattern, “and this boarding pass with its beautiful TSA mark is relevant in the same way that a handwritten note from one of my friends left in the morning before I got up is relevant.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Four Large Portraits, 2011-2016, Archival pigment print, 42×42 in. | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

“In the same way that a beautifully staged and composed portrait is relevant,” adds Markonish, who points to an iPhone photo of a landscape shot through curtains.“They’re all relevant and all democratized, where each thing is as important as the next. I’ve done a lot of big shows here, but I think this show involves the most amount of information.”

Markonish’s comment is not an overstatement: Are you really my friend? Features 5,701 images (edited down from over 100,000) displayed on the walls, assembled over giant curtain banners, and framed in quiet concrete corners. It’s the first time that all of Hollander’s Facebook-friend portraits are being shown in one place.

Clip from Are you really my friend? The Movie | Directed by Robin Greenspun.

Hollander’s approach to dissecting and understanding friendship, the data we compile about ourselves over time and travel, is surprising and extremely contemporary. The scanned familiar objects from her travels link to a specific time, location, and, finally, to a Facebook friend portrait shared via a data visualization platform that will be available online and at the show. While the ephemera and notes don’t literally relate to each other, they act as markers of time and place throughout Hollander’s journey. A discarded package of European cigarettes links to a post-it note left for Hollander, which links to one of the 30 large portraits installed at the beginning of the exhibition space. “Everything cross-references everything else,” she explains.

We stroll into a partially walled-off portion of the exhibit, where most of the large portraits hang. For Hollander, it was very important to go to a person, share a meal, and sometimes even stay at their house. This emotional labor and caring connection is present in the portraits, which seems a bit ironic considering so much of social media, particularly Facebook, is about voyeurism and establishing a comfortable distance from certain people. Markonish comments on one of the portraits, a family seated upright in a clean, sunny kitchen. “They’re not uncomfortable, like a stranger is capturing them,” she says. “When I look at this portrait, I don’t feel like I’m spying on them; it feels very authentic.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Travel Ephemera Still Lifes, 2011-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in. | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

“All of these people welcomed you into their homes,” Markonish says to Hollander, “and for so many of them, it wasn’t just ‘come in here, take a picture of me and leave,’ it was ‘share a meal with us, have our guest room.’ It became about welcome and hospitality.” The room of portraits features a wide variety of people in equally varied circumstances. I find myself drawn to a mother and daughter, heads tipped toward each other, sitting in a lovingly disorganized, cluttered kitchen that reminds me of home. The portrait hangs across from another featuring stylish furniture in a large living room, with an abstract painter-turned-meticulous-bird-illustrator sitting perfectly upright, almost regal, her chin up, cheek turned toward the viewer.

I ask Hollander and Markonish why, of all of the 626 friends exhibited, they decided to feature these 30 larger than the rest. “It was really based on image quality,” says Hollander, “while also keeping in mind class, race, age, gay, single parent, single person as opposed to just couples and families. Just trying to get the whole range of what is here, and highlight some of them [by making them] big. Both Denise and I were pretty conscious of not exclusively featuring white, middle-class arty people.”

Detail of Grid of 16 Snapshots, 2011-2016, archival pigment print | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

Exiting the portrait room, I’m reminded again of how hard it is to avoid peering into the Nick Cave show adjacent to Hollander’s exhibit. “I will not lie, being next to Nick is incredibly intimidating,” Hollander admits. “Maybe I’m not as far away from Nick’s work as I think: he is overwhelming with bedazzle, and I’m doing it with the mundane, the every day. I’m saying, Look, you have these things, I have these things, we are all relevant. That’s what social media does. It’s the greatest historical archive of all time, written and visualized by the people for the people—not the aristocracy, who are usually the history writers and cultural influencers.”

Cautiously trying to avoid a Full House moment, I don’t ask Markonish and Hollander what they each have learned about friendship during the process of traveling, gathering information, and curating the show. But as I leave, Hollander, in her straightforward yet highly endearing way, offers one up herself. “One of the most important things that I learned is that I have a really close, tight group of friends that are my family,” she says. “They don’t all live in Maine; they live all across the world.”

Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Post-it Notes, 2012-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 in.

Tanja Hollander – photographer
Auburn, Maine
Website
Tumblr
Instagram

Top photo Tanja Hollander, Detail of Grid of 16 Post-it Notes, 2012-2016, Archival Pigment Print, 44×44 | Photo courtesy MASS MoCA

The post Facebook-to-Face appeared first on Take Magazine.

Professional and personal challenges aside, I knew my 2016 was bust when Bowie died. As a cultural influencer he was unparalleled; the depth to which his death had an effect on my friends was unlike anything I had experienced from the passing of any other cultural figure in my life.

2016 went on to claim many more amazing creative people. All news was just generally shitty, and the U.S. election left the entire world with a sense of unease, at best, and utter dread, at worst.

What on earth could possibly be “Best of” from a year like this?

When times seem bleak, it seems trite to say something along the lines of “Look! Good stuff happened, too!” But our work at Take is about bringing you the best of the creative communities of New England. When times are trying, it bears remembering that art rejuvenates the mind and the heart.

To that end, we looked back at all the stories we covered this year and are presenting a list comprised of our favorites, our most read, and some stories we think not enough readers had a chance to see. We hope you enjoy giving them a read, perhaps for the first time, maybe for the second or third.

As Take Magazine heads into 2017, we’re going to continue to look for stories about creative people and ideas that shape where we live, and pass them on to you. The year ahead is full of uncertainty; as our creative neighbors continue to make art and culture in response to it, we will be there to both report on, and celebrate, the extraordinary things they do.

Wishing you a very safe and Happy New Year from all of us at Take.

Michael Kusek
Publisher

Connecticut

Red Color Story Fall/Winter 2017 | Photo courtesy of American Woolen Company

Paris, Milan, London, and New York have long been the fashion capitals of the world. Now add Stafford Springs, Connecticut.

Massachusetts

Noel’le Longhaul’s unique style and approach to the centuries-old practice of tattooing transcends our narrow, worldly expectations. 

Maine

Illustration by Rob Kimmel

It doesn’t matter whether you think I look like I’m from Maine.

New Hampshire

Iron & Air

Iron & Air Magazine will quell your motorcycle-ride-through-the-mountains wanderlust when the weather don’t play.

Rhode Island

A tender glance into J.R’s world of big queer feelings, Star Trek Next Gen, and laying on the floor with Scott the cat.

Vermont

Photo by Jewellea Photography | Courtesy of the Wexler Gallery

Roberto Lugo’s pottery will blow your damn mind, mixing classic Royal Worcester forms, graffiti, and some Ghostface Killah.

Top image Nick Cave “Until” | Photo courtesy MASSMoCA / Photography by James Prinz

NICK CAVE, UNTIL, 2016
MASS MOCA, NORTH ADAMS, MA
OPEN THROUGH EARLY SEPTEMBER 2017

The post Take Magazine – Best of 2016 appeared first on Take Magazine.

On October 15th, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave opened his most epic installation to date, Until, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The piece broadcasts ambition on two fronts.  Physically, the installation swells to fill almost the entire volume of Building 5 – a football field-sized gallery space. The ambition of the message of Until’s is even greater ranking as Cave’s most overtly political installations to date. Full of imagery driven by the deaths of young African American men such as Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the work’s title is a play on the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” or in this case “guilty until proven innocent.”

Until is more than an installation to be simply strolled through – as powerful an experience as that simple act can be. Cave sees his role as an artist to go beyond making work infused with a powerful political message, to make work that has a deep and meaning fun impact by instigating, provoking conversations across communities. His intention is that the gallery will play host to dancers, singers and performances and meetings by community groups over the next eight months.

Take was fortunate enough to attend a tour of Until, lead by Cave and Denise Markonish, curator at MASSMoCA for a group of about a dozen community leaders, artists and activists from Berkshire County. Cave and the museum have invited them to create work in response to Until that highlights and addresses community issues across the county. Beginning later this week, Take Magazine will begin a series following the development of this work over the next eight months, sharing with our readers how this community responds to Until, the creative output that is launched from it and the impact it has on the region.

Top Image | (From L to R) Bob Faust, Special Projects Director for Nick Cave, Nick Cave and MASSMoCA Curator Denise Markonish, Photo by Austin Harney

The post Wait Until You See This appeared first on Take Magazine.