Artist Interviews

Frank Gehry

Famed architect Frank Gehry, notorious for his ostentatious style, has created elaborate - and sometimes overwhelming - edifices all over the world (with many in NYC). The architect sits down with NY Magazine columnist Justin Davidson to discuss everything from notable disappointments throughout his career to the building of the Guggenheim’s ornate Bilbao branch in Spain and what it’s like to be considered one of the world’s most detested architects.

Click here to see what Gehry has to say.

Georgia O'Keeffe

It seems like there is just so much talk of Georgia O’Keeffe these days… her spirit is just in the air.  There was the Lifetime Original movie last week and the O‘Keeffe retrospective at the Whitney, so I felt like doing a little bit of my own research on the incredible woman.  While doing so, I came across a really great little video with her - can you believe she was 92 years old!?….

Merce Cunningham

Although he wasn’t a “fine artist” in the sense that we typically use the term, and although he passed away nearly two months ago, I feel like I should dedicated some space on this blog to this incredible figure.  I have so much respect for the man, the dancer, the choreographer - Merce Cunningham, so today I will post several interviews with the legend:

Listen to the audio interview with Merce Cunningham from the BBC here

Jerry Saltz

Okay, okay, so Jerry Saltz isn’t exactly an artist (unless you count his way with words a tittilating artform), but he is an extremely important figure in art criticism today. Mr. Saltz has been gathering even more attention these days with his Facebook profile, but I thought I’d post a 2008 interview between Saltz and Irving Sandler of the Brooklyn Rail.

(Portrait of Jerry Saltz. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.)

Here’s just a small portion of the interesting interview:

Irving Sandler (Rail): You arrived in New York in 1980; where did you come from, and what was your earlier situation in art?

Jerry Saltz: I’m from nowhere, which means the suburbs of Chicago. I went to art school in Chicago for a couple of years. I never got a degree—although I was recently given an Honorary Doctorate from the Art Institute of Chicago; I asked them to make me a cardiologist. After dropping out of art school I helped found N.A.M.E. Gallery, an artist-run space in Chicago. I co-curated over seventy-five shows there. Eventually, my artist friends started moving to New York. By 1980, I decided to join them and try to become rich and famous. I was twenty-six at the time, and I thought it was too late already.

Rail: What brought you into criticism?

Saltz: It was an accident. Charlie Parker said: “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” He could have added, “If you don’t play it for two years, you might not be a saxophone player.” After two years of not working at all and fretting about it all the time I stopped making art altogether. I haven’t made it since. I miss it. I miss being able to listen to music while writing, working with materials, and the amazing psychic space making art creates. Soon, I became a long distance truck driver; my CB radio name was the Jewish Cowboy. I’d come on and say “Shalom, partner.” While driving trucks I thought about how much I loved art and the art world. I knew I wanted to be part of that world no matter what. I thought writing criticism would be easy, so I decided to become a critic.

Rail: How did you first begin to write?

find out - click here to continue reading

Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy seems to be one of the most honest and sincere artists working today.  His performance/video work draws on his personal history to produce gender-bending soap operative narratives.  In 2008, Nick Stillman interviewed Linzy for a BOMB Magazine article - excerpt below:

Nick Stillman This is a lamely conventional first question, but biographical details are pretty interesting in your case. Where did you grow up?
Kalup Linzy I grew up in a small rural community in Florida called Stuckey—not really a town-town, but a close-knit community where my great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother settled in 1898.
NS 1898? You know that?
KL Yeah, they all migrated there from North or South Carolina to work at a steel mill. Originally, the man who owned the mill and another man who owned the gas company donated land in Stuckey for people to build houses on. So they built shanties around the mill. We had a railroad track and everything, but there were no more trains by the time I came along.
NS So trains were like phantoms. I asked about where you grew up because the ways in which people organize as groups—family and churches, most obviously—are so relevant to what you’re doing. In the Conversations Wit De Churen series of videos, Taiwan won’t marry Harry because he’s freaked out about how the church and his family will react to him being with a man. What was your family situation like growing up?
KL I want to say “weird.” It’s not at all sad. In earlier interviews, I wasn’t comfortable with talking too much about my family situation. I never wanted to play the sad part—… click here to keep reading

Below is an excerpt from Linzy’s 2003 work All My Churren: