Artebella On The Radio: June 25, 2020

Public art and public spaces are an important part of the changes happening in our world right now, and Curator Eileen Yanoviak and Artist Brianna Harlan will be talking about these issues this week with Keith Waits. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear artists talk about their work.

Dr. Eileen Yanoviak has sixteen years of museum experience in development, marketing, curatorial, education, and guest relations. She has worked at the Speed Art Museum and Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (also known as KMAC Museum), both in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. She has had a parallel career in higher education as a teacher and administrator for more than a decade at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Louisville, among others. She received her doctorate in Art History from the University of Louisville in 2017. Her area of expertise is nineteenth-century American landscape painting, and she is particularly interested in environmental history, American studies, and museum studies. She has presented and published her research nation-wide and is a regular contributor to Burnaway: The Voice of Art in the South.

Brianna Harlan is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer. She works conceptually in multiform, socially engaged art. Her work is driven by an obsession with interpersonal culture and how that influences quality of life, health, and habits. Brianna is a Hadley Creative and Kentucky Foundation for Women Fire Starter awardee. Her most recent residencies were at Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Materia Abierta in Mexico City, and Makers Circle in North Carolina. She also leads community experiences and presentations, has been a speaker for organizations like For Freedoms, 21C Museum Hotels, and the KY ACLU. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Art and Social Action at Queens College, CUNY.

A Talk With Great Meadows Critic-In-Residence Kóan Jeff Baysa

Baysa with Brianna Harlan while visiting the LVA exhibit, “Ballet Box”, curated by Skylar Smith.

Kóan Jeff Baysa is a specialist physician, writer, art collector, Whitney Museum ISP Curatorial Alumnus, and AICA member who networks the areas of medical science and contemporary culture and creates interactive exhibitions and forums that focus on health perception, acculturation, sustainability, access to creative experiences and the sensate human being. Some of these goals are achieved through his company, SENSEight, and the Come to Your Senses Series. Others are manifest in two startups: Collectrium, that pioneered image recognition software for art, and Medical Avatar, a visually personalized avatar on a health app for handheld devices, where his current focus is the role of social media in patient engagement and formulating educational strategies for improving individual self-awareness and health betterment.

He is currently the 2020 Great Meadows Foundation Critic-In-Residence. The residency was intended to be only for the months of February and March, but the CoVID 19 pandemic dramatically altered his plans to return to Los Angeles, his home base, or the location of his next adventure in Hawaii, so he is staying with us a bit longer. I spoke with him at length on March 26 about his observations on the art community in Kentucky and other subjects.

Baysa’s mission, as was the case with the previous Critics-In-Residence from Great Meadows, was to visit a wide array of visual artists in their studios. Of course, about halfway through his tenure, social distancing took over because of the growing coronavirus pandemic. Still, he estimates he did personal or live social media interactions with over 50 artists so far, and he hopes to accomplish more now that his stay in this area has been extended. “Using social media you miss the dimensionality, texture, and visceral feeling of the work, but in terms of what sort of observations and advice I am able to give the artist, I believe that hasn’t changed.” We were pleased that he did manage to visit LVA’s “Ballot Box” exhibit at Metro Hall, conceived and curated by Skylar Smith, while the building was still open to the public.

Even more than his predecessors, Baysa had emphasized group meetings and public events in his schedule, but most of it had to be canceled. “I’m a grass-roots person,” explains Baysa, “and I approach with a perspective formed from multiple overlapping careers: medicine, collecting, and curating. I arrived with an open mind, but I had an idea of coming to Louisville to investigate the interstices of the art world here. I am looking at the diversification of the community, art made in prison, art made by special needs individuals - ‘incarceration’ in any form, even if self-imposed.” How much has social isolation affected his ambition? “I had planned on traveling the state more. I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to explore Appalachian art on this trip, especially Queer Appalachian artists that I’ve heard about. Which just means I will definitely be returning.”

Baysa has traveled and worked all over the globe, and when asked how he saw Louisville fitting into an international landscape, he answered, “States can be considered entities within themselves, with something like a creed among the communities found there. What I have discovered is that Kentucky has an air of Southern Hospitality, a politeness that is certainly very welcoming, but it begs the question of how do you then develop a useful critical perspective, which I think is what is badly needed here.“

Baysa, Stan Squirewell, Susan Moremen, & Lance G. Newman II.

“Kentucky, and Louisville in particular, has been described as, ‘where the south meets the west’. What I have found is that it is a city filled with conundrums. It is also called the most cultured city in the MidWest, but at the same time, it is the 4th most segregated city in the region and has the 4th highest number of deaths from opioid overdose. But are artists addressing these issues?” The open space Basa leaves in the dialogue there suggests that he hasn’t found sufficient evidence that they are, but his recommendation is problematic in this moment of government-issued orders to stay at home and quarantine. “I look at the LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) program (public talks that happen internationally in 30 cities and which have now moved on-line) as an example of events that break down what I call ‘stealth regation - the isolation that Louisville needs to overcome. It could boost the common integrity of the art community.” 

With Baysa’s unique background crossing medicine, science, art, and broader cultural concerns, I wondered about his take on our current public health crisis. ”People will always seek ways to lessen the anxiety and art will help,” he offered. We spoke at length about the opportunity for new forms to develop during this period, as artists turn to social media both as a means of self-expression and a method for reinforcing the existing community and perhaps building new ones.”

For visual art, some models are already in place. “The Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco has placed their current and upcoming exhibits online.” In Louisville, Moremen Gallery has posted both an on-line catalog and a video tour of Anne Peabody’s Sunspike exhibit that was opening at the very moment that non-essential businesses were being closed, and the University of Louisville Hite Art Institute MFA candidate Shae Goodlet’s Invocation exhibit is also online.

Big Talkers: Kóan Jeff Baysa is a virtual lecture from Baysa hosted on Zoom by Ruckus and Great Meadows Foundation on April 7 beginning at 6:00 pm.

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2020 by Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville. 

Q&A With Curator Dan Cameron

Dan Cameron is a New York-based independent curator, art writer, and educator. He is known for being the founder of Prospect New Orleans, an organization he ran from 2006-2011 — a period when he was also Director of Visual Arts for New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center (CAC).

In February and March of 2018, Cameron was Critic-in-Residence at the Great Meadows Foundation in Louisville, and on March 29 he was interviewed by Keith Waits on LVA’s Artebella On The Radio, which broadcasts live each Thursday on WXOX 97.1 FM /Artxfm.com. This is an edited portion of the interview, which you can listen to in its entirety here.

What is your mission with Great Meadows Foundation?

It is a 2 month residency, its called a critics residency but it could also be called a curator’s residency, since I kind of wear both hats. I have been in Louisville for the past 2 months, staying in a beautiful home in New Albany, which provides me the seclusion I need to do my work.

I have been spending a lot of time in the studios of Kentucky artists, I think it is about 40 at this point, and that was the idea, for me to give advice and reaction as a way of giving back to the community for allowing me to be here. And, of course, on top of that, I’ve been giving lectures and participating in panel discussions, I’m hanging out with my colleagues, which is really a lot of fun, I just came back from Knoxville where, for the second year in a row I attended the Big Ears Festival.

My curatorial work has taken an interesting turn in that I have begun working more with performing artists and performing arts groups along with visual artists together, because I’ve never really understood why they are apart in the first place, and something about that leaves me unquiet. And I also just saw my fifth play in this year’s Humana Festival, so I’m kind of doing a deep dive into Kentucky – Louisville but also Lexington.

You say Kentucky. What was your geographic range?

I had to rein it in, to be honest. It got the point where there were places I wanted to go where it would take the better part of a day just to get there, and what I was hoping to do was see one artist, or perhaps two, and there wasn’t really an opportunity to develop a research method that would allow me to go to Bowling Green, let’s say, or Paducah, and really figure out anything and everything that would be there that would be of my interest so that when I left, I wouldn’t feel like I had given it short shrift.

So what I worked with was a list of about 100 or more artist’s websites, almost any artist with a working website that would have been recommended by any one of four or five curators to Great Meadows Foundation. That was the initial filtering, and then I did my own filtering, and found about 50 artists whose studios I wanted to visit. Before I leave it will be 42 or 43 actual visits.

Which is a lot in that amount of time, especially if you don’t want them to be cursory, superficial, drop-ins.

It is a lot of time, and it’s also a kind of privileged connection. If you are a curator and on the road somewhere and they have booked you to do 10 studios in the same building, because you are packing so much into a limited time, there is always this sense that you are looking at your watch or looking at the door. You can have a quality experience but you’re having it within a constrained limit.

In this circumstance, in contrast, what I’ve been able to do is pretty much show up at the artist’s studio and stay as long as I need to, or want to. There are exceptions, but usually I have seen one or two artists in a day, and that allows me to feel fresh about the exchange that we are having, and also to give the time that the circumstances seem to require.

At the March 28 panel discussion at KMAC, a question was posed to you: are you going to deliver a policy report, or some kind of report card, and you made it clear that you didn’t see that as your mission, that you will somehow summarize or provide a quantifiable analysis.

Correct. I’m not part of a longer process where I am expected offer my own metrics to what’s working and what’s not in the Louisville art scene. We have an exit interview, and I will give a formal statement (to Great Meadows), but I think the understanding is that it will proceed more organically, get things going, form a relationship, and let it evolve on its own.

And that the value, as you said, is that time in the studio with those artists, and their time with you, so that - who knows, you may wind up working with them in the future?

Right, and what would normally happen…you, know we talked a lot last night (at KMAC) about the centralization of the NY art world, and how the machine would normally work for a Louisville or Lexington based artist, or elsewhere in Kentucky, is that a curator of national profile working on a new project that would make it relevant to visit studios would come to your town. The Whitney Biennial would be the obvious example, where every other year the curators would go out into the field and check out a lot of work. Very famously, Crystal Bridges spent - I think it was three years, visiting over a thousand studios, or some even more impressive number.

As an artist you want your local or regional curators to know who you are, and you want their support, but, presumably, they can only get you so far in terms of national recognition, and if that (national) curator is coming, they have 15 minutes in your studio, and they have to do a blog post, and they have to phone into a meeting, and they are checking their emails the entire time, so that is not helpful in terms of where the artist feels he or she is in terms of their work and where they want to be, and so just the idea is that a kind of professional mentoring will just happen if a natural, normal conversation unfolds in the studio context.

Are there things that surprised you about what you discovered here?

No. I think I am almost beyond surprise in a sense. What’s always wonderful is when you see outstanding artists whose name had never crossed your paths, and the point isn’t whether you might work with them in the future, the point is that you saw them in the first place.

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