Madison Square Park's Conservancy Names New Chief Curator
The Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York has selected Denise Markonish as its next chief curator, the organization announced Thursday.
Currently the chief curator at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., Markonish will begin her new job stewarding the art program for the 6.2-acre park, which is used by 60,000 people daily, in June. She succeeds Brooke Kamin Rapaport, who helped raise the park's profile as a platform for ambitious commissions of public art. Rapaport's departure was announced last October.
As a leader of Mass MoCA's curatorial program since 2007, Markonish has worked with artists including Nick Cave, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Kaino, Teresita Fernandez and Jeffrey Gibson on commissions often the size of a football field. That experience immediately put her name at the top of a list of applicants, Holly Leicht, the conservancy's executive director, said in an interview.
'Denise is someone who brings the combination of academic rigor, an ethos of collaboration and a strong sense of fun,' Leicht added. Markonish had previously partnered with the conservancy to find a long-term site for Martin Puryear's 40-foot sculpture 'Big Bling,' which debuted at Madison Square Park in 2016 and traveled to Philadelphia. It has presided over a new park space created for the piece in downtown North Adams since 2019.
'I've built my career on doing large-scale commissions,' Markonish said in an interview. 'And to do so now in such a public place and thinking outside the box of the walls of a museum will be an amazing challenge.'
Born in Boston, Markonish, who is 49, has degrees from Brandeis University, where she studied art history and interned at the Rose Art Museum, and from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. After graduating in 1999, she worked at the Fuller Museum of Art (now the Fuller Craft Museum) in Brockton, Mass., for three years. There, she did her first big artist commission, with Mark Dion, in 2001.
'That was a game changer for me in thinking about working deeply with an artist one-on-one and starting from zero,' said Markonish, who also worked at Artspace in New Haven, Conn., for five years before coming to Mass MoCA.
Markonish collaborated with Nick Cave, the artist best-known for his wearable sculptures called Soundsuits, on his immersive landscape 'Until.' The work, made up of thousands of found objects and millions of beads, debuted in 2016 at Mass MoCA and traveled to Arkansas, Australia and Scotland.
Cave remembers Markonish coming to his studio to offer the project. 'She goes, 'Only one stipulation — no Soundsuits',' he recalled in an interview, adding that he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Considering Markonish's move to Madison Square Park, he said: 'I think she will assess and work with artists that are up for the challenge of public space and really hungry for that kind of moment.'
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Forbes
6 days ago
- Forbes
Sunday Conversation: The National's Matt Berninger On His New Solo Album
How to describe an interview with The National frontman Matt Berninger? Like talking to Moby or Liz Phair (who along with Robert Plant might be the smartest interview in music) it is a fascinating labyrinth of cerebral twists and turns where you just hold on and do your best to keep up. It is as compelling and enlightening as his music. Which is saying a lot because along with Nick Cave and the timeless Bruce Springsteen, Berninger, with The National and on his own, has been, to me, the most consistent rock act in the first quarter of this century. Once again, Berninger stuns with his second solo album, Get Sunk. A gorgeous slice of life that, like the writing of Raymond Carver, is deceptively complex and profound, Get Sunk is, as Berninger describes it, a romance with ghosts. As we discussed, it is a record of memories, of life, of hope. Steve Baltin: I'm a big believer in environment affecting writing. So, was it Connecticut that lit the spark for this album? Matt Berninger: The Connecticut part of it maybe colored the process. This record has a lot of Midwestern atmosphere with creeks and trees and animals and bike rides along rivers and stuff. I've always been writing about that stuff. But yeah, getting to Connecticut, back in an area that is like what it was like in my youth and particularly on my uncle's farm. The place I live now, I have a barn, and I have a little bit of land. But I have all this stuff and there are trails in the woods and creeks all around where I live now. And that's where I spent all my most memorable stuff of my childhood, it all happened at that farm in Indiana. So, Connecticut really inspired that part of it. But I think anytime you uproot and go to a new place, or take a vacation, you're riding a train through Italy, like suddenly, you're going to write differently and be inspired to write different kinds of stories. So, I do think, I think changing the soil you're in every 10 years is really smart. 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I didn't want to move back to Brooklyn, but I really want to be close to New York again. I go to New York every week and ride the train. So yeah, it's really new and inspiring and I think that is really good and it does jolt me, although some of this record I started five years ago in Venice. Even some of the songs that are talking about Indiana, and the Midwestern pastoral scenes were written when I still lived in Venice during the lockdown. So maybe I was just dreaming of wandering the woods or going back to a time. But I always write about that stuff. But moving and changing your environment does change your brain. Baltin: Would this album have been made anywhere now at this time? Berninger: Yeah, I feel like this would have been made anywhere at this point in time. I do, and I have been saying this recently because I've been trying to answer that question. Because yeah, a lot of this record does go back and it's a really conscious effort to try to reshape, not in the details and truth, but in the emotional memories of things and write a great story, and of a great 45-minute immersive connected experience. And it was really important for me on this record more than anything I've ever done, I think. But you're right, what is our past? What is it? And often, I've been saying this, that our past is a story we tell ourselves. and we remember it differently. Our memories of it change and our memories are memories of memories. So, it's our own version of (the game) telephone constantly going as we go and try to retell the stories of what happened and why am I like this and what was my childhood like and what were my relationships with my parents like and what was it? It's all fantasy and it's just the same way your future is a story you're telling yourself. What you want, why you're doing what you're doing and where you're trying to go and how long you want to live and what you want in your life and what experiences you want to have going forward is also just a story. And what experiences you had in the past so you're just telling your story of those experiences. All those things, traumas, good things, can totally shape you, yes, but sometimes we can be confined by our own definitions of ourselves and that we create a little bit of a prison or a trap around ourselves and we say, 'I'm this way because of this and that's why and I'm going to stay this way.' And right now you're seeing in the world, everybody, it's an identity crisis. People don't know. I'm a Catholic, but there are so many Catholics identifying with something else that is so un -Catholic. And that kind of thing, but there's so much, 'But this is me now, I'm this and I identify with this.' I think we really trap ourselves into our ideas of who exactly we are and I think it's a dangerous thing. I was trapped in an idea of what I was. Like I was this type of guy. I'd written all these stories. I had manifested becoming this melodramatic, unhinged character. And then I was leaking into that facade or that story I had told had started to become a little real. And it wasn't real. And so, yeah, I think that this record is trying to maybe go back and kind of recontextualize some of the beauty and I think the good things mostly. There's a lot of darkness in this record, but I'm a happy person. I've had very unhappy times. I've had very dark, long depressions. Everyone has, but my core is optimistic, hopeful, kind, brave, and happy mostly, and I remember that. And I learned that from my parents. I learned that from my cousins. I learned that from my uncle. I learned that from nature. I learned that from the farm. I learned that early, and that hasn't changed. 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Then they become this really weird cool sculpture that everybody buys tickets to see. And then the next thing you know, you're stuck as this thing that wasn't what you intended. Baltin: You and I have talked over the years too about literature being inspiring and I feel like there were very literary and cinematic points of this album. Right when we got on the Zoom, I was listening to the record again. I love 'Silver Jeep.' That one has almost like a Raymond Carver feeling to me. Berninger: Yeah, there's a few of them. Some of them are more kind of blurry, abstract, impressionistic, emotional descriptions of emotional things or descriptions of process, like 'Nowhere Special' is a totally different song from a lot of the other songs and so is "End of the Notion.' I don't think about it when I go in but I see that I'm often trying to write a type of song I've never written but I've written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. 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New York Times
23-05-2025
- New York Times
A ‘Chicano Hieronymus Bosch' Has an Unflinching Vision of America
It's easy to see why so many people describe Vincent Valdez's work as prophetic. Take 'Requiem,' an installation he made in collaboration with his partner, the artist Adriana Corral, centered on a bronze sculpture of a dying bald eagle lying pitiably on its back. When it was first shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in 2019, it seemed to precisely capture the mood of many Americans who were fearful for the future of the country under the first Trump administration. But it was actually created two years before the 2016 election. Likewise, 'The City,' Valdez's 30-foot-long oil painting depicting a modern-day gathering of men, women and even a baby dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods. Shown in 2018, it could have been a direct response to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Except it, too, was made before the rally took place. 'I don't have a crystal ball in my studio,' Valdez, 47, said in a recent telephone conversation from his studio in Houston. (He splits his time between Texas and Los Angeles.) 'I'm just keeping my eyes open, especially at a moment when more and more people find it easier to just turn away from the world.' Now museum audiences are having a chance to assess the full sweep of Valdez's vision of America — a record of 'love, struggle and survival in 21st-century America,' he calls it. His midcareer retrospective, 'Just a Dream …,' opens at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Mass., on May 25; it is the second stop for the exhibition, which debuted at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) last November. Visitors to Mass MoCA will find meticulously rendered drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, etchings, videos and even a painted truck that home in on some of the most indelible and poignant images of Chicano (or Mexican American) and Latino experience. Valdez calls his devotion to a realist style and traditional art-making techniques a form of 'high-definition vision.' His subjects include exhausted, defeated boxers; the funeral of his best friend John R. Holt Jr., an Iraq War veteran who took his life in 2009 because of PTSD; televised scenes of American politics and pop culture (Oliver North's trial, Michael Jordan's slam dunk contest); victims of racist violence against Mexican Americans; and inspirational figures from the Latino community. Valdez's socially engaged art finds its focus in the often overlooked presence of Chicanos, a vision planted when he was only 9 years old, and already working alongside the artist Alex Rubio on murals around San Antonio, his hometown. His commitment to painting — as well as to the historical research demanded by these compositions — was so passionate that his high school teachers let him cut class to create murals in the school cafeteria, figuring it was the best way to keep him engaged in school. He had taught himself to draw the human form via television, asking his mother to pause the VCR so he could trace the figures on paper. He arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, where his penchant for anatomically precise drawings called to mind art from the Renaissance, or the 20th-century social realism of George Bellows and Paul Cadmus — decidedly out of sync with the abstract vibe. When Valdez began working on 'Kill the Pachuco Bastard!' (2001), some of his teachers balked at its frank depiction of racist and xenophobic violence, he said. The painting portrays the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, in which American servicemen attacked hundreds of predominantly Mexican American men. 'I remember an instructor saying, 'You're never going to have a successful career if you continue to work with controversial and confrontational subject matter like this,'' he recalled. That instructor was wrong. The painting soon caught the eye of Cheech Marin, the actor, comedian, art collector and founder of the Cheech, a center for Chicano art and culture at the Riverside Art Museum in California. On a tip from an art adviser, he traveled to San Antonio to see it. Valdez, who had moved back into his parents' home after college, pulled it out from under his mother's bed, Marin said in an interview. 'I took one look at it and said, 'This is great, I'll buy it' — it was as simple as that.' The painting also captivated the musician Ry Cooder, who at the time was working on 'Chavez Ravine,' a 2005 Grammy-nominated concept album inspired by the story of a longstanding Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles demolished in the 1950s. Real estate developers promised public housing; residents, forcibly removed from their homes, got Dodger Stadium instead. Cooder had the idea of creating a painted vehicle — a homage to Chicano lowrider car culture — that would narrate the history of the event. He found Valdez's phone number and began leaving messages, to no avail, he said in a recent interview. ('I never bothered calling back because I assumed it was a friend pulling a stunt,' Valdez said with a laugh.) When Cooder did finally get through, he convinced Valdez to move to California. Over two years there, the painter transformed a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck into a complex historical account of a crucial moment in Los Angeles history. 'He's kind of a Chicano Hieronymus Bosch, or Albrecht Dürer,' Cooder said. 'He has the technique, but he also brings tremendous imagination, beautiful colors and a sense of action and movement.' Portraiture plays a central role in Valdez's practice. 'People of the Sun / El Gente de la Sol (the Santanas),' from 2018, depicting his grandparents in front of a clothesline, took three years. 'It's one of the very, very few paintings that I am content with,' Valdez said. 'It speaks about the labor and the toil and the determination of creating that better life and situation in America, so that your offspring have a better way forward.' If paintings like 'The City' offer up a troubling vision of America, Valdez's continuing series 'The New Americans' points to what it could be. ('The City,' 'The New Americans' and a 2018 series titled 'Dream Baby Dream,' showing mourners at Muhammad Ali's funeral, are part of a trilogy, 'The Beginning Is Near.') 'I want to paint Americans in the 21st century who, in my eyes, are still fighting the good fight, not for power, not for profit, not for fame, but because it's still simply the right thing to do,' he said. Subjects include Sennett Devermont, a legal rights activist known as Mr. Checkpoint and founder of the AFTP ('Always Film the Police') Foundation; his partner and sometime collaborator Adriana Corral; and the jazz musician and music education advocate Wynton Marsalis. The artist Teresita Fernández, another subject, has been a longtime admirer. 'There is a particular, very sharp sensitivity to the way Vince brings power to the act of looking,' she said in an email. 'He's very tenderly seeing layers of personhood, revealing a second, deeper layer of portraiture that's much more subtle and intimate, beyond broad ideas of identity.' His approach — showing both the lows and the highs of American experience — seems to resonate with museumgoers. Patricia Restrepo, a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and an organizer of the exhibition, said that attendance there included a huge number of first-time visitors and multigenerational families, many Latino. 'Parents would bring in their young children and really engage in uncomfortable and critical conversation about the ways in which white supremacy continues to operate and continues to harm them,' she said. 'I think Vincent really is able to usher in difficult conversations through the strategy of beauty and technical mastery,' she added. Not everyone is so comfortable when confronted with the art. When 'Kill the Pachuco Bastard!' was shown at the Smithsonian almost 20 years ago, Valdez recalled that curators insisted on installing it behind a curtain. And when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin bought 'The City,' the museum kept it in storage for two years while curators considered how to display it. When they put it on view, it was hung behind a wall with content warnings for visitors who might have been troubled to see such a frank depiction of the K.K.K. Though the museum was criticized by some for its handling of the presentation, no significant protest materialized. That painting developed out of Valdez's study of Texas history, during which he learned that between 1848 and 1928, 547 Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas and California. The piece was also informed by his interest in the artist Philip Guston, who depicted Klan figures in his work during the 1960s and '70s, and by his own unsettling encounter with a K.K.K. rally as a teenager. 'I didn't make the painting to be controversial or have a shock value,' Valdez said. 'My goal was to create a 30-foot mirror of America, to recreate the kinds of tensions I felt in the air outside my studio.' He had tackled the subject with an earlier series, 'Strangest Fruit,' depicting Chicano men — modeled by family and friends — in poses suggestive of victims, hanging against blank backgrounds like the martyred saints of the Renaissance. 'No one was bothered by those paintings,' he noted. 'People are more comfortable seeing the victims of violence than the perpetrators.' Both CAMH and Mass MoCA made the decision to present 'The City' straightforwardly; at Mass MoCA, it is one of the first things visitors see. 'Vincent is unflinching,' said Denise Markonish, who co-curated 'Just a Dream …' 'We, as a museum, should be too.' The payoff of close looking is apparent in works like 'So Long, Mary Ann,' Valdez's searing 2019 portrait, whose name alludes to a Leonard Cohen song about heartbreak. It shows a young man — shirtless, with a shaved head, tattoos covering his body. But push past the surface, past the current discourse around tattooed Latino gang members, and his expression is mournful, tender and vulnerable. Look closer still, and you will see a tiny cross reflected in the young man's eye. It's this attention that makes Valdez a singular artist, Markonish said. 'He paints a picture of his grandparents with as much care as he paints the Klan,' she said. 'In taking the time to render these things, he's confronting them in a really intimate way. He's doing himself what he is asking us to do, which is not look away.'
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
Soaking in the Past at the Cruel World Festival
The very first Cruel World festival at Brookside at the Rose Bowl was held over two sweltering 90+ degree days in 2022, daring denizens of gloomy music and ghoulish dress-up to brave the California sun in their fishnets to see their favorite artists live in an outdoor festival setting. Saturday's wet and rainy 2025 edition may have been more appropriate in terms of environment for a goth and new wave assembly, but it didn't appear to be as successful, and the rain wasn't even the main problem. Economic struggle has affected us all, from gas to groceries and especially entertainment like concerts. Coachella, now a mainstream pop extravaganza, barely sold out its GA tickets this year in its first weekend, and the second weekend didn't sell out at all. Beyonce, who kicked off her Cowboy Carter Tour with five nights at Sofi Stadium did ultimately sell out, but it wasn't quick, and cheap seats were released each night to fill the venue. Niche and nostalgia fests like Cruel World can be hot tickets but the bill has to be right— and the formula can't last forever unless it evolves. C.W. has attempted to do that as its grown, dipping into poppier acts from the 80's and expanding its scope into the 90's and 2000's alongside 80's bands and new ones inspired by them. But excitement for this year's line-up never matched the first incarnations which featured comeback shows from post-punk legends Bauhaus (2022) and Siouxsie Sioux (2023), and pop-friendly new wave poster boys Duran Duran (2024). At this year's Cruel World —headlined by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and New Order, with secondary bill-toppers including the Go-Go's, Devo, OMD, Death Cult, Garbage, Madness, Til Tuesday, She Wants Revenge and Alison Moyet— the bad weather definitely put a damper on things, but the atmosphere was clearly diminished regardless, from the vendor count to the crowd itself. Musically, there were more hits than misses, but some of the misses were Order closed out the night on the main Outsiders Stage with a whimper, and even a vibrant light and laser show couldn't save them. Lead singer Bernard Sumner's vocals were on the weak side of acceptable, but his energy was lacking to the extent that we wondered if he even wanted to be there. The band have a handful of heartfelt hits that bring a lot of us back to a wistful time in our lives. For me, songs like "True Faith" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" recall teen breakups, unrequited loves, house parties and clubs (right there in Pasadena) where they all played out. New Order's music is melancholy in the best possible way, especially from the Gen X perspective— upbeat sonically but haunting lyrically. Saturday the band didn't come close to conveying the emotion that made them so special in their heyday. Even their Joy Division material lacked angst. 'Blue Monday' a hit so well-known, it veers into wedding reception playlist territory (it played at mine anyway) felt limp as well. By contrast, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who played just before New Order, were mesmerizing and powerful. It felt like they had something to prove, though Cave's transcendent performances always kind of feel that way. He may be a legendary dark music figure —from his time in the Birthday Party to his Bad Seeds and Grinderman projects— but he doesn't have the American radio hits that many from Saturday's bill did. Some Reddit and social media groups doubted him as a headliner, pointing out his lack of populist appeal. They were proven wrong on Saturday, and we're guessing many of the same naysayers became new fans this past weekend. The Bad Seeds turned in the best headliner set of the day led by Cave's eternally visceral, passionate, theatrical presence up front. Even when no one in the crowd knew the words to sing along to classics like "Frogs" and "Tupelo," or the band's latest, "Wild God" (read our conversation about the record HERE), he had everyone enraptured from start to finish. Across the Brookside Golf Club grounds at the Sad Girls stage, The Go-Go's played in between the two headliners. Sound-wise, they had some problems but their energy made up for it. These ladies are L.A. legends of course, and it was nice to see them get the spotlight twice, first at Coachella and then at C.W. Dressed in sequins, lame and colorful prints, the band brought lots of exuberance to their set full of hits like "Our Lips are Sealed," "Vacation" and "We Got the Beat," which were joyful if imperfect, leading guitarist Jane Wiedlin to remind fans that they started out a bit sloppy too, playing at the legendary Hollywood punk club The Masque. Other retro sets that made the soggy Saturday worth trekking: Blancmange, whose hits "Don't Tell Me" and "Living on the Ceiling" sounded just as sharp as they did when we first heard them on K-ROQ 106.7 and DJ Richard Blade's local new wave TV show MV3; Alison Moyet, arguably one of the most powerful voices of the 80's, giving us chills-inducing takes on Yazoo faves "Situation," "Only You" and "Don't Go;" the Buzzcocks poppy-punk bops which still have bounce even without Pete Shelley. It poured during all these sets but it didn't matter; each made their own did Madness, whose ska-flaired pop is proving timeless on stage (and in TV commercials); Devo, who've shown they basically can't give a bad performance at this point, with ebullient sets at the first Cruel World and last year's Darker Waves as well as Sat.; OMD, a vocals-driven group whose hits like "If You Leave" and "Enola Gay" still sparkled; and Death Cult (for many of us, their closing nod to the Love era with "She Sells Sanctuary" made the set). Beyond Cave, who is really in a class by himself —or at least, right next to Peter Murphy, Siouxsie and Morrissey from past fests— the strongest sets of the day came from Garbage and She Wants Revenge, two somewhat younger bands who've been around the block but clearly still have a lot of hunger on stage and in their hearts. Rather than simply playing their hits and hoping they still sound good, both added nuances to their best known numbers and served up new material they're been working on that actually got us excited to hear more. Dressed in a colorful ruffled frock, Garbage's Shirley Manson really connected with the crowd talking about the Butch Vig-led band's 32 year journey and conveying what an honor it was to share the stage with so many influential artists. She also begrudged her band's slot against Devo, playing the opposite stage at the same time, and thanked everyone for being there. Garbage may not have fit with the festival's 80's-heavy or goth thematics on paper, but songs like "#1 Crush," "Paranoid," and especially "Only Happy When Rains" were perfect vibe-wise and Manson made them sound and feel of the rain. She Wants Revenge's Justin Warfield was the only one to truly celebrate Saturday's weeping clouds, likening the day to the perfect "goth prom." Indeed, the grey clouds made for a sexy and moody backdrop behind him as he crooned hits like "These Things" and "Red Flags and Long Nights."A Psychedelic Furs cover, a new song and the early 2000s-era band's now iconic hit "Tear You Apart" (which won new fans when a vampiric Lady Gaga seduced and bludgeoned someone to the track in American Horror Story a few years ago) represented everything Cruel World can and hopefully will continue to be: dark and dramatic energy, killer hooks and lyrical reverence for the outsiders and weirdos who made music so interesting and intoxicating decades ago. See more photos from Cruel World by photographer in the photo gallery below: View the 48 images of this gallery on the original article
