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New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lumi Tan on How She Plans Frieze New York's Focus Program
For the second year in a row, Lumi Tan, a curator and writer in New York, is reprising her curatorial role at Frieze New York, bringing a multilayered and collaborative narrative to the highly anticipated Focus section of the fair, which features emerging artists and galleries. Tan, 43, said her process was instinctual and subjective. 'I'm looking for a wide range of international and material representation that will grab the fairgoer's attention, while weighing what the presentation means to the artist in New York at this time,' she explained. Tan, who is the editor in residence for the New York-based arts organization Topical Cream, recently served as the curatorial director of Luna Luna, a revival of the world's first art amusement park created by André Heller in 1987, which exhibited last year in Los Angeles. She will also curate the 2026 Converge 45 citywide exhibition in Portland, Ore. For Focus, Tan received over 100 submissions. She and the Frieze committee landed on 12 'young' galleries, each of which have been in business for one to 12 years, and will highlight one emerging or underappreciated solo artist, with Tan paying attention to diversity and inclusion, from each gallery. Seven galleries will be first-time exhibitors, 'while five are returnees, some on the cusp of aging out,' Tan said. When curating a show, Tan's goal is finding a balance, she said: 'I'm trying to create a nontraditional experience for the viewer, while looking for traditional presentations that show a gallery's strengths and the artist's strengths.' Tan was interviewed by phone. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Who might be a good example of the balance you're looking for? Public Gallery in London participated in Frieze before but never in New York until now. They're presenting Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, an artist from Berlin who has recognition in Europe and does enormous interactive installations, which draw huge audiences, but has never done a large-scale presentation here. I included her because her work needed a platform and to be shown in New York on this scale. Danielle, a Black trans woman, has been focused on creating interactive video games that address Black trans experiences, bringing the viewer in to confront their own bias. Having curated Focus last year and now this year, what are some differences? Last year, there was a bigger presence in terms of the intergenerational aspect of the section. We also had a strong representation from Indigenous artists. This year, the focus is more international diversity, and a larger number of first-time galleries. Last year, there wasn't any video or digital work. As a representation of what is happening in contemporary art right now, it felt like an absence. This year, we have two strong presentations by video artists, Brathwaite-Shirley and Yehwan Song, a Korean-born artist. She creates large-scale, digital installations that are tactile, tiny screens made of cardboard. They are about the internet as a place where you become confined to identities and confined to your algorithmic bubbles. It feels very D.I.Y., but is also technologically ambitious and an unconventional approach. Is Focus more for the gallery or the artist? It's for both. It's a very symbiotic, shared relationship, and that's what we try to highlight. The display of the work and how it's seen by audiences for the first time creates a relationship that's special to the Focus section and to working with these younger galleries and artists. Because these booths are solo presentations, they're like mini-exhibitions. It's a more dedicated approach to spotlighting an artist and giving them a platform. Many of these galleries try to align these presentations with current institutional presentations in New York so that audiences can see multiple bodies of work. How are you amplifying diversification and inclusion? The associations people have with art fairs are big, expensive paintings. And big, expensive paintings are generally made by white men and a few women. Because Focus is younger galleries and artists and is subsidized, there's more risk-taking that's brought into the fair. And the fair counts on this section to bring that diversity. Tahir Carl Karmali, who is presented by Management, is a queer artist from Kenya whose work is specific to his experience living in New York. There's Brathwaite-Shirley and Citra Sasmita, a Balinese artist who is represented by Yeo Workshop, in Singapore. You mentioned a strong international presence. What locations stand out? Central Galeria is presenting C.L. Salvaro, and Mitre Galeria is showing Luana Vitra. Both are in São Paulo, Brazil, and are returning galleries, showing complex installations by artists that talk about the destruction of the environment through extractive mining practices. They always bring a sensorial way of installing their booth, so you feel transported when you walk into that booth. Citra Sasmita's work is culturally specific in a way that I think is very important for the first Southeast Asian gallery to participate. Sasmita depicts traditional paintings that are of epic stories of men in battle and replaces the men with female figures, reinventing the stories for a contemporary audience. She also uses antique textiles that are no longer produced. Champ Lacombe, based in Biarritz, France, and Company Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan are the only two galleries highlighting the same artist. What are the benefits to that? This is an approach a lot of galleries are doing at fairs now. Fairs are really hard on small galleries. They're exhausting and expensive. Sharing the same artist [that they both represent] allows them to share invites and resources, which allows them to do a bigger presentation because they can share expenses. Champ Lacombe, one of the newest galleries to show this year, and Company, which is about to age out, are sharing Stefania Batoeva, a Bulgarian figurative painter. This gave them an opportunity to work together and to introduce the work of the same artist to their respective audiences.
New York Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Goose Rules the Jam-Band Roost (Sorry, Haters)
A monkey, a giraffe, a pair of goth nuns, a bee holding flowers and an old-timey circus strongman made their way through the crowd last month at Luna Luna, the lost art carnival, in Manhattan. Fans of the 11-year-old jam band Goose were wise to what they were witnessing. 'They're from the band's lore,' one explained spying the performers, who had assembled to help announce a new Goose album, 'Everything Must Go.' Soon the four members of Goose and a guest saxophonist situated themselves in the center of the crowd of hundreds that fanned out to Jean-Michel Basquiat's Ferris wheel and Keith Haring's carousel, and began an hourlong jam. Creative, intentional, extremely eager to please: The whole thing was very Goose. A jam band 'is like a sitcom,' said Cotter Ellis, Goose's drummer. 'When you watch a show like 'The Office,' after a while you feel like you know the characters. That's how people view us — they feel they're such a part of the scene that they actually get to know us.' Ellis, 33, who earlier had strolled anonymously around Luna Luna dressed as a lion, added, 'I like that. I don't want to be seen as better than the crowd. I want it to be seen as, 'We're all in this together.'' 'Everything Must Go,' a 14-song set that features major-key tunes with lyrics alternately goofy and uplifting, a prog-y instrumental number and a new single, the Don Henley-inflected 'Your Direction,' comes as the group solidifies its status as rock's biggest 'new' jam band. On Thursday, Goose will make its debut at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, followed by its first destination festival — Viva el Gonzo, next month in San José del Cabo, Mexico — and a sold-out headlining concert in June at Madison Square Garden, long the site of heralded residencies by the jam great Phish. Together, it all inescapably feels like an anointment. 'Within the community, there's all this talk of, 'Who's coming next?'' said Peter Anspach, Goose's keyboardist. 'You see the lineage of the Grateful Dead, Phish. 'Well, what's going to happen after this?' Is it going to be a pool of bands? Is it going to be, like, one pinnacle band?' Goose — not to be confused with Geese, an indie-rock band from Brooklyn — has been embraced by its elders. Rick Mitarotonda, the band's virtuosic guitarist, has sat in with Dead & Company and played with Phil Lesh and Friends. Phish's Trey Anastasio joined Goose during a 2022 concert at Radio City Music Hall, and took his Trey Anastasio Band on the road with the young group for eight dates where they shared top billing later that year. Performing at a benefit for hurricane victims last year at the Garden, Goose welcomed Dave Matthews for a rendition of 'The Way It Is,' a song by the former Dead touring member Bruce Hornsby — who has also performed it with Goose. 'They're creating something that will expand and evolve to more adventurous musical areas for years,' said Hornsby, who guested on the song at a Goose concert last year at Hampton Coliseum, near where Hornsby lives in Virginia. 'I think their musical heart is in the right place,' he added. 'They're intellectually curious, musically.' But as in any insular scene with its own customs, vernacular and fiercely protective fans, there has been backlash. Social media is packed with digs and memes implying that Goose is too slick, too corporate. The band has 'gotten guerrilla advertising campaigns that have gotten the name out via social media,' a Reddit post said. 'Their fans are convincing themselves that they're witnessing something like 93 Phish' reads a message-board post. 'Not 100 percent sold on Goose,' the saying goes. Hidden amid the invective and gatekeeping is a kernel of truth about the novelty of Goose's rise. It has not been a stealth 'guerrilla advertising campaign,' but rather the work of savvy, ambitious musicians leveraging how music travels today to make themselves supremely available to fans. Borrowing from pop fandoms — and some roots laid by jam royalty — Goose has been assiduous and clever about building lore like cheeky in-jokes (its self-proclaimed genre, 'indie groove,' is a pun on 'in the groove'), annual celebrations (one word: Goosemas) and gimmicks such as Bingo Nights, where the next song is selected by a gigantic ball generator. Concerts are livestreamed, and soundboard recordings available to download within hours after a gig. Four shows from last year alone — including a two-night run at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., that included Vampire Weekend sitting in for a 33-minute jam on 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' — are available on Spotify. 'It's the classic thing, of how everything seems like an overnight success,' Mitarotonda, 34, said. 'It was many, many years of work. To me, it started when I was in middle school. It's not a straight line, it's a very weird and challenging road.' GOOSE'S JOURNEY BEGAN in suburban Connecticut, where three-quarters of the band grew up and today Mitarotonda lives in a house purchased during the pandemic alongside a barnlike studio he built. In middle school and high school he studied jazz; he listened to the Dead and Phish, he said, 'to get stoned and let my hair down.' Trevor Weekz, Goose's bassist and the other founding member still with the band, was into metal as well as jam music. Weekz, 35, and Mitarotonda met in high school, and later played in a band called Vasudo along with Ben Atkind, Goose's original drummer, who left in late 2023, and Matt Campbell, who remains Mitarotonda's songwriting collaborator. Vasudo ended, and Mitarotonda found himself in Fort Collins, Colo., slinging tacos and itching to be in a band again. So in 2014 he put one together with Vasudo alumni, borrowing a bit of nonsensical kitchen lingo from the restaurant Dam Good Tacos — 'Goose, I need three pollo'; 'Carne asada, good to goose.' Already, Mitarotonda's listening habits were expanding. Jerry Garcia had bluegrass and Django Reinhardt; Trey Anastasio mined Frank Zappa and Talking Heads. Mitarotonda became enamored of Fleet Foxes, the Seattle indie-rock act. Other indie influences followed, including Father John Misty (Fleet Foxes' drummer for a time, who has since sat in with Goose) and Bon Iver. 'It was two LPs and two EPs,' Mitarotonda said of Fleet Foxes' output circa 2014, 'but it was a world. The artwork, the aesthetic, the music, the melodies, the lyrics — nothing took you out of that world.' Goose by all accounts became the band it remains today, in 2017, when Anspach, who was with the eclectic jam band Great Blue, joined as keyboardist despite being a guitarist who did not really know keys. Something of a Paul to Mitarotonda's John — sonically obsessive, interpersonally garrulous — Anspach, 32, took on the role of concert emcee and, thanks to a charismatic mustache, the one you would be likeliest to recognize if you saw him walking down the street. Anspach's technical know-how and perfectionism unlocked the band's secret weapon — accessibility — and the group started to pump out a constant stream of almost immediately available, high-quality soundboard recordings and impressive video. 'Once he joined the band, it was like I had someone on the front lines — I always picture Green Berets with knives in their teeth, scaling a wall,' Mitarotonda said. 'It felt like I had had another guy with a knife in his teeth.' Goose's appearance at the 2019 Peach Music Festival in Scranton, Pa., is a case in point. The festival poster broadcast headliners like Phil Lesh and Friends, the Trey Anastasio Band and the String Cheese Incident in big print; Goose was the equivalent of a footnote. But its jam-heavy set — with multiple, well-edited camera angles and terrific soundboard audio — has been viewed on YouTube 434,000 times. A 38-minute clip from the 2022 Radio City show with the Anastasio cameo has nearly one million views. 'During Covid, they maybe grew, didn't shrink,' Peter Shapiro, an impresario of the jam-band world, said in an interview. 'They had their own video crew, and their streams would feature these hand-held cameras that are unbelievable. The last generation of bands didn't have that streaming thing and the ability to self-release videos.' Shapiro waved off talk of a conspiracy theory to boost the band's profile. 'It's all grass roots,' he said. 'It all comes from the fans and the band's unique relationship to them.' EARLIER THIS MONTH, Goose gathered at Mitarotonda's barn studio in northern Fairfield County. The guitarist has a Golden retriever, Shasta, and chickens whose daily eggs are a better hedge against inflation than most of us enjoy. On a couch in the studio, next to a pull-up station, the band members discussed the things millennial men discuss — real estate, a Bill Burr stand-up routine, lunch — and then tuned, jammed a bit and rehearsed tight versions of tracks from 'Everything Must Go' for a TV appearance. 'Everything Must Go,' its first studio album in three years, catches Goose over an extended period of change, like a photograph taken by a camera set to a very slow shutter speed. Most of the tracks have already been performed live, some for years; a few are brand-new. Four drummers or percussionists appear, including Ellis, the departed Atkind and the percussionist Jeffrey Arevalo — who joined the band in 2020 and left Goose earlier this year because of what the band in a statement called 'inappropriate behavior in Jeff's personal life that does not align with the band's core values.' In a phone interview, Arevalo declined to comment on the behavior; in a statement, he acknowledged pursuing a 'program' to deal with a 'mental health crisis.' Ellis, the current drummer, joined the band a little more than a year ago to replace Atkind. Ellis could well be a typical Goose devotee. While familiar with the band, he had not been a huge fan, instead preferring — who else? — Phish. But as he acquainted himself with Goose's ouevre, he was surprised by how much he loved the music, particularly given its debt to newer sources. (Ellis has since become a Bon Iver fan, too.) 'It felt fresh and exciting, and like we could actually do something new,' Ellis said. For a community that relishes the novelty and spontaneity of live shows, jam-band fans can sometimes be awfully set in their ways. On a recent episode of 'Slow Ready,' a generally worshipful Goose fan podcast, one host proposed that Goose stop releasing studio albums. 'In the jam-band scene — I made this joke the other day — putting out records sometimes feels like extra credit,' Mitarotonda said. But the band relishes seeing what happens to the songs in the studio. Anspach grinned while observing that the live staple 'California Magic' had gotten slower ('swampy') on the album, with in-studio horns. The title track clicked for Mitarotonda when the producer D. James Goodwin recorded and chopped up the drums, the kind of thing Radiohead might do. In addition to 'Everything Must Go,' in recent months Goose has recorded more for another, future album. In the phone interview, Arevalo, the recently departed percussionist, criticized Goose for prioritizing commerce over music: 'I think it was a conscious decision to spend more time focused on growing the business and less time focused on growing the art.' Mitarotonda dismissed the complaint — the band's primary motivation, he maintained, is pushing its music further. But he acknowledged that as Goose has grown more popular, maintaining focus on the art has become harder. It is difficult not to notice that the album's closing track, the anthemic 'How It Ends,' is about a band driving a van off a cliff (a 'metaphor,' said Mitarotonda; 'super-hopeful,' clarified Weekz). 'Most artists I would imagine struggle with the chaos of everything,' Mitarotonda said. As an example, he cited George R.R. Martin, the author of the book cycle that became 'Game of Thrones.' Martin famously has not delivered a conclusion to his narrative even as the television show raced ahead and ended the story in its own, widely criticized fashion. 'He wrote these books, and they had such an impact,' Mitarotonda said. 'And the show moved at a different pace, and the world moved at a different pace than his pace. And his pace is what made the whole thing good in the first place.' Mitarotonda added, 'I'm slow. I like being slow. Sometimes when you're slow, then it happens fast. But if you try to do it fast — if you try to keep up with the fast — nothing good happens.'
Washington Post
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Watching my toddler fall in love with art is a peak joy of parenting
The perfect age to experience 'Luna Luna,' the restored art carnival now on display at the Shed in New York, might be 2. To a toddler, the futuristic pavilions designed by Salvador Dali, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney are towering castles of glass and mirrors and swoops of color. The riderless Basquiat Ferris wheel turns as if it were enchanted. Massive puppets of animals and monsters flit among the crowds. Everywhere you look, there is music and light and movement.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At Luna Luna You Can Look, but Please Don't Hop on the Rides
Sketch Pad At Luna Luna You Can Look, but Please Don't Hop on the Rides Visitors to the avant-garde carnival at the Shed were mostly undeterred by the Basquiat Ferris wheel and other attractions being off limits. It 'makes it more mystical,' one guest said. Share full article
