From Boston to Brazil Links

by Robert Boyd


Reid Sutton and Brad Nagar's House

I like looking at other people's art collections. That's why the Rice Design Alliance Living With Art tour would be so perfect for me. Two days, eight houses, lots of art. But alas, by the time I heard about it, it was full up. One of the houses to be toured is Reid Sutton and Brad Nagar's home, which was featured in an article in the Houston Chronicle. The article is accompanied by a short slideshow of some of the houses. I can see Rachel Hecker and Aaron Parazette paintings in this photo from Sutton and Nagar's home.  See how many pieces of art you recognize. (By the way, if you are one of the lucky ones on the tour, we'd love to publish your annotated photos--or even just see them.) [RDA, The Houston Chronicle]


Jaca, painting from his exhibit at the Museu do Trabalho

Art spaces around the world 1: the Museu do Trabalho in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I stumbled across this space's Flickr page and it looks awesome. The Museu do Trabalho (literally, the "Museum of Work") was founded in 1982 to be a museum of labor. At first it was housed in the sheds below with the intention of moving into a refurbished factory. However, the factory never got refurbished so they stayed in the sheds. The space was too small for a full-on museum, so it has evolved over the years into an alternative art space. Which would not be all that exciting if the art weren't really interesting--which it is. Looks like I will have to save up for a Brazilian vacation... [Museu do Trabalho, Museo do Trabalho's Photostream]


The Museu do Trabalho


Lilian Maus, art shown at Museu do Trabalho


George Kuchar opening at Mulherin + Pollard [VernissageTV]

When underground comics met underground films. George Kuchar was a well known underground filmmaker (if you haven't seen his work, I recommend the documentary It Came From Kuchar, available on Netflix), but did you know he also dabbled in underground comics? He was friends in San Francisco with Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, who both occasionally appeared in Kuchar's films. They returned the favor, occasionally running his comics in their great anthology Arcade. Some of his film work is being shown at the Whitney Biennial, but if you are in New York, you can see his comics work at Mulherin+Pollard through March 25. [VernissageTV]

Awright you artist maggots--drop down and give me 50! This is one of the weirdest stories I've seen in a while. In Boston, there is a building called Midway Studios, a mixed live/work building intended for use by artists. Then, weirdly enough, a small defense contractor, Ops-Core, moved into one of the office spaces. Weird, but not alarming. But then they rented the basement, which hitherto had been theater space used by the Actors Shakespeare Project, to turn it into a manufacturing plant for military headgear. (Between moving in and taking over the basement, Ops-Core had been purchased by Gentex, a large military contractor.) When the artists complained to their landlord that they didn't want to be living on top of a military products factory, they got a letter from David Rogers, former Ops-Core CEO and now a VP at Gentex. Among other things, it said:

The false sense of entitlement of many of our fellow residents astounds me. I have lived in the neighborhood for the past 18 years and am also very familiar with the expectations of some local artists. . .The majority (and some of the most outspoken)"posers" do not create anything whatsoever. They are merely self delluted [sic] bullshitters and drama queens who use art as an excuse to justify and rationalize their pathetic existence [sic] while mooching from others to sustain a living

A rancorous public meeting was held next, and the situation is still unresolved. [The Boston Phoenix (part 1 and 2) via Hyperallergic]