Momus // Marfa’s Two-Step: The Uneasy Landscape of Minimalist Heaven

The town’s charms consolidate around a yin and yang of two primary attractions: the preservation of Donald Judd’s presence and the promised absence of anyone else. This contrast tinges the town with an aura of pilgrimage, which is thickened by its relative remoteness. With the nearest city about three hours away, Marfa’s location presents a gauntlet for would-be visitors. If Marfa is Minimalist heaven, it seems unlikely that its patron saint, the famously prickly Donald Judd, would suffer the presence of devotees by convenience.



Art Agenda // Gallery Weekend CDMX 2018

Gallery Weekend 2017 was marked by a sense of solidarity. Mexico City’s cultural landscape features a number of bitter divisions spawned from the branching off of the cultural family tree as former partners split and set up their own shops, strengthening the scene with their numbers, but creating bitterly genteel rivalries in the process.

Art Review // Edgar Orlaineta: History is taking flight and passes forever

‘History is taking flight and passes forever,’ wrote Isamu Noguchi from the Poston War Relocation Center internment camp in Arizona in a letter to Man Ray, expressing his frustrations at the US policy towards Japanese Americans during the Second World War. 

In his exhibition titled after the famed designer’s lamentation, Edgar Orlaineta presents new sculptural works and an installation that considers the political and artistic legacies of Japanese-American icons of mid-century art and design who had been interred in concentration camps in the US, a history that was something of a suppressed anathema in contemporary American consciousness and is now being invoked into broad awareness by Donald Trump’s proposals.

Art Agenda // Lima Gallery Round Up

I’ve often found myself wondering whether it would really be such a radical gesture to show a majority of work by women without bracketing it as women’s work. What would it be like to experience a city filled with exhibitions that weren’t reinforcing the patriarchal tendencies of the art world?

In Lima this possibility came true.

frieze // Nicholas Ceccaldi at House of Gaga

In ‘Les Chemins de la Honte – The Path of Shame’ at House of Gaga, Nicolas Ceccaldi presents just such a series of mass-produced works – purchased from the Pier 1 Imports section of a Sears department store in Mexico City – which he has altered with paint-pen markings, paper collages, animal skulls, butterfly wings, fabric flowers and hair clips. A series of wall-mounted animal skulls has also been similarly decorated.

Art Agenda // Elusive Earths III

At Parallel, Oaxaca, curatorial-artistic-investigative-philosophical team Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione present “Elusive Earths III,” the third iteration of their ongoing ethnographic inquiry into the history of geophagic traditions.