I am back in Massachusetts purging and sorting as we prepare for Dan and Stella’s West Coast migration, but if I were in the Bay Area this week I would attend Joseph Smolinski’s opening at Swarm Gallery in Oakland on May 15. Am very curious to hear other people’s responses to Taking Back the Jetty (2009).
Almost exactly a year ago, Smolinski’s Tree Turbine debuted in the Badlands exhibition at Mass MoCA and I interviewed him for The Art Agenda. In the podcast, Smolinski talks about the work’s origins, and the process of working with students, curators and a fabrication team to realize his vision.
Dan and I met up with some friends at Mass MoCA’s Badlands opening on Saturday. It was curator Denise Markonish’s first outing in her new role at the museum, and lots of New Haven artists who knew her from her Artspace days were there to cheer her on, including Marion Belanger, Erica Van Natta and Mark Williams.
Vaughn Bell’s biospheres were enjoyed by all. I was tempted to adopt a pocket biosphere, but decided to focus on keeping my new herbs (chocolate mint, rosemary, lavendar) alive instead.
Interview with Joseph Smolinski, New Haven-based artist and one of twenty participants in the upcoming Badlands exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.Joseph talks about his tree turbine, thinking about art on a grand scale, provoking discussion about contemporary issues through the creation of art, his potato battery, spying on people at gallery openings, and more …
Interview excerpted from The Art Agenda. Originally broadcast on 88.1fm, WESU, Middletown on May 1, 2008.
Lex Leifheit is the Executive Director of SOMArts Cultural Center, co-host of Feast of Words: Literary Potluck, and has an insatiable appetite for art. She lives in San Francisco.
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