Kimberly Shifflett was born in Champaign, Illinois, grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and settled for a few years in Tucson, Arizona. After skipping her art classes at the University of Arizona to learn to weave, she started a needlework design business, and moved to Cincinnati in 1993.
What is contemporary art? This increasingly important topic is complex and it is debated with no clear-cut conclusions, since current conditions fold back upon themselves and older conditions re-emerge anew and new technologies create seismic shifts in artistic practices.
In August I traveled to Chicago to see shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute. Recently when I visit these institutions I sometimes feel as if I am a citizen of one of those contested provinces such as Alsace, or a small state in the Balkans, or perhaps I am even a member of a minority population dissolved and diluted within a larger population. Will my artistic passport be recognized?
Contemporary art is a moving target. That is as close as I have ever come to hearing a suitable definition of contemporary art. It is also the reason I am still interested in some version of a career in the arts.
Thirteen is the infamous and mystical number we fear, dark, enigmatic and magical. The number thirteen is associated with ill-luck, the conjured, the dangerous, the forbidden and the unknown, but many have no conception of the mathematical laws which govern it. Most are convinced of its magical powers, and most are uninformed of its numerical elegance or significance.
Joey Versoza’s “Is This It,” at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) through February 2, 2014, offers continual clues to a mystery that’s disintegrating while you stand inside its contexts and riddles.
Editor’s Note: Doug Birkenheuer was beginning his photography career in the early 90’s in Cincinnati, after his graduation from Antonelli College, where he studied photography. He has been in Chicago ever since, where he now teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, and has had a flourishing career in both fine art and commercial art photography.
Painter Cole Carothers answers “What is contemporary art?” by weighing the branded spectacle of the art world and Chris Burden’s provocations against painting that slows down to record change, the passage of time and the imperfect.
It’s slow going on a Sunday afternoon in the new installation of European Paintings (1250-1800) at the Metropolitan Museum. The handsome spaces have been spruced up and galleries once given over to temporary shows now are part of the logical flow of ideas and innovations that can be found in this stunning stretch of time in Western art.
