Writing 2020

Trouble is brewing at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship

Artists have left the programme early after negative experiences—and are now speaking out

Catherine G. Wagley, 7th December 2020

The Archer Studio Building in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma is located on what was once Black Wall Street. It has big windows and the artists who occupy the building, participants in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (TAF), are meant to keep these windows open and unobstructed whenever possible, so that passersby can see them at work. The windows can also make artists vulnerable.

Where is Our Reckoning?

Catherine Wagley, September 29, 2020

For weeks, I have been preoccupied with the brilliantly crafted tweets of freelance food and wine writer Tammie Teclemariam, who has been fueling, supporting, and live-tweeting reckonings in food media since early June. Her early grand slam, tweeted alongside a 2004 photo of now-former Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport in brown face (two anonymous sources sent her the photo, which the editor allegedly kept on his desk),1 read: “I don’t know why Adam Rapoport doesn’t just write about Puerto Rican food for @bonappetit himself!!!”2 Hours later, Rapaport—who, according multiple accounts, nurtured a toxic, discriminatory culture at the publication—had resigned.

At a Crossroads

Catherine Wagley, July 21, 2020

How a pay-to-play corruption scandal at City Council intersects with Crossroads Hollywood, a glass skyscraper set to demolish a series of historic structures and displace their longtime tenants.

LACMA’s $750 Million Renovation Was Once Hailed as a Powerful Vision of What a 21st-Century Museum Could Be. Now, It’s a Lightning Rod

How the debate over LACMA's expansion became one about what a museum should be, who decides—and who should pay for it.

Catherine Wagley, April 1, 2020

At first, it was met with cautious optimism, called “architecturally ambitious” and “powerfully strange.” But eight years later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new building project designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has been criticized—sometimes by the very people who praised it initially—as “uninformed” and a “scorched-earth plan.” 

The Spaces Where We Live: Gentrification, Insecurity, and Experimental Living in LA

Catherine G. Wagley, March 13, 2020

Four men came to our house because they were interested in architecture. They knew someone who knew our landlord, which is how they got our phone numbers. We welcomed them, hoping they might know something about this place where we live, conceived by a muralist who never built anything other than the five buildings in our courtyard and who kept scant records of his work. They knew much less than we do, it turned out. One man wore a heavy flannel jacket over jeans but the other three were dressed like they’d just come from well-appointed Westside offices. They stepped into our living room, uttering “ooohs” and “ahhhs” as they looked up at the room’s pitched ceiling and the faded seahorses, birds, and flowers painted on the rafters. One man told me he liked my style. “Bohemian chic,” he said, gesturing at the furniture around him. “I don’t have any other way to describe it.” He meant this as a compliment but it sounded to me like he was calling me an artsy eccentric, when I had been trying so hard to make pleasurable, intuitive rooms that echoed the house’s unconventional contours. Their awkward presence in our living room reminded me that, despite all the care and affection we put into this place, we are tenants; it is not fully ours.

Plastic, pastries and pastel tones – Ree Morton at the ICA LA, reviewed

Catherine G. Wagley, March 17, 2020

It is difficult to write about Ree Morton, as it would be any artist who died under a decade into her career. But Morton poses different challenges from, for instance, Eva Hesse, who was also born in 1936 and died seven years before the car accident that killed Morton in 1977. Hesse had gone to art school as a young woman, started making work in her early twenties and had articulate, well-connected friends (the artists Sol LeWitt and Pat Steir and the critic Lucy Lippard) to design and write her catalogue raisonné and thus ensure the shape of her legacy. Morton, in contrast, lived a full life as a mother of three before becoming a working artist in her mid thirties. The work has been displayed and written about before, usually in brief, when it appeared in group shows and in the scant solo exhibitions she has had since her death, but it has ultimately been seen by few.

Museum Unions Aren’t Just Demanding Higher Pay. They’re Also Fundamentally Questioning the Way Their Institutions Work

Catherine Wagley, March 2, 2020

As a wave of unionization efforts has swept across the museum world, employees have faced plenty of pushback—one case in point being the New Museum’s hiring of a union-busting law firm during a recent labor struggle. But no institution has responded with as much drama and chaos as the Marciano Art Foundation (MAF) in Los Angeles.

The MAF laid off all of its visitor-service associates in November, days after those employees announced their intention to unionize. Soon after, the entire foundation was shuttered for good. The protests, lawsuit, and press that followed have kept the MAF in an unflattering limelight.