from the archives
past issues, relevant today
Mary Kelly
Since the 1970s, Mary Kelly has produced a diverse body of work has creatively engaged with issues of sexuality, identity, and the politics of memory. In this interview between the artist and Ramsay Kolber, Kelly discusses the Circa Trilogy works, the first of which premiered two decades ago at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
Sherrill Roland
Kate Fowle critically investigates the practice of artist Sherrill Roland which has most recently developed out of his experience within the carceral system. Fowle situates Roland’s work alongside theories of Rosalind Krauss, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Charles Gaines.
Roscoè B. Thické III
Writer Amanda Bradley looks at the Miami, Florida-born artist’s photo-documentary practice, focusing in on 1402 Pork n’ Bean Blue; exploring ideas of intimacy and the presence of absence.
Sandy Williams IV
I first came to know Sandy Williams’s work in 2018 when I selected it for a juried exhibition entitled New Waves at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. My curatorial assignment required working only with digital files, so I was not prepared for the way his work would occupy and disrupt both the physical space of the gallery and my mental space as a gallery viewer.
Darrel Ellis
Shortly after embarking on a career as an artist in the early 1980s, having already earned his credentials at Cooper Union and the Whitney Independent Study Program, Darrel Ellis discovered a trove of his father’s photographs. It was transformational, both personally and artistically. Thomas Ellis, who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem, had died brutally in the hands of police a month before Darrel was born in 1958.
Alex Harsley
Alex Harsley’s photographs hang in the window of The 4th Street Photo Gallery. Harsley opened it in 1973, two years after he had formed the nonprofit organization Minority Photographers Inc. Harsley has been photographing since he was 11, after moving to New York from South Carolina.
Duane Michals
I was seventeen, and my mother was a clerk at Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh. I went into the bookstore, which I always did, and saw this most beautiful copy of Leaves of Grass, illustrated by Rockwell Kent. It was absolutely stunning, and I began to read it. I was dazzled, not just by the way it looked, but by the content. It was the first time I read poetry where the genders were both men, and at first I thought there must be a misprint.
Kerry Schuss
In 1976, when I was twenty-four years old, I moved from Columbus, Ohio, to New York City to become an artist. At that time I was making abstract paintings influenced by Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, and tantric art, all of which I had only seen in reproduction in books.
Frances Uckermann
Every discovery carries the shock of the never-before-seen, and when you are young, each encounter with The New acquires a special significance, a secret bond between you and an expanding world. In July 1989, I had just turned seventeen when I visited Dem Herkules zu Füssen at the Fridericianum Kassel, an exhibition of students and recent graduates of the Kassel Art Academy.
Marie Tomanova
Marie Tomanova’s multi-media works explore gender, sexuality, and identity through youth culture in the post-communist, global age. Her series Live for the Weather (2017) embodies the carefree spirit of youth in the face of an uncertain future. In forty-eight, low-resolution, NSFW snapshots that can be hung or projected on a wall, Tomanova haphazardly captures with a camera phone her everyday life in her hometown, Mikulov, in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic near the Austrian border. As the legend goes, Tomanova purchased the phone in 2006 with money she earned through an arranged marriage and took photographs with it through 2010.
Kate Steciw
Kate Steciw’s ongoing body of work is high gloss and high polish in its presentation. The works are primarily dye-sublimation prints on rectilinear sheets of aluminum, professionally framed in naturally finished or colorfully dyed wood that, despite the small reveal separating the aluminum surface from the frame, is incorporated into each work as a part of its image.
Rafal Milach
There has been a major change in my understanding of photography since we met. Today I like to think of photography as a tool that can be used easily as propaganda; it is one of many tools. With The Winners, I didn’t try to describe the world as such, but rather wanted to point to systematic structures and to the fact that an image can be read differently depending on the environment it’s put against. So the entire story could be an affirmation of president Alexander Lukashenko’s regime if used by local authorities, but at the same time it could be a critical statement from the point of view of so-called “western democracies.” It’s quite a simple story, visually.
B. Ingrid Olson
Tom McDonough considers the myriad socio-political ranges of the visual register of framing and imaging the self, situating Olson’s work alongside Rosalind Krauss’ read of Florence Henri’s 1928 self-portrait.
Charlie Shoemaker
Noah Rabinowitz chronicles photo-journalist Charlie Shoemaker’s experiences documenting the happenings surrounding the funeral of South African president and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.
War on Drugs
Co Rentmeester's 1969 photograph of Police patrolling the waters between Mexico and the U.S. looking for marijuana smugglers, during Operation Intercept evidences that deputies were armed and patrolling the border to capture traffickers and seize product even before Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.
Vahap Avsar
In 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys visited the United States for the first time. After he landed at the airport in New York, he was picked up by assistants who wrapped him in felt blankets then placed him in an ambulance that transported him to the SoHo outpost of Berlin gallerist Rene Block. Beuys didn’t touch American soil until he reached the gallery where, for eight hours a day, he communed with a live coyote.
Onyedika Chuke
The work of New York artist Onyedika Chuke is beauty-driven, evocative, haunting, and ethereal; neither abstract nor representation- al; and timeless and placeless, not to mention astonishing in its technique. A defining characteristic of Chuke’s work is his deftness at culling imagery from multiple sources and facilitating a dialogue, remarkably free of pre-conception, among varied civilizations, time periods, and geographical places.
Wei Leng Tay
A television is on in a living room cluttered with toys and the haphazard accumulation of a busy family’s things. Presented as twenty-five stills, the work, Live Streaming, Prince Edward, 11/12/2019, 23:35:05–06, is one second of video documentation that Wei Leng Tay made of live streams of political protests on November 12, 2019.
Honza Zamojski
It is the simplest of forms: the stick figure—humorous and naïve. Honza Zamojski is no stranger to these qualities. His work, spanning multiple forms of media, ex- udes an unabashedly childlike spirit, fusing playful curiosity and subjectivity that, at first glance, might belie its philosophical and intellectual rigor.
Mathieu Mercier
Mathieu Mercier’s work operates somewhat whimsically between Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary exegesis and Duchampian transubstantiation. His dialogical juxtaposition of visual systems and frameworks from art his- tory, design, and architecture indulges viewers the opportunity to question a common object’s potential for authenticity in times of evident over-production while contrarily conferring value back onto such objects.
Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar’s film Rose Gold focuses on Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone, tracking how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals—the artist is one of its protagonists—negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the user’s emotions and imagination.
Donna Huanca
Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the human embryo. Scientists say that as early as eight weeks, the unborn fetus begins to explore its self and surroundings through the network of sensory receptors on the surface of its still mushy skin.
Ken Gonzales-Day
Drawing its title from my Pulitzer Prize–nominated book of the same name, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935, this series considers the transracial nature of lynching in California, from statehood to the last recorded lynching in 1935, as well as other western states and territories outside the historically better-known Southern black lynching areas. Given the broad number of people touched by this history (Asians, Anglos, Blacks, and American Indians), many will be surprised to learn that Latinos (Mexican, Mexican-American, and persons of Latin American descent) were statistically more likely to die of lynching than those of African, Asian, or European decent.
Michael St. John
Michael St. John might be the best-known artist you never heard of. In certain pockets of the art world, he is highly regarded as the teacher, mentor, and loyal friend to a younger generation of artists, including Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dash Snow, Alex McQuilkin, and Josh Smith. Though this artistic lineage becomes immediately apparent once the shared trajectory of styles, interests, sensibilities, and subject matter is acknowledged, St. John’s own critical vision has often been obscured by the popular success of these younger artists.
Diane Severin Nguyen
In OSMOS Magazine Issue 20, Curator Sohrab Mohebbi reflects on the artist’s poignant, unique, and layered abstractions of everyday objects, connecting her photographs to her interest in photojournalism.
Carmen Winant
For OSMOS Magazine 13, curator Drew Sawyer writes on the complexity of Winant’s inquisitions and engagements with the history (and present) of feminism.
Peter Halley
In March of 2023, MUDAM Luxembourg mounted the exhibition Peter Halley. Conduits: Paintings from the 1980s. OSMOS 24 features a brief retrospective look at Halley’s practice amidst the socio-political questions which surrounded the artist’s work during the decade.
David Ogburn
As an artist, David Ogburn’s images help shape my conception of the world. His images covered my home in personal ways, photographs of my mother, my father, my grandmother and pop-pop are part of my family archive. My father, inspired by his childhood friend purchased a 35mm Pentax manual camera. This camera became the camera I learned from.
Martine Syms
The newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)— affectionately dubbed the “Blacksonian” by The New York Times—takes on the formidable charge to analyze and present to diverse audiences essential qualities distinguishing black culture in America. Between earnest explications of door-knocker hoop earrings and the fashion brand FUBU looms a striking exhibition dedicated to the importance of movement in black culture.
Bev Grant
Bev Grant (b. 1942, Portland, Oregon) is an activist, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and musician who lives and works in Brooklyn. She began attending anti-war demonstrations in 1967. At a SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference at Princeton University, she attended a “Women’s Liberation” workshop led by Chude Pam Allen, who invited her to join a consciousness-raising group on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Alex Welsh
The stories Alex Welsh features in this issue of OSMOS emerged from his early work as a student of photojournalism in San Francisco, when he embarked on a six- month-long project about homelessness in the Tenderloin district. He eventually found himself in the Bayview- Hunters Point neighborhood, where he first got to know the subjects and situations that have occupied his personal documentary work since.
Hervé Guibert
It was February of 2013 when Stephen and I went to Paris to meet with Agathe Gaillard, the owner of the eponymous gallery that has been exhibiting Hervé Guibert’s photographs since 1980. Joining us was Christine Guibert, whom Hervé married toward the end of his life, and who was a close friend when she appeared in several of his photographs.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
There is an erotic side to paper. Whenever we look at a beautiful print or magazine ad, we indulge in a kind of consumption. For queer people—or at least for myself—paper has also provided a surrogate for something that wasn’t always available or present.
Steve Reinke
The first and last time I watched Steve Reinke’s The 100 Videos, a series created between 1989 and 1996, I was in college. A professor of mine, who was a student of his, had recommended I watch them and at the time they were all linked on the artist’s website. Huddled over a laptop in the basement of my school’s library, I began clicking through the links, one after another, and felt Reinke’s voice infect me with weird ideas.
Anton Stankowksi
Anton Stankowski strikes a deeply personal chord for me. For as long as I can remember, we had work by Stankowski in our home—first in my parents’ living room, then in my childhood bedroom. In 1986, my father organized a retrospective exhibition in Kassel, on the occasion of the artist’s eightieth birthday. I was a teenager, and I remember a visit to Stankowski's studio in Stuttgart, where he invited me to select a drawing from a stack of works on paper, a shocking offering of respect that I was not fully prepared to honor (I lost the drawing, I believe).