This week: Philip von Zweck sits down to talk with artist and educator Kelly Kaczynski.

GO CHECK OUT HER SHOW AT THE COLLEGE OF DUPAGE-GAHLBERG GALLERY! I heart the Gahlberg Gallery.

Kelly Kaczynski: Study for Convergence Performance (ice)
Jan.19 to Feb. 25, 2012

Study for Convergence Performance (ice) is the second work in a series that seeks to conflate the artist's studio as a performative site of production, the space of display as the reception of image, and landscape as site for epic but apathetic metaphor. It uses the devices of the theatrical stage and the green screen; both of which operate as a "non-space" that allows the conflation of multiple contexts or sites. She uses imagery from landscapes that shift in time, such as bodies of water including glacier fields. The title of the piece refers to Robert Smithson's idea of "the range of convergence between site and non-site" whereas the land from the originating site is placed in the container of the non-site. In Study for Convergence Performance, the site of origin and the sign of site converge as they transpose in a collapse of time.

Kelly Kaczynski is an assistant professor and assistant chair in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University.  Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist. Her work, while existing in a temporal-spatial platform, is deeply materials based. She received an MFA from Bard College in 2003 and a BA from The Evergreen State College in 1995. She has exhibited with threewalls, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; University of Buffalo Art Gallery, NY; Rowland Contemporary, Chicago; Triple Candie, NY; the Islip Art Museum, NY; Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY; DeCordova Museum, MA; 123 Watts Gallery, NY; and the Boston Center for the Arts, MA. Kaczynski's work was included in the Boston Drawing Project at Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston. Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, Pennsylvania; the Interfaith Center of New York; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks; and the Boston Public Library. Kaczynski has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Chicago.

This week: New York presents Jonathan Grossmalerman (http://vimeo.com/24076961)
 interviewed by special guests The Ladies Auxiliary. After that the Amanda and Tom bus keeps right on rolling to the Socrates Sculpture Park. Epic!

This week: The second installment of our pirate radio sessions, recorded live from NADA 2011! We are joined by local heroes The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago curators Michael Darling and Naomi Beckwith.

Naomi Beckwith is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Beckwith joined the curatorial staff in May 2011. A native Chicagoan, Beckwith grew up in Hyde Park and attended Lincoln Park High School, going on to receive a BA in history from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She completed an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, presenting her master's thesis on Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems.

Afterward, she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Beckwith was a fall 2008 grantee of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and was named the 2011 Leader to Watch by ArtTable. She serves on the boards of the Laundromat Project (New York) and Res Artis (Amsterdam).

Prior to joining the MCA staff, Beckwith was associate curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Preceding her tenure at the Studio Museum, Beckwith was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, where she worked on numerous exhibitions including Locally Localized Gravity (2007), an exhibition and program of events presented by more than 100 artists whose practices are social, participatory, and communal.

Beckwith has also been the BAMart project coordinator at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a guest blogger for Art21. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at New York alternative spaces Recess Activities, Cuchifritos, and Artists Space.

Beckwith curated the exhibition 30 Seconds off an Inch, which was presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem November 12, 2009 – March 14, 2010.  Exhibiting artworks by 42 artists of color or those inspired by black culture from more than 10 countries, the show asked viewers to think about ways in which social meaning is embedded formally within artworks.

Michael Darling (born 1968) is the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Darling joined the MCA staff in July 2010.

Darling received his BA in art history from Stanford University, and he received his MA and PhD in art and architectural history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Darling has worked as an independent writer and curator, contributing essays on art, architecture, and design to publications including Frieze, Art Issues, Flash Art, and LA Weekly. Darling frequently serves as a panelist, lecturer, and guest curator on contemporary art and architecture.

Prior to joining the MCA, Darling was the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he was awarded SAM's Patterson Sims Fellowship for 2009-10. In 2008, Darling began the program SAM Next, a series of contemporary art exhibitions presenting emerging or underappreciated artists from around the globe. Artist Enrico David, who exhibited as part of SAM Next, has since been nominated for the Turner Prize.

Darling curated the SAM exhibitions Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (June 25 – September 7, 2009), and Kurt (May 13 – September 16, 2010). Target Practice showcased the attacks painting underwent in the years following World War II. Kurt explored Kurt Cobain’s influence on contemporary artists.

Darling was associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before joining SAM. He co-curated The Architecture of R.M. Schindler (2001), which won the International Association of Art Critics “Best Architecture or Design Exhibition” award. The exhibition also won merit awards for interior architecture from the Southern California American Institute of Architects and the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.

This week: Happy 2012! We kick off the new year with Mark Staff Brandl reporting from Venice 2011!

A Venice Biennale 2011 extravaganza. Mark Staff Brandl is in the City of St. Mark. Brandl, the Central European Bureau and VaporettoShark, traverses and discusses his way through this huge international festival with sporadic assistance from Peter Stobbe, Claudia Tolusso, Manuela Gritsch, Elisabeth Payer, Tamara Remus, Lucas Malsch, Adam Vogt, Sarah Rohner, Johanna Gschwend, Marc Bless, Manuel Ackermann, Chandra Marquart and others from the Art Academy of Liechtenstein. He covers many of the national pavilions at the Giardini park, discusses much of the Centrale and even works his way through all of the massive Arsenale. Furthermore, at the end Dr. Mark and Dr. Peter visit and discuss some thrilling old paintings at the Accademia, the wonderful Venetian Museum and go to a retrospective of Julian Schnabel in the Museo Correr, located in the Piazza San Marco. Whew. Viva la Serenissima!

This is the 54^th incarnation of this show, probably the most important contemporary art exhibition. It takes place once every two years, the first Biennale being held in 1895. The Exhibition this year, titled ILLUMInations was curated by Bice Curiger; it is the largest yet, spreading over 108,000 square feet between the Giardini and the Arsenale, and features 83 artists from all over the world. The Accademia art museum is situated on the south bank of the Grand Canal, within the sestiere of Dorsoduro. It was founded in 1750 and contains among a huge number of others, works by Bellini, Guardi, Giorgione, Pietro Longhi, Lorenzo Lotto, Mantegna, Tiepolo, Titian, Veronese, Vasari, and Mark's great favorite: Tintoretto. The Museo Correr is the civic museum of Venice and extends along the south side of the Piazza. It holds art, documents, artifacts, and maps that chart the history of Venice across the centuries. It has also has shown one person exhibitions of contemporary artist such as Anselm Kieffer, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Enzo Cucci.

This week: Living legend, innovator, visionary, Carolee Schneemann.

Working across a range of disciplines, including performance, video, installation, photography, text, and painting, the artist Carolee Schneemann has transformed contemporary discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. During her recent visit to San Francisco, Schneemann participated in the November 30, 2011 panel discussion, “Looking at Men, Then and Now” [LINK: http://www.somarts.org/manasobject-closes/] at the Somarts SOMArts Culture Cultural Center, in San Francisco, in conjunction with the exhibition, Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze, in which she was also a featured artist. On December 2, 2011 Eli Ridgway Gallery hosted an evening in celebration of the recently published Millennium Film Journal #54: "Focus on Carolee Schneemann." Art Practical’s Liz Glass and Kara Q. Smith had the opportunity to sit down with Schneemann in between the two events to speak with her about her work.

Carolee Schneemann [LINK: http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/index.html] has shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art; among many other institutions. Her writing is published widely, including in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (ed. Kristine Stiles, Duke University Press, 2010) and Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (MIT Press, 2002). She has taught at New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Schneemann is the recipient of a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants (1997, 1998); a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship and a NationalEndowment for the Arts Fellowship. The retrospective of her work, Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, is on view at the Henry Art Gallery, in Seattle, through December 30, 2011. [LINK: http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions]

An abridged transcript of this interview appears in Art Practical's "Year in Conversation" issue, which you can see here:  http://www.artpractical.com

This week: Put on your footie pajamas, get a cup of hot coco, and eavesdrop on Max's bedtime story. There is enough hamming it up here to make a vegetarian squirm.

This episode is squeaky clean and safe for the kiddies.

This week: This week we talk with artist, writer, and WhiteWalls co-founder Buzz Spector!

Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose artwork has been shown in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Spector's work makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. He has issued a number of artists' books and editions since the mid-1970s, including, most recently, Time Square, a limited edition letterpress book hand altered by the artist and published in 2007 by Pyracantha Press and ABBA at Arizona State University in Tempe. Among his previous publications are Between the Sheets, a limited edition book of images and text published in 2004 by The Ink Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, NY, Details: closed to open, an artists’ book of photographic details from images in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, (List Art Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2001) and Beautiful Scenes: selections from the Cranbrook Archives (Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 1998).

Spector was a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a magazine of writings by artists, in Chicago in 1978, and served as the publication's editor until 1987.  Since then he has written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed reviews and essays to a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner.  He is the author of The Book Maker's Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists' books (Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue essays, including Conrad Bakker: untitled mail order catalogue (Creative Capital, Inc., 2002) and Dieter Roth (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999).

Spector’s most recent recognition is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA Fellowship. In 1991 he was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and in 1982, 1985, and 1991 he received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards.  He is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

This week: Bad at Sports changes in to 88.5 "the shack" for NADA Miami where we were kindly and patiently hosted by Ox-Bow and Jonas Sebura and Alex Gartelmann (who let us set up our lunacy in their sculptural installation).

We talk to John Riepenhoff, artist, gallerist, awesome person (who has work in a show at Western Exhibitions opening this Friday).

Then Art Practical sums up the fair(s) and Patricia expresses her desire to cross genre to breed with a sandwich. Which is odd in that early in the show, and uknown to Patricia, Richard expresses the crushing sadness caused by the loss of a sandwich when Abu's on Farwell changed owners and became awful.

This show is a fucking masterpiece, stop reading this and listen.

This week: Brian and Patricia talk to Artist Jim Campbell.

This week: After an inappropriately long and silly intro Duncan talks to artist and hilarious person David Shrigley.

David Shrigley was born in 1968, in Macclesfield, England. He studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991. His work encompasses drawing, sculpture, photography, animation and music. Recent exhibitions include Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; BQ, Cologne; Anton Kern Gallery New York; Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Bergen Konsthall, Norway. His drawings have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Esquire (Japan), Donna (Italy), Arena (UK), The Gaurdian (UK), Le Monde (France) Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), New York Times (US). He has produced animated pop promos for Blur and Bonnie Prince Billy and has produced album artwork for artists such as Deerhoof and Malcolm Middleton. In 2006 he produced a spoken word album Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others and in 2007 released a compilation album Worried Noodles featuring 39 artists invited to create songs based on his lyrics originally published in a book of the same name. The project included contributions from David Byrne and Franz Ferdinand amongst others. Shrigley is the author of numerous books of drawings details of which can be found at redstonepress.co.uk, He now lives and works in Glasgow and is represented by the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. More information can be found at davidshrigley.com

Go buy his book, now!