This week: From OxBow, Duncan along with with Abigail Satinsky and Elizabeth Chodos sit down for a chat with Hese McGraw, Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Programs at San Francisco Art Institute.

Here is an outdated bio from his website:

Hesse McGraw is a curator, writer and artist working as curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.

He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. He is the former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York, City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture magazine. He has served as a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary department of the Kansas City Art Institute and frequently serves as a guest lecturer, critic and juror for fine art and architecture schools and organizations throughout the US.

Alongside producing two dozens exhibits and projects over three years at Paragraph, he has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage (Topeka, Kansas), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show (Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC), Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis).

He regularly contributes to publications including Art Papers, Dots & Quotes, Empty magazine, The Kansas City Star, RES, Review, Tank, Ten by Ten. He has written exhibition essays for artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Tobias Wong, Steve Mumford, Eric von Robertson and many others.

His artwork incorporates photography, video, sound and text into site-specific installations and published works. The work experientially engages cultural information systems to amplify loaded micro-histories with the intent to create new networks of meaning. The work aims to construct democratic viewing scenarios that offer viewers a bit of personal space within the context of the general world. His work has been shown in venues internationally and in a solo exhibition at RARE, NYC.

This week: Amanda talks to artist Skylar Fein!

This week: From our residency at Expo Chicago 2013 we talk to the new (as of June 2013) Director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Solveig Ovstebo.

This week: Live on stage without a net from Art Expo Chicago 2013 (aka EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art) Duncan and Richard talk to Galleries Charlie James (Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles) and artist William Powhida!

William Powhida (b. 1976, New York) is an artist and critic living and working in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For several years Powhida worked as an art critic for the Brooklyn Rail while developing his own artistic practice. Powhida’s work, reflecting his critical background, displays a concentrated fascination with the politics of access and the powers that control the assignment of value in the artworld. All roles are fair game, from nouveau-hot artists and the market-setting collectors that buy them, to the branded dealers that sell the work and the critics paid to provide intellectual justification for the pricepoints.

To soften what might appear a direct editorial voice, Powhida projects his commentary through the lens of an alter-ego, one with whom he shares a name (William Powhida). This alter-ego closely resembles any number of freshly minted artworld ‘geniuses,’ though Powhida’s character happens to exhibit all of the worst traits imaginable in any coddled enfant-terrible art star. The fictional Powhida is petulant, narcissistic, and debauched. He has enormous feelings of entitlement, and a perspective so firmly rooted in solipsism that it seems an impossible exaggeration. This art star on the verge of self-immolation documents his misery and rage against the manifold injustices of the art world through a series of To Do Lists, Enemies Lists, and monomaniacal screeds that take on the look of disturbed 3am rants. However, not all of this work exists in the first person. In addition to the alter-ego’s jeremiads, Powhida adds the sycophantic voice of the press ¬ a vital part of the star-making process. Ostensibly a frequent subject of Man About Town profiles in fashion magazines and newspapers, the alter-ego’s more offensive conduct and outsized claims are documented in this way.

Which brings us to the startling visual power of Powhida’s work. All of the content above, from the character’s first-person attacks to press profiles by the New York Post, the LA Weekly, and 944 Magazine (examples) are all rendered in beautiful trompe l’oeil compositions that use various combinations of graphite, gouache, and colored pencil on either panel or paper. It is in fact the visual presentation of Powhida’s arguments, coupled with their humor, that makes Powhida’s sometimes scathing commentaries so much fun to digest.

William Powhida earned his BFA from Syracuse University, and took his MFA from Hunter College. He is represented by Platform Gallery in Seattle, and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Established in Los Angeles in 2008, Charlie James Gallery represents work by emerging and mid-career artists.

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