Grace-Yvette Gemmell
Grace-Yvette Gemmell is an Art and Cultural Historian and writer on the heels of completing her dissertation at Cornell University while working concurrently in the curatorial department at the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan.
Her interests focus on the intersections between visual and material culture, rhetoric and representation. She is particularly drawn to what might be called the tensions between description and narrative that govern representation.
She strongly believes in the merits of interdisciplinary and collaborative pursuits, as well as the necessity of reducing—or exalting—the sublime to the quotidian. Every day a Golden Age: the kismet stutter of a cursory moment where a happy confluence of aesthetics and utility is such that the one cannot be discerned from – or without – the other.
Posts written by Grace-Yvette Gemmell
Will Brown is something of an anomaly in the art world. The brainchild of artists Lindsey White, Jordan Stein, and David Kazprzak, Will Brown is difficult to define, which is one of the things that makes the collaborative project so appealing.
The Academy’s Annual was always intended to be a reflection of contemporary American visual culture. I would say that because the show is both self-selected and selected by artists/architects (i.e. not a curator or curatorial team) it is in many ways more democratic than an exhibition chosen with a particular curatorial agenda in mind. It is not bound by a specific ideology.
The arrangement of the show had a lot to do with the demands and opportunities presented by the building – which is a crazy combination of intimate spaces, impossibly high ceilings, curved walls, etc. We made an effort not just to group the similar together, but to expand ideas through juxtaposition.
I was interested in the old avant-garde idea of the creativity of the masses and how to present work that was not done by professional artists. Amateurism and regionalism became terms we spoke a lot about. Both signal in my understanding a form of resistance to the monoculture of consumption in the art world at this point in time.
The term biennial may have lost its original meaning on a lot of fronts, but people still want to see a snapshot of the current artistic climate. Biennials are less connected by thesis or theme and more so by time. The viewers themselves make the connections and conversations with the works.
Biennials, triennials, annuals, and other large group shows like to tout themselves as paradigm-shifting productions that gauge the current climate of a particular slice of the art world. Whether these ambitious visions are ultimately achieved is often a topic of heated debate once these shows go up.
Reconsiderations of self-portraiture are having a moment in New York, with a major retrospective of Cindy Sherman’s work at MOMA and an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that intimately juxtaposes self-portraits by Degas and Rembrandt. The Guggenheim has mounted its second retrospective of photographs by Francesca Woodman, the young American artist who ended her life abruptly in 1981 at the age of twenty-two.
ARTLOG asked five terrific art advisors to share three of their favorite artists from across Armory Week. Here are the selections from Grace-Yvette Gemmell, Amanda Schneider, Anne Huntington, Susi Kenna, and Kate Robinson.
The fourteenth edition of the Armory Show promises many changes: a carefully honed, trimmed-down exhibitor list, a newly minted layout, and amplified program initiatives, as well as an exciting increase in site-specific installations, performances, and work by artists debuting in New York for the first time. This year’s show is being touted as a smaller, rigorously curated “boutique fair,” catering not only to collectors and dealers, but also to artists, museums, and a broad audience of art lovers.
Grace-Yvette Gemmel reviews John Chamberlain’s Guggenheim retrospective, Choices.
New Museum curator Eungie Joo has assembled an impressive array of new works from over fifty artists and collectives for The Ungovernables, this year’s edition of the museum’s triennial
The biennial continues to grow in popularity this year with just about every corner of the world dabbling in some form of the genre.
