Nodes and Meetings: ‘From the 60’s to the present day: The Rubell Family Collection’ by Oscar García García

The Rubell Family Collection (RFC) is one of the biggest and most important private contemporary art collections in the world. The collection has been assembled over the last 44 years, beginning shortly after the marriage of Don and Mera Rubell in 1964, when both husband and wife had the idea of collecting contemporary art. Their son, Jason, and daughter, Jennifer, joined their parents in collecting the works of art at a relatively young age and recently Jason’s wife, Michelle, has also joined the team.

Interview: ‘Skewed Visions: An Interview with Alice Maher’ by Brian Curtin

I have followed Alice Maher’s career ever since I was her student in Ireland during the later 80s, the time she began to attract significant attention as an artist. Her early works –large expressive, baroque, drawings where figures and the spaces they occupy appear subject to some urgent but temporary force of transformation– made a permanent impression on my psyche. I believed an interview with the artist might help explicate both my early and on-going fascination with her output. However, given the nature of fascination and the power of Maher’s…

Files: ‘Codes + Vital Signs and Thinking Dysrhythmia’, Project Curated By Mariano Del Rosario

As taste and attitude change over time, so do the ways art is informed, filtered and shaped. Timelessness is an elegant concept yet problematic. To say that timelessness is the mark of artistic integrity is to posit that the universe is static or that it has stopped accelerating. This is not good news to purists as things come and go and are, at times, cyclical, and the only thing constant is change. At its core is the dysrhythmic state of painting, an irregular art pulse condition, which signifies contradiction and…

Monographs: ‘Beijing #798′ by Jorge Larrañaga

The economic growth of the giant China has been accompanied by an explosion of ‘creativity’ flooding the international contemporary art markets. While its creative value may be questionable, there can be no doubt that this is a tidal wave of art prepared to defend itself in the face of western culture and, as with other areas of Chinese pride, with political and financial backing. For many, the headquarters of this movement would be Dashanzi, an area…

Metropolis: ‘David Adjaye: Bringing African Design Home’ by Michelle Linden

For generations, architecture in the UK, and indeed the world, has been dominated by older white men, with little room for women, minorities, and representatives of other cultures. Slowly but surely, this community is being infiltrated by architects that better represent the British public and its imperialist past. Among these architects is rising star David Adjaye. Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian diplomat parents, David spent his early formative years traveling throughout Africa before…

Books and publications: ‘A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music’, Review by Jim Johnson

Here is the question: “Why do original works of art often strike us, at first, as being coarse, awkward and difficult to place?” While John Berger poses this query in a considerably different context, it applies both to the immensely influential work produced by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and, arguably, to the organization in its entirety. The AACM is quite self-consciously difficult to place precisely because…