Soundboard

Inspired by February’s Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film Dialogue and Retrospective, five voices, all working at the intersection of documentary, politics, and activism, offer perspectives on the documentary form. Read as Daniel Bergin, Elizabeth Faue, Andrea Jenkins, Paula Rabinowitz, and Peter Rachleff describe how storytelling has the power to redefine history, inviting us to consider a walk in different shoes—a proven strategy to influence powerful decisions, impact laws, and save and change lives.

Movement artist Miguel Gutierrez notices that, especially in the US, more and more people are starting their bios by naming their nationality, sexual orientation, or race. “While I understand this kind of specification as a call to consciousness around minoritarian presence, I also wonder if it ends up making their/our position…. inert?” As guest editor of a new edition of Soundboard, he invites four Latinx voices in performance—Brianna Figueroa, Xandra Ibarra, Pedro Pablo Lander, and Sebastián Castro Niculescu—to consider the question of identity.

In this digital golden age, people who restore motion pictures have powerful new tools to deflicker, clean, remove scratches, and color-correct existing films—and to then create high-resolution exhibition copies. Now, preservationists around the world are using these technologies to rediscover and restore the work of non-mainstream filmmakers, overlooked genres, student films, home movies, and experimental cinema, expanding access to stories by marginalized communities and under-appreciated artists. Four experts—Ina Archer, Margaret Bodde, Amy Heller, and Todd Wiener—weigh in on this work’s impact on cinematic history moving forward.

Indigenous fashion has seen a surge in public interest of late, with high-profile runway shows and exhibitions popping up across North America. But with this spike in attention, inevitably, comes controversy, as Native fashion continues to be appropriated by major houses and designers, from Victoria’s Secret to Jean Paul Gaultier. Can efforts to counter these trends be described as decolonization? Or should we sidestep that trending term altogether and focus on Indigenizing the industry instead? Four voices in Native fashion—Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Virgil Ortiz, Jessica Metcalfe, and Sage Paul—tackle these questions.

For creative people, online platforms are spaces where we find inspiration, collaborate, and learn from one another. But they are also businesses that increasingly police the boundaries of our experience, extracting information from our expressions and manipulating our behavior without consent. How can artists contend with the current state of the Internet, which has been massively influenced by corporate interests despite the utopic ideals that made up its foundation? Guest edited by Are.na, this new edition of Soundboard invites Ruth Catlow, Mimi Onuoha, Bo Ren, Danielle Robinson and Andy Pressman, and Gary Zhexi Zhang how to best go about it.

Native Americans make up only around 0.4 percent of characters in prime-time television and popular films, according to a recent study; even fewer can be found behind the camera lens. In conjunction with the INDIgenesis film series, four voices in Indigenous film—filmmakers Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, and Alex Lazarowich, and the Sundance Institute’s Hud Oberly—consider what it means for Native people to bring their own stories and worldviews to film audiences.

A new year affords us all—including cultural institutions—a chance to reflect on our values and resolve to live in better harmony with them. As museums continue to be called upon to change—from transparency around the ways philanthropists and trustees amassed their wealth to issues around race, representation, and decolonization—we invited Seb Chan, Nicole Ivy, Laura Raicovich, and Anthony Romero to share their suggested New Year’s resolutions for art museums in 2019.

One of the things recent events at the border reminds us is the power of documentation: audio, video, and photos that indelibly show the human impact of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. While the viral response to news of separated families and children held in “tender age facilities” underscores the power of such practices, it also raises questions for those of us in the art world: What can art do that journalism can’t? Natalia Almada, Jackie Amézquita, Dorit Cypis, and Ifrah Mansour weigh in.

The design canon is often the foundation of practices by educators in the field, but it is inherently reliant on impenetrable binaries.  In our second edition of Soundboard, guest editor Nicole Killian asks Kristina Ketola Bore, Nate Pyper, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Ramon Tejada how they envision a queering of design pedagogy.

As the #MeToo movement hits the art world, we invite five experts to weigh in on what museums must consider when showing or contextualizing work by artists accused of wrongdoing. Sharing perspectives are: artist Rashayla Marie Brown, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts CEO Deborah Cullinan, critic/historian Tyler Green, Hammer Museum educator Theresa Sotto, and journalist/editor Jillian Steinhauer.