Hammer Museum

2/8/11 --- The Hammer Museum celebrates the publication of Mark Twain's autobiography with Twain scholar and editor of the Mark Twain Project, Robert Hirst who discusses Twain's life and work in Part 1 video. Video Part 2 is a panel discussion with Hal Holbrook, moderated by David Kipen. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience. (Run time: 41 min., 29 sec.)

2/8/11 --- The Hammer Museum celebrates the publication of Mark Twain's autobiography with Twain scholar and editor of the Mark Twain Project, Robert Hirst who discusses Twain's life and work in Part 1 video. Video Part 2 is a panel discussion with Hal Holbrook, moderated by David Kipen. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience. (Run time: 41 min., 29 sec.)

2/24/11 --- Having survived 11 U.S. presidencies, Fidel Castro and his brother Raul continue to rule the tiny island nation despite a long and vexed relationship with its superpower neighbor. Will the U.S. embargo of Cuba end before the Castro rule does? Journalist and former Cuban revolutionary Max Lesnik and Castro biographer Ann Louise Bardach will join us to provide some insight. Currently the director of Radio Miami, Lesnik has been the target of several assassination attempts for his open opposition to the embargo. Bardach has reported on Cuban-Miami politics for more than 16 years and is the author the new book, Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington.

1/27/11 --- As we approach the 10-year mark of the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, Afghan broadcaster Spozhmai Maiwandi and American anthropologist Thomas Barfield join us to discuss the situation on the ground with firsthand perspectives. Barfield is president of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilization, and author of the new book Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. For 10 years, Maiwandi was chief of Voice of America's Pashto language broadcast. She is currently Voice of America's program coordinator for Afghanistan in its South and Central Asia Division. (Run time: 1 hour, 45 min.)

2/2/11 --- Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1944 and has been described as "one of the first, if not the first, African American, to work in the field of conceptual art." All of this and nothing will feature Gaines's 2008 work Manifestos, consisting of monumental graphite drawings of musical scores conceptually derived from four famous political manifestos. Gaines lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. (Run time: 1 hour, 46 min.)

Mateo Tannatt asked us to meet him at the old zoo in Griffith Park to discuss his work in the exhibition "All of this and nothing". Tannatt makes sculptures, paintings, photographs, videos, prints, and performances inspired by everyday urban experiences and the quotidian sites in which inspiration or creativity occur. Carefully positioning objects in diverse mediums adjacent to one another in what he calls "landscapes of objects," Tannatt creates a fragmentary and associative narrative that remains esoteric and incomplete. (Run time: 4 min., 14 sec.)

While Dianna Molzan was working on her pieces in "All of this and nothing" we visited her in her Los Angeles studio in November, 2010. Molzan's paintings explore established tropes in the language of painting by borrowing the techniques of recognizable historical styles, then attempting to overcome mannerism through radical alterations to the picture plane. She deconstructs and then rebuilds her canvases into wholly original forms that experiment with the painting surface to become sculptural in their presentation. (Run time: 3 min., 55 sec.)

We visited Kerry Tribe in January, 2011 during the installation of "Milton Torres Sees a Ghost" at LAXART, which she discusses in this video. Tribe's film and video works are meditations on cognition, using image, text, and sound to explore what she calls "the phenomenology of memory." Influenced by the structuralist filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, her works use varying approaches to installation so that the subject of the work is often mirrored in its structure. (Run time: 4 min., 45 sec.)

In November 2010 we visited Frances Stark in her Chinatown studio to discuss her work in relation to the exhibition "All of this and nothing". Language is both a medium and a subject in the work of Frances Stark, whose works on paper and sculptures explore the potential and the limits of language. Fascinated by language's ability to both inscribe and confuse meaning, her work explores art's capacity for communication, and interpretation in works that often take up the subject of the artist's studio and working processes. (Run time: 4 min., 14 sec.)