News Archive
2021
Galerie Lelong Dialogues: Jaume Plensa with Carol Kino • Dec. 21, 2021
I spoke with the artist Jaume Plensa on the occasion of his solo exhibition NEST at Galerie Lelong & Co. in Chelsea. We discussed his longstanding oeuvre that encompasses both intimate and monumental scales, including his latest public works Water's Soul and Utopia.
• I first met Jaume in 2011, when I wrote about his installation Echo in Madison Square Park for the New York Times. It was fascinating to interview him again, ten years later.
Time-Traveling Art Critics • Vasari21, Jan. 23, 2021
Ann Landi of Vasari 21 asked several critics what era they wished they’d lived in. I said the era of the book I’m writing.
“I would choose to live in the period of the book I’m writing for Scribner, provisionally titled The Fair-Haired Girls: The Twin Photographers Who Helped Define the Fashion Magazines of 1940s New York. The twins were at art school in the late 1930s, when New York City (and America) was emerging from the Depression, and they began their careers in the 1940s, during World War II, when young women suddenly got access to creative jobs that had previously gone to men. During this period many young women became magazine photographers. My twins were Kathryn Abbe, who free-lanced for all the new career-girl publications that flourished during the war, like Mademoiselle, “for Smart Young Women” and Charm, “for the Business Girl”; and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, the only woman to join the Condé Nast Studio, working primarily for Vogue and Glamour, “for the girl with a job.” Both twins loved working outdoors and on the street, and much of their work looks current today.
Creatively I think of this period at Pre-Mo (as opposed to Po-Mo). The city was barreling out of the Depression, everyone was glad to find work, everything was new, and anything went.”
2020
The Stories Behind the Sittings • Lucas Samaras
On Tuesday, February 4, in conjunction with the exhibition Lucas Samaras: Me, Myself and…, Pace Live invited a group of artists, curators, critics, and friends—all of whom have sat for portraits by Lucas Samaras over the past forty years—to share memories of their encounters with the artist, their perspectives on his influential body of work, and their reactions to seeing the photographs that Samaras took of them for his provocative Sittings series (1978–80) and Poses series (2009).
In this video, we hear from curator Patterson Sims; critics Carol Kino, Kim Levin, and Carter Ratcliff; artist Riley Hooker; art historian Jeffrey Hoffeld; and collector Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz.
2019
I won the New York Public Library’s Cullman Fellowship for my first book, from their largest-ever pool of applicants.
2018
My first book was sold to Scribner. As Publishers Marketplace wrote in May 2018: "WSJ arts & culture contributor Carol Kino's The Fair-Haired Girls: The Twin Photographers Who Helped Define the Fashion Magazines of 1940s New York, the untold story of a pair of talented Connecticut twins who joined the ranks of a circle of groundbreaking female photographers in the magazine industry while the men were off fighting in World War II, and forever changed the way women saw and were seen, to Valerie Steiker at Scribner, at auction, by Peter Steinberg at Foundry Literary + Media."
The twins are Frances McLaughlin-Gill, the first woman hired by the Condé Nast photo studio, and Kathryn Abbe, who worked for the career girl fashion magazines like Charm and Mademoiselle that flourished in the 1940s.
2017
April 9: Ann Landi interviewed me for her weekly Vasari21 podcast. Here we discuss, as she puts it, "the differences between art criticism and art reporting, the difficulties of interviewing Gerhard Richter and formidable dealer-doyenne Marian Goodman, and how long it takes to pull together a well-researched story for top-flight publications. We also examine the possibilities of a nascent art explosion in San Francisco and why people really like to talk to her." Ann's a great interviewer and it was a really fun conversation. I learned a lot from her technique!
January 18: Brainard Carey interviewed me for his wonderful program, "Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Curators, Architects, Critics and more," on Yale University Radio. We talked about the difference between critics and journalists (I initially used a very old-fashioned, purist, newspaper kind of definition of critic, mea culpa) and segued to the future for journalism and cultural journalism in the age of Trump.
2016
December 1: For the Conversation and Salon program of Art Basel Miami Beach, I moderated a panel on Public Museums and Private Partnerships. The panelists were Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Norah Stone, collector, philanthropist and a trustee of SF MoMA; and Howard Rachofsky, collector, philanthropist and a trustee of the Dallas Museum of Art.
August 29: A story about the deal between philanthropists Don and Doris Fisher and SF MoMA, celebrated by the SF Chronicle as a major scoop, turns out to reveal information I'd covered six years earlier in the New York Times. The resultant flap was covered by Lee Rosenbaum in CultureGrrl.
2015
October 22: I appeared on "Dr. Lisa Gives a Sh*t," a weekly radio show hosted by my good friend Lisa Levy–aka Dr. Lisa Levy S.P (Self-Proclaimed), which airs on Radio Free Brooklyn. She analyzed my issues with my accent (slightly English) and I analyzed her issues interviewing male artists of a certain age and stature.
October 10: I participated in an ArtDesk Conversation called Understanding the New Shape of Sculpture: from Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer to Rick Lowe. My fellow conversationalist was Leigh Arnold, assistant curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Our moderator was ArtDesk Associate Editor (and rocker chick mom) Alana Ruiz Salisbury. The place was Marfa Contemporary in the legendary Marfa, Texas.
September 23: A Talk with the Critics. I spoke on a panel with Ben Davis, Andrew Russeth and Benjamin Sutton, moderated by the excellent Sharon Louden–part of her Professional Practice Lecture Series at the New York Academy of Art.
2011
November: I was one of twenty-nine arts journalists chosen to participate in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship program. I originally participated in this fellowship in 2007. This time, for the project's tenth anniversary, they invited some of us former fellows back to create a pop-up journalism lab. We spent ten days working in teams on six projects that – as the website puts it – "poked and prodded notions of what arts journalism is ... or might be." The results can be seen at Engine29.org.
My team worked on the "Cultural Context Machine," a digital timeline that pinpoints some of the seminal cultural events that took place in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s. (Of all the projects, ours was the most closely related to Pacific Standard Time, another Getty-funded initiative that resulted in 68 shows about the area's art history between fall 2011 and spring 2012.) Because our team included three art journalists (me, Kim Levin, and Carolina Miranda) and one pop music journalist (Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times), it is heavy on art and pop music. And because we generated all the content in a frantic two days, the information is by no means complete! But it's still a lot of fun, and illuminating, so please take a look.
November: My essay about Blek le Rat (aka Xavier Prou), the street stencil art pioneer who taught Banksy everything he knows, was published in "Blek le Rat: the Thirty Year Anniversary Retrospective." Other contributors include Shepard Fairey, Carlo McCormick, and Waldemar Januszczak of the London Sunday Times. The publisher is Art Publishing, Ltd. in San Francisco.
July: I was one of three judges for the annual awards ceremony of the Coast Guard Art Program, or COGAP. My fellow judges were Vice Admiral Sally Brice-O'Hara, Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard, and Claudia Seymour, president of the Salmagundi Club in New York, which administers COGAP. We awarded the annual George Gray Award for artistic excellence to Robert C. Semler for his painting "Law enforcement training at Station Cortez," which depicts a Coast Guard law enforcement training exercise. We three judges were all intrigued by this painting because the scene it depicts is so ambiguous and confusing. At first glance it's very reminiscent of one of those photographs of prisoners being rounded up in Afghanistan or Iraq--an impression that's subliminally enhanced by the fact that the mat the prisoner kneels on suggests a Muslim prayer rug. At first Claudia Seymour and I also assumed that the man on the left was distracted by his cellphone; but then Vice Admiral Brice-O'Hara pointed out that he was probably just timing the exercise with a stopwatch.
The artwork can be seen here: "Law enforcement training at Station Cortez" by Robert C. Semler. An interview with me that ran in the Coast Guard Compass, the official blog of the U.S. Coast Guard, is here: Capturing the Coast Guard on Canvas.
2010:
July: I was interviewed by Clyde Haberman for New York 1 about my Marine Corps combat art story ("With Sketchpads and Guns, Semper Fi") which ran on the cover of the July 18 NYT Arts & Leisure section. The interview aired throughout the weekend as part of "The New York Times Close Up," a program about the top stories in each Sunday's paper.
2009
March-May: My video about Maya Lin's "Wave Field" appeared on Jet Blue's inflight programming throughout spring 2009. It was also republished by the New York Times on May 15, to coincide with the official launch of "Wave Field" at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. The piece was made in collaboration with Erik Olsen of the New York Times.
2008
December: Rock and Shift, the first major book on the work of the artist Suzanne McClelland, was published by Hard Press Editions; I contributed the primary essay, "Story of OOO."
May: I have been elected to the executive board of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics.
January: I curated my first show, "Dominick Lombardi - The Post Apocalyptic Tattoo: A Ten Year Survey," for Blue Star Contemporary Art Space, a non-profit exhibition space in San Antonio, Texas. It runs January 31 through March 23, 2008, and will travel to several other U.S. venues during 2009 and 2010.
2007
December: I was one of five judges for the launch of GEISAI Miami, an artist-run art fair. (The name "GEISAI" is adapted from the Japanese word for "art festival.") It was founded in 2001 by the artist Takashi Murakami – lord of the multicolored Louis Vuitton logo – and is held twice a year in Tokyo. This is its first American incarnation. The fruits of our deliberations will be on view at PULSE Contemporary Art Fair in Miami, Dec. 5 – 9, 2007. Click here for more information.
November: I was interviewed by Celeste Headlee of NPR about the controversial reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The story aired on Day to Day on Nov. 27.
August: My essay "Kunst und Geld in New York" ("Art and Money in New York") was included in the book "NYC: Das vermessene Paradies – Position zu New York" ("The Measured Paradise – Positions on New York"). It was published on the occasion of "New York," an exhibition, film and discussion series held in at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, from Aug. 24, 2007 to Nov. 4, 2007.
May-June: I was one of seven arts journalists chosen from around the world to participate in the 2007 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellowship program. We were accompanied by an additional "senior fellow" – the journalist Kurt Andersen. Starting in late May, our group spent three action-packed weeks in Los Angeles, discussing the future of our profession, exploring new ideas, and immersing ourselves in the city's extensive cultural scene.