weekend links: Dangerous Professors, Nudist Colonial Beach, the McAllen punk scene
Alex Nguyen-Vo, People Watching (2017). Image courtesy Hyperallergic/Claire Voon.
Demian DinéYazhi’s exhibit at the Portland Art Museum takes a closer look at how an indigenous queer body navigates the colonized land of the artist's ancestors. DinéYazhi’s grandfather was a Navajo Code Talker with the U.S. Marine Corps, which greatly shaped her life and, consequently, her art. [The Offing]
Last year, a list of “Dangerous Professors” was released to target liberal educators on college campuses across the country. At the Triumph Gallery in Chicago, over 150 “dangerous” educators, artists and writers submitted work of their own and of their students. Though the actual “Professor Watchlist” is pretty much inactive, the curator of the exhibit, Ruslana Lichzier considers the very existence of such a list problematic and oppressive, requiring a direct response from these “dangerous” professors. [Chicago Reader]
Amazon, which is credited for driving many bookstores out of business because of their online platform, opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in NYC this week. Visitors of the new store have said that while the selection of books is expansive, the atmosphere and layout of the store falls short compared to the traditional bookstores that preceded Amazon. What a surprise. [The Guardian]
Brian Sonia-Wallace was named the Mall of America’s new Writer-In-Residence for 2017. Sonia-Wallace will spend five days in June “deeply immersed in the mall,” writing poems for shoppers on the 100-year-old typewriter he carries around with him, because late capitalism. [The New York Times]
The third season of David Lynch’s cult classic Twin Peaks premiered this week, 25 years after the show’s cancellation. With its return, it’s time to brush up on some of the (very many) lit references scattered throughout the show. [Lit Hub]
A new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles features a collection of Italian paintings called vedute. Vedute were realistic paintings that served as proof of a person’s vacations to exotic destinations. These paintings also prove that “pics or it didn’t happen” isn’t exactly a new idea. [The Atlantic]
Ayqa Khan talks about her experience as Nat. Brut’s 2016 Artist-in-Nonresidence and what it means to take up space. [Nat. Brut]
Alex Nguyen-Vo's new exhibit, Colonial Beach, at Deli Gallery in Queens explores the privilege of Westerners visiting the beaches of Southeast Asian countries, but with a twist—everyone's nude. The result is a fun, funny, dark and unexpectedly complex exhibit. [Hyperallergic]
McAllen is a small border town in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. The city’s mostly Mexican-American residents have turned to music to express their political frustration, and in doing so, have created one of the most fertile punk scenes in the nation. (Also check out Fernando Flores’s Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, Vol. 1 for a great literary snapshot of the community.) [Pitchfork]
—Sean Redmond and Natalie Walrath