Gertrude’s Artists Salon | Art Writing, Part 2: Changing Landscape of Arts Writing

“How have reviews—the foundational form of art writing—evolved with technological shifts over the last few decades?” 

This panel will focus on who reads art writing and how readers engage. Arts writing has experienced a major shift in audience and dissemination since the age of the internet. It has become an open playing field, no longer only accessible to the writers and art critics of major publications. Since this cultural shift, new grassroots publications have eschewed print media and opted to only exist online. This has resulted in a new community where individuals play multiple or hybrid roles, including those of art writer, artist and curator. How do publications approach dissemination via the internet?

This panel will look at questions including “How do arts publications create open, safe virtual spaces that encourage healthy, diverse dialogues while also resisting defamatory or false responses?”  Moderator Joshua Fischer is an independent curator and writer living in the Boston, Massachusetts area. He recently moved to Boston from Houston, Texas, where he worked at Rice University Art Gallery and curated site-specific installations. He currently contributes to Big Red & Shiny, an online publication focusing on the Boston and greater New England arts. 

Panelists Heather Kapplow is a Boston-based conceptual artist and freelance writer/media producer. Kapplow’s writing has appeared in Big Red & Shiny, ArtDependence, DigBoston, Globe Media’s BDCWire; and WBUR’s ARTery. Kapplow is also a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and Delicious Line. More information available at: www.heatherkapplow.com. 

Tamar Avishai is a Somerville-based art historian and independent radio producer. She is the one-woman band behind The Lonely Palette, the podcast that aims to return art history to the masses, one object at a time. In the two years since its launch, The Lonely Palette has been written-up in WIRED, The Boston Globe, Salon, Hyperallergic, and was one of Paste’s 50 Best Podcasts of 2017. It has also aired on PRX, the CBC, and NPR. She is an adjunct lecturer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and picks a banjo in her spare time. 

Rebecca Uchill is an art historian, independent curator, and Editor of Art Journal Open, an independently-edited, open-access, peer-reviewed affiliate of the College Art Association’s Art Journal. She is a full-time member of the faculty at UMass Dartmouth in the Department of Art Education, Art History & Media Studies, and a lecturer in History, Theory and Criticism of Art in the Department of Architecture at MIT. An updated, limited-run version of her Random Exhibition Title Generator is presently on view in the exhibition “States of Change” at the Wassaic Project.