By the time they were graduating from CalArts in 1999, Robby Herbst and his classmates were speculating about what would come after postmodernism... was it post-postmodernism? The idea that postmodernism was just a temporary stage to new modernisms felt exciting because it meant the past never really subsides, despite being constantly historicized. So, for his thesis show that May, he carved a large foam sculpture in which the years 1968 and 1999 were '69ing. Herbst, co-founder of the Journal and Aesthetics and Protest and initiator of the Llano Del Rio Collective, looks back at the collective approach to art and publishing that developed among him and his peers in the late '90s and '00s.

“Good art makes me want to talk to people,” says curator Bennett Simpson talking to artist Ingrid Calame about his 2013 MOCA exhibition Blues for Smoke. Ruminating on the blues, their conversation roams over cultural influences and intersections from Robert Johnson’s Delta legacy to the poetics of everyday experience.