Exterior of Marciano Art Foundation, housed in a former Masonic Temple on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles, 2019. Photo by Yoshihiro Makino. Editor’s note: “So Much for Philanthropy” is (1) of (2) features written by Dr. Nizan Shaked for East of Borneo’s Museums in Crisis collection. Read Nizan’s…

Since 2003, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (as Gerard & Kelly) have worked at the juncture of dance, text, and visual art. Their conceptually-based  “choreographic scores" nimbly engage topics such as collective and individual memory, time, gender and sexuality, queer subjectivity, and dyadic relationships.

In the summer of 1999 the New York Times Magazine published a photograph of just some of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA’s) art department, arrayed along a whitewashed wall. It’s a remarkable line up of artists: John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Nancy Rubins, James Welling, all clad in black, save Charlie Ray’s fleece pull-over and a couple of pairs of blue jeans, book-ended by the khaki of Henry Hopkin’s slacks and Lari Pittman’s jacket. There’s much that could be said about the image, and about ‘How to Succeed in Art,’ the article by Deborah Solomon that it illustrates.