April 2024

 

Dear Readers,

 

Time and place have always been significant to my reading of art. I met Christopher Rothko in Atlanta at the High Museum in 2016 after his lecture on his book Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. In this issue of TAS, we talk about the curatorship of his father’s paintings and the current Rothko exhibitions at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, as well as the temporary rehanging of the Rothko room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The conjunction of these events certainly makes 2024 the year to think about Rothko and to hear from Christopher about his life with his father’s paintings.

 

Video artist Eglė Budvytytė was born in Lithuania and lives and works in Vilnius and Amsterdam. Budvytytė studied in Vilnius, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, and has shown her work from Paris to Venice to São Paulo. Currently her video installation, Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars (2020) is on view at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, through May 19, 2024. Writer Louis Corrigan, who first saw her work at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 as part of the exhibition The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani, dialogued with Budvytytė after viewing the work again and attending Budvytytė’s artist lecture at the Carlos Museum. Corrigan and Budvytytė’s conversation provides an intimate understanding of the artist’s work and all the boundaries it transcends.

 

Anya Liftig is a performance artist and writer whose work is about the great divides in her geographic and biographical life. Born in Connecticut, she grew up in an upper middle-class household, but spent summers with her mother’s family in East Appalachia, Kentucky. Her early work, after studying at Georgia State University, was in response to the history of the South, and Atlanta, specifically. Liftig writes about the two cultures that helped shape her identity, with great aplomb and humor in her book Holler Rat. The great cultural divide which Liftig has embraced provides insight into the rich layers of the American South. Performance scholar and editor of this journal Philip Auslander, himself a southern transplant having grown up outside Boston, Massachusetts, dialogues with Liftig for The Art Section.

 

All my best,
Deanna

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Deanna Sirlin

Editor-in-Chief

The Art Section