Dear Josh T. Franco,
We do not know each other and it appears that even despite the fact that we traverse many of the same kind of different worlds of Chican@s, artists, writers and so forth, we do not have any “friends in common” etc. I have to say I find a bit of comfort in this fact; that we can still not know people in a world that is ever-growing-yet-somehow-ever-tiny.
My name is Irina and I was raised mostly throughout the Pacoima-Arleta region of Los Angeles. Throughout the 40’s and 50’s, Pacoima was known as a place that was a safe haven for Mexicans and other farm working peoples. After much roaming and migration, I am fairly certain my family settled there because of this, because of the need of wanting to stop moving. I think about this as I sit with 20-some other artists and writers, all who have or will consider travel quite a bit as the job and lifestyle requires us to do so.
It is also important to know that I come from dreamers. My grandmother Dolores, who I was mostly raised by has always believed that our dreams are powerful tools for our waking moments on earth...
by Irina Contreras
Read full letter here.
Photo: interior, city hall, Marfa, TX, Richard John Jones
Serving up "Instant facul-Tea" with art history lecturer Josh Franco.
By Bethany George, Jaclyn Cataldi
Published: September 3, 2014
See video here.
"A pilgrimage to Marfa is a must for any contemporary art aficionado.
"The trek to the small high desert West Texas town to visit the Chinati Foundation — the singular art museum conceived from a 340-acre former Army facility by Donald Judd — becomes a qualifying badge of sorts, a way to let others know of one's dedication to and appreciation of Judd's heady vision of a place where as he wrote "contemporary art (can) exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be."
"The exclusivity of Chinati is undeniable: Marfa is nearly 200 miles from any commercial airport and about 80 miles from an interstate highway. And yet the disconnect between Chinati and its fashionable international visitors, and the longtime Marfa residents, remains profound.
"It's that disconnect that fascinates artist and art historian Josh T. Franco. And he pokes and probes those parallel communities in "Marfita," the clever and slightly irreverent installation he's created along with Alison Kuo and Joshua Saunders at Co-Lab Space."
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Read the full article here.
"Texas is enormous. The land is mostly desert with its endless sky. The road stretches for miles, causing the optical illusion of infinity, akin to staring at the ocean. Even in winter, mirages appear on the sand and asphalt. Everything here is marked by a contradiction of unpredictability and control.
"Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, housed in the remains of the military base Fort D.A. Russell, is comprised of permanent installations by eleven artists, including Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and Roni Horn, which fill the base’s former meeting-houses, infirmaries, and sleeping quarters. School No. 6 by Ilya Kabakov is a fabricated Soviet elementary school classroom where the holes in the exterior walls are left unfilled, allowing sand to blow in, coating an already aged patina. John Wesley’s surreal figurations, dependent on their own odd sense of repetition, stand out as the sole moment of whimsy. Everything was selected and overseen by Judd. A massive installation of his signature aluminum boxes, each with facets in unique configurations, fills two hangars that once housed German prisoners of war. A hand-painted sign that translates: “Use your head or lose your head” looms above the works."
Read the full article here.
From one of the four corners of the flat earth, Fogo Island, in Newfoundland, has appeared on the radar of contemporary art. Recognized for Fogo Island Arts, a residency-based contemporary arts institution with international ambition and connections, art here is inextricably tied to a larger rural renewal initiative to revitalize Fogo Island’s economy through sustainable tourism. The remote, rocky island is rife with lore and history, and the narratives developing around Fogo Island Arts are in keeping with that tradition.
Fogo Island is an outport (the term used for isolated coastal communities in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador) that was settled by the Irish and English in the mid eighteenth century. Its inhabitants have relied on fishing, struggled with dwindling cod stocks, and fiercely resisted a forcible move to a larger settlement as recently as 1967 — all while eking out a hardscrabble existence. Today the island has a population of about two thousand seven hundred, down from a high of six thousand prior to the federal government’s instatement of a cod moratorium in the early 1990s. Analogous to the island’s resilient culture, self-sufficiency is a key aspect of the Fogo Island Arts project. Engaging contemporary art to help reinvigorate a rural and remote community, it is a long way from the art world audience found in more urban contexts. To travel to Fogo Island requires multiple flights, driving, a ferry, and then more driving.[i] It’s a journey. The journey — an art pilgrimage not unlike a visit to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Fields — offers both imaginative escapism and access to experiential knowledge. Even place-names become more fantastical as one approaches Fogo Island: from Vancouver a traveller passes through airports in Toronto, St. John’s, and Gander, drives across a scrubby, densely treed landscape that appears endless, takes a ferry on the Atlantic through a stop at Change Islands, and then once on Fogo Island drives through communities such as Stag Harbour, Little Seldom, Seldom, Barr’d Islands, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting, where along the inlets small, mostly traditional wooden buildings face the ocean in surprisingly dense clusters.
Fogo Island Arts (FIA) undertakes a program that includes not only an artist residency, but also exhibitions, publications, and public programming such as the Fogo Island Dialogues, a three-day event (July 19-21, 2013) with approximately twenty international speakers that sought to focus on how art can influence social change. This program is the first in an internationally promoted series, simultaneously bringing attention to the FIA project and troubling its very premise. The Dialogues belong within a contemporary art system where conversations and speaker series are understood as legitimate and legitimizing discursive practices. Narratives, such as those produced by the Dialogues, result in concentric waves that spread the reach of the FIA project. However, art is not the only background against which the Dialogues play out: its intertwined contexts include business and cultural ecologies, specifically sustainable tourism that relies on national and international visitors, and the maintenance of cultural traditions.
Melanie O’Brian
Read the full article here.
I’ve known Josh Franco for about a year now. He teaches in the Art History department at Ithaca College, and I teach in the Writing Department. We both came to IC under the auspices of the Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. Josh and I share a mutual admiration for the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and in teaching the Poetics class this semester I invited Josh to come talk to my class about his involvement with the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa and about his dissertation, research, and art practice. In awe of his work, I initiated this conversation with him via email, which I am so excited to share with all of you.
"The U.S. Latina/o Art Forum has just put out a call to action for all its members, urging them to “increase the representation of Latinx art at the 2017 Annual [College Art Association] Conference by submitting a proposal to present a paper.” The appeal was made by the associate director of the Forum, Rose G. Salseda, and a student member, Mary Thomas. Salseda and Thomas founded this call on their analysis of Latino/a representation at the Annual Conference of CAA between 2012 and 2016."
Seph Rodney
Read full article here.
Writing about Josh T. Franco’s work “In Tlilli, In Tlapalli: Three Tejanos in Red and Black,” Rotem Rozental follows the migration and reincarnation of individuals, colors, ideas, and legacies between New York City and Marfa, TX.
Read full article here.
Selected cascarones from Impurity takes huevos y reading con cariño (for María Lugones), an installation and collaboration with Chris Oliver, were included in the event honoring Lydia Cabrera, folklorist.
See more about the event here.
by Kathleen Shafer
"This inviting book explores how small-town Marfa, Texas, has become a landmark arts destination and tourist attraction, despite—and because of—its remote location in the immense Chihuahuan desert."
See citations here.
Artists, Writers Gather in New York to Summon the Spirit of Donald Judd Through Marathon Reading
“Most know Judd, who died in 1994 at the age of 65, for his art, but his writing is equally famous among a die-hard crowd. Brick-like tomes of his writing and interviews have been put out regularly by the foundation, and his criticism has been published by art periodicals such as the one you’re reading right now. In some ways, Judd was more prolific as a writer than as an artist. He also gave numerous interviews, so it required a full afternoon even to scratch the surface of them. On tap this past weekend to read some of them—which are newly compiled in a 1,050-page book—were artist Josh T Franco, Flavin Judd (named after a different Minimalist, Dan Flavin), curator Juliana Steiner, ARTnews executive editor Andrew Russeth, critic Phyllis Tuchman, and writer Fran Lebowitz. Most readers paired off, with one side speaking as the interviewer, and the other reading as Judd.”
By Annie Armstrong
read full article here.
“Less cosmic would be Josh T. Franco’s work, centered on a snake cobbled out of colored stone and splayed on the gallery floor. Step carefully over and through and you’ll develop a sense of communion with the wonder of Franco’s evocations — of ancient cave paintings and wayfinding mechanisms, eons before European explorers ever thought to draw lines on a map. Franco’s work forges a connection — in color, in form, in the ground underfoot — across millennia, then to now. In a set of painted panels on the wall, he quotes Aby Warburg, the German cultural theorist who more than a century ago visited the Hopi tribes of New Mexico, moving him to see modern European culture as a blip against the vast arc of Indigenous practice despite centuries of attempts to destroy it. “It is only the contact with the new age that results in polarization,” he wrote.”
by Murray Whyte
read full article here.
“The most refreshingly disruptive of the offerings, particularly in the formal setting of the Addison Gallery, is an immersive reading room entitled SNAKE ATLAS (serpent lightning leads to water; for my father who was bitten, so that rattler also resides in me) by Josh T. Franco, a Chicano and Texan who currently lives in Maryland. The room has a warm and abundant feel accentuated by an upbeat, rollicking sonic land-scape made for the installation by ambient/experimental musician Chad Turner. The stimulating combination of materials includes handprints upon corn husks, art historical quotes upon a painted grid of 35mm projector slides, and even a rattlesnake head in a jar (an artwork by Robert Smithson) on a shelf flanked by pieces of gold quartz and golden obsidian. In an elaborate, map-like drawing, a handwritten passage from Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian encompasses the pictograph of a horse and rider, further bordered by engaging marginalia, including a phrase that is part of the work’s title, “fuck the Judge.” The star of the room is a large snake sculpture made with thousands of multicolored marble chips. Snakes traditionally lead desert peoples to water, so sighting one would be of more use than a map. It is the only work in the exhibition to refer directly to the earth by bringing pieces of it inside and placing them back upon the ground.”
by Shana Dumont Garr
read full article here.