Episode 263: Brooklyn-based artist and adjunct professor Alex Strada
Brooklyn-based artist and adjunct professor Alex Strada talks about:
Why she makes specialized artist\u2019s contracts even though her own work tends not to be object-oriented, which is a feminist-based approach to addressing inequities in the art market; her great admiration for Mark Dion, the artist and her former teacher who has always credited everyone that has worked for him; her various adjunct teaching gigs, at Columbia, Fordham, Cooper Union and Studio in a School; the socially engaged tendency of the work of her students, which she acknowledges comes out of her syllabi emphasizing diversity of all kinds; her film project \u201cSave the Presidents:\u201d how she and her collaborator were able to shoot these immense sculptural busts, which are eroding on a private field owned by the busts\u2019 purveyor, how the screening of the film in Times Square, as part of the Midnight Moments project, was the most surreal experience of Strada\u2019s life; and her life and citizenry as a native New Yorker who grew up in the West Village and still cherishes that neighborhood, but could never live there now \u2013 only Julianne Moore can, as she put it \u2013 and how the Chelsea gallery system, with rents so high, perpetuates an art world that has to play it safe in order to survive, and how we as individual artists need to fight for our opportunities and our space.