Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With
4/23/202641 min
This interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and on the occasion of the opening of Greater New York at MoMA PS1, where Cruz is also featured, we're resurfacing it. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young (born in 1998), and who just earned her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, critic Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise—that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.
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First 90 secondsBen Davis· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Ben here. This is a re-air of a favorite recent episode, my interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz. It first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and now the second major contemporary art survey where curators are highlighting Cruz, Greater New York, has just opened at MoMA PS1. If you're looking to get a sense of how emerging artists are thinking about all the many pressures on them now, I think our conversation is worth a listen.
Taina H. Cruz· Guest0:30
[upbeat music] I want that experience endlessly the whole time you're looking at my work, so duration matters in that way of how can I really capture and freeze the person in that time and sit with the moods that, like, may come up.
Ben Davis· Host0:52
[upbeat music] I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. [upbeat music] The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum's big curated show, which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging Greater New York.