• The Artist Is Kinda Present
  A Performance Piece by An Xiao
  Escape From New York, curated by Olympia Lambert
• Saturday, May 15
  5-8pm (the opening reception is 3-9pm)
• Shuttle bus available from NYC/Chelsea: From 2:30pm til 9pm return. Pick up at 22nd Street and 10th Avenue and will also stop at 14th Street L station at 8th Avenue.
• Facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=120602884632496&ref=ts
  ArtCat Listing: http://www.artcat.com/exhibits/11477

This will be her last show, sadly, before she moves back to Los Angeles later this summer. We hope to see you there!

 Can we talk? That seems to be an urgent art world question, partly because of an economic shakedown that sensible people — i.e., the writers of art fair news releases — keep saying is over, or never happened. But New York artists, in need of jobs or apartments or ways to pay their art school loans, are pretty sure that it did happen, and that it isn’t all that over, even if the Armory Show really had an extraspecial year.

…And the writer Joanne McNeil and the artist An Xiao led a panel on the notion that the art world isn’t as racially integrated as it likes to think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/arts/design/19galleries-002.html

Sharon Butler also mentioned An and Joanne for her article about #class in The Huffington Post:

#class, a sprawling and innovative project at Winkleman Gallery in New York, closed last week. Artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton had turned the gallery into a “think tank” for guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors, and anyone else interested in examining the way art is made, seen, and sold in our culture…. They included seasoned bloggers - Hrag Vartanian, Carolina Miranda, Barry Hoggard, James Wagner, An Xiao, Olympia Lambert, Loren Munk, Joanne McNeil, and many others (I organized a discussion about art school and the Ivory Tower) - in all the presentations and discussions, ensuring that blog and related coverage would be abundant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-l-butler/artists-take-on-the-art-i_b_516926.html

Many many kind thanks to both writers and publications for this coverage.  It was an amazing event.

• One of the most popular art feeds on Twitter right now doesn’t have a name or a face or a gender. It doesn’t represent an established arts institution or magazine, nor does it have any kind of credentials. And yet, less than a year since it started, it now boasts 10,000 followers (as of yesterday), a feat helped along by making Twitter’s staff picks.
• http://hyperallergic.com/4536/museumnerd

As well, she’s made a number of updates to this web site:

• A new section on An Xiao’s speaking and writing engagements.

• The Digital Meets Analog section is built out now - there are links to summary pages for Phone-Tastic View, Morse Code Tweets and Nothing to Tweet Home About, plus a summary paragraph on Photoglam.

• And if you follow An Xiao on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll notice that her name is regularly followed by a version number. She has written up version notes to explain what it all means (or not).

Lots of new things in the world of An Xiao:

• Hosted a panel discussion at Winkleman Gallery during Armory weekend for #class, organized by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida: Background, Identity and the Straight White Male.  The roundtable featured Hector Canonge, James Kalm and Raghava KK and was moderated by Joanne McNeil. #class is now an ArtForum Critics’ Pick.
• A YouTube interview with Alan Lupiani.
• A podcast interview with Joanne McNeil of the Tomorrow Museum.
• A quick mention of Photoglam in C-Monster: “The opposite of ArtForum’s Scene & Herd”.
• A new article in NYFA Current about Julia Kaganskiy’s Arts, Culture and Technology Meetup.
• A new article in Art21 about Connections at MIT Museum, featuring Personas by Aaron Zinman, and the work of Judith Donath, Fernanda Viegas, Alex Dragulescu and Yannick Assogba.

The performance is part of #class, organized by Jen Dalton and William Powhida, at Winkleman Gallery.  More info here: http://hashtagclass.blogspot.com/

E-Derive: Psychogeography and the Digital Landscape

Informed by the psychogeographic strategy of “derive,” we will be creating data visualization maps, or “portraits,” of a sample group’s virtual meanderings. These portraits will then be displayed in an online gallery.

Please note: Wifi-ready laptops are required to participate in this workshop.

 More information here.

Social technologies have been around for decades, but mainstream use of social media platforms has grown exponentially only over recent years. This column explores uses of social media platforms relevant to the arts community: by artists, art-based organizations, and the general audience. Leading off the column is a post from New York-based artist, An Xiao.

http://blog.art21.org/2009/06/25/platea-art-in-the-web-20-ethos/

Many kind thanks to Jonathan Munar and Kelly Shindler for organizing this new column and being great editors.

1stfans Meet-up
Brooklyn Museum
7:30 - 8:30 pm
($20 membership req’d)

200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY

In this presentation, An Xiao is talking about the @Platea collective and their public art projects carried out in the digital megacity of social media. Please stop by to learn more about some of their recent public art projects and An’s plans for future projects, including “hopes/dreams/fears”, which debuts at FIGMENT NYC on June 12.

Bushwick Reading Series
Part of Bushwick Open Studios at Bushwick Library
3:00 - 5:00 pm

340 Bushwick Avenue @ Siegel Street
Brooklyn, NY

The end of the season for the Bushwick Reading Series marks the following events:

1. Special musical guest Colin Summers,
2. Readings from poetic moguls Nicole Steinberg, Dan Magers, and Parker Phillips, and
3. An extraordinary interdisciplinary panel about the topic of WILD/LIFE. What does that mean, exactly? You’ll have to come find out what they have to say. The cast of characters includes:

Clara Jo, Video Artist
Nathan Schneider, Writer/Blogger
An Xiao, Photographer/Poet
Roger Bonair-Agard, Poet

Status Update
Through August 1, 2009.
Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 10am to 4pm.
Opening reception Thursday, May 14, 5-7pm

Yale Haskins Laboratories
300 George St., 9th floor
New Haven, (203) 772-2788

The show is curated by Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff and features artists Kevin Van Aelst, Cat Balco, Sharon Butler,Heather Freeman, Greg Garvey, Matt Held, Keith Johnson, Katie Ring, Jeremiah Teipen, Lee Walton, Rachel Perry Welty and An Xiao.

On Thursday, May 14, from 5-6 pm, An Xiao will also be participating in a panel discussion entitled “Big Love: Artists and Social Networking Technology.” Panelists include Matt Held, Paddy Johnson, Sharon Kleinman (editor of Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-first Century), and others.

About the panelists:
Sharon Butler, who organized the panel discussion via a Facebook Event Invitation, is an associate professor in Eastern Connecticut State University’s Department of Visual Arts, and maintains the art blog Two Coats of Paint. According to Butler, online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter represent “undefined territory in the art community.” In April she wrote about the artworld’s embrace of Facebook in The Brooklyn Rail.

Matt Held’s Facebook group, “I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held,” has more than 3,000 members, each of whom hopes to have his or her portrait painted as part of a collection of 200 works.

Paddy Johnson is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has been published in numerous art journals in this country and abroad. Her blog, Art Fag City, has been linked to by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine, among others.

Sharon Kleinman, a professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, earned her B.A. degree in English and American literature from Brandeis University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in communication from Cornell University. She is the editor of Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-first Century (2007, Peter Lang Publishing).

An Xiao is a conceptual artist who uses online social networks as her medium. The Guardian’s (London) Ruth Jamieson recently included her in a “who’s who” of the Twitter art world alongside Yoko Ono, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tate.

For those who can’t physically make it to New Haven, An Xiao is setting up a Twitter hashtag #hlsu (haskins lab status update) so farflung friends can follow live tweets. For more information about “Big Love: Artists and Social Networking Technology,” Status Update, and Haskins Laboratories, please call the Greater New Haven Arts Council at (203) 772-2788.

Thinking back to those days when my grandmother had to return to the Philippines after spending time with me in California, it wasn’t the big things that I missed…. I realized that Twitter and other microblogging media allows us to simulate closeness. It is the mundane tidbits that make us feel like the people we love, even those who are on the other side of the planet, are but a few feet away.  

An is also excited to appear in the April 2009 edition of ARTNews. The article is not available online but can be found on page 32 of the magazine.The last few months have served as a great stepping stone for An’s work and overall artistic vision.

She is grateful to both Suzan Sherman of NYFA Current and Carolina A. Miranda of ARTNews for generously supporting her work.