Our Correspondents: San FranciscoAs of June 1, 2007, this page will no longer be updated. Please visit our new site to access newly added programs. Hosted by Tania Ketenjian Ketenijan is a broadcast journalist based in San Francisco, her home town, to which she returned after working as a reporter for WBAI-FM in New York, interviewing authors for WBAI's "City in Exile." Currently, she is a contributor to Public Radio International's Studio 360 and has her own weekly radio show, "Sight Unseen," on KALX in Berkeley, CA. |
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Edition #14: Oakland - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast August 21, 2006 Oakland is just across the bay from San Francisco but has long been known not so much for its art work but more for its higher level of crime and its lower income population. What many seem to forget is that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Oakland was a bastion for music, specifically jazz, what many believe to be America's only original art form. But as Oakland became more and more neglected, many of these clubs that attracted artists from all over the world were forced to close. Art is now having a resurgence there. San Francisco is simply too expensive for artists; space and time are what artists need to produce their work. How this affects a community, what art brings and takes away from culture and how this manifests specifically in Oakland are some of the topics we visit in this interview. Sampling Yerba Buena Center for the Arts gives a glimpse of the emerging work from Oakland. Tania Ketenjian spoke with curator Berin Golunu, along with the owner of one of the older art spaces in Oakland, Kevin Slagle of Ego Park and Nicole Neditch of Mama Buzz Café. |
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Edition #13: Larry Clark - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 6, 2006 This week, the voice of Larry Clark, photographer, filmmaker, and social voyeur. In 1995, Larry Clark came out with his first film titled KIDS. It followed a group a teenagers in New York City and revealed a life of sex, drugs and general debauchery. Ten years later he emerges with Wassup Rockers, a film chronicling the lives of a group of Latino punk rock skaters from South Central Los Angeles. |
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Edition #12: FredriksonStallard - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 23, 2006 In this edition our San Francisco correspondent visits the East End of London and spoke with artists FredriksonStallard, a duo whose work and life seem inseparable and glorious. Their wonderful Web site is also a journey through their vision. |
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Edition #11: Masculinity - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 9, 2006 It seems like issues of gender roles and identity continue coming to the forefront, especially in the art world. As we look back on history, it was the male artists that always took the lead, women were not meant to be artists. They were the subject of great art works but as artists themselves, they faded in the background. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a series called New Work and this year, curator Joshua Shirkey has chosen three young male artists who directly look at notions of masculinity and the ways in which these manifest through image and medium. |
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Edition #10: Wim Wenders - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 25, 2006 In this segment, the voice of filmmaker Wim Wenders whose film, Don't Come Knocking, is hitting theatres fall 2006. Wim Wenders is best known for such films as Paris, Texas, Buena Vista Social Club and Wings of Desire. Wenders shares his love for his work, the American landscape and the magic of film. |
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Edition #9: William Pope.L - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast July 24, 2006 William Pope.L is a performance artist, sculptor, painter, writer, and social critic. His performances range from crawling on the streets of New York City to sitting in Wall Street and ingesting the Wall Street Journal. He says "social conundrum drives his work" and thus everything he does reflects on our social structure within the context of class, race, and consumerism. Pope L and host Tania Ketenjian discussed the purpose of art, the power of death, the evolution of his work, and the strength of performance. |
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Edition #8: Paraconceptual Design - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 11, 2006 This edition features the voices of New York-based paraconceptual designer and artist Tobias Wong and curator Philip Wood of Citizen-Citizen. Tobias and Philip discuss the importance of imbuing meaning into objects, the boundaries of conceptual design and terminology, and the power of irreverence and context. For more information on Citizen Citizen, please visit www.citizen-citizen.com. As for Tobias, google, just google. |
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Edition #7: Ilegal Entry at Galeria de la Raza - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 26, 2006 A couple of weeks ago, President Bush sent the National Guard to the Mexican Border and just a couple of weeks before that, immigrants across the country took to the streets to demonstrate for their rights, for amnesty, equality, justice. Host Tania Ketenjian spoke with three artists who have taken part in a show titled Illegal Entry at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. They are Nora Raggio from Argentina, Consuelo Jimenez from Mexico and Robin Lasser, from California. Also, this edition begins with a sound piece by Nora Raggio titled What Side Are You On?, with sounds from the Mexican/American border. (30.5 minutes) |
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Edition #6: Mark Horowitz - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 23, 2005 Mark Horowitz created Dinner with Mark out of a serendipitous event: he snuck his cellphone number into a photograph for a major mail order catalog. The minute the catalog went out, he started receiving phone calls. Since that time he has received over 15,000 phone calls which he has parlayed into dinner with people all over the United States. Horowitz has made an art out of simply meeting people, making a connection, and making people feel seen and appreciated (with the help of a cameraman and a documentarian). |
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Edition #5: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 4, 2005 Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video, was on view in early 2005 at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. The show presented video works by artists from over 20 different countries. By bringing together recent works that were structured around a single situation, action or individual, Irreducible offered pieces that re-visit and reinterpret video created in the late 60's and early 70's when video cameras first emerged. Artists were using the camera to document themselves working or performing or, in certain cases, simply walking across their studio. The new generation of video artists tends to use the medium to create art that represents and reflects upon the social and psychological landscape of the place they are from. Irreducible includes work from Romania, Scotland, Peru, Poland, Korea, Israel, and Norway. Ralph Rugoff, director of the Wattis Institute and curator of Irreducible, spoke with correspondent Tania Ketenjian as they walked together through the installation. |
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Edition #4: "Noir City" and the Castro Theater - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast Feb. 14, 2005 Are repertory film houses succumbing to Hi-Def TV? Host Tania Ketenjian gathers three people steeped in the experience of American art-house cinema to pump up its volume in one of the hungriest film-going cultures in the world. Anita Monga was for many years the historic Castro Theater's chief programmer and is one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic film historians in the west. Eddie Muller created the popular "Noir City" film festival three years ago for the historic Castro Theater. Last year, after new owners relieve Monga of her job, he moved the festival to Gary Meyer's almost equally historic Balboa Theater, its new home in San Francisco. |
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Edition #3: Home Galleries - listen | listen with RealPlayer As Tania Ketenjian tells the story, while New York artists priced out of Manhattan were moving to Brooklyn in the late 90s, a similar spike in San Francisco real estate values forced a number of artists and made it difficult for galleries to stay in business. Almost intuitively, she says, people started making galleries in their homes. Suddenly a domestic address would become a place for openings, a home for artists of different media, and the lines between home and art space blurred. Chris Perez created his first gallery in his Williamsburg apartment while working as an assistant curator on the 2002 Whitney Biennial, organizing a "stealth biennial" with artists he knew and admired. When he returned to his native San Francisco, he continued the practice and opened the showcase Ratio 3 Gallery in one room of his apartment, where Irish painter Conor McGrady recently had a solo show. Chris Sollars transformed his entire house, from the basement, up into 667 Shotwell, a homestead gallery that artists completely transform every month into new installations that are attracting serious collectors and crowds. |
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Edition #2: Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations - listen | listen with RealPlayer Tani Ketenjian spotlights "Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations," one of three new exhibitions on view at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center (through January 9, 2005) featuring work by artists and collectives from California and Tijuana who treat portraiture as metaphor. Tania speaks to the Bay Area's Faviana Rodriguez, L.A.'s Shizu Saldamando, and exhibition co-curator Berin Golonu. |
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Edition #1: Aaron Ximm & Ralph Rugoff - listen | listen with RealPlayer Bay Area correspondent Tania Ketenjian opens her debut show on WPS1 with a visit to the quiet storm of sound artist Aaron Ximm, host of San Francisco's weekly "Field Effects" concert series - flush with his field recordings - and Ralph Rugoff, curator of "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" at the California College of the Arts, which not only dares to reopen the East Coast/West Coast divide but attempts to redefine "regional" contemporary art in a global culture. |
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