OK, we are so seriously proud of this!

You know how when artists get together, we can’t stop opining about art stuff to each other?

Well, now we, and YOU, have our own MAGAZINE to OPINE our heads off IN PRINT.

Introducing the inaugural issues of Banana Panic!

This first issue is dedicated to varied reactions to the recently opened Venice Biennale, and future issues will cover the art world near and far.

We want you to read our MAGAZINE, and to send us your thoughts, opinions, questions and reviews!

ORDER BANANA PANIC HERE!

by Livia Linden

The upcoming Venice Art Biennale has forced us to think a little, on a question we find vexing. We hate being vexed, so we wanted to share our thoughts to see if it helps.

So here's the crux of our vexation (we do love that word!). Many people want to ban Russian artists from participating in the Biennale. And many many people want to ban Israeli artists. Both understandable points of view.

But we wonder why no one ever suggests banning the US artists.

The U.S. government has been a tool for devastating cruelty and destruction at home and around the world for a really long time, and now participates without even a fig leaf of sanity or morality as billionaires worldwide unite in the race to destroy our planet.

We wouldn't blame you for hating us, really, really hating us (American artists). And for not wanting us around at all. The trail of tears produced by our government circles the globe many times over. We get why you hate us.

The thing is, we (The Biennial Project artists, as well as nearly all the artists we know) utterly oppose all these horrifying actions being taken in our name! We actively protest all this carnage in every way we can think of, and will keep doing so as long as we have air in our lungs.

We are guessing (alright, hoping, in a couple of cases) that many if not most artists in other countries whose governments are busily engaged in committing atrocious acts (so many countries!) feel the same way about the atrocities committed by their rulers, and fight valiantly to change things for the better.

So, confusing as hell.

Just possibly, then, no to excluding artists overall from any country. We admit to not being sure about this, but it's worth a thought.

Now, if individual artists in their words or in their work promote or endorse the evil done in their names, well that seems like a good reason to protest those artists and that work. Which we have and will continue to do.

There, that's enough thinking for today.

Signed, a few little canaries chirping as loudly as we can. 

Vincent Valdez and Power: Winners, Losers, Collisions

by C. Liska, photos by Bart Higgins

I first discovered Valdez this Spring in his blockbuster show, “Just a Dream”… shown by both MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). It is no exaggeration to say I was blindsided by his work and it won’t let me rest if I don’t say something about it now. What I experienced was a collision of exquisite and delicate beauty with the blood and bones of graphic physical violence, war, and death; deft technique with raw emotion. There are lots of beautifully-made paintings of mostly battered fighters, not my usual choice of subject matter, but in addition to their wonderfully refined execution, something in them triggered a host of childhood memories of epic boxing matches on televisions then viewed as a collective cultural experience. Shocking and bloody battles with heroic winners and losers were quotidian experiences in my childhood. I thought of Muhammed Ali and the Rocky movies and Raging Bull and, later, a host of literary treatments ranging from the Aeneid to Nabakov to Ring Lardner, the Bible to Hemingway to, curiously, a modern Swedish detective novel I just happened to be reading at this time (I now know more than I ever wanted to about how best to execute a left hook, should it ever become useful). Most of these treatments are more profoundly about losing than about winning, and how one deals with the exigencies that living a life, any life, can sometimes offer. This is what Valdez is grappling with as a visual artist and he does it with all the seriousness that the subject demands.

Following are descriptions of some of Valdez’s recent pieces and some references that you can check any time in this fallow period between his shows. The printed matter and the videos will have to sustain for now, but I can’t wait to see what he has to offer next.

Just a Dream (In America). oil on canvas

Beautifully constructed. Notice the praying hands tattoo. There is art within art throughout this show, from body art to advertising to graffiti on moving trains. America’s always talking, and there’s always more to say. The painting has sound as well, the 1958 romantic pop song, “Just a Dream” about the loss of love, here the loss of the American Dream.

The Beginning is Near (An American Trilogy), Chapter One: The City. oil on canvas

This is a huge, superbly painted piece, one of our recurring nightmares. Valdez’s early and long love affair with mural-making is evident here in the sheer monumentality of the piece. A couple of points: this is fundamentally a family picture, literally, with couples clearly male and female, even with tiny robed klansbabies along for the picnic, so to speak. Note the looming automotive presence, as if another portrait of another family member, common in Valdez’s work. Wow!

Home, video, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

The video and related paintings collectively referred to as Home reference, on a personal level, the death due to PTSD of Iraq combat medic and childhood friend, John Holt. More broadly, the video challenges the at-the-time media ban of public images of American combat losses, a cover-up that ‘shields’ the public from the actual costs of military activity. Again, the images are rife with signs, graffiti, and other endlessly recurring elements of background talk.

Vincent Valdez was born in San Antonio, TX in 1977, and lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles.

He is currently collaborating with the ACLU of Texas in an artist-in-residence program, “The New Americans”. “My project, ‘The New Americans,’ will serve as a reminder: to fight the good fight, like a stubborn pulse in a dying heart.”

It Was Never Yours, oil on paper

Nunca era tuyo, óleo sobre papel

References:

https://massmoca.org/event/vincent-valdez-just-a-dream/

https://www.aclutx.org/vincent-valdez/

https://www.vincentvaldezstudio.com/

Video, Excerpts for John -- https://youtu.be/CwXv2aYzdaM

Video, The Art of Boxing -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGy9Lwteygo

SHOWS – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Ford Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Portrait Gallery (United States), Blanton Museum of Art, Parsons School of Design, Clark Art Institute, and the Fundacion Osde Buenos Aires

In 2024-25, "Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream..." at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.

CATALOG – https://researchdevstore.myshopify.com/products/vincent-valdez-just-a-dream?_pos=2&_sid=62c4a0621&_ss=r

CHECK BACK FOR LOCATION

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Assault on Venice was a total success!!! Watch it here:

written by Samantha Marder

At the Venice Biennale, national pavilions often reflect both art and politics. The Kiribati Pavilion, “Pacific Time – Time Flies” (“Ana tai te Betebeke – E biribiri te tai” in the Kiribati language), stands out for a different reason. It offers a quiet but powerful reflection on time, vulnerability, and survival.

Curated by Kautu Tabaka and Nina Tepes, and organized with the Institute ERGO SUM, the exhibition brings together 29 artists from different generations and disciplines. Their works combine to tell a layered story—one that feels both personal and political.

From the moment you step inside, the pace changes. Unlike many of the more flashy or overwhelming exhibitions in Venice, this pavilion encourages you to slow down. Videos, photographs, sound, performance, and interactive pieces are all woven together. This mix reflects the complexity of Kiribati itself—a country made up of 33 low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean, where rising sea levels pose a serious threat.

For many visitors, this is their first introduction to Kiribati. Instead of presenting climate change as an abstract issue, the pavilion makes it feel real and human. The artworks don’t just explain the crisis—they show what it feels like to live through it, through memories, traditions, and everyday life.

A subtle reference to Plato runs through the exhibition. He argued that ideas are permanent, while the physical world is always changing. In this setting, that idea becomes unsettling. What does “permanence” mean for a country that may disappear? Can culture survive without land? These questions stay with you as you move through the space.

Some works make these ideas especially clear. Kaeka Michael Betero’s photographs show homes and landscapes that seem calm at first glance, but carry an underlying tension. Nothing dramatic is happening, yet there’s a sense that these places may not last. They feel almost like records of something already slipping away.

In contrast, performances by the Kairaken Betio Group bring energy and movement into the pavilion. Their dances celebrate culture and community, but they also feel like acts of resistance—ways of holding on to identity. Watching them, you’re reminded that what’s at risk isn’t just land, but language, traditions, and shared ways of life.

An installation by Daniela Danica Tepes makes the experience even more immediate. She recreates a simple interior space—a room that could belong to anyone—but slowly reveals signs of flooding. Water seems to creep in quietly. It’s unsettling, because it brings climate change out of the distance and into a familiar, everyday setting.

Throughout the pavilion, sound, light, and materials work together to create an immersive experience. Rather than telling visitors what to think, the exhibition invites reflection. It encourages you to consider your own sense of time—how quickly it passes, and what it means when it starts to run out.

When you leave the Kiribati Pavilion, you don’t carry just one image or message with you. Instead, you’re left with a feeling: an awareness of how fragile things can be, and a deep respect for the people facing that reality. In a Biennale full of bold and attention-grabbing works, Kiribati’s pavilion is memorable for its quiet clarity. It doesn’t demand attention—it asks you to listen.

One of the most amazing video artists – Charlene Liska, with photos by Bart Higgins -  produced this beautiful and evocative video summary of the 60th Venice Biennale!

Enjoy!

"A personal Engagement with the 2024 Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere)" by Charlene Liska, photographs by Bart Higgins

WONDERFUL article about the Venice Biennale (and ArtVenice Biennale IV organized by The Biennial Project) by Charlene Liska, originally published in the North End Waterfront.

In this era of biennials, The Venice Biennale, the vast international art festival begun in 1895, is the grandmother of them all. While Venice is revered for it’s great Renaissance and earlier art, the Biennale has always managed to feature avant-garde and contemporary art, and somehow the contrast enlivens both worlds.

I attended the first week of the Venice Biennale with an East Boston-based arts organization, “The Biennial Project” which began about 10 years ago as a send-up of the many pretensions of the art world and has since grown into a world-wide network of people who care a lot about art and not at all about the pretensions. The BP stages its own counter-biennials, including one in Marfa, Texas and four Boston Biennials that have been held here locally, last in 2016. These people are the most serious fun around!

This year, in addition to attending the official Biennale, the Boston-based organization held its own parallel Venice event that featured several hundred artists from across the globe. Participating artists included German-born painter-sculptor Artemis Herber, Florida-based photographer Barbara Revelle, videographer Tom Corby from London, and Zsolt Asztalos, who represented Hungary in the official 2013 Biennale but who chose this year to appear in the Boston organization’s parallel event instead. Poetry, in English and Italian, was recited, locals and visitors confabbed, words and prosecco flowed liberally. One couldn’t really say it was a bit of Boston in Venice; it was more like a bit of the world, that had come together under prompting from Boston on a dark night in a Venice neighborhood to talk, and drink, and talk some more about art, because they admired the weird and interesting spirit of the Biennale and the art works that were on display.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: CLICK HERE to see the galleries of beautiful work exhibited in ArtVenice Biennial IV.]

And there were some stunning pieces in the Venice Biennale, not least, the small old wooden country house with holes in its roof that was imported in its entirety from the Republic of Georgia, down through which the artist, Chachkhiani, caused artificial rain to pour unceasingly, covering everything inside with dripping water; it captured everyone’s worst fear about waking up in the middle of the night to hear water dripping, and finding that somehow a hole has opened up in the roof — in this case many holes! — and the rain is starting to come in. And in the Italian pavilion, Il Mondo Magico, an exhibit which showed an assembly line in which simulated dried and mummified life-sized corpses of Christ were manufactured from plastic materials and then were heated in ovens and allowed to molder, and then, once finished, were broken into large pieces and displayed, in more or less random order, on a dark wall. It was about imitation versus reality, yes, and the almost unbelievable power of technology, but also about magic, and how and why people hope, and the power of belief. Of course, there were more conventional pieces too, in their hundreds; but this gives you an idea.

About timing, for anyone who might be thinking of attending — and it’s well worth going to see! — it makes a Venice trip even more dramatic than it would otherwise be. Either go early, as I did this year, in May, for the excitement of the crowds and the fun of getting there first, or otherwise consider waiting till late in the year — say, October month — which can be exquisite too, since the fact that there are no crowds then means you can actually see and enjoy and understand things in your own good time.

And full marks to “The Biennial Project”: they’re projecting Boston onto the global arts scene in a singular way, and they do it basically because, being artists themselves, they can’t help it. These people are living to make, and view, and talk about art. Interesting way to live.

Contact Information:
Venice Biennale 2017 — http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/
The Biennial Project blog — http://thebiennialprojectblog.com/blogengine.NET/
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/The-Biennial-Project-208168052547147/

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