SUMMER 2024 EDITION
ASPEN ART MUSEUM
13
Aspen Spirit
lms, but I’m taking great pride in all of the extraordinary content being created in lm and television here in California. It gets beamed all over the world and keeps Californians working, doing the jobs that they love to do. I think our country, unfortunately, is experiencing a moment of such deep polarization. But in a museum or movie theater, we’re all there experi- encing art and enjoying the opportunity to be together. AD On a personal level, my focus right now is on nding a way for art and lm to really exist together. For the last six, seven years, I’ve been making video work and sculpture largely in the context of the art world. Last year, I made a short lm that nally had a life both in the art world with exhibition formats and also on the festival circuit. I am interested in reaching a wider audience, and digging more into the language of lm. What it can do, what it can make people feel, is very exciting to me. But they’re not mutually exclu- sive industries, there’s a way to really straddle both and to make things that can live in both spaces. CB Film has the ability to provoke conversations about pressing issues such as poverty, war, racism and gender inequality. My cousin, Bradley McCallum, is a conceptual artist and social activist. He addresses trauma and struggle and racial identity. His work includes large public projects, sculpture, video and photography. I’m inspired by what he’s doing at this moment in time, mixing all of those disciplines together to address some really pressing issues. Incidentally, I went to the Ed Ruscha opening at LACMA last night, and it felt like such a powerful California experience. AD It’s funny, Ruscha is alive and well, of course, but I have a tendency to be very in©uenced by a lot of dead white men. My all-time favorite artist, although I cooled on it a bit, is Robert Morris, who passed away a few years ago. He was known for hard-edged minimalist sculptures, but through performance, video and lm he also really engaged with his own subjectivity as a white American man, inhabiting caricatures of the gangster, the cowboy, the intellectual. A lot of this work was happening during Vietnam and the anti-war and labor movements in New York City, and he was actively organiz- ing artists in relation to these through projects like Art Strike. I think he’s a reminder of how one can not only comment on or work through political stu in one’s work, but also be part of a community of people thinking about those things. A really early love of mine is Senga Nengudi. She has been a sculptor since the 1970s and raised interesting questions about making abstract work as a Black woman and about what it means to make art as a Black person in America. What are you supposed to be doing? Are you supposed to make gurative work? Is abstraction a tool that is interesting or useful? I’m also really in©uenced by a lot of maybe dry, experimental lm work from the 1960s and ’70s, like that of Michael Snow, who passed away last year. Stu that may seem very dull to watch but is riveting in some ways. Also Tiany Sia, a great artist and lmmaker who did a lot of work around the Hong Kong protests a few years ago, and is interested in the
ARIA DEAN I was born and raised in Pasadena, California. I grew up in a production family: My dad’s an assistant director, my mom’s a producer. All of their friends were in the industry and it was the height of the music-video era and MTV. I worked as a costume assistant when I was in college, but my parents really encouraged me to nd my own interests. I always did art stu. I painted, drew and wrote a lot as a kid and I ended up going to Oberlin College. I studied art and philosophy and just stumbled into the art world and went on to work in numerous places in my 20s. COLLEEN BELL I’ve been in Los Angeles for 32 years. I went to college in Virginia, with a spell at St. Andrews in Scotland. I was work- ing on Capitol Hill and I had traveled to various places in the world, but I had never been to California. Then I re-met my childhood sweetheart who was in LA launching a new soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful , and he proposed marriage right away. The show was just getting o the ground, so it was all hands on deck and, although it felt a little o my career trajectory, I went to work for the production company. So, I was producing and my husband was a head writer. This was the moment that the international markets were opening up, and we found that soon our little half-hour daytime drama was being seen in 110 countries around the world, with over 150 million viewers. The social activist in me thought, “Wow, what a platform to educate people, build social cohesion, and to promote peace and prosperity.” To give just one example, we had many viewers in Africa and it was when the AIDS epidemic was raging through the con- tinent. We would tell these long story trajectories, weaving in information about HIV prevention. When we had our fourth child, I decided to take a leave of absence and asked myself what had I always wanted to do but hadn’t had time to pursue, and that was to work on toxic chemical reform. The NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] was doing the best work in the nonprot space on this, and so I reached out to them and oered to volunteer. They sent me to Washing- ton, D.C., where I met Senator Barack Obama in the second month of his rst term. Then one thing led to another, which brought me back into government work. I was with the Obama adminis- tration and my nal position was as the US ambassador to Hungary. Now I work for the Newsom admin- istration, in the governor’s o§ce of business and economic development as the director of the lm commission. I am happy to be working somewhere where I feel like my values completely align. This is a state of dreamers, somewhere that doesn’t only recognize but celebrates our cultural and ethnic diversity as one of our great assets. I love being in California. AD Yes, lately I’ve been missing California more than ever, not just the sun but the California attitude, the way people interact. CB There is denitely a large community of creatives here. And some- thing I’m excited about at the moment is this even stronger belief that art and lm have the ability to build social cohe- sion, promote peace and unify people around the world. With my portfolio as lm commissioner, I’m not making the
Right, top to bottom Behind the scenes of The Bold and the Beautiful , 2007. Courtesy: Abaca Press/ Alamy Stock Photo Aria Dean, King of the Loop , 2020, installation view, Made in L.A. 2020: a version , Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2020. Courtesy: the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photograph: Joshua White / JWPictures. com ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN , 2024, installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2024, Museum Acquisition Fund, © Ed Ruscha, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA Active worksite of Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles , 1976. ©SPARC 1983. Judith F. Baca and the SPARC archives. Photograph: Linda Eber
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