Interview with Yale Radio This is available as a podcast online
Podcast Critical Mass Five Questions: Margaret Keller 5 Questions is a short podcast in which we interview creatives with connections to St. Louis. By design, we will be asking a set of unusual questions. These short episodes will be released as we record them. Our intention is to dig a little deeper, to get at the previously undiscovered, the weird, and perhaps the uncanny. The questions are as follows:
Why do you do this to yourself? Why art?
Which one of your works is most likely to end up in a suburban basement?
What needs to happen here in St. Louis?
What do you wish someone would ask you about your work?
What's your end game?
Regional Arts Commission Fellowship to Margaret Keller The Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis (RAC) has awarded $20,000 fellowships to ten local artists as part of its annual Artist Fellowship program. With this sixth round of grants, RAC has now awarded a total of $1.2 million to help regional artists further their artistic careers.
Instead of supplying funds for a specific project, the Artist Fellowships allow for the development of the individual artist's craft, providing the crucial gift of time to study, reflect, experiment, explore and create. These awards are not grants in the traditional sense. These fellowships are considered a financial endowment or investment in the careers of St. Louis artists. Recipients can use the funds to buy materials or studio space, pay collaborators, take sabbaticals, or engage in residencies to focus on their art. The RAC Artist Fellowship program is one of only a few multi-disciplinary fellowship programs of its kind in the United States.
New Public Art coming to the Gateway Arch National Park A new public art installation, Riverbend, by Margaret Keller is coming to the Gateway Arch National Park in September. Riverbend represents the navigable Missouri River as the symbolic Gateway to the West and as the main route west taken by Lewis and Clark, as well as by the settlers who followed them. By literally reflecting all people, this silver, mirror-finish artwork will include and honor all viewers.
Critical Mass Selects Margaret Keller for Public Works Commission Margaret Keller has been awarded the $10,000 Critical Mass Public Works Project Commission for her art installation Riverbend, to be located at The Gateway Arch National Park in September. The approximately 100-foot-long artwork represents the navigable Missouri River, highlighting it as the primary means of Westward Expansion and Gateway to the West. Made of reflective, mirror-like material, Riverbend will orient to the actual course of the Missouri, starting at its confluence with the Mississippi.
Public access will be from any point, to walk, bike, run, play or just sit. Literally a river of brilliant, changing light, Riverbend will activate the space, spark dialogue and generate community, as it literally reflects and includes the audience, along with their movement, through the site. A podcast will invite listeners to share their stories of the river.
Margaret Keller: Finalists for Critical Mass Public Works Honored to be selected as one of three Finalists for the Critical Mass Public Works commission for 2018
Center for Contemporary Art See my large Arch City series painting here.
Delicious Line Review Review by Margaret Keller of Amy Sherald's exhibition at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
temporaryartreview Temporary Art Review is a platform for contemporary art criticism that focuses on alternative spaces and critical exchange among disparate art communities. Temporary is an international network, highlighting both practical and theoretical discourse through reviews, interviews, essays and profiles on artist-centered spaces and projects.
The Luminary Manifesto for an art organization we can live in and with
I. To critique by building. We must build conscious alternatives to the world as we experience it: sustainable structures that support artists, support ourselves, and model a world we want to see embodied more broadly.
II. To embody and enact structures that are sustainable, just, conceptual and diverse in idea, manifestation and act.
IV. To hold money as a tool to be used and a horizon to be overcome. The methods of accessing money should be ethical...
V. To view art as a start, not the end.
VI. To understand our place in complex politics, ecologies and communities within and beyond art. The precarity within art does not exempt us ....
VII. To consider the intersectional implications of our actions in the Anthropocene, in America, in an evolving present. Injustice has no place....
VIII. To age well, to sustain or end well.
IX. To create a continuity of history.