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Rebecca McNamara

Rebecca McNamara

Arts & design curator & scholar

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Hello!

I am a curator and scholar, specializing in 19th-century through contemporary American arts, design, and material culture. Learn more about my curatorial projects, books, magazine & journal writing, blog writing, and speaking.

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Round and round I go...
In Laurel Nakadate's 2010 project "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears," the artist photographed herself sobbing, sometimes authentically and other times as a staged gesture, every day for a calendar year. Nakadate was responding to the performed and perceived happiness she saw infiltrating social media at the time; things have changed in the last decade, with many more people using social media platforms to express their truths, but in more ways than not, reality still remains indiscernible from fiction.
I treated myself to some art! This 5-color screenprint by @gabydalessandro, "Marine Explorer," is from a @kayrockscreenprinting series to make art by a wide range of artists, both emerging and established, more affordable. The colors are lush and the printing is 😘. I'm so excited to find a wall for it.
Today’s #WomensHistoryMonth post features a photograph of the artist Yayoi Kusama from the mid-1960s, around the time the art world started to notice her but more than half a century before Instagrammers posting like-worthy photos in/of her Infinity Rooms and signature polka-dot installations made her a household name (I say this in a positive way, glad so many now recognize her work). Here, in this photo taken in the Netherlands, she was taping cut-paper dots to a car—activating the street as a space for art and activating art as a space for everyone. No museum entrance fees or intimidating white-cube gallery assistants to bypass. Art for everyone, art in everyday life.

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