Are You A Foreign Artist?
04/29/20
by Li-Ming Hu and Lori Waxman
Lori Waxman worked day and night for three Saturdays at the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Photos by Jesse Bond (left) and Li-Ming Hu (right).
Overseas artists wanting to stay in the US and being unable to obtain a US spouse, or having the misfortune of already being married to another foreign national, must apply every three years for an artist visa, known officially as the O1B: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement. Alongside an eye-wateringly large list of professional accomplishments, applicants also need press, which seems to be an Achilles Heel for a number of incredibly talented artists.
Last February, as part of her DISCOmbobulation show at CoProsperity Sphere, Li-Ming Hu invited renowned art historian and critic Lori Waxman, in association with her project 60 WRD/MIN, to collaborate on the project Are You A Foreign Artist? Artists in need of reviews for their O-1 B visa applications could sign up to get one, on a first-come, first-served basis. Over the course of three Saturdays in February 2020, Lori wrote a total of 30 reviews live, working at a desk in one of the Co-Prosperity Sphere storefront windows.
These reviews will be published in Lumpen Magazine #136: Artists Run Chicago, produced in conjunction with the Hyde Park Art Center exhibition, “Artists Run Chicago 2020.” Both the exhibition and the production of the magazine have been postponed due to the COVID-19 lockdown, but visa application deadlines have not. While the print magazine cannot come out, Quarantine Times will publish those reviews in three installments, one for each Saturday of the project.
Round One: Saturday, February 1st, 5-11pm
Round Two: Saturday, February 15th, 3-9pm
Round Three: Saturday, February 22nd, 3-9pm
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When I told Lori about an idea I had to get art writers to generate press to aid artists with their O-1 visa applications, I did not dream that she would volunteer herself. Suddenly I had a real art critic, whom established media might actually publish. It was a perfect fit with her fifteen-year-long project, “60 wrd/min art critic,” where she writes reviews live, in 25 minute increments, for any artist who wants one. The performative element doesn’t really hit home until you actually witness it, watching Lori’s words and thoughts form before your eyes on a 50-inch monitor connected to her laptop, the artist’s submissions nearby. Apparently self-consciousness is not a problem, nor is noise, as was evidenced in her smashing through one set of reviews in the midst of a full blown disco party, then joining in the dancing afterwards.
—Li-Ming Hu
So here’s how it works. I set up an office in an art space, artists bring me their work, I write reviews fast, and then afterwards everything gets published. The idea is to provide reviews for people who want that sort of feedback, whatever the reason, and especially in cities and towns where there is a scarcity of art writing. Also, to make a normally discrete and obscure profession public and transparent. One need not be a professional artist to apply—one can be a retired homemaker taking watercolor classes for the umpteenth time, a priest with a conceptual landscape painting practice, or twelve-year-old twins who like to draw fauna and flora (these are all real examples from past iterations). For this version of the project, which took place over the course of three Saturdays in February at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Li-Ming and I made the review slots open only to foreign artists who needed to gather reviews for the express purpose of putting together their visa applications. It’s a real need, and the project as a whole is trying to serve the critical needs of artists, so why not. Plus, as a foreigner myself, though one lucky enough to have found a nice American guy to marry, I am extra sensitive to the precarities of being from somewhere else and wanting or needing to stay here.
—Lori Waxman
For once outside of the shop window, Lori Waxman reviews Li-Ming Hu's work at "DISCOmbobulation." Photo by Li-Ming Hu.
Lori Waxman reviewed artists’ work well into the evening. Photo by Stella Brown.
Lori Waxman (b. Montreal, Canada) has been the Chicago Tribune’s primary freelance art critic for the past decade. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Her "60 wrd/min art critic" performance has been exhibited in dOCUMENTA (13) and a dozen cities across the U.S. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a 2018 Rabkin Foundation award, and is the author, most recently, of Keep Walking Intently (Sternberg Press), a history of walking as an art form.
Li Ming Hu (b. Aotearoa/New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of our high performance culture, and the relationships between cultural production and the construction of subjectivities. Negotiating boundaries is a constant endeavor – between appropriate and inappropriate types of performance and appropriation, performance and documentation, tragedy and comedy, success and failure, art and life.
She has exhibited widely throughout NZ and performed at Links Hall, dfbrl8r, Mana Contemporary and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and held residencies at the Wassaic Project and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
