A Little YouTube Discovery
As I mentioned, I’ve allowed myself to be sucked into YouTube. Today I stumbled across The Art Assignment, a visual art channel hosted by Sarah Urist Green, an art curator. It is coproduced by PBS and Complexly, whe educational video company owned and run by John and Hank Green. Sarah Urist Green is married to John Green, making The Art Assignment a part of the family business. Complexly produces Crash Course, which I praised in an earlier post. The Art Assignment doesn’t appear to be part of the Crash Course family of educational videos. But if it’s not in the immediate family, it is a distant cousin. A lot of it consists of prompts for art-making activities. But there is a little art history and a series of art trips, where Green visits a city or state and checks out the art scene. These visits are necessarily drive-by. How deep can you get over the course of three or four days? But this is a kind of visit I love to make. She visited Houston in January 2017, so I was naturally very curious to check it out.
She starts off visiting the studio of a friend of mine, JooYoung Choi. Choi’s work was all over Houston in early 2017—the video encounters her work at Lawndale and in an installation at Project Rowhouses. (Green made an art assignment video with Choi—with guest appearances by Alexander Calder and Henry Darger.) It’s interesting to see Art Trip: Houston, Texas now because of course I saw these shows in 2017 and most of the others that Green visits and remember them well. I had been in Lawndale for ZineFest in November of 2016 and my table was set up facing Choi’s sculpture Freedom From Madness. (I had a zine with her art in it for sale at that show.)
JooYoung Choi, Freedom From Madness at Lawndale Art Center in 2016
It was a well-made video and Green picked what seem to be the obvious highlights of a short art trip to Houston. I haven’t delved too deep into her assignments yet, so I have more to check out from the seemingly endless library of Green family videos!
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