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Brian

@sholis.com
301 followers 327 following 194 posts

Chicagoan in Toronto, art worker, autodidact, dad. This is mostly a read-and-reply account. More about me at sholis.com; I’m also building valise.works for artists.

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Brian @sholis.com · 17/06/2025
Today is publication day for my dear friend @laurenoneillbutler.bsky.social’s new @versobooks.bsky.social book “The War of Art.” It is great! You should click this link and learn more and then buy it or order it from your library! www.versobooks.com/en-ca/produc...
versobooks.com
The War of Art
Artists in America have long battled against injustices, believing that art can in fact “do more.” The War of Art tells this history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debat...
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Brian @sholis.com · 30/05/2025
Every Friday morning, I set aside time to open @mactanaka.bsky.social’s wonderful app MusicHarbor, which is like an RSS reader for Apple Music, and sort through new releases from the 1,000+ artists I follow. This morning I feel especially blessed.
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Lauren O'Neill-Butler @laurenoneillbutler.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
!!! Thursday, July 17, 2025, 6pm !!!
nypl.org
Lauren O'Neill-Butler with E.C. Feiss and Ciarán Finlayson: The War of Art: A History of Artists' Protest in America
What do artists' protests reveal about the possibilities for protest in our democracy? Lauren O'Neill-Butler's "The War of Art" invites us to learn, imagine, and mobilize, which we'll do together at t...
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Ido Radon @idoradon.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
We are launching a new exhibition project for art, its discourses, and histories in Portland Oregon above Mother Foucault’s Bookshop. societysocietysociety.com
societysocietysociety.com
SOCIETY
SOCIETY is a space for art and its histories and discourses above Mother Foucault's Bookshop in Portland, Oregon
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Brian @sholis.com · 16/05/2025
So far as I can see in these roundups, there wasn’t a single photograph on view at Independent, NADA, or ESTHER in New York last week: artviewer.org/independent-... artviewer.org/nada-new-yor... artviewer.org/esther-ii-ne...
artviewer.org
Independent New York 2025 – Art Viewer
Featured Artists: Nooshin Askari, Adam Higgins, Douglas Coupland, Nana Wolke, Zoë Carlon, Amel Bashier, Ada Patterson, Suyi Xu, Sam Mattax, Wendy White, Tincuta
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Brian @sholis.com · 16/05/2025
Toronto: @billorcutt.bsky.social (!) and Aidan Baker (!!) at Allan Gardens Conservatory (!!!) on August 9. I got tickets for me & Julia. See you there? dice.fm/event/7daneb...
dice.fm
Bill Orcutt Tickets | CA$50.48 | 9 Aug @ Allan Gardens Children's Conservatory, Toronto | DICE
As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of A...
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Brian @sholis.com · 16/05/2025
Every year I think to myself: “Why don’t they just publish all of these books?” Looking forward to seeing which of these they _do_ publish.
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Brian @sholis.com · 15/05/2025
If you’re in Toronto, consider joining us! Julia and our friend Rhiann helped our neighbours make their papier-mâché sculptures, and a similar parade along the rail path last year was lots of (family-friendly) fun. spacing.ca/toronto/2025...
spacing.ca
The Junction Triangle Parade - Spacing Toronto
Two dedicated community organizations, Friends of West Toronto Rail Path and Angry Locals, are coming together to host a vibrant and meaningful parade on May 29th, 2025 in Toronto’s Junction Triangle ...
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Jordan S. Carroll 🌹 @jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
one of the fundamental problems of our culture is that we treat the time from college graduation to retirement as homogenous and undifferentiated. a saner society would break it up with age-based sabbaticals, holidays, retreats, initiations, and educational interludes.
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Brian @sholis.com · 08/05/2025
“Different Rooms is meant to meet you where you are. It’s a decidedly urban album. The field recordings were captured on train platforms, in city streets, in rooms at home …” The lead single off Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer’s new album is enticing: intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/differ...
intlanthem.bandcamp.com
Different Rooms, by Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
10 track album
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Brian @sholis.com · 04/05/2025
Jim Nill trying to single-handedly make DFW feel better about Nico Harrison and, for tonight at least, succeeding.
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Brian @sholis.com · 03/05/2025
If you see this Post your getaway vehicle
Damián Ortegas’s 2002 sculpture, “Cosmic Thing,” a VW bug taken apart into dozens of pieces and suspended by cables in a warehouse-like setting
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Brian @sholis.com · 02/05/2025
Can’t see this record falling out of my top ten during the rest of the year. Jamal Moss is so, so good. Chicago represent! Smalltown Supersound keeps nailing it as it increasingly reaches beyond Norway for new artists to add to the roster. hieroglyphicbeingsts.bandcamp.com/album/dance-...
hieroglyphicbeingsts.bandcamp.com
Dance Music 4 Bad People, by Hieroglyphic Being
8 track album
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Brian @sholis.com · 01/05/2025
Love Emily Braun’s idea to have twenty-four writers each describing an hour spent with Christian Marclay’s “The Clock.” I’m going to dole these out to myself, one per day: brooklynrail.org/2025/05/crit...
brooklynrail.org
Keeping Time with Christian Marclay’s The Clock | The Brooklyn Rail
There have been many single-author pieces on The Clock, but I wanted to juxtapose different voices, expertise, and ages (spanning six decades) in response to its montage fabric and temporal structure....
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Brian @sholis.com · 24/04/2025
For years I’ve waited for a New York gallery to give the German photographer Jochen Lempert a solo show. I love his work (and live with examples of it) and I’m excited that Anton Kern is opening a show on May 6. It’s not on the gallery website yet, but it’s at their main 55th St. space. Recommended!
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Brian @sholis.com · 18/04/2025
I don’t know what’s going on with this Eva Kot’átková exhibition in a palace in Vilnius, but I’m definitely intrigued … Images via: www.contemporaryartdaily.com/project/eva-...
A figurative sculpture composed of a wooden pallet, 40kg bags of concrete (I think), and a spherical head sewn together out of bits of fabricPhoto of a large wooden structure with ramps in front of a series of arched windows. Large heads made of sewn-together fabric, all with mouths apage, rest on and around the structure, as do pieces of clothing or cloth.Dozens, if not hundreds, of small quasi-figurative elements—are they bits of paper? are they little sculptures?—dangle on strings hooked onto rows of white wire.
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Brian @sholis.com · 18/04/2025
I was late to the Lisa Oppenheim show, but too early to shop the Eckhaus Latta look, so I blogged about it. www.sholis.com/blog/lisa-op...
sholis.com
Lisa Oppenheim at MUDAM Luxembourg
Late to the show, too early to shop the look …
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Brian @sholis.com · 17/04/2025
My friend Lucas Foglia has just released a beautiful new photobook, “Constant Bloom,” which tracks the migration of Painted Lady butterflies across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. A week from today he opens a show of the photos at Fredericks & Freiser in NYC. Links below 👇🏻
A mockup depicting a book with a purple cover against a light-blue background. The cover features words in small type and a large black print of butterfly wings.Spread from a book with a large photograph depicting a Painted Lady butterfly resting on a large skull sitting in the sand or dirt.Spread from a book featuring a large photograph of a man with a butterfly net standing atop a rock in a green and mountainous region.
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Brian @sholis.com · 16/04/2025
“We’re fact-checking because we want to represent the world accurately. We’re also fact-checking because we are trying to have a piece that works on its own terms.” An interview with Fergus McIntosh, head of the @newyorker.com’s fact-checking department. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...
nybooks.com
One Wonders | Fergus McIntosh, Merve Emre
Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an
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Brian @sholis.com · 16/04/2025
As someone who values artists, publications, ephemera, and artists’ books and editions, it was a no-brainer when @iamasq.bsky.social nominated me to join Art Metropole’s board. I’ve just begun serving my (first?) two-year term. 🎉
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Brian @sholis.com · 15/04/2025
I wondered what kind of self-portrait would emerge from my browser’s autocomplete feature. Now I know: it’s pretty accurate. www.sholis.com/blog/my-digi...
sholis.com
My Digital A–Z Portrait
The sites my browser has committed to memory
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Brian @sholis.com · 14/04/2025
This 1842 cottage an hour north of Hobart, Australia is for sale. I’m in Canada, so I’ll need a partner who can put up some money and time-share it with me. Anyone in? thedesignfiles.net/2025/04/on-t... More images & plans: www.are.na/brian-s-arch...
Photo of an elderly gentleman sitting on a ledge built in to a large new window in a renovated 1840s cottage in Australia. The interior is dark and moody, with brick and wood, despite the light coming in from outside.A view of a renovated kitchen in an old stone cottage. Wooden shelves line one wall; a modern countertop runs beneath a window.
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Brian @sholis.com · 14/04/2025
Toronto: two weeks remain to see the exhibition at Cooper Cole featuring Hangama Amiri and Melissa Joseph. It’s one of my favorites in the city right now. For those who can’t go in person, Art Viewer has you covered: artviewer.org/hangama-amir...
artviewer.org
Hangama Amiri & Melissa Joseph at COOPER COLE, Toronto – Art Viewer
COOPER COLE is pleased to present Gathering, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Hangama Amiri and Melissa Joseph. Through fibre, cloth, and the inti
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Brian @sholis.com · 14/04/2025
Last week, driving into Montreal, @rosszurowski.com and I noticed vibrant Club Piscine signage along a busy road. This morning I realize that brand is getting an update from Caserne, perhaps Canada’s hippest design studio. Interesting to see the firm doing more straightforward/corporate work.
Three photographs of Club Piscine signage, featuring a yellow smiley face and the brand’s name in bubbly red and blue letters
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Brian @sholis.com · 10/04/2025
This wonderful, thought-provoking essay also serves as a preview of Blaise’s forthcoming “What Is Intelligence?,” out in September from @mitpress.bsky.social. I’m proofing this book now and it has changed so much about how I think about computers, other species, brains, relationships …
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Brian @sholis.com · 09/04/2025
Have a customer transferring to Valise, who said he’d upgrade once he cancels his other subscription. Now says “they want to charge me for 3 more months b/c I gave them 24 days’ notice instead of 30.” We’re comfortable waiting three months. Our healthier approach will yield a lifetime relationship.
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spencer chang @spencer.place · 09/04/2025
i made a website that prompts you to do something intimate and absurd with your phone every hour and transforms your gestures into a piece of self-generative art. experience it here: artlab.hyundai.com/commissions/...
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Brian @sholis.com · 09/04/2025
“Melancholy, for Sebald, is a kind of preserving force, a means of keeping alive the past—broken and in ruins, perhaps, but still in the forefront of consciousness. ‘On the level of art, in particular, its function is anything but reactive or reactionary,’ because …
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Brian @sholis.com · 09/04/2025
Love when my Google Alerts turn up sweet gestures: Latvian-born American artist Vija Celmins has created a foundation and used it to endow an annual $30,000 USD prize for supporting Latvian artists, funding it for at least ten years: artdaily.com/news/180794/...
artdaily.com
Vija Celmins Foundation Grant established to support Latvian artists
On Thursday, 3 April 2025, at a press conference at the Latvian National Museum of Art, the establishment of the Vija Celmins Foundation Grant to supp
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Brian @sholis.com · 09/04/2025
New goal: a flower garden of TestFlight apps …
Six app icons, four of which could be described as flower-like …
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Brian @sholis.com · 08/04/2025
Making a second pass on the typesetting of this book and encountering accidental life advice …
Image of a sticky note superimposed over text. The note reads: “aim for / self- / reflection”
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Brian @sholis.com · 08/04/2025
My friend & neighbor Jamie Wolfond asked twenty-three fellow designers to remake the wall clock. The results are on view in Milan until April 13. I copy edited & proofed the small accompanying publication. Some highlights: www.dezeen.com/2025/04/07/d...
dezeen.com
Seven surprising clocks from the 24 Hours exhibition in Milan
The 24 Hours exhibition at Milan design week features 24 weird and wonderful clocks, all by different designers. Here are seven of the most imaginative.
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NHL (Bot) @notnhl.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
Look at all those excited dots witnessing history 🤭 #Gr8ness
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Brian @sholis.com · 06/04/2025
This Carrier EP is extremely my shit in a way that nothing else this year has quite been. Sam Valenti sold me on it by saying it’s “impeccable, featherweight, but still hardbody digital dub with photekian clean room sheen.” Need to listen in a float tank. 0207carrier.bandcamp.com/album/tender...
0207carrier.bandcamp.com
Tender Spirits, by Carrier
3 track album
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Lauren O'Neill-Butler @laurenoneillbutler.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Thank you to the anonymous reviewer from Publishers Weekly for this early review!
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Brian @sholis.com · 06/04/2025
Last weekend, the city of Kortrijk, Belgium, opened a renovation and extension of its municipal museum designed by one of my favorite firms, Barozzi Veiga. Info: barozziveiga.com/projects/gro... Opening photos: www.instagram.com/p/DH2-2cIIBkg/
A crowd of people, with one person pointing toward the ceiling, in a high, red-painted roomAerial view of a picturesque town square with a block-shaped stone building jutting into the frame in the foreground and a church spire in the backgroundA tall, monolithic gray form, with the sun peeking over its topmost edge, stands next to an older, enclosed stone passageway with newly installed windows; two people, one with a mobility aid, stand in the foregroundAn in-progress construction photo depicting a large monolithic stone form with a large window at ground level that is not yet fully installed; a mount of dirt rests in the foreground. The in-progress building is connected to an older brick building by an enclosed passagway.
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questions by elliott @elliottcost.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
A short trailer for the Internet Phone Book ... 📒 internetphonebook.net 🍊 We are creating a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.
youtu.be
Internet Phone Book (trailer) – A directory for exploring the vast poetic web
YouTube video by questionsonair
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Brian @sholis.com · 05/04/2025
Very niche skeet: can someone help me make a Flexoki custom theme for Bear? I can pay a small bounty, or edit/write something for you as barter. stephango.com/flexoki www.reddit.com/r/bearapp/co...
stephango.com
Flexoki
An inky color scheme for prose and code.
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Brian @sholis.com · 04/04/2025
Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has a “working file” of 148,000 notes: writingslowly.com/2025/03/20/t...
Georges Didi-Huberman’s hands viewed from above, writing notes and arranging them on a table
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Brian @sholis.com · 04/04/2025
It’s been a year since I went on a tour of an Amazon Fulfillment Center and tried to make sense of what I saw (partly through Heike Geissler’s 2014 novel “Seasonal Associate”): magazine.frontier.is/seeking-fulf...
magazine.frontier.is
Seeking Fulfillment
On touring an Amazon warehouse and reading Heike Geissler’s “Seasonal Associate”
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Brian @sholis.com · 04/04/2025
“I’m on the train that audiobooks don’t count as reading. You don’t read the radio.” – Cleveland Cavaliers starting center Jarrett Allen, to Wosny Lambre, @robmahoney.bsky.social & @justinverrier.bsky.social 📚📚📚🏀🏀🏀
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Brian @sholis.com · 04/04/2025
A good new-music Friday! The sun is out and I’m eager to settle in with albums from Sundowner, Henrik Meierkord, DJ Koze, Perila, Barker, Joachim Spieth & Andrew Thomas, & Penelope Trappes …
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Brian @sholis.com · 03/04/2025
My pal @iamasq.bsky.social pointed me to an amazing Okinawan hardcore band yesterday and I’m making sure its music is coming out of my speakers as the markets open: naha.bandcamp.com/album/voidin...
naha.bandcamp.com
voiding into the scream, by naha
5 track album
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Brian @sholis.com · 03/04/2025
John McPhee is “donating all current and future royalties from all versions and editions of his book” The Pine Barrens to the nonprofit Pinelands Preservation Alliance: www.inquirer.com/news/new-jer...
inquirer.com
He helped save the Pine Barrens in 1968. Now his help will never end.
John McPhee’s nonfiction book about New Jersey’s most unique landscape first appeared in The New Yorker.
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Ido Radon @idoradon.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Valise is great! Recommend!
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Brian @sholis.com · 02/04/2025
I don’t say this often enough: my friend Ross and I are building Valise, the best inventory software for artists. We want it to be easy to keep track of your work; the admin side of running a studio shouldn’t be difficult, and information is power. Please share with artists you know! valise.works
Screenshot of Valise depicting a grid of Ellsworth Kelly artworks set in a clean digital interfaceScreenshot of a "collection" in Valise, showing a grid of works under the heading "Works on Paper for the NYT" (yes, it includes one work that is not a work on paper)Screenshot of an artwork record in Valise. Everything is very small, but if you squint you can see how we record an artwork's details, price, images, editions, collections, consignment history, presentation history, expenses, and miscellaneous other documents.
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Brian @sholis.com · 02/04/2025
“The same simple question—what is the best way to encounter a work of art?—lies at the heart of each of Rose’s interviews.” Ian Volner on Julian Rose’s book of architect conversations: www.artforum.com/columns/juli...
artforum.com
Museum Studies
Ian Volner reviews Julian Rose’s book Building Culture, featuring interviews on museum architecture with Frank Gehry, Elizabeth Diller, and more.
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Brian @sholis.com · 28/03/2025
Nell Zink, being inimitable, as ever: “The NYT would be an odd choice of venue to air my conscious shortcomings, especially in writing. 📰 editors treasure the indiscretions their journalists coax out of me on the phone …, but you can’t expect me to do it to myself.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/b...
nytimes.com
Nell Zink Couldn’t Have Written a Book Had She Stayed in the U.S.
Working to cover rent and insurance, “I turned out a two-page story every three months,” she says. “At that rate a novel would take 25 years.” She lives in Germany, the setting of her sixth, “Sister E...
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Brian @sholis.com · 28/03/2025
Twelve years ago, while working at Aperture, I went to Vija Celmins’s studio to see about doing an article (or a book, or a show) about her relationship to photography. Nothing came of it, as happens, but finally there’s an article in the Spring 2025 issue—an interview with Richard Learoyd.
A photograph of piles of black-and-white newspaper and magazine clippings and photographs, often frayed or marked on, including some in an shallow, open cardboard box.
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Brian @sholis.com · 28/03/2025
The just-released title track of this forthcoming Anthony Naples album bodes so well for the rest of it. Listening on repeat: anthonynaples.bandcamp.com/album/scanners
anthonynaples.bandcamp.com
Scanners, by Anthony Naples
10 track album
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