This week, we speak with Barbara Pollack live from NYC as she discusses her recent, co-curated online initiative "How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?" to promote and reflect numerous artists' works during this time of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Barbara Pollack is the co-founder and co-director of Art at a Time Like This Inc., a platform for free expression for artists at times of crises. Launched on March 17th, ATLT has over 110,000 views in over 100 countries with worldwide press coverage. Pollack is a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art. Her latest book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, was published in 2018. Her first book was The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China, published in May 2010 Since 1994, Pollack has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art for such publications as Artnews, Art & Auction, the Village Voice, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and many others. In addition to articles, Pollack has contributed major catalogue essays for such leading artists as Li Songsong, Lin Tianmiao, Wang Gongxin, Zhao Zhao, Sun Xun, and Tu Hongtao. Several of her essays were included in the China Art Book, published by Dumont Literatur in 2007.
Pollack was the lead curator of many shows of Chinese contemporary art including the groundbreaking My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, the first exhibition of the 1980s generation of Chinese artists in the U.S. which was shown at the Tampa Museum of Art and Museum Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in 2014 and traveled to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art in 2015. She has also curated in China most notably Tu Hongtao: A Timely Journey, at the Long Museum West Bund in November 2018and Sun Xun: Prediction Laboratory at Yuz Museum, also in Shanghai in 2016. In 2022, she will present Mirror Image: Changing Chinese Identity at the Asia Society Museum in New York.
Based on her research in this field, she received two grants from Asian Cultural Council in 2008 and 2016 and the prestigious Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation arts writers grant in 2008. Additionally, Pollack is an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and frequently lectures on contemporary art at universities and museums throughout the United States and Asia.