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To hear the phrase “the first woman to” do or become something is unfortunately quite common nowadays, and while the road to equality is still long, we salute those who help pave it.

We are also nevertheless very happy for Laurence des Cars, the first woman to lead The Louvre in Paris in its 228-year-long history. She was appointed on May 26, 2021 by the French President Emmanuel Macron, and will assume her position at the realm of world’s most visited museum on September 1.

While the name of Laurence des Cars only just became familiar to many, this experienced art historian has been around for a while. Born in 1966 to journalist and writer Jean des Cars, she studied art history at the Sorbonne and École du Louvre. Her first position as curator was at the Musée d’Orsay, of which she has also been President since 2014, along with the much smaller Musée de l’Orangerie since 2017. From 2007 to 2014, she was in charge of Agence France-Muséums, the French government body behind the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Des Cars is a specialist in 19th- and early-20th-century painting. As a teacher at École du Louvre, she organized many exhibitions for various museums, including the traveling show on Edward Burne-Jones (1998-99), Gustave Courbet (2007-08), and Jean-Léon Gérôme (2010-11).

During her time as head of Musée d’Orsay, Laurence des Cars oversaw the acclaimed 2019 exhibition “Black models: from Géricault to Matisse,” which looked at the representation of Black figures in visual arts, from the abolition of slavery in France (1794) to the modern day. The museum is also the first French venue of its kind to voluntarily return a Nazi-looted painting to its rightful owners.

“My heart beat much faster,” des Cars said to France Inter, after learning about her new role from the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, on May 23. She will be replacing the museum’s leader of the past eight years, Jean-Luc Martinez, who will now serve as a special ambassador for international co-operation on cultural heritage. According to a statement from the French culture ministry, Des Cars pledged to extend The Louvre’s opening hours in order to attract younger visitors, and to foster “a dialogue between ancient art and the contemporary world,” which will be particularly interesting to see, given that The Louvre has been a “classical” art museum under Martinez’s leadership.

In an interview with The New York Times, des Cars expressed her excitement to be the first female president-director of The Louvre. “Things are really changing for women in the museum world. Of the 70 curators in the Louvre, more than half of them are women. More women are heading museums, especially in Europe. And younger women are much more confident these days,” she said.

Although he grew the museum’s attendance to over 10 million a year, the previous Director Jean-Luc Martinez was criticized for a few decisions, including the Louvre’s partnership with the Uniqlo brand for a merchandize line, or the one with Airbnb, which allowed a couple to spend a night in the museum.

The Louvre Museum is a state-owned venue with the annual budget of about $291 million and more than 2,000 employees. Despite the fact that the attendance plunged by 72 percent to 2.7 million in 2020 during the pandemic, it is still the most visited – and the largest – art museum in the world.

As reported by The Guardian and the French Culture Ministry, about 67 percent of the country’s national museums are headed by women. Laurence des Cars will be joining the company of Catherine Chevillot, Director of the Musée Rodin, Tatyana Franck at the Élysée museum, and Sophie Makariou, President of the Musée Guimet.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/laurence-des-cars-named-louvre-director
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/arts/design/louvre-laurence-des-cars.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/louvre-appoints-laurence-des-cars-as-first-female-president

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You are an artist and you also perform in shows. Which side of the job do you like and enjoy the most?

I like when everything blurs together and it’s a lifestyle versus a job or a show. It is not just painting, not just performing. I like being ongoing. I paint on my face, then I smash the paint into a canvas, then I stack that onto my chest, then I slam it into a wall, while making a song. Then the song inspires me while I’m drawing. I let it all out, non stop. Sleep less/do more. When we dip back into this “human” life of roles and routine we become less in the moment.

You bridged the gap between the Art and Club world in the 90’s; can you tell us more?

I was a naive kid working clubs in ’93 for food money. I drew at all my events, jobs, even when I WAS A D.J. or did the door or ran events. From booking Wutang to Fat Joe, I was still  drawing all the people that came out. I filled sketchbooks and everyone was like YOOOOO! “Why don’t you just show your work?”  and I was like “ whhhhhhat???”

As a kid I had no clue. I grew up struggling and with no art education so the Club world x “my” people put me on, and then I started organizing art shows at the clubs. Once I saw that I could organize I put other people on. I did things every week back then. I was curating in a way, from dance shows, raves, punk, palladium, horrible bars etc but I left all that and moved on into showing and full time artist life around 18, 19 years old.

Your signature line work has made an impact on NYC. Can you tell us some of the details of what that line is and how it impacted NYC?

I don’t think it’s up to the artist to determine if the work impacts anyone. New York City is constantly changing, the lines are fluid and always moving, overlapping, changing, like this crazy place. Everyone has a line of work, I’m just channeling the rhythms  worked on as a kid and what I develop daily now, to hopefully make new language.

The lines developed from growing up here as a coping mechanism, drawing life, faces, places and movement. Everyone’s experience in New York is different. Growing up I was an extreme outsider to art. The line work I developed was without exposure to the art, even though I was born here. This kind of lifestyle is often overlooked in “art” storytelling when we think of NY. I hope we can start to think of other artists from rough areas that made it, but the common story is born into, or came for it???

I was born sick, as a kid I suffered from extreme illnesses and just became known as the kid that stayed inside and drew weird lines. Outsiders come from all over the world to New York to make art. I was an outsider in my own town, I just drew all the time and it took all the other New Yorkers to tell me to look at these drawings, to look at Warhol, that I was an artist and to go see a Chuck Close show. I was a strange street kid- I was always  getting into trouble living by the side of the road. My NYC story is odd, but many can relate; they just don’t all get the chance to speak and I hope that changes in this extreme twisted culture.

How would you define your work, technique, and what your message is behind it?

I work around the clock every day. I’ve always been this way since I was a kid. My focus has been being free, making, making, making- from doing collage, sculptures, drawings, paintings, masks, music, immersing myself. I like to throw paint on my clothes, cakes on my head and do jackass performances. I need to escape the system and all this man made bullshit construct by creating all the time and fully being lost in the moment. I don’t want to conform and be a part of anything.

You say that your paintings are inside paintings, can you explain to us what you mean by that?

I try to create paintings that are not one dimensional. Even if it’s as simple as strange Miss Piggy if you look closer you can see a skull, a flower and an exploding eye, then maybe yourself. I have to compete with life. People are busy. If I’m making work and want people to see, I have to think of my competition, this huge thing called life which has so many pictures.

There are layers into layers, pushed, smushed and splattering all around fields of color that shift, faces inside of worlds and if you move in close you can discover hidden levels. I’m doing my math, drawing from different angles, different foregrounds, and multiple perspectives. It’s not a straightforward story, it’s more like a painted Matthew Silver bit.

What is art for you?

Art to me isn’t described by the word art. It isn’t something in a box, destroyed by intention, it just is. All the rest is just human bullshit, needs and wants. The thing that works is when it transcends into the next dimension.

You opened the Alien X the living installation. What inspired this installation and can you share with us more about it? What is it about?

We just did an installation on our Lower East Side rooftop with the city skyline, and have another one coming up. We recorded the whole thing live and it’s available to watch. www.michaelalanart.com/thelivinginstallation

During our performances we are creating human paintings, that change and melt and transform on our bodies and in space. In short we slap ourselves up with anything you can think of. We create robots, slam materials on our head, scream and transform and meld our skin, wreaking and creating objects, blindfolded and covered in paint. We speak about the human condition and the artist as a clown and the underlying emptiness of capitalism. My 84 year old mother performs! Jadda cat is my partner. I am just a clown.

People think of New York and they think of Graffiti and Hip Hop and an underground performance scene. We are continuing that old school punk ethos. New York has been shut down and there’s not been too much going on and we are trying to contribute to its rebirth. We designed the show to be accessible in the open air or by live feed so that people have a way to experience art safely again. We also at random daily walk around as living art.

Since artists seem to always be creating or thinking of their next creation, please share with us any of your future projects and dreams.

I have so much work around me piled up and in progress, and series upon series and so many various styles that I can barely keep up. I just keep working and I let it guide me to where I’m going. I want to keep finding the new without an agenda.

 My next show is this upcoming Saturday, May 22nd.

www.instagram.com/michaelalanalien

www.instagram.com/thelivinginstallation

www.facebook.com/MichaelAlan1.0

www.michaelalanart.com

https://michaelalanalien.bandcamp.com/album/michael-alan-alien

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With the difficulties posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, virtually every in-person event on Earth was cancelled, art fairs among them. Directors had to get creative, inspired to find a way to keep art, hope, and inspiration alive by bringing the show to the public somehow.

A little background: Cube Art Fair is actually a Brussels-based enterprise, happening in the Belgian capital every year for four years now. It mainly focuses on American artists through a high standard of curation, presentation, and organization of a major gallery fair. Through Cube Art Fair, European collectors have a unique change to get familiar with the contemporary art scene in the United States, be it emerging or established.

So how does a Brussels fair end up in New York? The reason would be Gregoire Vogelsang, the man behind Cube, who moved to the Big Apple after managing an art gallery in Belgium for two years.

Now onto the NYC event! To visit Cube Art Fair 2021, you better get your legs ready: the artwork can be viewed on over 100 of the city’s many billboards and kiosks, from the heart of Times Square to the Lower East Side, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper East Side and beyond. The whole of Manhattan is Cube Art Fair’s exhibition space! The billboard initiative seems to be part of Cube’s #staycreative campaign, which had already taken place in Brussels and Miami.

What not to miss? The Cube Art Fair definitely recommends seeing “Soft Stories,” one of the artworks appearing on a 12,000-square-feet billboard in Times Square. Created by Canadian photographer Laura Jane Petelko, the open series takes the symbolic inhabitation of animals as the point of departure and goes on to tackle the topics of intimacy, isolation, our relationship with nature.

On the other hand, the sculptural work of the American artist Sam Tufnell tries to reorient our understanding of beauty. His pieces present in the Cube Art Fair exhibition call out the macabre: there is a sculpture of a skull made of noodle soup, for instance.

Among other participating artists are Denmark’s portrait photographer Kenneth Willardt, the French-Mexican photographer Patricia de Solages, and Belgian wildlife photographer Griet Van Malderen.

Make sure you scan the QR code of each artwork, to find our more about it, or even to purchase it, in physical or NFT format.

Cube Art Fair is on view in New York City through May 9, 2021.

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