Gordon Hall’s version of this oddly gendered furniture item is riddled with tiny nails, a laboriously achieved decorative feature that resembles reptilian skin, silvery and shifting in the sunlight. Here it stands, drained of use but suggestive of function, stiff but body-like, in the gallery. These tensions in the clothes valet point to a sense of animacy that threads through the enigmatic works in Hall’s exhibition, which shares the clothes valet’s name: END OF DAY. While most of the works hover on the edge of domestic function—a table, a chair, a bench, folded linens—they veer in unexpected directions. The leg ...

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment is a unique and wide-ranging anthology featuring essays, drawings, and assignments from over one hundred contributors including John Baldessari, William Pope.L, Mira Schor, Rochelle Feinstein, Bob Nickas, Chris Kraus, Liam Gillick, Amy Sillman, James Benning, and Michelle Grabner. Bringing together assignments, anti-assignments, and artworks from both teachers and students from a broad range of institutions, we hope it simultaneously serves as an archive and an instigation, a teaching tool and a question mark, a critique and a tribute.

Shifter’s 20th issue, What We Can Knot draws from George Bernard Shaw’s quip “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” In this issue we would like to parse out and challenge what we see to be Shaw’s false binary, and to explore the value of negotiation and collaboration as important elements both in the studio and in the classroom. To this end we have invited several individuals who are both artist and educator, to consider the active relation between art practice and teaching in their life. We have invited them to do this through a conversation or correspondence with ...