DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

William Powhida infiltrated the art industry with his unapologetic attitude, insightful drawings, lists of enemies, letters to collectors and curators, and other written and visual material that prey upon the “catastrofuck” of the art world. Merging his background in art criticism with his visual art practice, Powhida graphically dissects the complex capitalistic structure of New York art using graphite, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, and incisive text. The artist has garnered much attention for his controversial cultural products.

How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, seen above, depicts floating heads of several members and affiliates of the New Museum, suspended in the composition and surrounded by sharp and satirical handwritten text questioning the institution’s alliances and decisions. The drawing, which the artist describes as “a modest drawing about the New Museum’s terrible decision to show a trustee’s private collection,” appeared on one third of the covers for Brooklyn Rail’s November 2009 issue, fueling an ongoing debate about institutional ethics. Powhida was a regular contributor for the Brooklyn Rail for three years before he “decided he could no longer keep helping other artists develop careers,” and began concentrating on his own artistic inspirations.

The artist completed his M.F.A. in painting at New York’s Hunter College in 2002 and is represented by Schroeder Romero in New York and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Powhida co-organized the group show Magicality, currently on view at Platform Gallery in Seattle until August 5th, with Eric Trosko. Magicality investigates the parallels between the disciplines of art and magic and includes Powhida’s series of thirteen prints, which double as talismans and hexes, entitled Ars Magica Portfolio.

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery’s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Off Book is the title of a current exhibition by acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition, which is on view through January 23rd at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, continues the artist’s investigation of cultural identity, social and historical constructs, language, race, and gender. Similar to previous exhibitions by the artist, Off Book explores these ideas through text-based work, installation, and video. This new series of works investigate many themes discussed in James Baldwin’s essay entitled Figure, originally published in 1953. For this series, the artist has silk screened versions of existing text-based paintings onto colored backgrounds, and then dusted the surface with coal particles. The result is a semi-abstracted surface where the test is obscured through the application of the screen print.  Also on view is a 16 mm black and white film titled, The Death of Tom, and a neon piece, which features the word AMERICA backwards, titled Rügenfigur.

Ligon’s work has been the focus of several major international exhibitions. The artist’s work was selected by the Obama’s to be on loan at the White House. This inclusion made Ligon the youngest artist ever to receive this honor. Recent solo exhibitions for the artist include, ‘Nobody’ and Other Songs at Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Figure/Paysage/Marine at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Love and Theft at Power House in Memphis. The artist is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Rhode Island School of Art and Design. Ligon lives and works in New York City.

When I was an undergraduate painting major, my drawing instructor, a cool-headed minimalist who approached teaching with as much restraint as he did art-making, warned me not to preach to the choir. I had made a series of over-stimulating, muddy drawings in which decadent magazine imagery swam in bleeding pools of ink. The drawings criticized consumer culture (loudly), but they didn’t do much else. “Everyone who sees these will already agree with you,” my instructor said. If I was going to make art that would hang on walls and be viewed by largely liberal audiences, what would I gain by reiterating progressive ideas? A pat on the back?

Over the past year, I’ve seen a spattering of activist art that made me bristle—all-but-haloed images of our new president, liberated grocery carts that have been turned into mobile compost bins, or wall texts that proclaim vague imperatives like “Now” or “Act.” Seeing work like this in a gallery feels like encountering a self-contained anti-war protest in the quad of a left-leaning campus. It makes you wonder, for a moment, if you do live in a vacuum.

Art and politics belong together, but not in the way the way global warming belongs to Al Gore, or the FDA belongs to Phillip Morris—there shouldn’t be any self-congratulation, lobbying, or under-the-table favors. When I think of the potential of political art, I often think of David Wojnarowicz’s videos from the early ‘90s—portraits of disintegration, they attacked Aids-era government with a vengeance so guttural and naked that they turned politics into gut-spilling and made viewers who voted red squirm just as badly as viewers who voted blue.

Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the Aids Crisis, 1987-1993, currently on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Art Center, may not rival the intensity of Wojnarowicz’s ITSOFOMO or Fire in My Belly. But it takes on the relation between art and activism in a way that is gripping, urgent and also pragmatic. Curated by Helen Molesworth, Harvard’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, and Claire Grace, curatorial intern and doctoral candidate, the exhibition chronicles six peak years of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act UP), a group that took to the streets to advocate for gay rights and health care in the late 1980s, as the Aids death toll rose steeply. The work archived Act Up doesn’t pose as art, per se. It does, however, seem at home in an art space.

On the first floor of the Carpenter Center, video monitors play interviews from The Act UP Oral History Project, an effort, spearheaded by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, to record the stories of living Act Up alumni (Schulman knew she had to begin the project after she heard a commentator on the radio say “At first, America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then they came around”—“I could not continue my life without making sure that no one would ever say something like that again,” Schulman told the National Institute of Health). There are more than enough monitors to overwhelm; no one can possibly watch the hours of footage that loop through that room. Yet the talking faces on each screen compel attention, many of them speak carefully, considering their history with the hesitation of people old enough to feel the weight of time but young enough to see their personal futures as more promising than their pasts. Says on interviewee, “Becoming an Aids activist was like a religious conversion, in many ways, in terms of the passion and self-discovery and creating a new identity.”

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Lawrence Weiner is mounting a new body of work, “As Far As The Eye Can See”, at the Whitney Museum from November 2007 through February 2008. The artist uses words to serve as the raw material for his art. Words are spoken, sung, painted, printed, stamped on coins and manhole covers, put to film, just about anywhere. The text is intended to help people understand their relationship to the objects in their world. Weiner is one of the key figures associated with the emergence and foundations of Conceptual Art and has defined art as “the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings”. Recent solo exhibitions of Weiner’s work have been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Weiner has produced various films and videos, including “Beached, Do You Believe in Water?”, and “Plowman’s Lunch”. Weiner lives in New York and Amsterdam.

Blowing up on the rock-poster scene, Leia Bell is bringing a new show of posters and original paintings titled “The Business of Ferrets” to the Richard Goodall Gallery in London Sept. 29 – Oct. 25. After only seven years Bell has created 250 limited edition hand-printed silk-screened music posters for bands such as Echo and The Bunnymen, The Darkness, My Chemical Romance, and The Decemberists. Bell uses a camera to document people she knows at parties and shows. She later uses the photos as references simplifying the scene to something universal that anyone can relate to. The artist was recently featured in Print magazine’s “20 Best Under 30″ annual issue and Art of Modern Rock. Bell received her BFA in Print Making from University of Utah.

Sean Landers’ work is known for its risky experimentation that allows the artist to expose his process of creation. Although the work avoids consistency in a particular medium or style, Landers’ work acts as a self-portrait that relies on influences of contemporary culture that’s often revealed through text. His most recent exhibition with the Andrea Rosen Gallery consists of only text-based paintings that build up texture across the picture plane, creating a delicate, beautiful surface with biting personal content. Often, the images have an easy-to-follow dialogue, but many of them also become abstracted in image and concept. Landers received his degree from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and his MFA from Yale University in 1986. In the past few years, he has had shows with Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, greengrassi in London and Sister in Los Angeles. In addition, Landers has been involved in the fourth Berlin Biennial and other group shows with P.S.1 in New York and the Serpentine Gallery in London.