In an article for the Detroit Metro Times, writer Devin Culham chronicled the adverse reaction many had to Green Book director Peter Farrelly’s plug of the luxury goods brand Shinola in his thank you speech for Best Original Screenplay at the 2019 Oscar Award Ceremony. Farrelly’s thank-you speech for Best Original Screenplay concluded with “and Shinola watches – unbelievable, they’re saving Detroit!” In Cullham’s critique, he cited Rebekah Modrak’s criticism of the company in her work ReThink Shinola:

“In 2017, University of Michigan professor Rebekah Modrak analyzed how the company used Detroit and racial tropes like the “white savior” in its marketing for her project Rethink Shinola.”

Oscar-winning ‘Green Book’ director thanks Shinola for ‘saving Detroit’ | Metro Times

On Friday, February 15,  2019, Rebekah Modrak presented a paper entitled “Disarming Misogyny as a Dude” as part of the “Power, Resistance, and Gender Issues in the Arts of Women” session at the College Art Association’s 107th annual conference in New York City.

She spoke about Re Made’s brand messaging, designed (in the image of Best Made Co.) to be “masculine,” and her discovery that most viewers who encounter the work as an artwork (not a plunger company) assume that the artist behind the parody is also a man. During the presentation, she described audiences’ gendered expectations of both handcrafted plungers and art.”

Stamps Professor Rebekah Modrak’s article “Entrepreneurship 407: White Supremacy, Benevolent Institutions, and Shinola” was published in the December 2018 edition of the New Art Examiner.

The article proposes that, even as Civil War-era Confederate monuments are de-installed around the country, the values of white supremacy find new forums in unexpected places, namely in academic institutions, through the lapses of entrepreneurial engagement.

This article was originally published by the National Center for Institutional Diversity.

Rebekah Modrak’s chapter “Best Made Re Made: Critical Interventions in the Online Marketplace” has just been published in the book The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, a collection of new essays edited by Myra Thiessen and Chris Brisbin, faculty at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia.

The book aims to investigate Critique, Criticality, and Criticism from an inter- or multi-disciplinary perspective. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries – the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark – this edited volume provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances.

Modrak’s invited and peer-reviewed contribution is within the book’s Part 4, a section reflecting on the various new ways that media influences and provides a platform for criticism and criticality and exploring the role of new media in influencing the relationship between opinion, lay critique, and traditional forms of professional expert criticism.

Her chapter examines consumptive practices and un-critical consumerism by analyzing the dual Best Made/Re Made marketing campaigns and proposing that critical artistic interventions can enact critique through strategies of parafiction and parody. The Re Made Co. artwork responds to Best Made as brand and also to the news and cultural media that can appear critical while simultaneously promulgating brand messaging, including art and design institutions that commodify, rather than critique, luxury design items like those sold by Best Made.

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design has been reviewed by James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, who writes: “This is an exceptionally carefully assembled book. Criticism inhabits this book in Protean fashion: as a profession, an historical artifact, a philosophic position, a hope, a form of experimental writing, a family of theories, a material practice, and above all as conversation and a sense of community.”

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design | Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

Rebekah Modrak presented at the Anywhere & Elsewhere Biennial Conference, a two-day conference on November 15th and 16th at Parsons School of Design, supported as part of a partnership between Parsons Fine Arts (Parsons School of Design, The New School) and the Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne).

Modrak co-presented with her collaborator, curator Marialaura Ghidini, as part of the WHERE⇄ABOUT panel moderated by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum. Their presentation described their online curatorial project #exstrange, which generated a collection of artworks to be encountered, auction-style, by the users of one the largest marketplaces on the web, eBay. During this live exhibition project, parasitic to the commercial platform, over a hundred artists and 12 curators infiltrated eBay throughout 88 sequential days in early 2017 — spanning the inauguration of the 45th United States president, the Women’s March, and North Korean’s tests of a ballistic missile.

The Anywhere & Elsewhere Biennial Conference featured presentations from artists that successfully navigated blind peer evaluation as part of Project Anywhere’s Global Exhibition Program (2017-2018), together with invited presentations from established artists, designers, scholars, curators and writers actively engaged with practices outside traditional circuits. The conference recognized the practices of an increasing number of artists and creative practitioners working across spaces, places and temporalities well-beyond the limits of established exhibition formats. This two-day conference explored questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time.

Rebekah Modrak’s short animated film The Implicit Jacques Panis was screened at the 7^th Art Festival of Miami in Miami, Florida on October 21, 2018. The 7^th Art Festival of Miami is a forum for “counterculture cultivators,” selecting films from independent artists and filmmakers from around the world.

The Implicit Jacques Panis is a re-creation of a pre-existing promotional video presenting a typical day-in-the-life of Shinola’s then-President Jacques Panis. A choreographed succession of hats on Panis’s head throughout the narrative exposes unspoken, oft-historical, expressions of power, allowing Panis to openly act out the roles implicitly suggested by the original video.

The film festival was held at The Center For Social Change on Sunday, October 21, 2018 from 1pm – 6:30pm. Modrak’s experimental short was screened during the first segment at 2:05PM.

Address: 2103 Coral Way 2nd Floor 2nd Floor, Miami, FL

Rebekah Modrak offered her perspective on “The First Egg Out of the Chicken’s Anus” at the University of Michigan’s Sustainable Food Systems Initiative’s 5th annual Fast Food For Thought series. In this event, held on October 9, 2018, 10 interdisciplinary faculty members from across campus gave a series of fast-paced talks related to food and/or agriculture.

Modrak spoke about the elevation of the ordinary within status-based consumption, as exemplified by the first egg out of a chicken’s vent.

5th Annual “Fast Food for Thought” | Sustainable Food Systems Initiative

Rebekah Modrak’s art practice is featured by journalist Valerie Vande Panne in a recent article published on the progressive news magazine Alternet. In Meet the Artist Using Media to Defang Capitalism, Vande Panne introduces the artworks Re Made Co. and Rethink Shinola, writing: “Humor and truth help expose profound colonialism, racism, and straight-up ridiculousness used to sell luxury products.”

“You may have heard of Shinola, the racist shoe-polish company of the early 20th century whose brand was reinvented by hypercapitalists from Texas into the feel-good story of Detroit, marketing $1,100 watches and bicycles for more than what many Detroiters would pay for a car.”

Shinola’s marketing might make rich white folk feel like they’re “saving” Detroit by purchasing one of those incredibly overpriced, made in China/assembled in the USA by poor black people, pieces. But what the company is really doing is reinforcing a racist, plantation mentality, and selling it to the world like they are martyrs saving Detroit with each and every watch that bears its name.

But, if you’re not media and history savvy, you probably don’t know that. Enter Rebekah Modrak, an artist and professor at University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design.”

Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies has invited Stamps Associate Professor Rebekah Modrak as an honored guest and featured voice at their Fair Use Week Symposium on March 1, 2018. The one-day program, “Tried and True: Fair Use Tales for the Telling,” celebrates Harvard’s Fifth Anniversary Fair Use Week, with leading fair use scholars and practitioners sharing their stories and engaging in discussion about this powerful provision in copyright law.

During the symposium, Modrak is scheduled to speak on the panel “Fair Use Makers and Policy Shapers,” where she will talk about legal contests to her interventionist work Re Made Co. (http://remadeco.org), an artwork posing as a “company” to critique brand appropriation of working class identities, and her use of sourcing in her latest work, Rethink Shinola (http://rethinkshinola.com).

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-anniversary-fair-use-week-tried-and-true-fair-use-tales-for-the-telling-registration-41053754886