1stfans Twitter Art Feed Artist for June 2010: Mike Monteiro

June’s 1stfans artist is Mike Monteiro, an artist whose work we discovered through our friends at 20×200.com. We were initially attracted to Mike’s work because of his strong use of text: his striking black and white paintings illustrate maxims which are sometimes sarcastic, sometimes poignant, and often just really funny. For me, these bold captions express awkward or uncomfortable truths that I’d find difficult to confess myself (at least, out loud anyway), and seem to expose private thoughts to the public sphere.

The upfront nature of this work, however, provides an interesting contrast to the fact that Mike also likes to tells stories. When we approached him about participating in the Twitter Art Feed, Mike explained that he’s always been amused by how much credibility Twitter has a source of information and being the satirist that he is, he wanted to play on that idea. I don’t want to reveal too much about what Mike is going to do—Shelley and I think it will be a lot more fun to let 1stfans figure out his project through the progression of his tweets—but I can say that it’s going to be focused on Museum and it will definitely keep you guessing. I’ve been amazed by the variety of ways in which Twitter has been used as a medium so far, and it will be interesting to see how Mike experiments with this medium while giving 1stfans a completely new way to engage with his work.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.