When I first met Forrest Nash he was wearing khakis. It was June 2009 in Venice, four months before Hyperallergic declared Khaki pant wearers amongst the most powerless—at least in the Lower East Side. I liked Nash immediately. He was smart, had a great eye, and was almost completely lacking in pretension. His knowledge of art was encyclopedic and at that point he’d only been running his blog Contemporary Art Daily for a year.
Contemporary Art Daily (CAD) is a curated website featuring extensive documentation of selected art exhibitions from around the world. There’s no one style the site gravitates towards, but the photographs on the site typically show art deliberately hung and arranged in interiors like gallery and museum spaces and include a range of installation and individual shots of the work.
Now updated 10 times a week and religiously followed by art professionals across the globe, the blog began with Nash in 2008, while he was still a student at The Contemporary Art Institute in Chicago. It has since grown. In addition to CAD site now includes Contemporary Art Venues, (a venue listing service) and Contemporary Art Quarterly (comprehensive documentation of an artist’s career). To make all this happen CAD now employs four full-timers including Nash. In 2012 the blog became a non-profit.
In short, a lot has happened over the past seven years, and a lot of his happened relatively recently.. Contemporary Art Quarterly was launched earlier this year and Nash moved from Chicago to California this summer. I wanted to get the full history on the site, so we sat down to talk.
