In this fractured world, how do the arts build community, understanding, and inspire change? How does art help us define who we are and our place in the world?

April Gornik is known for her large scale landscape paintings which embrace the vastness of sea and sky. Her imagined landscapes, built up through a series of underpaintings are meditations on light and time. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
She is a director of the board of the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center and co-founded The Church arts, exhibition space, and creativity center, which is a sanctuary for visual, performing, literary artists, and other creatives. Together with her husband the artist Eric Fischl, they are at the center of Sag Harbour’s arts district, and in this episode, we’ll also hear from some of the talented artists they’ve brought to their stages.

"I was so mad at the Catholic Church and my upbringing and the way that my parents, my mother particularly, was so manipulated to think that if she did one thing for herself that she was somehow hurting Jesus and the local priests. I mean, it's such a brainwashing kind of situation. On the other hand, if you're raised Catholic, you're raised to believe in miracles. And the idea of transubstantiation. There's so many things about Catholicism, there's so much imagery that's magic, magical thinking, that lets your mind run free to a certain extent. You know, it does give you the willful ability to dream and imagine and just take off on crazy tangents. I mean religious people tend to be seekers and seekers tend to be the people that keep us whole and spiritually grounded and not just religious per se."

www.aprilgornik.com
www.thechurchsagharbor.org
www.milesmcenery.com/exhibitions/april-gornik2
https://sagharborcinema.org/

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Kimiko Ishizaka - Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - 01 Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain

Additional audio courtesy of Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center.