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 just started reading Emerson, and I'm glad that I've gotten to it because he talks about history and says that folded into every person, if you think of this as a fractal situation, I was just reading about this and it blew my mind. There is the understanding and the containment of all of history, of all dreams, of all desires of all the furthest reaches of our minds and our accomplishments are folded into every person. And how astonishing is that? I mean, I'm so mad at people all the time about what a mess everything is. On the other hand, we are just astonishing. And we have so much potential. But we're also so misdirected by advertising, by product placement, by false desires - say, to get everybody addicted to corn syrup and then have them develop diabetes is really evil, in my opinion. So I'm just always swinging wildly between an appreciation at the amazement of the human spirit and humanity and its accomplishments and then frustration at the bad uses to which that's put."

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.