What a ride! ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL's first season is coming to an end. It's been wild, adventurous, lovely and above all, very cozy. Join Svea and Jozefien in this season finale as they reminisce and relive all the crushes they've had so far. Which artist served the best snacks? What backstory surprised them the most? What was the most emotionally challenging interview and which one was the most physically demanding?

ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL will be back on August 31st with many more crushes - Ana Teresa Fernández (https://anateresafernandez.com/) is our first crush of season 2! - and CRUSHED VELVETS, in which we debunk misconceptions about artists and give Svea a chance to process her feelings.

Have a healthy, safe and lovable summer!

Onward! To East Oakland where artist-physician-writer Lorraine Bonner sculpts clay in the house that was once her mother’s home. Lorraine shows us the space, now converted completely to a studio-gallery, and talks about growing up in Queens, moving to rural California in 1970, moving to Tanzania with her husband so they could have their baby in an African socialist country, and studying Medicine at Stanford with two small children at home. Bonner’s work addresses personal, societal, and environmental traumas including racism, abuse, and torture through figurines and abstract shapes. How does she navigate such heavy topics without buckling under their weight? Why doesn’t she want to be a doctor anymore? What does it mean to “redeem” the colour black?

Lorraine Bonner's website: https://www.lorrainebonner.com/

Learn more about the East Bay Open Studios: https://eastbayopenstudios.com/

Our Beautiful Online Thing of the week: the Rhoda Kellog Child Art Collection: http://www.early-pictures.ch/kellogg/en/

Follow ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artcrush_international/

Jozefien and Svea are fed up with misconceptions about artists and in this series, called CRUSHED VELVET because it sounds good even if it makes no sense, they're setting the record straight. There's more to life than making art. There is, for example, trauma, sexism, capitalism, haikus, and other funny things.

Watch the documentary "The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography" on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80145699?tctx=0%2C1%2C%2C%2C%2C

Herman Van Rompuy is the former Belgian Prime Minister who writes haikus. This is the one he wrote in 2018 for the Engelenburcht in Tildonk, Belgium: "Als wapens zwijgen, hoor je in de stille tuin, de wind en de vogels".

Extremely Crushable Keats: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

We climb and descend the hills of Potrero Hill in San Francisco - in high heels of course! - as we search for Sofia Shu's secluded studio. We're mesmerised by Sofia's meditative, spiritual, detailed abstract paintings and wall hangings. Sofia serves us a delicious vegan latte and talks about growing up walking through snow tunnels in Siberia, learning English by tending bar in NYC, ending up in the Bay Area, and meeting her sweetheart prince. We love her love story and you will, too.

Sofia Shu Studio online: https://www.sofiashu.com/

Beautiful Online Thing: the Norwegian Sexguiden: https://www.nrk.no/spesial/sexguide 

ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artcrush_international/

Hop into our car to East Oakland where we’ll meet textile artist Richard Jonathan Nelson at his friend and fellow artist Jamee Crusan’s place. Richard talks about being a black, queer man in the US, how his mother and aunts encouraged him to make textile art as a child and how language plays an important role in his life. What’s a hand baby and who brought the Kudzu? Richard tells us all.

Richard’s website: http://www.richard-jonathan-nelson.com/

Check out Jamee Crusan, artist and good friend of Richard Jonathan Nelson. Her work Black and Blue/Lack and Lure is our Beautiful Online Thing of the week: https://jameecrusan.com/new-index#/black-and-bluelack-and-lure/

Learn more about

Get ready for our next crush, Ana Teresa Fernández: https://anateresafernandez.com/

Follow ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artcrush_international/

Join us on a trip to the harbour of Ghent, Belgium, where we meet Linde Carrijn and Maxim Storms, the avant-garde performance-duo known as BRIK TU-TOK. At their light-filled studio in an old red-brick factory we marvel at BRIK TU-TOK's handmade fashionable costumes, colorful accessories and extraordinary DIY music instruments. What's the Giggle Gallery, and can we come? Welcome to our crushes' bizarre, but fascinating universe!

BRIK TU-TOK on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/briktutok/

Look up atelier Pantserschip, the collective of makers that's now housed in the old red-brick factory of I. Mahy & ses fils: https://www.instagram.com/atelierpantserschip/

Beautiful Online Thing: NauticalWaters on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/NauticalWaters

Our next crush! Shirley Watts of Natural Discourse: https://naturaldiscourse.org/

ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artcrush_international/

We rush to visit Edith Hillinger at her garden studio inside the West Berkeley house she built in the 1990s. Hillinger is 88 years old and studied at New York’s Cooper Union College in the 1960s. She draws from her childhood experiences as a refugee in Ankara, Turkey, to create obscenely masterful full-scale collages and paintings. She quotes Rilke! She tells us about fleeing Nazi Germany, her marriage, the women’s movement (and how it helped her get a divorce), and what it’s like to be an accomplished female artist in her later years. We fête her.

Edith's website

Read more about Edith's father, Franz Hillinger, on Wikipedia

About White Terror in Hungary 

Take a look at the Women in the Arts Foundation 

Find out more about the Bay Area Women Artists' Legacy Project here

Beautiful Online Thing: Dante's Divine Comedy

Music at 6'50" and 18' is from the album The Long Embrace by Vega Victoria

Our next crush! Ghent based performance duo BRIK TU-TOK

ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL on Instagram

Join us on a trip to Oostakker, Belgium where we meet textile designer Leda Devoldere in the art studio she has in her parents' garden. Leda designs carpets, pillows and plaids in bright, vibrant colors and abstract shapes. She also has a lisp, which makes some English words hard to pronounce and her voice very easy to love. She knits almost all of her work by hand on her historic hand knitting machine, which makes every single object a real act of devotion. We are in full awe of all this beauty and high design coziness! 

Leda online: ledadevoldere.com

Beautiful Online Thing: Taryn O'Gorman Designs

Read more about woollen Viking ship sails here

Our next crush: Edith Hillinger!

Contact Svea and Jozefien: [email protected]

All music during the interview with Leda is from the album Abel by Kabas, a Ghent-based jazz quartet, with Jan Daelman (flute), Elias Devoldere (drums) (Leda's brother!), Thijs Troch (piano/harmonium) (Jozefien's cousin!) and Nils Vermeulen (double bass).

This episode is dedicated to Bay Area artist Gary Hackett, who died suddenly. He was a good friend of Alison OK Frost, and this episode was postponed out of respect for her. We are grateful for Hackett’s presence in the Bay Area: an artist precariously housed and studiously generous with his time and care. It’s a little less colourful now, with him gone.

We go with realist painter and arts educator Alison OK Frost to the Mosswood Park homeless encampment in Oakland, California. Frost is interested in humanity and creativity; she paints from photographs taken of homeless encampment citizen architecture (tents, tarps, wheelchairs, trees, mannequins, and other artefacts of ingenuity). It’s a hot day and Jozefien is feeling really woozy.* We help Frost deliver socks and bottles of water to camp residents, make friends with an artist named Rose, and find out why Frost wants her daughter and her students to learn more about the “two Bay Areas.”

*Jozefien is pregnant with her daughter, Rosie. She doesn’t know it yet!

Alison OK Frost's website: http://www.alisonokfrost.com

What is Social Practice Art? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_practice_(art)

Beautiful Online Thing: the 'Flower Bae' exhibition at General Hardware Contemporary

For a visual tour and transcript of this interview, visit the ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE: https://artcrushinternational.com/alison-ok-frost.html

Join us on conceptual/installation/social practice artist Michele Pred's red couch in her white-walled studio at Faultline Artspace in East Oakland, California. Pred is a Swedish-American artist who started the "Art of Equal Pay" movement to encourage female and non-binary artists to charge more. She's got a billboard in New York City all about it. With us, she talks about the "Power of the Purse" series, a collection of vintage purses that blink light-up political messages. Does your purse do that? Not yet. Her couch is from IKEA and her work is from the heart.

Browse Michele's website: https://michelepred.com/home.html

The Art of Equal Pay: https://www.theartofequalpay.com

Visual tour: https://artcrushinternational.com/michele-pred.html

Beautiful Online Thing: Immerse Yourself, a virtual reality art gallery featuring works by Alice Marinelli

Hear us talk to Marika Reisberg on the Sustaining Creativity podcast!