ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL

What's the difference between jewellery and sculpture? The patriarchy, that's what.

Welcome to the cool, stone-walled studio of avant garde Stockholm jewellery designer Helena Johansson Lindell. We fall in love with her capacity to turn plastic toy bits (don't you have a box of plastic toy bits??) into smooth, multilayered wearable art. She's that genius who can look at a Lion King franchise Happy Meal toy and see the perfect oval pendant hiding within its soul. Svea's four-year-old daughter appreciates all aspects of this experience. Colours are discussed. Also, kardemummabulle!

Helena on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helenajohanssonlindell

Visual tour of this interview: https://artcrushinternational.com/helena-johansson-lindell.html

Beautiful Online Thing: SLOW ROADS on Instagram

We hop in our time machine and eat all the snacks at Kat Trataris' white-walled gallery and studio space in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.* We talk drunk barbering, performing linguistic feats as a screaming punkrock diva, growing up in a Los Angeles exurb, tooth gems, and why their dad put a wall of chain link behind their white picket fence.

Kat is also a founding member of art handlxrs*, marginalized people who make the arts world actually happen. Check out their open call here.

Kat on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/domestic_daddy

See a transcript of this interview and a visual tour on our website! www.artcrushinternational.com

Musical interludes: "Amber Eyes" by Vega Victoria

Tippet Rise, Montana: where two wealthy artists have invested in making ecstatic experiences for others. Would you like to be surrounded by rugged mountains, transported from one large-scale contemporary artwork to another in a free, solar-powered van while they charge your phone for you? How about being driven around by a sweet Frenchman who waxes poetic about his life’s work in a dusty pick-up truck? How about some gourmet locally-sourced food and a concert pianist? And some cows? This week, we’ve got it all.

Visual tour: https://artcrushinternational.com/is-tippet-rise-a-religious-experience.html

This piece was inspired by an article by Rachel Syme: https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/tippet-rise-sculpture-park-montana/

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

Beautiful Online Thing: Livecam of the International Wolf Center in Minnesota

We find Angela Hennessy standing at a table of shiny metal objects at her studio in industrial Oakland. Jozefien calls it cozy, but that’s just because she’s a real European. Nothing hygge about this bright warehouse space in which a lot of hair is transformed into a lot of art. Hennessy talks growing up in Humboldt County, riding horses in the summer, Blackness, being a hospice doula, and avoids telling us who gave her the genuine actual coffin standing in the middle of the room.

Visual tour: https://artcrushinternational.com/why-angela-hennessy-crochets-with-hair.html

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

Beautiful Online Thing: Chefchaouen on Flickr

Get your boots and your coat, for this Canadian mischief. Join us as we desperately seek a quiet space to conduct an interview in Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art with Palestinian-Canadian artist Samar Hejazi. Hejazi is game for anything, which is probably why she’s so good at conceptual, installation, and sculptural arts. Hejazi is working on a commission that involved making a live cast of someone’s face, stitching onto dissolvable fabric (and then dissolving it), and making abstract marks for literally no reason at all. We are besotted.

Join us as Svea runs into the car in her pyjamas and Jozefien is forced to scrunch under a low wooden table. All in the name of art (and Wilson, also in the name of Wilson). Our art crush David Wilson shows us his pristine “garage”, bougainvillea, and tape recorder. He talks FaceBook artist residency, drawing, bringing people together to sing and eat, and what happened when he had to cut just a few extra pieces for the garage ceiling. It rains. That’s very romantic. We demand snail mail and access to his outdoor shower.

We’re on our way to Belgium! Come eat quesadillas in Tramaine de Senna’s studio with us. She’s a mixed media artist with a background in architecture, proudly from Vallejo, California. Nowadays, she loves the light and space in the Antwerp studio she shares with her husband. It has a band saw and a paint dryer and a sewing machine and a huge jar of beads that’s great for looking at. De Senna talks love, absurdity, and the migration of forms. We can’t bring ourselves to leave.

We visit Simon Tran in his small, art-covered bedroom, which also functions as his studio. Tran is a Vietnamese-American artist who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from UC Berkeley’s Fine Arts program as a painter. He gives us a tour of the old North Berkeley house he shares (built on top of a tunnel with a creek running through it), serves us strong coffee, and we huddle around the mics together, talking about how terrible his friends are (they’re all comedians), how much he admires architecture students, and how he is, in Svea’s words, ‘just a failed modernist’. We’re crazy about him.

Hop in crushers, we’re going to the Arctic. We take a walk through the woods with Sámi reindeer herder, choreographer, and filmmaker Elle Sofe Sara. The wind blows, the snow falls, the noses run, the hearts beat wild. She talks the importance of refuelling, travel, an old Sámi tradition called ‘ribadit’ where you grab your crush’s belt and walk around with them, and what it was like to move from the tundra to London at the age of 19. We are blessed to know her.

Welcome to ART CRUSH INTERNATIONAL! We take you to visit Mariam El Quessny in the Oakland apartment she shares with her husband and two small children. Quessny, originally from Egypt, has lived in California for five years and, despite being a graduate of the Pratt Institute’s School of Design, only recently begun to call herself an artist. She serves us dandelion tea, shows us the tightly packed studio corner she has carved out for herself, and tells us about ‘Motherhood Illustrated’, in which she transforms women’s photographs of gritty, unflattering motherhood experiences into lovingly detailed watercolour paintings. We make a fort in her kid’s bed.