For painter Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, the land on which she lives and works is the raw material for her art, both metaphorically and literally.

In November 2016, ten days spent at Standing Rock, ND protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and meeting and working alongside fellow Native artists changed her life. Ka’ila, who is Klamath Modoc, learned about the Jordan Cove Energy Projects, a liquid natural gas LNG pipeline that was threatening her ancestral homeland in southern Oregon, and in 2018, she moved to Modoc Point, where she jump-started a new chapter in her activism and artistry journey, scoring a couple of big wins in the first year. She created her “Land Back” series of paintings, in which she started incorporating pigments and minerals from the land around her, and she was successful in blocking the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

Now, in 2024, represented by the Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, she’s had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, including at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. One of her pieces is also in the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. On the activist front, she is suing the State of Oregon for illegal surveillance and is also combating lithium mining in Native regions of Southern Oregon and Nevada.

In this interview, Ka’ila explains why she left the artistic hub of Portland to live in rural southern Oregon and describes how her activism and artistry have evolved hand in hand.

https://www.kailafarrellsmith.com/

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In February of 2024, after a year of touring the country, the musical group Rising Appalachia, an ensemble that marries American folk music with a wide array of world influences, made an announcement that might have been surprising only to those who don’t know them well. Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, who created Rising Appalachia over 15 years ago, had decided to take a sabbatical year, though they would honor the concerts already on the books in 2024. 

Longtime Rising Appalachia fans have been supportive because they know this is a band that has never taken shortcuts in how they manage their artistry and their lives. Since early on in their careers, Leah and Chloe have been advocates for and practitioners of the slow music movement, an ethos of touring and music-making that places sustainability, local engagement and creative control at the heart of their business. The current sabbatical is the latest tool in their slow music toolbox.

Yet though last year’s tour was hugely successful and they’ve just released an album titled “Folk and Anchor,” Chloe and Leah’s decision was undeniably gutsy and far from conventional in the music industry. In this interview, the sisters, speaking from their homes in the North Carolina mountains, discuss why this was the right time for a yearlong break, how they prepared for it and the ways in which they and their bandmates keep the slow music ethos at the heart of their artistic practice.

https://www.risingappalachia.com/tour

https://www.risingappalachia.com/

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Through her wildly multicolored and multitextured interdisciplinary work, April Bey loves to explore speculative realms. For example, in a recent installation of hers, titled “Atlantica, the Gilda Region,” she invited the viewer to imagine they’d just landed as aliens on the faraway planet Atlantica, an opulent galactic wonderland full of Black and Brown bodies savoring luxury and leisure. First exhibited at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the show then traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno this past fall.

Art Restart was eager to speak with April specifically because of a project she created to transform one particular speculation into reality: What if the people who collected her art looked like her and/or had similar backgrounds to hers? What if the world of art collecting invited collectors who for a host of reasons had felt excluded from or intimidated by it? She named the new venture the Equity in Collecting Program, and it is already bearing fruit, with April currently reviewing the third round of applicants to the program.

April spoke to Art Restart from Los Angeles, where she lives and works, including as a tenured professor at Glendale College. Here she explains why and how she created her singular program and explains how her radical invitation to new collectors is changing not only the art-collecting culture but also her relationship with her fans as well as with her own art.

https://www.april-bey.com/

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For New Orleans-based film composer Sultana Isham, plunging into research on her subject matter is as important as creating her score. Trained as a classical violinist, she moved from her native Virginia to New Orleans to steep herself in one of her passions, the peoples, history and culture of Créolité throughout the Americas and abroad.

Once in New Orleans, Sultana Initially busked in various venues around New Orleans and then started playing with Les Cenelles, an ensemble devoted to Creole folk music and work by composers of color. She began to write her own pieces, and in 2017 she put out her first EP, “Blood Moon,” a mixture of avant-garde classical and pop fusion, attracting the attention of director Zandashé Brown, who hired her to write the score for the horror short “Blood Runs Down.” Other directors soon came knocking on her door.

Director Angela Tucker hired her to be both researcher and composer on the documentary, “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk,” a PBS documentary about a historic New Orleans mayoral race between two Black women. Among Sultana’s other credits are “The Neutral Ground,” which also aired on PBS and received an Emmy nomination for best historical documentary, and the PBS series “Making Black America,” narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Sultana’s scholarship continues unabated. LSU Press is developing an essay she co-wrote with Dr. Denise Frazier – “Mémwa Nwa: Agency, Sound and Women in AfroCreole Louisiana Folk Music” – into a book. A month before this interview, she concluded her residency at Ace Hotel New Orleans by co-curating an exhibit titled “Them Handy Sisters,” celebrating the careers of noted performers and musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy Southall and D. Antoinette Handy.

Here, Sultana explains how she developed her musical skills hand-in-hand with her research practice and why heeding her heart and feeding her curiosity continue to open incredible new doors for her.

https://www.sultanaisham.com/

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Zeke Peña is a Xicano cartoonist and illustrator who, for most of his professional life, has focused on the lives and stories of El Paso, TX, where he grew up and lived for decades. A self-taught artist with an undergraduate degree in art history from UT Austin, he has built a rich portfolio of varied works that, as he describes them, are “a mash-up of political cartoons, border rasquache and hip-hop culture.”

He has illustrated several award-winning books, including “My Papi Drives a Motorcycle,” which The New York Times called a best children’s book of 2019, and “Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide,” a Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award Winner and a Moonbeam Children’s Book Gold Award Winner. Both were written by Isabel Quintero, who has become a close collaborator. In 2023 he illustrated bestselling author Jason Reynolds’ “Miles Morales Suspended: A Spider-Man Novel.” His editorial work has appeared in a wide array of publications, including VICE, ProPublica and Latino USA.

Here he describes the evolution of his ambitious journalistic endeavor, “The River Project,” about the increasingly politicized Rio Grande and all it represents. He also discusses how he’s adapted to the latest moral book-banning crusade and how he wishes for publishers to honor their writers’ and illustrators’ collaborative spirits. 

https://www.zpvisual.com/

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One of the bona fide theatrical hits of 2023 was a play titled “Public Obscenities” by director-turned-playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury. It opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan in January of 2023 to the kind of glowing reviews and audience responses a playwright can only dream of. The same production was remounted that fall at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., and as of this writing, it is currently running at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.

A New York Times Critic’s Pick from its first outing, the play continues to draw raves in its latest iteration. Helen Shaw of The New Yorker calls it a triumph. A few days after this interview, Misha won an Obie for his direction of the play, this after the play’s cast received a 2023 Drama Desk Award for best ensemble.

What makes the success of “Public Obscenities” so remarkable is that that there’s nothing about the play that screams “Guaranteed Surefire Hit!” For one thing, with its relatively large cast of seven and with its multimedia elements, it’s not cheap to produce. Then also it is bilingual, partly in English, partly in the playwright’s native Bangla. Granted, Bangla is the sixth most spoken native language in the world (thank you, Wikipedia), but it is not a language familiar to most Americans. Plus, though sections of the play in which Bangla is spoken are supertitled, there are other scenes without any translations at all.

Also, the play is very queer. It follows an Indian-American PhD candidate as he returns with his Black American boyfriend to a family home in Kolkata, India. There he plans to interview sexual minorities for his dissertation. The play is therefore very frank about sexuality and features two non-gender-conforming characters.

And it’s three hours long.

But despite these details — or maybe exactly because of them — the play is an unqualified hit.

Here Misha details how he hewed to his vision for the play no matter its evolving demands and hints at a road map for struggling theaters and the artists who wish to create work for their stages.

https://www.shayokmishachowdhury.com/

https://www.tfana.org/current-season/public-obscenities/overview

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In 2009, while expecting their first child, visual artists and life partners Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova and Frances Trombly co-founded a new artist space in their hometown of Miami. They named it Dimensions Variable after their short-lived visuals-only blog that had showcased the kind of challenging art they rarely saw supported or valued in their city.

Using a donated space in Miami’s Design District, Leyden and Frances worked in their personal studios in the back, and in the small front space, Dimensions Variable started curating exhibits. Leyden was committed to imbuing their new venture with the ethos that had guided a previous Miami-based venture named Box that he’d co-run years before. Dimensions Variable would support great art and artists without placing the demands of the market ahead of the artists’ needs or aspirations.

Since its founding, Dimensions Variable has had to relocate several times for reasons beyond their control due to the increasingly treacherous real estate market in Miami. Since 2019, though, they have operated out of their largest space yet comprising 4,500 square feet in Miami’s Little River/Little Haiti neighborhood. In 2019 they also registered as a non-profit organization and since then have continued to support a wide range of artists with residencies, exhibits and, since DV is also a gallery, sales.

Here Frances and Leyden discuss very frankly the lessons they’ve learned in the last 14 years in how to make Dimensions Variable sustainable through thick and thin while remaining as welcoming and enriching as possible to the art and artists they are passionate about supporting.

https://dimensionsvariable.net/

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Architect Andrew Schachman and multidisciplinary artist and educator Faheem Majeed are two of the four artists who, along with poet avery r. young and sculptor Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, co-lead Chicago’s Floating Museum. As its name suggests, the Floating Museum does not have a brick-and-mortar fixed space; rather it creates inventive projects through which to explore and strengthen the relationship between art, community, architecture and public institutions in sites throughout Chicago.

One example of past Floating Museum projects is “Cultural Transit Assembly,” which activated not only the Chicago Transit Authority’s green line but also parks and spaces along its track. Some green line CTA cars served as pop-up performance spaces and galleries, and giant movable sculptures as well as community-art events could be spied from the train throughout its route, inviting riders to visit neighborhoods that perhaps were new to them.

Another example is “River Assembly,” which over a month saw an industrial barge dock at different sites along the Chicago River, bringing a host of performances and interactive exhibits to several neighborhoods, celebrating the entire city as one giant museum campus, all corners of which have always been hubs of culture and art.

In a sign of the Floating Museum’s cultural influence not only citywide but also nationally and abroad, its four leaders were tapped to be the co-directors of the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial, one of only two architecture biennials in the world, the other being the century-old Biennial in Venice, Italy.

Here Faheem and Andrew describe the municipal savvy and community trust they had to cultivate for the Floating Museum and its many projects to move throughout Chicago. They also discuss how as a quartet they manage a growing institution that must remain nimble and responsive enough to continually engage with its home city. 

https://floatingmuseum.org/

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Cellist Leo Eguchi has played all over the world in a variety of settings, from frequent appearances with the Boston Pops and the Portland Symphony to playing for some of pop music’s biggest stars, including Demi Lovato and Peter Gabriel. A career as a performer only, however, did not satisfy his itch to make music that would move an audience with its intimacy and immediacy, so he co-founded not one but two chamber music ensembles and began commissioning work from a broad array of contemporary composers.

He continues to co-lead Sheffield Chamber Players, which is based in Boston and performs in community members’ homes throughout the region, and the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, which performs in several Oregon wineries through its August season. The commissioning and performing of new work remain central to both ensembles.

Leo created the “UNACCOMPANIED” project, through which he commissions immigrant and first-generation American composers to create solo cello pieces that explore the very notion of American-ness. Among the commissioned artists are well-known composers such as Gabriele Lena Frank and William Bolcomb as well as newer talents, including Milad Yousufi, a recent refugee from Afghanistan whom Leo met while completing a residency in Kabul in 2012.

He also commissioned a suite titled “Shared Spaces” that pairs new work by composer Kenji Bunch with the personal recollections of David Sakura about his time imprisoned with his family in a WWII internment camp. As for the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, in each season it highlights the work of a different composer in residence.

Here Leo explains how he developed the ethos that drives his artistry and leadership and details how he continues to put his passion into practice. 

https://www.leoeguchi.com/

https://www.sheffieldchamberplayers.org/

https://www.wvchambermusic.org/

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As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valuable? Can and should art be treated like widgets? Or like a new app?

To the second question, Frances Pollock and Keith Hamilton Cobb might answer, “If the artist is up for it, why not?” Frances, an opera and musical-theater composer, is the CEO of a nascent company called Midnight Oil Collective (MOC) that cribs from the funding practices of tech accelerators, which after all are hubs of creativity, to connect creators with money not from nonprofit sources but from private investors. MOC also trains its artist partners to regard their creative work as intellectual property akin to the tech innovations of an inventor. This means that an artist working with MOC learns how never to relinquish the rights to her work from start to finish and also learns how to scale it as needed. The artist does not wait for a producer or non-profit entity to determine if and how the project will grow, turning over the reins to the project in the process; she remains its captain and determines what the project requires in its own startup lab, so to speak.

Keith, an actor and playwright with a lengthy and distinguished television, film and stage resume, is not only on MOC’s artistic board; he is also in the first artist cohort to fund and develop a new piece through the company. He is the director of “The Untitled Othello Project,” a hybrid theater-making-and-education innovation endeavor that brings together creative minds of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine and interrogate the esthetic, moral and pedagogical values promulgated by the Western canon, using the Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. “The Untitled Othello Project” is currently in residence at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. 

Here Frances and Keith explain why this is the perfect moment for MOC’s brand of disruption in the art world and describe how the company funds and supports the projects under its wing.

https://www.midnightoilco.com/

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