Nikita Gale makes sculpture and installation-based work that explores the exchanges and barriers between audience and performer. Nikita talks about how artwork can influence group behavior, protest and dissent as performance, research as a way to pull out ideas, noise and silence as social and political positions, the similarities between studio visits and dating, maintenance and mind-body awareness, and art as an open invitation.

See Nikita’s work HERE

Nikita’s culture recommendation: Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang  

Nikita Gale/Private Dancer at California African American Museum through May 9, 2021

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Curtis Talwst Santiago is a multi-disciplinary artist that makes sculpture, drawings and paintings, performance and video. Curtis talks about pivoting from music to visual art, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, his recent show Can’t I Alter at The Drawing Center in New York, genetic trauma and ancestry as concepts, intuition as an important tool, the complexities of Kanye West, honesty during studio visits and learning to be patient with the process of making art.

Susan Bee makes energetic oil paintings that feature a mix of female figures in fantastical landscapes, art historical references, geometric abstraction and pictorial invention—all serving as iconic flashpoints for current social and personal struggles. Susan talks about symbolism and being inspired by romance and poetry, inserting herself into someone else’s narrative, how images can represent sound, surrendering meaning and embracing ambiguity, vulnerability during studio visits, the self as primary audience, and feeling completely absorbed by the process of making a painting.

Libby Rothfeld makes conceptually driven sculpture that combines found objects, photography and drawing, and built wood structures that are often covered with banal hardware store tiles and kitchen counter laminate. Libby talks about the varied ingredients in her studio practice, subdued and faded color palettes as suggestions of time, an interest in the peripheral of our world, formality as feeling, figure skating and the collisions between taste, choice and identity.

Graham Collins makes sculpture and paintings that often combine complex structures, minimalism and material exploration. Graham talks about his approach to making and how different bodies of work connect and disconnect, thriving off of deadlines, being skeptical of art as a healthy exercise, allowing for fun in studio, small versus big galleries, green smoothies as placebo, how feelings aren’t facts, a desire for meaning to be visible and artist’s as the drivers of culture.

Joshua Abelow makes abstract paintings that feature a mix of geometric patterns, angular bursts, and stick figures that awkwardly vibrate up and through the picture plane. Josh talks about balancing broadness and specificity in his work, his writing and the futility of artist statements, his curatorial project and exhibition space “Freddy”, the value of maintaining a routine, and the similarities between making a mixtape and making a painting.

Erin M. Riley is a fiber-based artist that makes large scale, hand woven tapestries that depict still lives of forlorn objects, scenes of intimacy and self-portraiture. Erin talks about women expressing masculinity through art, selfies as a form of existence, her source material, ritual and the physicality of process, code words as privacy, slowing down and looking, and art as a fundamental survival mechanism.

2019 Fall Fundraiser: show and wear your support for Deep Color™ with an artist shirt by episode 38 contributor Maia Ruth Lee. All proceeds go towards off setting the cost of producing Deep Color™ episodes and ensuring excellent future programming. Only a limited number of these shirts will be produced. To view and pre-order, click HERE.

Jennie Jieun Lee makes ceramic sculpture covered with luscious layers of glaze, and wall works that combine assemblage, drawing and painting. Jennie talks about graduate school as a way to check ego and stretch the brain, otherness and an immigrant’s ear, emotions as appraisals of intelligence, collapsing boundaries between craft and fine art, her glazing strategies, and personal fulfillment through service and art making.

2019 Fall Fundraiser: show and wear your support for Deep Color™ with an artist shirt by episode 38 contributor Maia Ruth Lee. All proceeds go towards off setting the cost of producing Deep Color™ episodes and ensuring excellent future programming. Only a limited number of these shirts will be produced. To view and pre-order, click HERE.

Eric White makes representational oil paintings that often depict cinematic scenes and unsettling but graceful interactions between people and objects. Eric talks about film as an influence and using reference material, finding ideas in dream states, sleep and painting as obsession, the perverse satisfaction of using tiny brushes, and enjoying all the variables and challenges of making a good painting.

2019 Fall Fundraiser: show and wear your support for Deep Color™ with an artist shirt by episode 38 contributor Maia Ruth Lee. All proceeds go towards off setting the cost of producing Deep Color™ episodes and ensuring excellent future programming. Only a limited number of these shirts will be produced. To view and pre-order, click HERE.

Hilary Pecis makes vibrant acrylic paintings that depict still lives, landscapes and domestic interior spaces. Hilary talks about the benefits and challenges of a home studio, translating camera phone photos into dynamic paintings, looking for opportunities to try different types of mark-making and visual vocabularies, throwing a pie at Renoir, her takeaways from working in a contemporary art gallery and the importance of keeping ego in check.

Fall/Winter Fundraiser: show and wear your support for Deep Color™ with an artist shirt by episode 38 contributor, Maia Ruth Lee. All proceeds will go towards off setting the cost of producing Deep Color™ episodes and ensuring excellent future programming. Only a limited number of shirts will be produced. To view and pre-order, click HERE.