Double Scoop Podcast

Barry Crawford talks shop about the surprise details of his ambitious kinetic artworks. You can see one of them, "Rearing Horse," in downtown Reno, and his newest creation, "Ratchetfish," will debut this month at Burning Man.

Our host this season is Noah Glick.

Jessica Schimpf is a glassblower with a studio in downtown Reno. After years of establishing herself in a physically demanding, male dominated field, then losing several loved ones over a short span of time, she was feeling grief on top of burnout. She reassessed the way art worked in her life—both her professional life and her downtime. Then, she made some adjustments that really helped.

Five years ago, mixed media artist Sogand Tabatabaei packed everything she could fit into two bags and moved from Tehran, Iran, to Reno to start in UNR's MFA program. The loneliness of her new life produced some crushing anxiety—which she channeled into her artwork.

This episode also features Miya Hannan, one of Sogand's art professors at UNR.

How do you keep all of those looming "what-if" anxieties at bay? For Reno's Rob Garrett—a veteran and sculptor—welding metal objects together helps quite a bit.

"Art and anxiety and mental health, they go hand in hand," said Las Vegas artist Lance L. Smith. "And whether your art is your cooking or your parenting or your gardening ... you have a right to allow those things to be a container for things that other folks can't hold."

In the first of 4 episode on Art + Mental Health, Lance talks with Holly Hutchings about how, at a young age, they realized that art was the avenue to help channel the feelings that didn't have anywhere else to go.

The Art + Mental Health Podcast is coming soon!

This season's host, Holly Hutchings, spoke with four artists——Lance L. Smith from Las Vegas, Reno's Jessica Schimpf and Rob Garrett, and Sogand Tabatabaei, a UNR graduate who now lives in Dallas——about how art and mental health work together in their lives.

We'll start releasing episodes soon. Meanwhile, check out the season trailer!

Elaine Parks is a ceramic sculptor who lives in Reno and Tuscarora, a northeast Nevada town with 10 residents. You can get an almost uninterrupted view of the natural world from there—a fact that's informed her sculptures for decades. Lately, she's been processing climate doom.

Meet the latest curators from The Holland Project's Curators Series, Annaiz Ramirez + Sal Barajas-Alvarez from Savior Studios. Annaiz is a recent UNR graduate with a degree in art history. Sal is a TMCC student. They both grew up in Mexican families in Reno, and they have very different stories about how art became part of their lives.

During the pandemic, Reno portrait artist Zoe Bray took a detour into comic-style drawings of a happy-but-cooped-up family. Now she's back to exhibiting oil paintings. Her latest exhibition Face to Face: Contemporary Portraits, is at the Courthouse Gallery in Carson City through Feb. 10.

Tahoe artist Paula Chung has undertaken the laborious task of honoring every person in the United States who's died of COVID—803,000 and counting. For each person, she's sewing a mark onto a long roll of rice paper.

A few of these rolls are on view at the Bristlecone Gallery at Western Nevada College through Dec. 22.