June 30, 2020

Episode 45: The Struggle Is Continuous (w/ Sonja John)

1 hour 30 minutes

Hey everyone. I hope y'all are hanging in there. I hope everyone is maintaining social distancing if you can and staying safe and healthy in the mind and body. It took me a bit to start back up with editing the podcasts. I took this time to deep dive back into my unreleased materials that I never got around to releasing for one reason or another and then got too embarrassed to release them so late. But better late than never. So for the next few episodes I'll be going a bit back to some older conversations I had done.

Anyway, for today, I am chatting with the wonderful Sonja John, a queer first generation New York City-based artist, educator, and poet I met last January in Vermont. Sonja received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and her contributions to museum education and visual art have been featured at the RISD Museum, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic. Drawing from flora and fauna native to her parents' homelands of Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Philippines, Sonja's work seeks to interrogate theories of color, belonging, contested geographic and biological bodies, and post-colonial effects on landscape and culture. We talk about these topics and so much more in our conversation. As I edited this episode, I really enjoyed listening to Sonja's laughing and her smart witty commentaries. It made my work much easier, especially since I didn't feel motivated to do edit this week. In any case, I hope you enjoy this episode and I'll be back in two weeks. Stay safe and healthy in the meantime and goodbye for now.

Links Mentioned: