FUSE: A BOMB Podcast

Chase Hall’s paintings in coffee and acrylic on cotton canvas investigate generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. In 2023, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and in 2022, he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork for its opera house in New York. Previously, Hall has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine, and he is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU.

Henry Taylor lives and works in Los Angeles. He is currently the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Taylor’s work was featured in the Whitney Biennial (2017) and the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). 

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For this episode, we asked artist, mother, and activist Tanya Aguiñiga which artist she would most wish to speak with and she chose visual artist and curator Julio César Morales.

The pair discuss the versatility of the border experience, unlikely influences, and functional art practices.

This episode is in partnership with The Armory Show. Both artists appearing in the episode are part of the curated sections of the fair’s 2022 edition. Tanya Aguiñiga’s work is presented by Volume Gallery in Focus, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, while Julio César Morales’s piece La Linea is presented by Gallery Wendi Norris in Platform, curated by Tobias Ostrander.

Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist, designer, and craftsperson, who works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. Her solo exhibitions include the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Arts and Design. Additional exhibitions have been held at the Annenberg Space for Photography, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum—among others.

Julio César Morales investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’s practice explores diverse mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, and reenacted a famous meal—all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives. Morales’s work has been shown at SFMOMA, Museo Rufino Tamayo, LACMA, Hammer Museum, Muca Roma, Prospect 3 Biennale, Lyon Biennale, and Istanbul Biennale among others.

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For this episode, we asked artist, mother, and activist Tanya Aguiñiga which artist she’d most like to speak with. She named visual artist and curator, Julio César Morales.

The pair discuss the versatility of the border experience, unlikely influences, and functional art practices.

This episode is in partnership with The Armory Show. Both artists appearing in the episode are part of the curated sections of the fair’s 2022 edition. Tanya Aguiñiga’s work is presented by Volume Gallery in Focus, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, while Julio César Morales’s piece, La Linea, is presented by Gallery Wendi Norris in Platform, curated by Tobias Ostrander.

For this episode, we asked writer Maggie Nelson which artist she would most wish to speak with and she chose painter and animation artist Tala Madani. In the course of their conversation, Maggie reflects on the process of writing On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. The pair discuss how to capture magic in adult life, balancing doubt and trust, and Maggie’s first experience writing about art. 

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her latest work of nonfiction, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

Tala Madani is a Los Angeles based artist who makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Madani has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, and in 2022, she will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective at MOCA, Los Angeles.

FUSE is overseen and produced by Libby Flores, Associate Publisher at BOMB. It is edited and engineered by Will Smith with production assistance by Isis Pinheiro. Narration provided by Chantal McStay, Associate Editor at BOMB magazine. Our theme music is “Black Origami” by Jlin.

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Abdu Ali is a musician, writer, cultural worker, and artist. Blending punk, jazz, Baltimore club music, and rap. Their works explore ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and liberation. They received a 2018 Ruby Artist Grant and a 2019 Best Artist Award by the LGBTQ Commission of Baltimore City. 

Tschabalala Self is a Harlem-born visual artist. Her work concerns the emotional, physical and psychological impact of the Black female body as icon. Her solo exhibitions include: By My Self, at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and Cotton Mouth, on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Self’s work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Hammer Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.

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David Byrne is a musician, composer, and producer, and the cofounder of the band Talking Heads. His recent acclaimed rock spectacle, American Utopia, toured the world and was adapted into a Broadway play as well as a concert film directed by Spike Lee. Byrne has received Academy, Grammy, and Golden Globe Awards, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Open Mike Eagle has over a dozen solo and collaborative projects to his name. He is the founder of Auto Reverse Records and co-founder of The New Negroes, a standup-meets-music variety show that explores perceptions of Blackness. Eagle’s most recent album, Anime, Trauma, and Divorce, was released last year.

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Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, from Detroit. She has premiered fifty original performance artworks around the world and is the author of two books, Swallow the Fish and Experiments in Joy. Her recent performances include Jupiter and Wild Beauty. 

Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, musician, singer, and writer. His recent projects include the performance This Bridge Called My Ass, his Madonna cover band SADONNA; and Are You For Sale?, a podcast about the ethical entanglements in dance-making and philanthropy. 

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David Harrington is the artistic director, founder and violinist of the Kronos Quartet. For over 45 years, San Francisco’s Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet and its nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association have reimagined and redefined the string quartet experience through thousands of concerts, over 60 recordings, collaborations with composers and performers from around the globe, more than 1,000 commissioned works, and education programs for emerging musicians.

Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma but since 2014 has been performing her solo project, A Body in Places. In 2017, she launched a multi-year Duet Project, a series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-generational experiments with a diverse range of artists both living and dead.

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FUSE Season 2 Lineup:  

Episode #1: Okay Kaya & John Wilson

Episode #2: Olivia Laing & Matt Wolf

Episode #3: Eiko Otake & David Harrington

Episode #4: Miguel Gutierrez & Gabrielle Civil

Episode #5: David Byrne & Open Mike Eagle

Episode #6: Tschabalala Self & Abdu Ali

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Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City, and Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. She was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2018. Her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, is an investigation into the body and its discontents.

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker whose critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries include Wild Combination, Teenage and Recorder. His newest film, Spaceship Earth premiered at Sundance and is now streaming on Hulu. Wolf has also made many short films about artists and queer history, including The Face of AIDS and HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary. Wolf is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

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