Glasstire

This is an interview with Dixie Friend Gay, an artist living and working in Houston. She had grown up in western Oklahoma on a cattle ranch, made her way to New York to be an artist and eventually settled in Houston. Her work focuses on the sacredness of nature, looking specifically at the wild southern native landscape. Her detailed lush paintings have led her to create large mosaic murals and sculptures in the public realm all over the US. We have a video online that documents her most recent installation “Books of a Feather”, which consists of three 15-foot tall mosaic birds in front of the Alice M Young Library in Houston. For this interview, she talks about how to balance being a mother and an artist, advice on how to get involved in public art, and how her first public intervention was taking political action against a series of gates that were put up between affluent and minority neighborhoods in Houston.

Christina Rees and Rainey Knudson discuss celebrities doing performance art, and the issue of artists gentrifying poor neighborhoods. Also discussed: killing animals for food + favorite music videos from the 80s!

Rainey Knudson and Christina Rees on art that's a cry for attention; whether artists should have to talk about their art; and whether it's a good idea to cross over from the nonprofit to the commercial side (or vice versa) of the art world. BONUS: they disagree on John Currin!

A conversation between the photographer Catherine Opie and Eileen Myles, author of "Chelsea Girls" and numerous volumes of poetry, in Houston on April 29, 2017.

The sixth episode of Not A Hobby features Rahul Mitra. He was born in Hyderabad, India, and lives in Houston. His work is heavily drawing based - mostly black ink on paper - through which he’s created his own visual vocabulary. He sees his work much like notes and his drawings like an extension of his handwriting. Rahul is also a scientist. He is the program director at The Center for RNA Interference and Non-Coding RNAs at the MD Anderson Cancer Research Center in Houston. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is one of the three major biological macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life. They are the messenger between our DNA and the ability to produce proteins. A non-coding RNA is a RNA molecule that is not translating between DNA and protein production. So the idea is to introduce non-coding RNA into cells to disrupt production of particular proteins and whatever gene expression they trigger or suppress. Thus non-coding RNA can be targets to treat cancer.

All of this is to say that Rahul is pretty with it - looking at things on such a molecular level, testing out theories that might never come to fruition and all the while looking at society as a whole understanding how external forces can influence us on the microscopic level.

Art Dirt 3: Texas Art Fairs: the Good, the Bad, and the Dallas by Glasstire

In Glasstire's Art Dirt podcast, Christina Rees and Rainey Knudson discuss the controversy over Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial.

In Glasstire's new Art Dirt podcast, Christina Rees and Rainey Knudson discuss whether it's too soon for happy art, the new Moody Center at Rice University (and the demise of Rice Art Gallery), and Spring Break plans.

Dallas artist Thor Johnson weaves a tall tale of international art-crime intrigue in the Panhandle.

This episode is a little different than the previous Not A Hobby interviews - our guest is Dirk Rathke, an artist living and working in Berlin, Germany, and he does not have a full time job that he balances with his art career. But I wanted to interview him anyways since I feel like there is a fascination among the artist community in the US that longingly looks to their European colleagues. There is a sense that the funding and general support from the European governments for their artists is much more generous, so that they are able to focus full time on their art career without having to take 2nd or even third jobs.

Dirk is a painter and has lived in Berlin quite some time. He was in Houston for an exhibition late last year and I wanted to ask him some frank questions about what the assistance situation is really like in Germany. You’ll be surprised how familiar it all sounds despite some glaring differences.