Interviews by Brainard Carey

Ana Segovia produces images through paintings that subvert the heteronormativity of popular imaginaries. The artist revisits mythical scenes and figures from industries like film and sports, reconfiguring their hegemonic role as idealized models of masculinity. An intimate connection to cinema constantly inspires and drives him to transgress norms. Segovia takes familiar images from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the Western genre, intervening in their forms, altering their tonalities, and dislocating them. It’s in this disruption where he reveals the montage, artifice, and the performativity in constructing gender and national identities.

Segovia’s paintings confront viewers with undefined faces, strident color palettes, and scenes infused with humor that juxtaposes the serious. His work positions playfulness as a political tool, challenging and creating tensions in a dialogue between the norm and the unconventional. Segovia rewrites our visual models, inviting us to reconsider them, and offers the possibility of encountering the familiar from a perspective that questions and blurs its contours.

Ana Segovia received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), specializing in painting and drawing. In spring 2020, he participated in the Casa Wabi Residency, Puerto Escondido, Mexico.

Segovia lives and works in Mexico City.

Erin Milez (b. 1994, Pittsburgh, PA) received a MFA from New York Academy of Art, NY and a BA from Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA. Her work has recently been exhibited at Studio E, Seattle; Seattle Pacific University, Seattle Pacific Art Center, Seattle; Cob Gallery, London; Kutlesa Gallery, Switzerland and Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.

Milez’s work is included in an upcoming group exhibition at Lazy Mike, Seoul in November 2026. The artist was awarded an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2021 and 2024. Milez lives and works in Seattle, WA and is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.

She was interviewed previously in 2023, that interview can be found here.

Janet Biggs’s work focuses on extreme landscapes and situations, drawing connections between physical terrains and psychological, societal, or political dynamics. She has had solo exhibitions, film screenings, and performances at the SCAD Museum of Art, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, Jeu de Paume, Taubman Museum of Art, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Blaffer Museum of Art, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tampa Museum of Art, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Mint Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among many others.

Biggs is the recipient of numerous grants, including the 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, Moore College of Art & Design 2022 Visionary Woman Award, Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts Award, Media Arts Assistant Fund Grant, Arctic Circle Fellowship/Residency, Art Matters, Inc., Wexner Center Media Arts Program Residency, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the NEA Fellowship Award. Her works are in the collections of the SCAD Museum of Art, Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC), Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl (Ruhr Kunst Museen), Tampa Museum of Art, High Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Mint Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of Art. Biggs lives and works in New York.

She was interviewed previously on Yale University radio in 2021.

Wade Schaming (b. 1984; Pittsburgh, PA) lives and works in New York City.  He studied at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (BA 2006) and the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (MFA 2010).

Residency awards include the Bronx Museum’s AIM program, Bronx, NY (2012), the Lower East Side Printshop’s Keyholder Residency, New York, NY (2015), Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2016), Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ithaca, NY (2017), The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Montauk, NY (2017), Jentel Foundation, Banner, WY (2018) and Art & History Museums – Maitland, Maitland, FL (2020).

“EASY FEELINGS,” a solo exhibition of new work opens September 10, 2026, at Equity Gallery, New York, NY, and is on view through October 10, 2026.

Julian MacMillan (b. 1992) lives and works in New York. Working across painting, printmaking and sculpture he creates works that resemble mythical landscapes, mysterious figurations, and funerary objects. Through his multidisciplinary practice, which also spans carpentry and metalworking, MacMillan is able to combine and compress these genres, and make images that are both sensitive and other-worldly. Born and raised in Washington DC, MacMillan studied art at Dartmouth College prior to receiving his MFA in painting at Boston University. Recent exhibitions include Left Tower at Atlantic Mills (Providence, RI), Do It Again at East Manning Projects (Providence, RI), The View From Mars at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and Tell The Devil I’m Coming As Fast As I Can at Outlet Manhattan, New York, NY.

(b. 1979, Chicago) creates paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculptures that honor familial archives and imagined contemporary realities. Beginning from a space of personal inquiry around their family’s migration from the Philippines to America, Palileo quickly uncovered the immense connective points between individual histories and broader global systems, like colonization, displacement, assimilation, and the Philippine–American War.

Michael Morgan (b. 1992, Syosset, Long Island) is an artist and curator whose work spans painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage. Raised in a conservative suburb of Long Island, Morgan’s early experiences navigating his sexuality within a community at odds with his identity profoundly shaped his artistic voice. Exploring identity, loss, LGBTQ history, environmental issues, and societal division, his practice often draws attention to overlooked histories and underrepresented voices, including a project honoring Christine Jorgensen, the pioneering transgender figure who grew up in his hometown.

Morgan earned his B.A. in Environmental Sciences from Northwestern University in 2014. Following the passing of his father, he shifted his focus from a legal career toward art and art education. He went on to graduate from Columbia University with a second bachelor’s degree in visual arts. While at Columbia, he was also a graphic designer at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a finalist for the 2020 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for his writings on environmental theory and art, and inducted into the academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa.

From 2024 – 2026, Morgan pursued his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University. He curated Magnum O-Pspsps at Cornell University, a large-scale exhibition featuring over 40 artists that received coverage in Hyperallergic and Art Spiel. Morgan’s research has also been supported by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Morgan has exhibited work at Sotheby’s, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Columbia University, Cornell University, Roberson Museum, the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Ortega y Gasset Projects. He is the curator of Deus Ex Bark-ina at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art and will be an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project in fall 2026.

Jimena Velarde-Alvarez (b. 2001, Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian artist based in New York. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Emerging from attention—to and over time—Velarde-Alvarez’s work develops through a process of accumulation and return. Working primarily across painting, drawing, and sculpture, she approaches image-making as a practice of sustained attention, returning to an image as it gradually emerges and evolves. Through repeated encounters, her work follows the echoes of time as they surface and recede.

In her paintings, carefully considered compositions and an atmosphere of restraint allow light, shadow, and architecture to emerge in quiet relation to one another. Spacious interiors, recurring windows, doorways, and thresholds create spaces where atmosphere becomes an active presence within the image. Through translucent figures, shadows, and layered surfaces, Velarde-Alvarez traces the subtle ways time gradually reveals the contours of things.

Across painting and writing, layering becomes both material and metaphor. The accumulation of paint and language mirrors the ways memory, attention, and time are sedimented within the self: how the past accumulates and is continually rewritten, and how these layers can only be accessed through stillness, yet never be fully recovered.

Parallel to her painting practice, Velarde-Alvarez’s writing opens another point of entry into the work. Through poetry, diary fragments, and text-based pieces, language serves as both companion and counterpart—a space for reflection and self-examination that deepens and expands the questions posed by the paintings rather than explaining them.

Deeply rooted in personal experience, Velarde-Alvarez’s practice continues to evolve alongside her, unfolding through and remaining open to the questions that emerge over time.

Velarde-Alvarez’s work has been exhibited in the United States and Peru. She is currently presenting her first solo exhibition, La sombra del tiempo, at Margot Samel, New York.

Meena Hasan (born 1987, NYC) received her B.A. from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2010, she was awarded the Terna Prize Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and in 2025 she was an artist-in-residence in the Winter TNT Residency hosted by Transmitter and Tiger Strike Asteroid Galleries in NYC.

She has participated in group exhibitions at the Kristen Lorello Gallery, NYC, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NYC, Center for Book Arts, NYC, The Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands, Deitch Projects, NYC, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY, the 2022 New England Triennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and Fruitlands Museum and at BRIC Arts and Media in Downtown Brooklyn in Spring of 2023 among others.

Recent two-person and solo exhibitions have been shown at The Old Stone House of Brooklyn, NY, Main Window, Dumbo with Deanna Evans Projects, NYC, and Stowaway Gallery, Los Angeles, CA all in 2025. Meena has taught Painting at Rutgers University – Newark, Pratt Institute’s Painting MFA program, the School of Visual Arts at Boston University and Studio in a School, NYC. She is currently the Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in Painting at RISD, Providence and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.