Interviews by Brainard Carey

Jessica Spring learned to set real metal type in 1989 and has been a letterpress printer ever since, most recently inventing Daredevil Furniture to help other printers set type in circles, curves and angles. Her work at Springtide Press—artist books, broadsides and ephemera—is included in collections around the country and abroad. She also collaborates on the Dead Feminists broadside series with illustrator Chandler O’Leary. Their book, “Dead Feminists: Historical Heroines in Living Color” is available from Sasquatch Books.

Spring has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and teaches letterpress printing and book arts at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington where she also has co-organized the annual Wayzgoose—a book arts festival—for over a decade.

She has led workshops and residencies around the country, including Penland, Paper & Book Intensive, Wells Book Arts Institute, Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and the International Printing Museum.

“Seeding the Vote” is the latest broadside in the Dead Feminists series, a collaboration with illustrator Chandler O’Leary.

Print from reCollection series, 400% reproductions of vintage matchbooks my father collected incorporating handset type and linocuts.

Print from reCollection series, 400% reproductions of vintage matchbooks my father collected incorporating handset type and linocuts.

photo by Jennifer Wetzel

Peter Mishler is the author of Fludde (Sarabande Books), chosen by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. The book was a selection for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club and was called "must-read poetry" by The Millions. Poems from Fludde have appeared at Conjunctions, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, diode, The Literary Review, and The Winter Anthology.

Mishler is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Syracuse University and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. As an editor, he curates a contemporary poetry interview series for Literary Hub. 

Learn more on Spotify or get an autographed broadside here.

The book mentioned in the interview are here.

Brian Alfred is an artist, musician, and curator based out of Brooklyn, and has shown his work internationally for the past seventeen years. Alfred is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the New York Foundation of the Arts Inspiration Award, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

This is the first of two interviews with Brian, the second interview can be found by clicking here.

He is an alumnus of Yale, Skowhegan, and Penn State. His work is in the collections of institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Alfred is also the creator and host of the Sound & Vision podcast, which features conversations with contemporary artists and musicians.

Flatiron​ 2018

 

Central Park 2017

Michelle Charles at Jo Watanabe studio Brooklyn NY circa 2001 (Medium: Photograms Scale: 16"x20" Title: Glasses of Milk 2001)

Michelle Charles is an artist who whose practice centers on painting and drawing, while also including cameraless photographs, films, and videos.

After residing in the U.S. for almost two decades, she returned in 2001 to her native London, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been collected by such institutions as the British Museum; the Wellcome Trust, London; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; and the Jerome Foundation, Minneapolis. She has received awards and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, The Arts Council of England, the Wellcome Trust, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

The Book she mentioned was published by Yale University Press, The Shape of Time.

An 8 minute mini documentary that outlines the work and archiving the work in New York and London, click here.

Information on the exhibit, ON THE PERIPHERY OF VISION, mentioned in the interview is here. It opens on June 27th at Jane Lombard Gallery.

Crystal Ball Photogram (Series 2) 16”x20” 2012/2013

Crystal Ball Work On Paper (Series 2) Scale: 22”x30” Medium: Ink on Paper Date: 2012

Photo Credit: Ingrid Pape-Sheldon

Barbara Earl Thomas is a writer and visual artist. Drawing on her personal history between the American south and the Pacific Northwest, Thomas incorporates themes of people and their rituals with the land, foregrounding the a mythologized, metaphorical sense of place as operating between a geographical and spiritual location. Thomas’ builds tension filled narratives through abstracted papercuts and prints, placing silhouetted figures within almost mythological landscapes. Thomas’s site-specific sculptural practice expands these forms into space; her public sculptures and large-scale installations incorporate light, space and location into her dramatic landscapes and scenographies.

Thomas’ works are included in, among others, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, in addition to Washington State and Seattle City public collections. She is the recipient of the City of Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award for Cultural Ambassador, the Artist Trust Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award, and the The Stranger Genius Award for excellence in the arts. Thomas has  lectured on arts and culture as well as serving as a  social and cultural activist who was instrumental in the creation of the Northwest African American Museum, where she served as its executive director from 2008 to 2012. She received her BA and MFA from the University of Washington School of Art.

Thomas is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY.

Derailed, Cut Tyvek and rag construction paper, 36 x 48 inches, 2018, Photo Credit: Spike Mafford

Power Down, Cut Tyvek and rag construction paper, 36 x 68 inches, 2018 Photo Credit: Spike Mafford

Natasha Ria El-Scari is a poet, performer, writer, Cave Canem fellow, 2016 Ragdale Residency recipient and educator for over a decade. Her poetry, academic papers, and personal essays have been published in anthologies, literary and online journals.  She has opened for and introduced many great writers, singers and activists, and has been featured at a host of universities and venues nationwide.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Natasha has a BA from Jackson State University and a MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Natasha’s Black Feminist approach is reflected in her writing, poetry and performance pieces. Once asked in an interview what makes her unique she replied, “…most people lie to themselves, but I like to reveal myself.”

In 2015 Natasha released her first book, Screaming Times (Spartan Press, 2015). Of her work, critic and poet Denise Low writes, “Poems lift off the page, almost reading themselves. Unlike some performance poetry, her words translate well to the printed page.” Her second book, The Only Other (Main Street Rag, 2016) dives into the taboo voice of the other woman. Natasha’s CDs, DragonButterFirefly (2006), This is Love… (2010), CuddleComplex (2016) and DVD Live at the Blue Room (2015) display how Natasha connects with any crowd with maternal warmth and unrelenting honesty.

This mother of two teenagers is also the founder and curator of Black Space Black Art, an organization created to promote the exhibition of African American visual arts and businesses. She is also the founder and curator of the El-Scari Harvey Art Gallery, a small gallery who focuses on exhibiting marginalized artists. For book purchases, details and booking: www.natasharia.com

Mildred Beltré is a Brooklyn based artist, mother and activist working in print, drawing and participatory politically engaged practice, to explore facets of social change. She is interested and implicated in, political movements and their associated social relations and structures.  Using text and the body her most recent work involves looking at revolutionary theory and how it is animated and experienced in the day to day.

 

Beltré’s selected exhibitions include the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; The International Print Center New York; Load of Fun Gallery, Baltimore, MD; Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA; Projecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hollar Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; Brun Leglise Gallery, Paris France, among others.  Her work is included in the Special Collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN among others.

She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Apex Art, BRIC, Lower East Side Printshop, Vermont Studio Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute.  She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Brooklyn Foundation and the Rema Hort Foundation, among others.

Beltré is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, an ongoing socially engaged collaborative art project in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that addresses gentrification and community building through art-making.

Leonardo Bravo is an artist, educator, and curator. He is the Director of Education and Public Programs with the Palm Springs Art Museum where he oversees partnership development and program implementation with school districts in the Coachella Valley and the development of new participatory audience engagement projects. He is also the founder of Big City Forum, an interdisciplinary, social practice and curatorial research project that brings attention to emergent practices across design, architecture, and the arts. It provides an ongoing exploration of the intersections between these creative disciplines and new ways of knowledge making within the context of public space and social change. Leonardo Bravo received his MFA from the University of Southern California and his BFA from Otis College of Art & Design

Leonardo Bravo's paintings draw upon the language of modernist geometric abstraction depicting complex structures with vibrant colors that touch upon a sacred geometry suggestive of cosmic energies and states of transmutation. These works take their cues from a variety of sources including Bauhaus master weavers Gunta Stolzl and Ani Albers, the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the works of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, and traditional South American woven tapestries. Inherent in these structures is the visual tension suggested by the relationship of each color form to the other, and the way in which negative space becomes a counterpoint to each fixed form. The complexity of these structures suggest an architecture of time and space in which forms build, layer, and rub up against each other, emanating new relationships and offering pathways to limitless possibilities, questions, and complexities.

Born in Santiago, Chile, Leonardo Bravo earned his BFA from OTIS Institute of Art & Design and MFA from the University of Southern California.

Kukulkan, 2018, gouache on paper

Olmeca, 2018, gouache on paper

An Interior Biography - by DM Simons

Images and words are the stuff of history spilling into clichés. It is the cliché not the image, not the picture that reverberates, that echoes the traffic of history, the freighted footprint of our existence. The mining of the cliché, excavating it as representation, as picture—co-opting it, infusing it with an urgent agency.

Revitalizing it's tenants—history, popularity, repetition, myth—rents the cliché as we understand it, and it's purpose outside and separate from comfort of it's couching not as familiar or non threatening but edgy unsure, captivating. With use the cliché becomes it's cliché.

Using images, be it photographs or film stills (Still-life) tells a better story or at least an interesting one. The manipulation of fragments, of feelings, of thoughts rent mute is the gist of our interior selves as story. Pictures, singularly or in juxtaposition with others act like a mise en scene. It is not what is seen but what is suggested that is the condition, the echo of it's own cliché. A clarity of intent obscured, filtered, suggests an enigmatic reading. Images occupy the fragile working place of memory/imagination. Agitating this cleavage between thought and action develops the inchoate into something like an identity, like an understanding though fleeting. My work is a representation of a representation, an acknowledgement of the cliché and sharing with the past, with the present and future.

Sol’Sax was born in Kings County Hospital in 1969. In the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s Sol’Sax grew up in Bushwick on Halsey Street except for four years to attend High school in Leonia New Jersey in the eighties. He still lives and works in Brooklyn N.Y.

He received a BFA with honors from The Cooper Union in 1992 and a MFA with honors from Yale School of Art in 1995, he also studied abroad in Berlin the year the Berlin wall fell. Since 1990 Sol’Sax has produced objects, images and performances that fuse African-American cultural heritages like Hip Hop, House, Reggae, Soul, Jazz, Blues and spirituals with traditional African religions like Yoruba, Congo, Mende, Akan and Fon.

Over the last twenty years Sol’Sax has received some notable honors in sculpture. In 2005 he received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2004 he received Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2001 he was awarded a public commission by MTA arts for transit and designed 16 permanent glass panel designs in The Halsey Street Subway station. In 1996 he was a resident at Socrates Sculpture Park. He was the first artist to be given a solo show at Rush Arts and has exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, The Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, P.S. 1 MoMA, Sculpture Center and the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles among other venues.

Sol'Sain't Rob Hurt Jah'Son, Installation with guitar, clothing, mannequin, leather, wood, iron, Beaded necklace for Elegba. 10ft x 6ft x 4ft 2018

“Sol’Sain’t Rob Hurt Jah’Son” Digital Photo Montage on paper 2014

Statement from the artist, Sol Sax - Robert Johnson the father of Rock N Roll credited his new musical style with a trip to the crossroads where Papa ‘Legba gave him a Mojo hand. His Blues songs were a medicine from heaven bought by Elegba an Angel not a Devil. African retentions in the USA were associated with evil and devil worship by a European Supremacist society that had twisted many black people even to this day with fear and hatred for African Culture. Sol’Sain’t Rob Hurt Jah’Son wears the face of the Orisha Elegba the original rock star.

Elegba certainly is not the devil. In fact there is no such concept as the devil in Yoruba culture. The Yoruba are Monotheistic Animists that believe God called Olodumare is the singular sum of creation so is beyond all conflict. Good God Almighty is at peace with the whole of creation. It is just this fact that Elegba celebrates as he flips the game and makes the reviled, revered and the rich, paupers. Elegba is often called a trickster for turning the tables like this but in fact Papa legba is just pointing out the equality that should be in society to begin with. From The Blues to hip hop there is a string of young men and women bought up on Street culture, Elegba culture where Bad equals good and the low down dirtiest gets the most respect. In Yoruba culture when a person dies they spend eternity with they’re Angel. In this work Sol’Sain’t Rob Hurt Jah’Son is Elegba ready to sell Mojo hands to the next generation of the Street Kids.