Interviews by Brainard Carey

William J. Simmons, photo by Whitney Lasker

William J. Simmons is Provost Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Southern California and Mellon Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society.

Simmons did his BA at Harvard University and spent three years at the Graduate Center, CUNY and taught at the City College of New York.

His criticism and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and books internationally.

He was interviewed a second time, a year after this interview and that one can be found by clicking here.

 

 

 

Mare Blocker

Mare Blocker has been making limited edition and unique books since 1979 and established The MKimberly Press in 1984.

She earned a BFA in Ceramic Sculpture at the University of Washington and an MFA at the University of Idaho. Her work can be found in over 85 public collections and museums including The Victoria and Albert, The University of Washington Special Collections, The Getty and The Library of Congress.

Mare has been a Library Fellow award winner from the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, DC and a Sally R Bishop Artist in Residence at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

She is the recent President of the Book Arts Guild, a regional organization for book artists and enthusiasts, on the Board of Directors for the College Book Art Association, and currently teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

Starting upper l to r: Denise Carbone, Jessica Spring, lower l to r: Julie Chen, Thomas Helmers

Upper l to r: Nan Robkin, Carl Youngmann, lower l to r: Mare Blocker, Jasper Sortun

Based in Berlin, Stefan Römer, works as a de-conceptual artist; his works and essays are widely published.

He teaches as professor for art and art-theory and received the Award for Art Criticism by the Working Commitee of German Kunstvereine (AdKV) 2000.

Quenton Baker is a poet and educator from Seattle. His current focus is anti-blackness and the afterlife of slavery. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Vinyl, Apogee, Pinwheel, The James Franco Review, and Cura.

He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the 2016 James W. Ray Venture Project award and the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. He is the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016).

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the new novel Everything is Borrowed (New Door Books), called “utterly absorbing” by the writer Robin Black, and the co-editor of Who Will Speak for America?, a literary anthology in response to the American political crisis, forthcoming in June 2018 (Temple University Press). He is the fiction review editor of Cleaver Magazine, as well as a prolific book critic—and National Book Critics Circle member—focusing on literary fiction and works in translation. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Rumpus, Tablet Magazine, LitHub, The Millions, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications.

As a keen observer of cities and lived places, Popkin has often turned his eye to the layers of history and life in his own city. He’s the founding co-editor of the Hidden City Daily, a web magazine that covers architecture, design, planning, and preservation in Philadelphia, and the co-author of the 2017 work of non-fiction, Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City (Temple University Press). He’s also the senior writer and story editor of the multi-part documentary film series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” for which his work has been recognized with several Emmy awards. He was the guest architecture critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 2011-12.

Popkin’s first novel, Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), is a mediation on originality and influence in art. It reimagines the life and tragic death of the first great American genre painter, John Lewis Krimmel. Lion and Leopard was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book of the Year Award, and novelist Ken Kalfus described it as “historical literary fiction at its most engaging.”

Lion and Leopard followed two books of literary non-fiction, the 2002 Song of the City(Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books) and the 2008 essay collection, The Possible City (Camino Books).

Popkin has been a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow and a writer-in-residence at Philadelphia University and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

Kirsten Hassenfeld working at Dieu Donne paper mill

Kirsten Hassenfeld moved to New York in 1999 and has been living and working in Brooklyn ever since. She focused on making sculptural works from paper until 2012, when recycled materials and objects became her primary medium. Originally a printmaker, she most recently has turned her attention to large-scale woven wall works.

Hassenfeld received a Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2014 and has also been a Pollock-Krasner grant recipient, and a grantee of the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has been a studio resident at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio, Smack Mellon Studio, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been shown at such venues as the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York, and PS1/MoMa.

"Papaver" (2018, salvaged textiles with mixed media, approximately 8 ft in diameter)

"Charms" (2005, paper with mixed media, dimensions variable) shown here installed at the Hudson River Museum.

Anthony Haden-Guest, photograph by Jessica Craig-Martin

Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He was born in Paris, grew up in London and has long lived in New York. He won a New York Emmy for writing and narrating a PBS program about the coming of the affluent immigrants – aka Eurotrash - to Manhattan.

His books include The Paradise Program (William Morrow), Bad Dreams (Macmillan); True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World (Grove Atlantic); The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night (Morrow). He has published two books of cartoons and verse, The Chronicles of Now and In The Mean Time, and his cartoons have been shown at many venues including Deitch Projects in New York and Manolis Projects in Miami. He is curating a show which will open in New York at a date to be announced. The Further Chronicles of Now, a CD of Haden-Guest reading his verse, produced by Keith Patchel, can be found on his website, TheRealAnthonyHadenGuest, as can some essential teeshirts.

Front and back cover of the CD, The Further Chronicles of Now.

By Anthony Haden-Guest

by Anthony Haden-Guest

Michael Broder is the author of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is the founding publisher and managing editor of Indolent Books  a small nonprofit poetry press in Brooklyn, championing underrepresented voices writing innovative, provocative, and risky poetry addressing racial, social, and economic justice themes.

His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Assaracus, BLOOM, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, OCHO, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm Creative, 2004), ed. Rudy Kikel; My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (Terrace Books, 2009), ed. Michael Montlack; Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010), eds. Kelly Norman Ellis and ML Hunter; Divining Divas: 50 Gay Men on Their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), ed. Michael Montlack; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), edited by Joel Allegretti; and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York (Artepoetica Press Inc., 2015), eds. Carlos Aguasaco and Yrene Santos. He edited Poems in the Aftermath: An Anthology from the 2016 Presidential Transition Period (Indolent Books, 2018).

His essay "The Most Obscene Satires: A Queer/Camp Approach to Juvenal 2, 6, and 9” appears in the volume Ancient Obscenities: Their Nature and Use in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (University of Michigan Press, 2015), eds.Dorota Dutsch and Ann Suter. He holds a BA in comparative literature from Columbia University (magna cum laude); an MA in classics from The Graduate Center, CUNY; an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from NYU; and a PhD in classics from The Graduate Center, CUNY. His doctoral dissertation, Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship and Camp Aesthetics in Juvenal’s Ninth Satire, is available for free download from CUNY Academic Works. 

He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of feral and stray cats.

Sharon Arnold is a Seattle-based writer, independent curator, and the founder of Bridge Productions. They graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornish College of the Arts in 2006. Since 2009, they’ve written for multiple local and national publications, curated various institutions and galleries, served as the video interviewer for the regionally prestigious Neddy Artist Award Exhibition from 2013-17 (and served as the curator from 2014-15), and they were one of four curators for the inaugural 2015 landmark event, Out of Sight— an annual survey of over one hundred Pacific Northwest artists which ran alongside the Seattle Art Fair for three years. They were featured as The Gallerist on the 2014 City Arts Future List, and were a Seattle Mayor's Arts Award nominee for Cultural Ambassador in 2017.

Arnold's practice strives to create accessible entry points, public engagement, and critical discourse within and beyond art-world audiences. This includes a focus on the exploration of new modes of exhibition space, alternative currencies and exchange, sustained patronage, and viable arts ecosystems.

In 2008, they launched Dimensions Variable, an online journal dedicated to approachable visual arts journalism. Inspired by welcoming conversations about contemporary art across the internet, they sought to create an environment of open and engaging dialogue across audiences. Bridge Productions launched two years later as an online gallery, featuring curated box sets designed to connect mainstream audiences to art and literary communities. In 2012 the project expanded to a brick-and-mortar space focusing on collaborative process-based work, talks, and projects by artists, curators, writers, and performers.

Sharon occasionally writes for Sharon Butler’s Two Coats of Paint, as well as Seattle publications City Arts Magazine and Crosscut. They are also a published author in 'Suyama Space', a compendium of writings and reviews spanning the twenty-year lifespan of this significant and historical Seattle exhibition space, published in autumn of 2017.

Patrick Kelly, In Time, installation view of his 2016 exhibition of graphite works on paper

Kat Larson, carefull, installation view of her 2018 exhibition of video and installation

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence.

Bök is currently working on The Xenotext — a project that requires him to encipher a poem into the genome of a bacterium capable of surviving in any inhospitable environment.

Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Charles Darwin University.

Gentle on Tokyo Snow

"Protein 13" from The Xenotext

The Nocturne of Orpheus