Interviews by Brainard Carey

Melissa in Cezanne's studio, photo by Svetlana

Melissa Meyer received both a BS and an MA from New York University.

She is represented by Lennon Weinberg Gallery in New York. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland.

Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions—one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York; Texas Gallery, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York and the National Academy of Design in New York, an organization of which she is a member.

She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and currently in fabrication is an eight by fourteen-foot ceramic mural for the new U.S. embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum and many other public and private collections across the United States.

Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Recently, she was a resident at the MacDowell Colony and the Bogliasco Foundation outside of Genoa, Italy. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, as well as at the Vermont Studio Center. With Miriam Schapiro, Meyer authored the seminal and widely reprinted essay "Femmage," first published in the 1978 issue of Heresies magazine.

Melissa Meyer, J.Mulligan 80" x 78"

Melissa Meyer, Waste Not Want Not 15 3/4 x 12

Max Strang is the founding principal of [STRANG] Architecture, a Florida-based firm acclaimed for its site-specific and climate-driven designs.

Through his work and discourse, Strang has consistently underscored the ongoing relevance and importance of regional modernism to an international audience.

In 2016, he was elected to the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and in 2013 he received the Silver Medal from the Miami Chapter of the AIA, the highest honor the organization can bestow.

He was raised in a Mid-Century Modern home designed by Gene Leedy of the Sarasota School of Architecture.[1] Strang is a graduate of the University of Florida and Columbia University. Prior to establishing his own firm, he worked in the architecture offices of Gene Leedy, SHoP Architects and Zaha Hadid.

Learn more about [STRANG] Architecture in this book and this article.

The book mentioned in the interview about Rockhouse, is here.

Completed in 2004, Strang’s “Rockhouse” adapts the concepts of Paul Rudolph’s “Umbrella House” to the local context of Miami’s jungle-like Coconut Grove neighborhood.

The award-winning Ballast Trail Residence, designed by [STRANG] in the Florida Keys, is raised substantially above the ground in anticipation of hurricane storm surges and rising seas.

Brice Brown was born in Louisville, KY, and currently lives in New York City and Milton, PA. He received a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Pratt Institute, and has also studied at the Chautauqua School of Art.

He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, NPR, and The Village Voice, among others. He has held residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, and has been a visiting artist/lecturer at Bucknell University, Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University, Williams College and Drew University.

From 2006-2010 Brown founded and edited, with Trevor Winkfield, The Sienese Shredder, an annual arts journal bringing together visual arts, poetry and fiction. In 2015, Brown and Winkfield regrouped to found the annual arts journal Tether. He was a regular art critic for the New York Sun newspaper from 2006-2009, and for City Arts newspaper from 2009-2010. Brown has also contributed essays for exhibition catalogues, including Chuck Webster, Louise Kruger, Barbara Takenaga, and Carl Plansky.

His work in public collections include the International College Center, Speed Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. Brown also curates Front Window Gallery, an alternative exhibition space located in the window of a 19th-century townhouse in Milton, PA. In 2017, he launched Milton Art Bank (MAB), an alternative/experimental artist-run space in Milton, PA, located in a converted bank building. Brown has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Evergreen Museum in Baltimore, MD, in 2020.

The book mentioned in the interview is  The Sight of Death.

"SOS"      Cast paper and sound element      Dimensions variable      2017

"I Looked Down I Realized I Had A Body"      Three-channel video with sound      Dimensions variable      2016

photo: ethan hoffman-sadka

Paul McMahon (b. 1950, San Diego, CA) is a musician, artist, writer, producer, curator, minister, and part-time mailman. From 1972-75, he organized over 30 conceptual and performance art shows at Project Inc., his independently run temporary art space in Cambridge, MA. He has played in bands such as Daily Life and A Band, performed parodic routines in shows such as I’m With Stupid at the Kitchen (NYC, 1977), and duelled one-liner jokes dressed as a giant potato on national TV against Soupy Sales.

McMahon’s work has been shown in select group and solo exhibitions including Me at 3A Gallery (NYC, 2015); 44 at 321 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY, 2015); The White Room at White Columns (NYC, 1987); The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 curated by Douglas Eklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC, 2009); All Suffering Soon To End! at Callicoon Fine Arts Gallery (Callicoon, NY, 2009); Stairway to Heaven at Susan Inglett Gallery (NYC, 2010); and Made in Rosendale at Roos Arts (Rosendale, NY, 2011).

McMahon has released ten albums of original music, published two books of humor, and performed as the Rock’n’Roll Therapist since 1980. He received a fellowship in New Genres from the National Endowment for the arts in 1990 and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College acquired the Project Inc. archive in 2010. McMahon graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Pomona College in 1972 and received an MS in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1975.

He had a Kundalini rising experience in 1988, and in 1993 the Goddess spoke inside his head and told him that he is King of the Universe. He is the proprietor of the Mothership, an everything center in Woodstock, NY, where he lives and works with his twin girls.

installation view on untitled dot painting  20x16"  acrylic on wood  2006 (series begun in 1978)

bedstock   installation shot of southern half of gallery space with study area

Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and received his MFA from Columbia University in New York City. Olujimi’s work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His solo exhibitions include; A Life in Pictures, at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Solastalgia, at Cue Arts Foundation, and Wayward North at Art in General. His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and Mass MoCA. Internationally his work has been featured at The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok;  Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong among others. Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. He has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions including A Blade of Grass, The Jerome Foundation, and MTA Arts & Design for the City of New York.  Newspapers and journals such as The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times and Modern Painters have written about Olujimi’s artwork. Monographs on his past project include Walk the Plank (2006), Winter in America (in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, 2006), The Lost Rivers Index (2007),Wayward North (2012), and Zulu Time (2017).

Mercy Doesn’t Grow On Trees, 2016 Wood, glass, hair, gold leaf, ratchet straps 150 x 48 x 30 inches

I Knew You Before You Was Born, 2016 Wood, brass, glass walking canes, foot stool, faux pearls 163 x 84 x 16 inches

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle

Beth Stephens, Ph.D. has been a filmmaker, performance artist, activist and educator for three decades. Stephens is the Founding Director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at UC Santa Cruz where she is the Department Chair and Professor of Art. In the last five years she has produced two new feature documentary films, and has shown many video installations in galleries and museums.

Annie Sprinkle has been creating multi-media projects about sexuality for four decades. She was the first adult film star to earn a Ph.D. She bridged into art and toured her one-woman theater pieces to many countries. Her new book, she co-authored with Beth Stephens, Explorer’s Guide to Planet Orgasm—For Every Body, is all about orgasm and only orgasm.

Together Stephens and Sprinkle are founders of the “ecosex movement” where they aim to make the environmental movement more sexy, fun and diverse. They were official Documenta 14 artists (2017) where their new film, “Water Makes Us Wet—An Ecosexual Adventure” premiered, plus they had visual art exhibit and  gave Ecosex Walking Tours. Currently they’re completing a book about their work, “Assuming the Ecosexual Position” for University of Minnesota Press.

Watch the trailer to their film, Water Makes Us Wet, below.

Water Makes Us Wet - - Trailer from Elizabeth Stephens on Vimeo.

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle

Shana McCaw is an artist-curator with over 18 years of experience researching, teaching, and working in the Milwaukee area. She is currently Senior Curator at the Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Art Museums in Milwaukee, WI. McCaw’s past projects include curating and directing the Northwestern Mutual Gallery at Cardinal Stritch University; assisting in the design and installation of five exhibitions in partnership with the Chipstone Foundation at the Milwaukee Art Museum; teaching 3-D design, sculpture, and domestic field study courses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Cardinal Stritch University; and developing an internationally recognized art practice with her husband and collaborator, Brent Budsberg. McCaw and Budsberg received the Mary Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Established category in 2008 and 2014. They were also recently awarded residencies in Wendover, UT with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (2012) and in Death Valley, CA with the Goldwell Open Air Museum (2013). McCaw earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1999. She currently lives in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and her studio is also based there.

Shana McCaw’s recent curatorial projects include Carlos Hermosilla Alvarez and Colin Matthes: Echoing Concerns, All In: Photographs by Lois Bielefeld, Clandestine Possessions, and Family Time (recent work by James Pederson, Mariah Tate Klemens, and Jackson Hunt) at the Charles Allis Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI; Strata & Cipher (prints by Barbara Manger and sculpture by Richard Taylor) and Back to School (a group show) at the Villa Terrace Art Museum; the following six exhibitions curated for the Northwestern Mutual Art Gallery at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, WI: Midwest Field Reporters (recent collaborative work by Jenna Knapp, Zach Hill, and Kayle Karbowski); Digital Craft: Redesign, Remake, Reimagine (recent work by artist/designer Frankie Flood); Everyday Mysteries: Emily Belknap, Grant Gill, Jon Horvath (recent photography and sculpture); A Culture of Evil (recent work by Sarah Nitschke and Robin Assner); The Collection Project (a display case exhibition of collections amassed by local people); and New Histories and Old Futures: The Timeless Art of Story (backdrops and small works by Sue Lawton). Previous to these, she co-curated Gigantic at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN (2005), and Destination, a MARN production, in Milwaukee, WI (2003).

McCaw and Budsberg’s recent exhibitions of their personal work include The Sub-Suburban at the Suburban in Milwaukee, WI; The Cleft and Shimmering Hour at Portrait Society in Milwaukee, WI; The Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Living Rooms at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; and A Tenuous Framework at the Caestecker Art Gallery in Ripon, WI. They were also recently awarded “On Our Radar” status with the Creative Capital Foundation in New York, and their self-published book of photographs, titled States of Matter, is archived at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, CA, and has also been collected by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg Untitled Photograph 2016

Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg Detail of digital sketch for Skew (in production) Opening May 2018 for Sculpture Milwaukee

The Inhabitants Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg Film still from The Inhabitants (in production)

Bridget Talone is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Bridget is the author of the chapbooks In the Valley Made Personal (Small Anchor) and Sous Les Yeux (Catenary Press)

Her first full length collection, The Soft Life, is out with Wonder as of April 1st.

Neha Choksi by Hugo Glendinning

Neha Choksi (b. 1973, USA) works in Inglewood, California and in Bombay, India. Choksi received her BA in art and Greek from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, and MA in classics from Columbia University, in 2000.

Choksi works in multiple media, across disciplines and at times collaboratively and in unconventional settings to explore how we seek, experience and acknowledge losses and transformations in material, temporal and psychological terms.  Increasingly her work includes her own intellectual, cultural and social contexts.  She works by setting up simple situations and memorable interventions in the lives of everything--from a stone to a plant, from animal to self, from friends to institutions--disrupting logic to open a space for poetry, absurdity, humor, surprise and existential insight.

Her work has been exhibited or performed at Dhaka Art Summit (solo, 2018; group 2016); Manchester Art Gallery (solo, 2017); LAMOA at Occidental College, Los Angeles (solo, 2017); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (solo, 2017); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2017); Project 88, Mumbai (solos 2016, 2013, 2010, 2009, 2007); 20th Sydney Biennale (commission, 2016); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (solo, 2015); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (2013); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (3-person, 2012); Asia Pacific Triennial, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2012); Shanghai Biennale (2012); Wanås Foundation and Kristianstads Konsthall, Sweden (2012; the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale (2006); among others. She has upcoming exhibitions at Hammer Museum (biennial, 2018); 18th Street Arts Center (commission, 2018); University Art Museum, CSU Long Beach (solo, 2019). She was awarded the India Today Best New Media Artist of the Year Award (2017) and the designation of Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles DCA (2017/2018). She is on the editorial board of the Los Angeles-based arts journal, X-TRA. Her work is represented by Project 88, Mumbai.

The Book and letter Joshua Whitehead wrote that was mentioned in the interview.

Neha Choksi, Faith in friction, 2017. 7-channel 4K video installation transferred to HD, each channel with stereo sound, 36 min loop. As installed at the Manchester Art Gallery. All images courtesy the artist and Project 88.

Production stills from Faith in friction, 2017. 7-channel 4K video installation transferred to HD, each channel with stereo sound, 36 min loop. All images courtesy the artist and Project 88.

Neha Choksi, The Sun’s Rehearsal / In Memory of the Last Sunset, 2016. One image on wallpaper digitally generated by OmniCosm Studios (Hollywood); seven photographically generated images on wallpaper underneath; freestanding wall with cutout; curtain; activated by performance and interaction in a collaboration with dance artist Alice Cummins. Installation at Carriageworks, Sydney. Commissioned by the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai. Top Photograph: Neha Choksi. Bottom Photograph: Document Photography.

Igor Eškinja (Croatia, 1975.) live and work in Rijeka, Croatia. Eškinja constructs his architectonics of perception as ensembles of modesty and elegance. The artist “performs” the objects and situations, catching them in their intimate and silent transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional formal appearance. Using simple, inexpensive materials, such as adhesive tape or electric cables and unraveling them with extreme precision and mathematical exactitude within strict spatial parameters, Eskinja defines another quality that goes beyond physical aspects and enters the registers of the imaginative and the imperceptible.

Eškinja’s participated in various group exhibitions: Manifesta 7, Rovereto (2008); Complicity, Rena Bransten gallery, San Francisco (2009); 28 Grafični Biennale, Ljubljana (2009); Dirt, Wellcome foundation, London, (2011), Rearview Mirror, Power plant, Toronto, (2011); Inhabitants of generic places, Kunstforum, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art-Zagreb (2011), Ash and Gold – a world tour, Marta Herford, (2012); 2nd Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg, (2012); 8 ways to overcome space and time, Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade, (2013), T-ht nagrada, MSU, Zagreb (2016.), Every time a ear di soun – Dokumenta 14 program, Savvy contemporary, Berlin (2017), as well as solo exhibitons in: Project for unssuccesful gathering, Casino LuxembourgForum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg (2009.), Inhabitants of generic places, Kunstforum, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art-Zagreb (2011), The Day After, Federico Luger gallery, Milano, (2011); Interieur Captivant, MAC/VAL Museum, Vitry, (2012); Quixote, MUWA, Graz, (2014).

The book mentioned during the interview was Blameless, by Claudio Magris and Fox, from Dubravka Ugrešić

Ephemeropolis, 2016. Installation, digital prints on polyester Variable dimensions exhibition veiw, House of Arts, Usti and Labem, Czech Republic photo: Polak

Ephemeropolis, 2016. Installation, digital prints on polyester Variable dimensions exhibition veiw, House of Arts, Usti and Labem, Czech Republic photo: Polak