Interviews by Brainard Carey

Artist Portrait by Alexander Bedder

Anthony Cudahy (b.1989, Fort Myers, Florida, US) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cudahy is a figurative painter whose tender scenes reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gestures. Personal and poetic, Cudahy's figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes. At once dark and luminous, Cudahy's paintings often have a phosphorescent quality to them, as though they are lit from within. For the artist, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential - the thick textures, light airy space, patterning and delicate marks are all active in the story he is creating. Alongside painting, Cudahy makes incredibly detailed colored pencil drawings, in an all-consuming process of mark making. Unlike his paintings which transform throughout the making, the challenging medium calls for the compositions to be decided beforehand. Cudahy devotedly collects images. His collection draws upon film stills, snapshots of his partner, ancient sites, hagiographic icons and the photography of his great uncle, Kenny Gardner (which his husband, Ian Lewandowski has been compiling). Cudahy returns to his collected images time and time again, for they have a potent quality, which sparks ideas and concepts for the works.

Anthony Cudahy, Dowsing (studio), 2024, Oil on linen, 243.8 x 182.9 cm | 96 x 72 in

Anthony Cudahy, Death instinct (for Bergman, for Tarkovsky), 2024, Oil on linen, 121.9 x 304.8 cm | 48 x 120 in

Anthony Cudahy, Ian and Alex, 2024, Oil on linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm | 72 x 72 in

Pieter Schoolwerth. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.

Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970, St. Louis, Missouri) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He works in a multitude of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation, and video.

Since graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in 1994, Schoolwerth has exhibited nationally and internationally with notable solo shows at Kunstverein Hannover, Thread Waxing Space, New York; Greene Naftali, New York; Grand Palais, Paris; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin and Petzel, New York; Twelvetengallery, Chicago.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Sadie Coles, London among others. From 2003–2013 Schoolwerth ran Wierd Records, and the Wierd Party in the Lower East Side of NYC, releasing music by 46 bands and producing over 500 live music, DJ, and performance art events. This is his third solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery

Pieter Schoolwerth, Texture Tile #6 (Noone Believes Anything, and They Believe Everything), 2023. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.

Pieter Schoolwerth, OpenWorld (Supporting Actor #12), 2024. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.

Below: Pieter Schoolwerth and Phil Vanderhyden, Supporting Actor, 2024, 4K video with sound by Aaron Dilloway. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.

Torey Akers is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College.

Her work has been featured at arts venues across the country, most recently in a solo show at A.I.R. Gallery in Dumbo, NY.

 

 

Install image of "Besotted", a solo show at A.I.R. Gallery

Tzipporah, 2024, 38" x 19", ink on paper with sealant, cardboard, velour, sewing pins, mirrors, ribbons

Untitled, 2024, 12" x 5", printed chiffon

Sasha Sykes (b.1976) is an Irish artist with a research-based practice in rural Ireland, at the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. Her artworks and furniture pieces are hand made using acrylics and resins to explore, manipulate, and challenge the material language of the natural world through the embedding of plants, flowers, algae and fungi she collects from the landscape. Her architectural background infuses her work with a sense of rigor, and informs her strong approach to form and composition, exploring notions of history and usefulness in a 21st century context.

The artist has worked all over the world including London (1999-2003) and New York (2003-2006) and has now settled in her native County Carlow where she lives with her husband and three children and works in a strawbale studio next door. Known for her use of hand-cast resins, embedding found objects and collected organic materials, Sykes tells stories of our landscape and social history. Her work is found in numerous private and public collections such as the National Museum of Ireland, The Office of Public Works, The Department of Foreign Affairs and The Department of Culture & Heritage, as well as prestigious hotels and corporate headquarters: from Carton House to the Bank of America. The New York Times stated that Sykes’ art is ‘for people who live in the city but dream of the country’. Noted honors include Gyre, which had critical success at the PAD fair in London, and being invited to exhibit in the ‘Best of Europe’ at the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity’s 2018 ‘Homo Faber’ show in Venice, and receiving an inaugural Fellowship from the foundation in 2023.

Blooom! Screen, 2014, Resin, acrylic & garden flora, 63 x 79 inches

Verdiculture Cocktail Tables, 2023, Resin, Acrylic & plant material 21 x 16 inches and 18 x 18 inches

Blue Hydrangea Console, 2023,, Resin, Blue Hydrangeas,, 34 x 10 x 33 inches

Louise P. Sloane (b. 1952) has been active as an abstract painter since 1974, infusing her works with personal text that motivates her own experimentation. The visual language of her paintings continues the legacy of reductive and minimalist ideologies, while celebrating color and the human inclination towards mark making. Sloane’s detail-oriented works are typically divided into rectangles or squares. The quadrangle has become a repetitive motif, often centrally featured within the context of a grid. In contrast with her iterative geometries, it is important to Sloane that the works present themselves as human made objects. Thick paint constructs repetitive handmade patterns, the physical motion of her brush strokes revealing the humanity of her practice. The surface holds Sloane’s signature extrusions. Painstakingly written and overwritten, Sloane’s inscribed text is a form of private meditation. Turned into a relief, and abstracted through color blocking, the text is interpreted through its physicality, not its meaning. Contrasting color choices intensify the dimensionality of the surface texture. Sloane uses color straight-up, without mixing. Blending takes place optically, as one color reacts to the other, red against green, or blue against yellow. The elements of mark-making, color, and geometry compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, unifying her interests in the form of the square.

Sloane’s work has been featured in numerous institutional collections, including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Cornell Museum of Art and History. Sloane’s works are in the permanent collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Nassau County Museum of Art, Yeshiva University Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (the Sidney and Francis Lewis Collection).

Louise P. Sloane Hot House, 2013 Signed, titled, and dated on the verso Acrylic paint and paste on aluminum panel 56 x 48 inches.

Louise P. Sloane Patrician Blue, 1999 Signed, titled, and dated on the verso Acrylic paint and paste on panel 32 x 32 inches.

Cool Tones, 1976, Signed, titled, and dated on the verso, Oil, paraffin, and pure pigment powders on, canvas, 54 x 48 inches.

Howard Fishman is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, where he has published essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture. His bylines have also appeared in the The Boston Glove, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Artforum, San Francisco Chronicle, Mojo, The Village Voice, Jazziz, and Salmagundi. His play, A Star Has Burnt My Eye, was a New York Times “Critics Pick.” As a performing songwriter and bandleader, Fishman has toured internationally as a headlining artist for over two decades. He has released eleven albums to date, and is the producer of the album Connie’s Piano Songs: The Art Songs of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse. His book, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, was shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of 2023.

To Anyone Who Ever Asks

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life.

This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense—a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?

Connie Converse, Schenectady, NY, 1955

Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.

But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.

Credits for Talkin' Like You and Birthday song excerpt: The Musick Group.

Age of Noon: Produced by Howard Fishman.

Jen DeLuna in her studio

Jen DeLuna (b. 1999), a Filipino and Colombian-American painter, explores the feminine through the lenses of affinity and vulnerability.

DeLuna uses found and family photographs as the basis for her work, capturing the tension between movement and stillness, personal and public.

Her figurative works in Dust and Sweat and Feigning Grace are wrapped in blurry hazes yet pierce through the surface with shining highlights, creating a simultaneously uncanny and invasive impression. Her mystifying and alluring style builds visual and emotional tension in her works, calling into question their own viewership.

Jen DeLuna | The Soft Animal of Your Body, 2024, Oil on canvas | 24 x 24 in.

Jen DeLuna | Etiquette, 2024, Oil on canvas | 12 x 12 in.

Jen DeLuna | Timid Repetitions, 2024, Oil on canvas | 36 x 36 in.

Sarah Brenneman (b.1975, Middletown, OH) lives and works in West Orange, New Jersey. She received her degrees in painting from Columbus College of Art (BFA) and Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA).

She has had several solo shows including with Garvey|Simon at Artisan Lofts (New York, NY -  a two-person exhibition with Gary Petersen 2024); Gold Scopophilia (Montclair, NJ) in 2020 and with Jeff Bailey Gallery (New York, NY) in 2004, 2006 and 2011. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally most recently with La Grange Gallery, (Reims, France) in 2022.

She has been awarded residencies with Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Millay Colony of the Arts, Chashama, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Liquitex-Just Imagine Residency and VCCA, Moulin à Nef, Auvillar France. Brenneman’s paintings are included in many  private and corporate collections including The Aspen Contemporary Art Collection, Citigroup, Cleveland Clinic, Sprint and The Progressive Corporation.

Sarah Brenneman,  Dove, 2024 Acrylic on Canvas 60.0h x 48.0w in.

Sarah Brenneman Rust Register 2024, acrylic and watercolor on panel, 20 x 16 in

Sarah Brenneman,  Open But Empty, 2023 watercolor on paper 9.0h x 6.0w in.

Elias Wessel in front of his work series “Nostalgia” at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) New York.

Elias Wessel is an artist whose conceptual work moves between photography, painting and site specific installations with moving images and sound. He has had exhibitions at 1014 New York (formerly known as Goethe House); Palais Beauharnais, Paris; Art Collection of the Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin; NRW-Forum, Dusseldorf; Art Basel, Basel; Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern (mpk); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei among many others.

His works are included in public and private collections such as the Spallart Art Collection, Salzburg; AXA Art Collection, Cologne; and the German Parliament’s Art Collection (Kunstsammlung des Deutschen Bundestages), Berlin. Recent publications include Textfetzen (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2022) and Aesthetics of Conflict (Verlag Kettler, 2023). He is based in New York City since 2008 with regular stays in Germany.

Picture Theory: Elias Wessel, “It’s Complicated” (2019-2022), Installation View, 2024

Elias Wessel It’s Complicated – No. 2, 2019 Color photograph, archival pigment print Tabloid Edition: 24 1/2 x 18 5/8 in (framed) Original: 80 1/8 x 60 5/8 in (framed) Is Possibly Art – No. 2, 2021 Audio: 1:42 min

Elias Wessel It’s Complicated – No. 5, 2019 Color photograph, archival pigment print Tabloid Edition: 20 5/8 x 18 5/8 in (framed) Original: 67 5/8 x 60 5/8 in (framed) Is Possibly Art – No. 5, 2021 Audio: 1:59 min

Jack Arthur Wood in his studio. Photo by Bradley Marshall

Jack Arthur Wood Jr. is a visual artist, writer, curator and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens. Wood studied at Guilford College, in Greensboro, NC, receiving a BA in printmaking in 2012, and earned an MFA in printmaking from Texas A&M University—Corearned Corpus Christi in 2017.

He has been a resident at The Skowhegan pus School of Painting & Sculpture, The Wassaic Project, The Jentel Foundation, Little Bear Hill, and Tiger Lily Press. Wood has had solo/two-person presentations at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; My Pet Ram, New York, NY; Conduit Gallery, Ridgewood, NY; Paradice Palase, Brooklyn, NY; Not Gallery, Austin TX; The Weil Gallery, Corpus Christi, TX; Hudson & Jones Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; The Bakery, Vancouver, BC; and The Clay Street Press, CinThe Cincinnati, OHcinnati, OH.

His work has been exhibited at Chart, New York, NY; . Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; 5-50 Gallery, Queens, NY;Green House Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Field of Play Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; O’Flaherty’s, New York, NY; The Ekru Project,KanBrooklyn, Kansas City, MO; No Place Gallery, Coulmbus, OH; Heaven Gallery, sas Chicago, IL; Pause OFF Gallery, Milford, OH; The Wassaic ProjChicago, Project, Wassaic, NY; Flatbed Press, Austin, TX; and Deanna Evans ect, Projects, Brooklyn, NY. Wood has recently curated exhibitions at Thomas VanDyke Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

Jack Arthur Wood, The Multiplicative Index of Metropolitan Contact Paths, 2024, acrylic, fabrics, glue, and paper on muslin, 60 x 72 in

Jack Arthur Wood, Immolator, 2024 acrylic, fabrics, and glue on canvas 60 x 52 in 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Jack Arthur Wood, Open City (Channel Changer), 2024 acrylic, fabrics, and glue on canvas 54 x 40 in 137.2 x 101.6 cm