Interviews by Brainard Carey

Molly Hassler is an interdisciplinary artist, often embracing collaboration and primarily using drawing and fibers techniques to mine the complex relation between representation and identity as a queer person in the Midwest. Through printing, drawing, weaving and quilting, she is actively sewing up the past, literally and metaphorically mending. Her fine art practice rests most comfortably between peculiar three dimensional objecthood and semi-narrative works containing drawings and text that speak to the sweetness and trauma of queer and trans coming of age.

Hassler is a 2022 recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and 2021-2023 Springboard for the Arts: Rural Regenerator Fellowship. She has shown her work in exhibitions including Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York, The Jackson Dinsdale Art Center in Hastings, Nebraska as well as Portrait Society Gallery and Real Tinsel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Currently working as a teaching Artist in Residence with Lynden Sculpture Garden and Woodland Pattern Book Center, she carries out multiple community based projects in Milwaukee Public Schools.

The book mentioned at the end of the interview was Johnny Appleseed.

“I Keep My Feelings In My Chest”  Quilted Chest Binder;  Hand Dyed Cotton, Piecework, Thread, Fringe 2020

“She Was a Public House” : Detail of "Serving Fish", Ongoing Installation; Gouache Painting, Wood, Soft Sculpture, Paper Mache, Plaster, 2019 - 2020

Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice, and she is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing.

Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships from the Laundromat Project, A Blade of Grass, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Skidmore's Documentary Storytellers' Institute, KODA Lab, Asian American Arts Alliance, En Foco, China Residencies, Flux Factory and Santa Fe Art Institute.

Her work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Artists Space, SPACE Gallery, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Tribeca Film Festival's Interactive Showcase, 2019 BRIC Biennial; Old Stone House, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. In 2018 she had a solo exhibition at Open Source Gallery in New York. In 2017 Ms. Yu won the Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film "Three Tours" about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq, and their journey to overcome PTSD.

She holds a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, a MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a One-Year Certificate from International Center Photography New Media Narratives program. Ms. Yu teaches video, social practice, art and activism at Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and The New School, in addition she has over 20 years of community, media justice, and labor organizing work. In the Fall 2020, Betty had her curatorial debut as she presented Imagining De-Gentrified Futures, an exhibition that featured artists of color, activists and others along with her own work at Apexart in Tribeca, NYC. Betty sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films; and on the advisory board of More Art.

The current project that was discussed in the interview: We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril

The book mentioned in the interview was Race for Profit.

My grandparents in New York City in the 1950s with the cut out of 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the Background, Digital Collage, 2020.

(Dis)Placed in Sunset Park: My Personal Story from Betty Yu on Vimeo.

Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer whose practice is at the intersections of art, activism, and creative resistance to consumer culture. Her web-based artworks critique brand messaging. Re Made Co. (remadeco.org) takes the form of an online "company" to parody actual company Best Made Co.'s appropriation of working class identities and revitalization of traditional male roles. RETHINK SHINOLA (rethinkshinola.com) analyzes and exposes a complex and patronizing agenda of marketing the White savior myth, Detroit, and authenticity. Modrak is a co-curator of #exstrange, a curatorial project featuring site-specific works by artists using eBay as a site for the exchange of ideas. She is co-editor of the recently published Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts (Belt 2021) in which twenty writers consider humility as a state of being, with the power to impact institutions, families, and individuals. She is the lead author of Reframing Photography (Routledge 2011), a book critically exploring photographic representation, ethics, re-enactments, mediated vision, and other issues within the image-based world. Modrak is a professor at Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where she teaches courses related to image culture, commerce, labor, interventionist tactics, and wearable art.

Still from the Re Made / Best Made Echo video. http://rebekahmodrak.com/work/re-made-best-made-echo/

Best Made Co. and Re Made Co. New York Times articles. http://remadeco.org/article1a.shtml

Lecture, originally presented by Shinola's President to students in U-M's Center for Entrepreneurship. Restaged for RETHINK SHINOLA. https://rethinkshinola.com/

A painter and arts writer, Sharon Butler is widely known as the founder of Two Coats of Paint, a project which includes an influential art blogazine about painting, an artists’ residency, online conversations, a small press, and other initiatives. Her geometric abstractions, which explore the tension between digital and handmade, and are based on drawings that she makes in a phone app. Solo painting exhibitions in 2016, 2018, and 2021 at Theodore Gallery were written about in Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, The James Kalm Report, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine. In a review of her 2021 solo, artist-critic Laurie Fendrich called her work “beautiful and grittily compelling” and suggested that “the future of abstraction will be owned by those who accept a post-compositional approach to their paintings. Right now, Sharon Butler has the best of both worlds.”  She has received awards and residencies from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Connecticut Comission on the Arts, Connecticut State University, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Pocket Utopia, and Counterproof Press.

Sharon has served as a lecturer and/or Visiting Artist/Critic at many notable art programs and organizations, including Brown University, Cornell University, Vermont Studio Center, Penn State, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hoffberger School of Painting(MICA), School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Desgin. She currently teaches in the MFA programs at the New York Academy of Art and the University of Connecticut.

Sharon Butler, Baselitz (2021) oil on canvas, 52x45 inches

Sharon Butler, Quarto, May 10, 2019 (2021) oil on canvas, 52 x 45 inches

Sharon Butler, Trade Painting-- November 19, 2019 (2020) oil on canvas, 12 x12 inches

Enemy Combatant, David Winner's third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher's Weekly/Booklife Editor's Pick.

He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times briefly-noted Anthology. His Kirkus- recommended, second novel, Tyler's Last came out in 2005 while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions and The Kenyon Review.

He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, and a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail.

The subject of part of the interview, Dorle, with Mick Jagger

Esther Kläs employs hands-on dexterity with her process-oriented sculptures and works on paper which challenge contemporary sculptural norms and discourses. With links to Postminimalism, she utilizes malleable materials including clay, oil stick, or resin while maintaining an intimate physical relationship with her work. The artist’s distinctive visual language relates to her body in a surrounding environment while simultaneously referencing her inner experience. Appearing at once as mysterious presences and projections of a poetic imagination, her sculptures and works on paper emphasize the intuitive gestures that shape her work. Questioning the essence of objects and herself within a space, the work suggests relationships of both being and seeing.

Esther Kläs, Start, The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 21 – November 30, 2019

Esther Kläs, The subtle interplay between the I and the me, Kolumba, Cologne, Germany, June 2 – August 16, 2021

Esther Klas, Maybe it can be different, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy, February 14 – April 18, 2020

In this interview we discuss Poetic Song Verse, a new book by Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez.

Mike Mattison is a singer, songwriter, and founding member of Scrapomatic and the Tedeschi Trucks Band with whom he has won two Grammy Awards, eight Blues Music Awards from the Blues Music Foundation, and four Canadian Maple Blues Awards. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1991. He tours over 150 days annually and frequently publishes essays and music journalism.

Ernest Suarez is the David M. O’Connell Professor of English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and executive director of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. He was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Spain and China and was named the Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia. He has published widely on southern literature, poetry, and music.

Caterina Verde is an American and French artist whose work is most often presented in a cross-plat- form of media that includes video, installation, performance, drawing, photography, and editions. Much of what she has considered in her practice has centered around identity construction + constriction through referencing historical, psychological, perceptual content as well as language and its use for limitation and containing culture.

Verde is a 2021 recipient of a New York City Artist Corps grant sponsored by NYFA and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs for her three-channel video (in-progress and most recent) project, Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle.

In the nineties, she was the Hybrid and Performance Curator for The Kitchen in NYC (under a pseudonym), and later spearheaded a few early online performance projects, including, Strange Positioning Systems and most recently Peat and Repeat, an art edition house based in NYC. In September 2021, Verde curated the exhibition: “a micro-biology of circumstance: now what?" at the Tashmoo Springs Pumping Station in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

Caterina has received grants and residencies internationally. This year, Verde gave birth to an animated character, Pandarina deChine who is now occupying a certain realm of Verde’s work.

Currently she is exploring the flora and fauna of New York City and its environs in search of the lost paradise. She lives and works in the Ridgewood section of Queens, NY.

The book mentioned in the interview is  The Fifth Season by NK Jemison

Installation view of Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle, a three-channel video installation installed in Ridgewood, Queens in October 2021. Sponsored by City Artist Corps/NYFA, © caterina verde 2022.

Caterina Verde, Inside Out, 2021, print 19 x 21 inches, © caterina verde 2022.

Caterina Verde, Bird, print, 24 x 30 inches from Remote Viewing and Recreational Vehicle

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce Jimmy Raskin’s STATIONS OF THE LAST ECCENTRIC, the artist’s fourth one-person exhibition at the gallery. The exhibit is open Jan. 4th - Feb. 5, 2022.

STATIONS OF THE LAST ECCENTRIC features nine layered works, each holding at its center The Cone of Expression. This diagrammatic overlay includes a prominent vertical line that imposes a primordial fold, creating a mirror-image wherein a chosen picture of the cosmos faces itself. This event, in turn, conjures a myriad of faces staring back at the viewer. The phenomenon, known as facial pareidolia, instills an emotional charge in an otherwise non-sentient image or form. A point of connective stillness emerges, which may be considered sacrificial: we bypass the layers, critical-distance, dynamic conversations therein, and reach an almost humorous reduction point; an anthropomorphic flattening in the name of stillness. Within the gaze of the gaze, a space for mesmerization or resonance is generated.

An artist book accompanies the exhibition.

Jimmy Raskin (b. 1970, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Raskin has exhibited his work internationally and staged “lecture-performances” in institutions, art galleries and other non-traditional gathering places since the mid-1990s, notably at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Thread Waxing Space, Foundation 2021, Greene-Naftali, Cooper Union, Miguel Abreu Gallery, SculptureCenter (all in New York), as well as at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Real Art Ways, Hartford, The Swiss Institute, Paris, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. In 2013, Raskin participated in Performa 13 as part of Performa After Hours, which marked his second contribution to the performance biennial, following A Certain Misgiving in the Disciple (2009). Raskin’s third one-person exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Petals Ears & Tears, was held in 2013. Previously, his work was selected for the Art Statements sector of Art |42| Basel (2011). He was included in For the blind man in the dark looking for the black cat that isn’t there (2010), a major group exhibition curated by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The show traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, the ICA, London, de Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam, and Culturgest, Lisbon. Raskin also participated in the group exhibition Breaking New Ground Underground (2009), curated by Thea Westreich at Stonescape, a private museum in Napa Valley, California.

Raskin’s publications include The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree (Foundation 20 21, 2005), The Lisbon Lecture (Sequence Press, 2012), Corner Jump (Onestar Press, 2012), and The Final Eternal Return, published as part of his participation in the group exhibition Tribe-Specific at Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (2019).

Jimmy Raskin, STATION 4, 2021, 18×31 in., courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery

Jimmy Raskin, STATION 7, 2021, 18×31 in., courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery

Chris Sharp is the founder and director of Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles.

Formerly an independent curator and writer, Sharp also co-founded the project space Lulu, Mexico City, in 2013.

 

Aaron Gilbert, The door to the other world is always open,December 11- January 22

Tyler Vlahovich, Pulling Up Roots  01/29 – 03/12