Interviews by Brainard Carey

Montana Ray is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her first book of visual poetry, (guns & butter), was described by Cathy Park Hong as a mix of “Apollinaire with Pam Grier.”

She holds an MFA and a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on settler longing in the work of Cuban and feminist artist Ana Mendieta.

Ray is at work on a narrative nonfiction book, To thicken it, which explores the relationship between "the South" and Central and South America through genealogies, monuments, and cultural performances; you can read her creative nonfiction in The Point, BOMB, Narrative Magazine, and The New Inquiry. She also translates from Spanish and Portuguese mainly feminisms of the 1970s.

"Crazy Desire: chronicles of the AIDS ward," Asymptote Magazine, 2020. Photograph by Leonora Calderón.

"Os Confederados: 'Family and History' in the Plantation Americas," The Point, 2020.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.

Jarrett Key (b. 1990) lives and works in Providence, RI. Key is a recent MFA graduate from RISD Painting. Key is one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. Key’s practice embodies several modes of production in one frame. Through form, image, and material, the objects they make integrate a sculpture, painting, and performance practice. Excavating lost stories and the oral histories that define their upbringing in rural Alabama, Key’s work seeks to criticize those historical conditions that are the seeds of contemporary issues in their life, while creating spaces that celebrate beauty, joy and survival.

Key has been featured in exhibitions and residencies at 1969 Gallery, Fierman Gallery, the RISD Museum, La MaMa Galleria, The Columbus Museum, Gallery 67, Swiss House/MGLC, Galerija Kresija, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Caelum Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Outlet Fine Art, Former Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Secret Dungeon, La Maison D’Art, Shanghai Theater Academy, and East Meet West Gallery, among others.

Key’s work is in the collections of the The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions. The Hair Painting Series series has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Harlem Arts Festival in Marcus Garvey Park.

2019, Silkscreen and Cement on Paper Collaboration with Merrick Adams

ESP Slab 1 2018 40” x 30” Silkscreen on Cement

Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality—from the surface of the page to the surface of language.

Her most recent projects are the chapbook W/\SH: Initial Contact (Above/Ground, 2021), a speculative ecopoetic collaboration with Terri Witek; The Book: 101 Definitions (Anteism, 2021), a collection of definitions of the book by artists, writers, scholars, librarians, and book artists; and Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona (QPL, 2020), a printable chapbook of computer-generated curtal sonnets. Borsuk is also the author of The Book (MIT Press, 2018), a brief introduction to the book as object, content, idea, and interface published in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series.

Her books of poetry include Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016),  Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Poetry Prize; and Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), a chapbook-length erasure. Abra (1913 Press, 2016), a book of mutating poems created with Kate Durbin, received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and was released as a limited-edition book with a free iPad / iPhone app created by Ian Hatcher. The collaboration As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), selected by Julie Carr for the Subito Prize, reshapes 60 entries from Andy Fitch’s summer diary into a collective confessional/constructivist collage that foregrounds the tensions of authorship.

Collaboration and materiality are central to Borsuk’s practice. Together with Brad Bouse, she created Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012; Springgun Press, 2016), a book of augmented-reality poetry. It has been featured on Salon.com, BrainPickings, Wired, and other media sites and has been exhibited widely. Through a grant from CT@Work and SiteProjects, Inc., Borsuk and Bouse completed Whispering Galleries (2014), a site-specific interactive text work for the New Haven Free Public Libraries that uses the Leap gestural controller to invite visitors to brush the dust from a historic diary, revealing poems hidden within it. Borsuk’s other digital collaborations include Wave Signs, an immersive sound installation with Carrie Bodle; and The Deletionist, an erasure bookmarklet created with Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul.

Borsuk is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. 

The book mentioned at the end of the interview was by Renee Gladman: Houses of Ravicka

Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016)

The Book (MIT Press, 2018)

Photo of Nicolás by Wadi Céspedes Raful / Courtesy of Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited or performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Call/Walks, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Nicolás has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and MacDowell. Nicolás holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, where he studied with Coco Fusco; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 2011 he was baptized as a Bronxite; a citizen of the Bronx.

Since 2006, he has pursued trainings with key people in the healing, somatic movement, and writing fields. Nicolás is the founding director of The Interior Beauty Salon, a space working at the intersection of creativity and healing.

Learn more and follow The Interior Beauty Salon on Instagram.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful In Bed with the Tropicals, 2015, inaction Photo: Frances Pollitt / Courtesy of Nicolás Dumit Estévez In Bed with the Tropicals consisted of a five-hour stopover by a sleeping subject in Wave Hill’s conservatory, NY. This dormant being rested uninterruptedly, side by side with the vast array of orchids, lichens, air plants and ferns that make up the lush greenhouse’s collection. In this exercise, which relied on inaction, the cessation of the most visible movements on behalf of the sleeper were meant to put him on a par with the imperceptible activity generated by the plant world around him. In Bed with the Tropicals was meant to conjure images of hibernation, catalepsy, the Dormition of the Virgin, and the continuous interplay between life and death. It also signaled the urgent call for what deep ecology activist Joanna Macy refers to as the “greening of the self” or the eco-self; an awareness for one’s inextricable interdependence with all living beings irrespective of the lesser status “humans” have assigned to them.

Rhina Valentin and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful with Michael Max Knobbe and Angel RodríguezThe Metropolitan Portal, 2020, art in everyday lifePhoto: Argenis Apolinario / Courtesy of Nicolás Dumit EstévezNicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo invites Rhina Valentín, who in turn invites Master Percussionist Angel Rodríguez to represent her spiritual guide, and BronxNet Executive Director, Michael Max Knobbe to represent her connection to community. They step into Rhina’s everyday portal through the shopping district of Parkchester, reminiscent of the walk she would take to get to the train when she lived there with her Mother—through improvisational ritual choreography that launches near the fountain of Parkchester and processes through Metropolitan Avenue. Mantras, colors, and drum beats are all part of the portal through which Rhina skillfully takes the group: a magical field. She eventually leads all involved out into the day-to-day buzz of the City to enjoy the echo of any transformations experienced during the action. This action is part of Performing the Bronx. Performing the Bronx is an expansion of Nicolás’s on-going efforts to generate work with and within different communities in the Bronx. It is also representative of his interest in recovering,

Ben Balcom (b. 1986, Massachusetts) is a filmmaker currently living and working in Milwaukee, WI. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and is the co-founder and co-programmer of Microlights Cinema. Since 2013, Microlights has hosted over 50 film and video artists from around the world. Combining elements of documentary, fictional narrative, and abstraction, Balcom’s films investigate the relationship between cinematic artifice and ordinary affects. He has explored melodrama, essay film, and, most recently, regional histories.

His films have been exhibited at venues and festivals such as the European Media Festival, Media City Film Festival, Anti-Matter Media Arts, Alchemy Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Slamdance. Balcom received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his bachelor’s degree in Film-Video Production from Hampshire College.

The books I mentioned in the interview are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Douglas Kearney's Sho.

Garden City Beautiful from Ben Balcom on Vimeo.

News From Nowhere from Ben Balcom on Vimeo.

Eric Fleischauer is a Chicago-based artist whose projects engage the histories of media culture to examine technology’s nuanced influences and forgotten genealogies.  Working across various mediums, fleischauer utilizes conceptually-driven production strategies to make work that can be read as an aestheticized form of media theory and criticism.

His work has been exhibited at the MCA Chicago, Interstate Projects (NYC), Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and discussed in Artforum, The Washington Post, Afterimage Journal, and rhizome.org.

Currently he is an Associate Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Universal Paramount, 2010, digital image, dimensions variable

homeland security, 2020, staples on paper, xerox print, 11" x 14"

twohundredfiftysixcolors (preface) 2013 from eric fleischauer on Vimeo.

Self-Portrait

Ian Weaver is an Artist and Professor at Saint Mary's College, South Bend, IN. His M.F.A. is from Washington University in St Louis (2008).

He has exhibited at the South Bend Museum of Art; The Chicago Cultural Center; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; and Saint Louis Art Museum.

His residencies include Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts; Ox-Bow; the ISCP Residency, New York; and Yaddo and the Millay Colony, both in upstate NY. Awards include the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award; Artadia and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, both based in NY; and the Illinois Arts Council.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for The Believer Book Award in Poetry, as well as the book-length poem Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013).

 

His poetry and essays appear widely in such venues as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Believer, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest, and his work has been recognized with an Iowa Review Award (selected by Srikanth Reddy), The Paris-American Reading Series Prize, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the I-Park Foundation, the University of Denver, and Columbia University.

 

During the 2021 — 2022 academic year, he will be teaching creative writing at George Washington University, and will also be Writer-in-Residence at the State University of New York, New Paltz. An Associate Editor for 32 Poems, he lives in Maryland.

George working on "Tia Catrina"

George Rodriguez addresses sensitive sociopolitical issues through his highly ornamented figurative ceramic sculptures. There is a tongue-in cheek-ease that is evident in the sense of warmth his works convey. Themes of culture and identity recur throughout his sculpture, celebrating the unique attributes of diverse cultures as well as the similarities that unite us all.

Rodriguez’s ceramic sculptures eloquently communicate the emotions they embody, through figures spanning a wide range of forms and personalities. Aspects of certain forms echo elements of African, Italian, and South American ceramic traditions, yet the resulting pieces are dynamically modern.

George received a BFA in ceramics from the University of Texas El Paso then went on to receive an MFA from the University of Washington.  His world curiosity grew as a recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship where he traveled the world through most of 2010. His work can be found in the permanent collection of the National Mexican Museum of Art in Chicago, Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Oregon and the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery amongst others.  George is represented by Foster/White Gallery in Seattle, WA and is the Artist in Residence at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

The book he was reading that was mentioned in the interview was Natalie Diaz Book of Poems.

Mexican/American Gothic. 2018. ceramic with glaze. 84 X 39 X 30 in.

An Altar. 2018. ceramic with glaze. 100 X 60 X 60 in.