Interviews by Brainard Carey

Susan Mastrangelo was born and raised in New York City and Washington D.C. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School, and received her MFA from Boston University under the tutelage of Philip Guston. Based in New York since graduate school, she has shown nationally and internationally, and is a recipient of a Mercedes Matter Award, a Rockwell Grant and two grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a guest at Civitella Raneri, and a resident at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Triangle Workshop (as a student of Anthony Caro), and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. For 27 years she taught and chaired the Art Department at the Buckley School in New York City, and now works as a full time multidisciplinary artist at the Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

High expectations, 2020, Knitting, cord filler, fabric, acrylic paint on wood panel, 60 x 48 inches.

Not A Ghost Town, 2020, Knitting, cord filler, fabric, acrylic paint on wood panel, 60 x 48 inches.

Robert Schirmer’s novel Barrow’s Point won the Gival Press Novel Award and was a finalist for a Foreword INDIES Book Award. He’s also published a collection of short stories titled Living with Strangers (NYU Press), winner of the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. His stories have appeared in a wide range of literary journals such as Glimmer Train, The Sewanee Review, Epoch, New England Review, Fiction, Byliner, Confrontation, Joyland, and The Best of Witness. Over the years he’s won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Walter E. Dakin fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship from The Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project. His screenplays have been optioned by Amblin Entertainment and Warner Brothers. He’s also been a Visiting Writer at the Southwest Writers Series and at Stetson University as part of the Tim Sullivan Endowment for Writing.

Selina Trepp (Swiss/American b.1973) is an artist researching economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often a result.

She works across media, combining performance, installation, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups that result in photos, drawings and animations.

In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the experimental music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer, to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her long running audiovisual collaboration with Dan Bitney.

Woven from Selina Trepp on Vimeo.

Michael Shewmaker is the author of Leviathan (2023) and Penumbra (2017), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Yale Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Texas Tech University. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.

Lissa McClure is the inaugural Executive Director of the Woodman Family Foundation, which stewards the work and legacies of Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman. She directs the vision and strategy for the Foundation with the Board of Directors and oversees its administration, operations, and partnerships. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was a longtime director of the Marian Goodman Gallery, where she worked closely with Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, and Lawrence Weiner, and with Betty and George Woodman on behalf of Francesca Woodman. She was the founding Senior Director of Kurimanzutto New York and is currently on the Board of Directors of the John Baldessari Family Foundation.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Rome, Italy, 1977-1978 Vintage gelatin silver print: 4 5/8 x 4 3/4 in. (11.6 x 11.9 cm). Photograph courtesy of Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 Vintage gelatin silver print: 5 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. (13.8 x 16.5 cm). Photograph courtesy of Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery,© Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021.

Francesca Woodman Contact sheet, Italy, c. 1977-1978 Vintage gelatin print; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Photograph courtesy of Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021.

Self portrait

Nikolas Ventourakis is a visual artist living and working between Athens and London.

His practice situates in the threshold between art and document, in the attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image. A quest that unfolds in the decisive years of the digital revolution, when a crucial overlap between producers and viewers seems to have reset all previous critical discourses.

Central to Ventourakis's visual work is a denial for a one-way resolution and an invitation to embrace an ambiguous imagery, where the photographic is not yet real, and the familiar is a projection of a mix of memory - stemming from both private and media experiences - with abstract thinking. Ventourakis’ fascination lies in our need for stories to be conclusive, which cannot but clash with the impossibility for apparent pictures to provide any evidence nor "objective truth". This is why his work allows for bias and misinterpretation.

Ventourakis completed an MA in Fine Art (Photography) with Merit at Central Saint Martins School of Arts (2013) and is the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013). He was selected for Future Map (2013), Catlin Guide (2014) and Fresh Faced Wild Eyed (2014) in the Photographers Gallery as one of the top graduating artists in the UK. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at CalArts with a FULBRIGHT Artist Fellowship and is a fellow in New Museum’s IDEAS CITY. He was shortlisted for the MAC International and the Bar-Tur Award. Recently he has exhibited in FORMAT Festival, Derby; the NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, the Mediterranean Biennale of Young Artists 18, the parallel program of the Istanbul Biennale , Hors Pistes 14 at Centre Pompidou, and The Same River Twice, at the Benaki Museum. Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala, and is co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Athens. He is a 2020 Stavros Niarchos Artworks Fellow. 

The book mentioned in the interview at the end is Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

Current Exhibitions mentioned: Tell Me I Belong group show and Betwixt and Between. https://www.miscathens.com/exhibitions

To earn more about the Band that we discussed at the end of the interview, click here and see the video below; RAMDAT.

Unlikely Outcomes: An Improvision from NIKOLAS VENTOURAKIS on Vimeo.

Nikolas Ventourakis, XX. “It was a Good Sunday as far as I remember it”, 2021, mounted on Dibond, in artist’s frame, 80 cm x 100 cm. Installation shot from Tell Me I Belong Exhibition

Nikolas Ventourakis, IX. interior false memory composition - left 2019, inkjet print on baryta archival paper, mounted on Dibond, artist’s frame, 125x85cm (120x80cm print) Installation shot from Unlikely Outcomes.Exhibtion*

Kathleen Winter is the author of three poetry collections: Transformer (The Word Works), I will not kick my friends (Elixir Press), and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press). Her chapbook Cat’s Tongue is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2022.

Kathleen’s poems and short fiction have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry London, Yale Review, Agni, Five Points and Colorado Review. She was granted fellowships by the James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dora Maar House and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas's Dobie Paisano Ranch. Winter teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University.

Duane Michals (b. 1932, McKeesport, PA) is one of the great photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text.

Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’ singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

To see all the work discussed in the interview as well as upcoming work, find Duane on Instagram and Vimeo. You can also see all the PDFs mentioned here.

The Boy Who Counted Stars from Duane Michals on Vimeo.

Mari Shaw is an intellectual property lawyer, an art collector, educator, and author.

She also organizes programs and collaborations among cultural institutions.

Since 2020, she has been teaching by zoom about the arts, writing,  and social justice in Philadelphia public schools and written about these issues.

 

Yury Urnov

An image of Stuart Netsky as he appears today.

Nathan Hoks’s most recent book, Nests in Air, was published in 2021 by Black Ocean Press. Previous books include Reveilles (winner of Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize), The Narrow Circle (winner of the National Poetry Series), and the chapbook Moony Days of Being (winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize). He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Christian Dotremont, and Henri Michaux.

In 2018 Hoks was a poet-in-residence at the Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Center in Ljubljana, and he has also held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Hoks occasionally works as an editor and letterpress printer for Convulsive Editions, and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago and in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute.

Books mentioned in the interview:  Wuthering Heights and Will Alexander's Across the Vapor Gulf.