Interviews by Brainard Carey

April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems.  

Bey’s work is in the collection of The California African American Museum, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Fullerton College Art Gallery, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, and more. Bey has exhibited in biennials NE7, NE8 and NE9 in The Bahamas. Bey has also exhibited internationally in Italy, Spain and Accra Ghana, West Africa.

Bey has launched 5 solo exhibitions: Picky Head at Liquid Courage Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas, COMPLY at Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown, Los Angeles, MADE IN SPACE at Band of Vices Gallery in West Adams, a large survey of work spanning several years, Welcome to Atlantica at Fullerton College Art gallery and most recently a solo presentation with UPFOR Gallery at UNTITLED ART ONLINE Art Fair. 

Bey is both a practicing contemporary artist and art educator having taught a controversial course at Art Center College of Design called Pretty Hurts analyzing process-based art and Beyoncé hashtag faux feminism.  Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.

And I'm Calm, Calculated and Perfectly Aligned [email protected] Watercolor drawing, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, hand-sewn "African" fabric, oil impasto 40 x 30 in 2020

COLONIAL SWAG: First Edition Atlanticans [email protected] Digital print stapled into eco fur on panel 30 x 24 in 2021

 

 

Charlotte Becket lives and works in New York City where she is an Associate Professor at Pace University.

She attended Hunter College's MFA program and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art.  Solo and two person exhibitions include LaMama Galleria, New York City, Valentine Gallery NY, Crisp Gallery in London, LEAP in Berlin, Taxter and Spengemann in New York City as well as group exhibitions at Gazelli Art House in London, Gasser and Grunert, Anna Kustera, NY Studio Gallery, Passerby and the Invitational Exhibition Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City.

She has been invited to lecture on her work at various galleries and universities and has been the recipient of grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Tony Smith Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, and the Center for Book Arts.  Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, TimeOut London, ArtForum, and Art in America, among others, and included in the publication, 100 Artists, a compendium of interviews with 100 international contemporary artists by Francesca Gavin.

Force Field Book Series, 2019, paper 8"x3"x3"

Particle Horizon, 2020, paper 26"x26"x30"

Fran Shalom has exhibited widely throughout the United States, including   the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge Mass, and the Newark Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rose Art Museum and the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris.

She has been the recipient of a Pollack Krasner Arist Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and an Art Omi Residency. She is represented by the Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York City.

The book mentioned in the interview is A Shoe Story by Lesley Chamberlain.

Untitled, 2021, 24x24” oil on panel

Rendevous,2020, 24x24” oil on panel

Judith Page was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and studied art at the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University. Early influences were her father, an amateur historian, photographer, and raconteur, who instilled in her a love and respect for history and the creative process, and writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers who provided her with many potent visual images. Other early influences include the Roman historian Tacitus and the politician Cassius Clay. Page says that her "art emerges from a Gothic sensibility, a place where horror and beauty exist in close proximity, where innocence encounters depravity, where the spirit is consumed and revived from moment to moment.”

Page lived and worked in Florida until relocating to New York City in 1992, and currently lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. She received individual artist grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the State of FL. Exhibitions include Pop Surrealism and The Photograph as Canvas, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Disarming Beauty: The Venus de Milo in 20th Century Art, Dali Museum, and solo exhibitions at Luise Ross Gallery, New York, NY; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC; Massry Center for the Arts, Albany, NY; Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, NY and Stetson University, DeLand, FL.

Known for her inventive use of materials and stimulating social commentary, Page’s numerous exhibitions and installation projects were written about in Art Papers, Sculpture, The New York Times, Art on Paper, and Art in America. Page’s art is represented in numerous public collections including Vanderbilt University; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee; University of KY Art Museum; Mint Museum of Art; University of TN; University of Iowa Museum of Art; and Orlando Museum of Art, FL. She was on the General Fine Arts faculty of MICA from 2004-2011 and on the faculty of the MFA Fine Arts program at SVA from 2010-2016. Her website is www.judithpage.com.

Fruits of War (Brooklyn), 2021, archival pigment print on rag paper

Spider’s Kiss (Manhattan), 2021, archival pigment print on rag paper

Photo: Xi Zhou

Kristin Marting is a director of hybrid work based in NYC. Over the last 25 years, she has constructed 29 stage works, including 9 original hybrid works, 6 opera-theatre and music-theatre works, 9 reimaginings of novels and short stories and 5 classic plays. She works in a collaborative, process-driven way to fuse different disciplines into a cohesive whole. She has developed a unique directorial form that features a “gestural vocabulary” used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element.

Kristin has directed 19 works at HERE and also premiered works at BAM, 3LD, Ohio Theatre, and Soho Rep. Her work has toured to 7 Stages, Berkshire Festival, Brown, MCA, New World, Painted Bride, Perishable, UMass, Moscow Art Theatre, London and Oslo. She has directed readings, workshops and premieres for Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, National Sawdust, Playwrights Horizons, Prototype, Public Theatre, Target Margin, and others. Selected residencies include Cal Arts, LMCC, Mabou Mines, MASS MOCA, NACL, Orchard Project, Playwrights Center, Smack Mellon, Voice & Vision and Williams. She has also directed productions for Cal Arts, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence.

Kristin was recently named a nytheatre.com Person of the Decade for outstanding contribution, a Woman to Watch by ArtTable and honored with a BAX10 Award. Selected grants include 2 MAP Fund, NEA, NYSCA, Greenwall, Harkness, Jerome and Santvoord Foundations. Prior works have been reviewed in all major NY papers.

Kristin is a political activist who has organized many art actions and a frequent panelist for the NEA, TCG, NYSCA, DCA, and ART/NY. She has taught Creative Producing and Directing as well as lecturing at a number of universities. She served as Co-President of the League of Professional Theatre Women. She assisted Robert Wilson on Salome and Hamletmachine and co-founded the tiny mythic theatre company. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with honors in 1988.

Kristin is co-founder and Artistic Director of NYC’s HERE Art Center, where she directs projects, cultivates artists and programs two performance spaces for an annual audience of 30,000. She also co-founded and is Co-Artistic Director of the annual Prototype opera-theatre festival.

Assembled Identity, photo: Purva Bedi

Looking at You, photo: Blythe Gaissert”

SANDRA MANN, photo: Tom Kauth

Sandra Mann is one of the most renowned artists and photographers of Germany. In her cross-genre oeuvre - she employs a wide range of artistic forms of expression such as photography, installations, sculpture, and video - she conceptually addresses the relationship between people themselves and between people and nature, the environment, the animal world, and gender.

Her work and teaching is defined by an exploration of the fundamentals of photography, imagery, and image perception. She also curates exhibitions in and outside Germany. She is a member of the international curator network Qipo and works as a jury member for photography and art competitions. Alongside various other prizes she got scholarships such as the Stipendium der Universitätsstiftung Augsburg, the Stipendium der Deutschen Künstlerhilfe, the Helsinki-Reisestipendium des Kulturamt and the Goetheplakette of the city of Frankfurt am Main.

She was 2016/17 Artistic Ambassador of Stiftung Palmengarten und Botanischer Garten and since 2017 she is Artistic Ambassador of the Keep The World Foundation.

Her works are represented in national and international collections, including Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, MUCA in Mexico City, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul, and the Art Collection Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.

060814-8816 Hommage an Monet (Jessica & "Seerosen", Buchschlag, Germany), 2014

210819-1309 Tigertarn (Le Brothers & LeLe Fire,Phu Quoc, Ru Cha, Hue, Vietnam), 2019

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, translator, and singer. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Glass, Gulf Coast, Meridian, and The Margins, and her translations in PBS Frontline and Words Without Borders.

Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an Emerging Poets fellowship from Poets House.

Below is the film trailer for An American Prayer, featuring "A Song For My Nation"

Arhm Choi Wild is a queer, Korean-American poet who grew up in the slam community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to perform across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, and Asheville Wordfest. Their debut book of poems, CUT TO BLOOM, was the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Book Contest. Arhm is a Kundiman fellow with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019. They have been anthologized in Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures, and their work appears in Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock, and other publications. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and as a Diversity Coordinator at a school in New York City.

Mark Jason Weston was born in Jamaica, and now lives and works in Philadelphia.

He studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Central Connecticut State University, and has had poetry published in various American and UK literary magazines.

 

 

 

Somewhere on the Island, 19 x 24 inches, mixed media collage on paper, 2019

Ground Provisions, 19 x 24 inches, mixed media collage on paper, 2020

Portrait of Brian Curtin, 2021, by Be Takerng Pattanopas

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art writer, lecturer, and curator of contemporary art. He has been based in Bangkok since 2000 where he lectures in the Department of Communication Design at Chulalongkorn University.

Brian’s work explores dialogues between contemporary art, Queer theories and studies in visual and material cultures. His commentary, essays, interviews and reviews have been published in Art Journal, Artforum, Art Asia Pacific, Circa, Craft Research, Flash Art, Frieze, Journal of Curatorial Studies and Parachute, amongst others. Brian’s monograph Essential Desires: Contemporary Art in Thailand will be published by Reaktion Books in June 2021.

Research work addresses challenges in thinking through hierarchies and antagonisms that limit critical approaches to modern and contemporary art; and published essays in this respect explore the art-historical marginalizing of ‘decoration’ and also problems of national identity as a frame for recent art. Brian has presented at conferences and symposia in Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, London and Singapore. And has held writer’s residencies in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

Seminar with artist Lim Sokchanlina at Toot Yung Gallery Bangok 2014

Essential Desires Publication in June 2021