Interviews by Brainard Carey

Bazzett and his dog, Zeus, playing chess during the pandemic. (photo credit: Leslie Bazzett)

Michael Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and translator. His debut collection of poems, You Must Remember This, won the Linquist & Vennum Prize in 2014, and his fourth collection, The Temple, was published by Bull City Press in 2020.

His fifth book, The Echo Chamber, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2021. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, Image, The Sun and Ploughshares, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was longlisted for ALTA's National Translation Award, as well as being named one of 2018’s ten best books of poetry by the NY Times.

He has received fellowships from the NEA, Teachers & Writers' Collaborative; you can find out more at www.michaelbazzett.com.

Tim McFarlane is a painter based in Philadelphia, PA. His paintngs and works on paper examine the fluid and contradictory nature of memory and place, with an emphasis on color, multi-layered systems and process. His practice has extended to include wall-based painting and drawing installations, as well. Much of his work is informed by everyday observations of the visual impact of human activity and engagement with the outdoor environments of his native Philadelphia. Tim is a 1994 Temple University/Tyler School of Art graduate who has exhibited his work extensively in the U.S. and has been featured in major art fairs in New York, Miami, Dallas and San Francisco. He has been a visitng artist and lecturer at several universities, has been a regular participant in artist panels and has taught at Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Tim McFarlane’s paintings and works on paper reside in numerous private and public collections such as Bucknell University, Fox School of Business (Temple University) and West Virginia University. His work is represented by the Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia) and ParisTexas LA (Los Angeles).

The book mentioned in the interview was: Because Internet

Installation view of Until The Break of Dawn, 2020, mixed media on drywall,  9.5' x 10' x 3'

Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller Shelley Hirsch, has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory and her vivid imagination for decades. She has performed her work on five continents and can be heard on more than 70 recordings.

Hirsch has received prestigious awards including a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship; A Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists; four NYFA awards in Music and Interdisciplinary Work, a Creative Capital Grant , and residencies including the DAAD in Berlin, Yaddo,  and six at Harvestworks Digital Media Center in NYC. In 2018 Hirsch's archives were acquired by The Fales Library at NYU for The Downtown Collection.

See / hear more of her work in quarantine include performance improvisations at home.  And Generating text Field recordings in Quarantine, and an excerpt from her performance/installation as artist in residence at QueensLab.

Jenny Roesel Ustick is Associate Professor of Practice and Foundations Coordinator in the School of Art - DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA from the same program and a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. 

A Cincinnati native, Ustick has become one of the most prominent muralists in her region, completing over 10 large-scale public mural projects with ArtWorks and several independent projects that include commissions from the US Soccer Federation, 21C Museum Hotel Cincinnati, and multiple local establishments. Her Mr. Dynamite (James Brown) mural in Cincinnati has earned her and Cincinnati international attention. Elsewhere in the U.S., Ustick has created or contributed to murals in Tennessee, New Mexico, Illinois, Kentucky, and Florida, including invitations to the Walls for Women mural festival in Tennessee, and the CRE8IV Mural Festival in Rockford, Illinois. Internationally, Ustick has participated in the Proyecto Palimipsesto mural residency with La Fundación ‘ace para el Arte Contemporáneo y el ‘acePIRAR, Programa Internacional de Residencias Artísticas in 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was Artist in Residence in spring 2018 with the Graniti Murales program in Graniti, Sicily. 

Ustick’s multimedia solo and collaborative studio practice is based in drawing and painting, with expansions into multimedia textile and time-based installations. Her solo and collaborative works have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museum venues that include the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Dayton Art Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, and Redline Contemporary in Denver. She has participated in multiple international art fairs including Governors Island Art Fair in New York, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and ArtPrize. 

Ustick is also a published critical art writer, contributing essays to The Cincinnati Anthology from Belt Publishing, and Still They Persist: Protest Art from the 2017 Women’s Marches. Ustick’s mural projects have been featured in Forbes, American Quarterly, Hyperallergic, La Sicilia, and numerous local publications and broadcasts; collaborative studio projects have appeared in the Huffington Post and Venus Zine. You can find her work at www.jennyroeselustick.com, and on Instagram @j_r_ustick.

Studio Character 2, 2019, photo taken by Miki Carmi.

Born in 1975, Jerusalem, Israel. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Tamy Ben-Tor is a graduate of The School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem in 2001, and the M.F.A. program in Visual Art at Columbia University 2006. Using spoken word, various soundtracks, costumes, masks and wigs, Ben-Tor's videos and performances are a hysteric embodiment of her surroundings and an amplified over exaggerated interpretation of “Normal”  .

“My consciousness is a sponge absorbing all of contemporary filth.

The artistic process for me, in the form of a performance, is to solidify this sponge into a hard stamp tool and press it back onto the audience's consciousness for the duration of the performance.

At the end, I hope they come out of it stained, impressed, as I am, by the ailments of this time which we live in.”

She has had solo shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Kunsthalle Winterthur; and Cubitt, London. Ben-Tor has also participated in exhibitions at ZKM, Karlsruhe; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Biennale of Sydney; Manifesta 7; Mori Museum, Tokyo; MoCA, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; as well as the PERFORMA 05 and PERFORMA 07 Biennials, New York.

She has been collaborating with artist Miki Carmi since their joint Artists’ book “Disembodied Archetypes” Regency Arts Press , 2008.

To learn more, check out Minerva projects link for their book project. Also, here is links to the videos discussed in the interview: Suma Kom Laudum, 2020. Bill Gates, 2020 and Revenge of The Bureaucrats, 2020.

Studio Character 3, photo taken by Miki Carmi.

Video still from young emerging artists eating and fucking, 2015

Alissa Juvan is an accredited coach and elevatED certified pole dance instructor.

A Vermont native, she moved to the UK for a number of years where she supported other artists in their creative careers through one-on-one coaching and development events before moving to Los Angeles to fulfill her own creative ambitions of being an actor.

Notable acting roles include “I Spit On Your Grave: Vengeance is Mine” and “Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television”, in addition to writing, producing and starring in an original series, “Kiddie Litter”, about a lesbian couple raising their son like a cat. Recently returned to Vermont, Alissa loves supporting other women through offering sensual movement workshops, one-on-one coaching, and retreats. Learn about her upcoming event here. The book mentioned in the interview was The Hate U Give.

Post-workshop and feeling fabulous

Still from sensual movement workshop free dance

Jmy James Kidd makes dances, textiles and community spaces. She is the founder of Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, CA. Choreographic commissions include REDCAT, The Kitchen, Made in LA 2014, The Broad, The Getty, Pacific Standard Time 2013. Residencies include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BOFFO, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is visioning a Music and Dance Temple to be built somewhere sometime in the next 10 years. She frequently collaborates with her wife, musician Tara Jane ONeil (musical collaborator) Insta: @jameskidd_studio.

Perin Hailey McNelis is a dancer and botanist based in Patagonia, Arizona. Perin holds a BFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Perin started working with James Kidd in 2012 as a dancer in the Sunland Dancers group and as the PR manager for Pieter Performance Space.

Perin has performed at the Skirball Cultural Center, Machine Project's Mystery theater, the Hammer Museum's Made in LA biennial, the Getty Museum, the Broad Museum and various galleries. Perin returned to her home in Arizona in 2015 to pursue interests in regionally specific ethnobotany and ecological work in the borderlands. Perin joined the Borderlands Restoration Network horticulture team in 2015 and now is the Assistant Manager for the Native Plant Materials program where she manages the seed lab and coordinates art+ecology programming. Perin is passionate about somatic practices, activism and geography - particularly in the form of land stewardship.

Books mentioned in the interview were: The Wild Kindness and A Pattern Language.

video still from BRINK. 2019, Created and performed by Nickels Sunshine, Jmy James Kidd and Dezmon OMega Fair. Video Directed by Brian Getnick 2019. Costumes by Jmy James Kidd. Sound Score by Dezmon Omega Fair.

Current work, iphone video still from rehearsal October 2020 in Landers, CA titled "Believers" Jmy James Kidd (dancer/choreographer), Perin Hailey McNelis (dancer/collaborator), Tara Jane ONeil (musical collaborator)

Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative.

She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects.

Born in San Francisco, Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The year following, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014. She has exhibited at the Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others.

Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library.

"This is how the village people bury their dead", Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood panels, 24" x 20" , 2020

Martha's Quarterly, Issue 17, Fall 2020, "There are No Edges on the Moon"

Philemona Williamson is a narrative painter who has shown widely in the United States and abroad. Her work explores the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment.

The lush color palette and dreamlike positioning of the figures ensures that their vulnerability - of age, of race, of sexual identity - is seen as strength and not as weakness. “My figures navigate a world of uncertainty as they search for understanding—both internally and in ever-shifting environments. I see the figures as vehicles to explore the existence of the most vulnerable adolescents, those evolving people of color, grappling with what will define and identify them. My paintings give voice and space to invisibility.”

Williamson has exhibited her work for over 25 years at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC and recently, at her mid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in NJ. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner, National Endowment For The Arts, New York Foundation For The Arts and Millay Colony as well as serving on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education. Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions such as The Queens Museum of Art, Wisconsin's Kohler Art Center, The Sheldon Museum in Nebraska, The Bass Museum in Miami, The Mint Museum in North Carolina, The Forum of Contemporary Art in St. Louis, The International Bienal of Painting in Cuenca, Ecuador and most recently at the Anna Zorina Gallery in NYC.

She is represented in numerous private and public collections, including The Montclair Art Museum; The Kalamazoo Art Institute; The Mint Museum of Art; Smith College Museum of Art; Hampton University Museum; Sheldon Art Museum; Mott-Warsh Art Collection, and AT&T. Her public works includes fusedglass murals created for the MTA Arts in Transit Program at the Livonia Avenue Subway Station in Brooklyn, a poster for the MTA Poetry In Motion and — for the NYC School Authority — a mosaic mural in the Glenwood Campus School. She currently teaches painting at Pratt Institute and Hunter College in NYC.

For Philemona’s latest project, she created a series of paintings for the children’s book Lubaya’s Quiet Roar, just out from Penguin Random House.

"The Gathering" 48" x 60 ” oil on canvas 2019

"Here I Hold Becoming” 48” x 60” oil on canvas 2020

Ali LeRoi is an Award-winning writer/director/producer best known for his work on the critically acclaimed series, CW's “Everybody Hates Chris”, TBS "Are We There Yet?" and the breakout Hit for STARZ, “Survivor’s Remorse”. Ali has five Emmy nominations as well as one win, he’s a two-time winner and five-time nominee for NAACP Image Awards, as well as scoring several nominations from the Golden Globe, WGA, and others.  Ali’s major motion picture credits include producing and co-writing “Head of State” and “Down to Earth,” as well as producing cult- favorite, “Pootie Tang.”

His feature film Directorial Debut “The Obituary of Tunde Johnson” premiered at The Toronto Film Festival and is slated for release in 2021.

The book mentioned in the interview is Open City by Teju Cole.

Award winning portrait of Chaz Jordan/ Creative Director and Founder of Ih Nom Uh Nit.

“Sir Nose DVoidoTrump” / Protestors photographed at Los Angeles City Hall/ Inauguration day 2017