Interviews by Brainard Carey

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

She was awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She lectured on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, Nalini Malini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.  Ann McCoy and Kentridge did a conversation at the American Academy in Rome for his Tiber project, “Triumphs and Laments”, which was published in the Brooklyn Rail.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ann McCoy has exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Annual, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. She is known primarily known for her large format drawings, work with projection, installation, and bronze sculpture.

Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library.  Most of her work is based on her dreams, and their relationship to alchemical texts, and Christian alchemy in particular.  For McCoy, alchemy is a symbolic language of processes dealing with spiritual transformation.  Incarnation of spirit into matter is the key concept of the alchemical practice.  The imagination is the gateway to the gods.

Dream of the invisible College  (Size: 9 x 14 ft. ) pencil on appear on canvas (2018) photo credit: Peter Dressel

Processional with Resplendor (Size: 19" by 7 ft. 2" by 9 inches) cast bronze with silver crown (installation 2018) photo credit: Peter Dressler

Robin Pogrebin is a reporter on the Culture Desk of The New York Times, where she covers cultural institutions, the art world, architecture and other topics.

She is also the author, with Kate Kelly of the book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” published in September 2019. At the Times, she has also covered the media industry for the Business Desk and city news for the Metro Desk. Prior to joining the Times in 1995, she was an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News and, before that, a staff reporter at The New York Observer.

Her freelance work has been featured in magazines like Vogue, Town & Country and Departures, along with several book anthologies. Pogrebin, who also teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts, is a frequent moderator, radio guest and speaker. She lives in New York City.

Self-Portrait in Blonde Wig, 2007

Jessamyn Lovell (b. 1977, Syracuse, NY) is a conceptual artist working with photography, video, performance, and surveillance contemplating class and personal identity. Lovell holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from California College of the Arts.

She is based in Albuquerque, NM where she is currently a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Director of the Art Department at the University of New Mexico. Lovell is a founding member and activist leader in the United Academics of the University of New Mexico, the institution's new faculty union and a licensed and practicing private investigator.

Lovell has received international recognition for her artwork including Dear Erin Hart, for which she found, followed and photographed her identity thief. She received her private investigator’s license in 2017 for D.I.Y. P.I. (Do It Yourself Private Investigation), a long-term conceptual art piece. 

Self Portrait Mirror, 2017 Self-portrait taken on surveillance, from Do It Yourself Private Investigation (2016-current), 50"x70” archival inkjet print

Self-portrait taken on surveillance, from No Trespassing, (2007-2009), 40x70” archival inkjet print

Matthew Langley received his BFA from Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC in 1985. Since then, Langley’s work has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe through numerous group and solo exhibitions.

Recent exhibitions include; Big Circle at M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kiev, In Color at Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA and The Unified Field at Blank Space, New York, NY.

Langley’s artworks have also been included in various public and corporate collections including; the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage, and Construction, The Doris Patz Collection at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, Ernest and Young, PNC Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue, Norwegian Cruise Lines, MacAndrews & Forbes and the State Department of the United States.

He currently lives and works in New York.

Books mentioned in the interview were White by Kenya Hara. Hara has been the art director of Muji since 2001. Also mentioned were the books of John le Carré

Photo of studio with the large painting in process that is mentioned in the interview; Unfinished, 2020, 60 x 96 inches

Marine Drive, 2019, 38 x 31 inches, acrylic on paper

Zine by Matthew Langley and book by J Saltz

Sarah Lawson is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective, and act as UDP's Publicity Director.

Lee Norton is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse Editorial Collective, where he also serves as the Development Director. He teaches composition and literature at Queens College CUNY, usually with a focus on the history and rhetoric of the life sciences, theories of genre, 20th-century fiction, and contemporary poetry, in some combination. He earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill; his critical work has appeared in Occasions; his poetry, in Ohio Edit, Drunken Boat, Supermachine, and several other magazines.

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Through the efforts of a volunteer editorial collective, UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a mission-driven small press that has published more than 300 titles to date, and produced countless prints and ephemera.

UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. In all of its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.

Here is a link to the pamphlet subscription mentioned in the interview and the regular subscription is here.

And here is some more writing on the reasoning / history that went into doing the pamphlet series, in the words of editor Daniel Owen.

Soviet Texts, the first representative selected volume of poetry by Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism.

The first batch of the 2020 Pamphlet Series, with work from Simon Cutts, Sergio Chejfec, Don Mee Choi, Steven Zultanski, and Aleksandr Skidan.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins' autobiographical novel One Small Saga; and Laura Riding's first book of poetry, The Close Chaplet.

Natalija Vujošević is an artist and curator based in Montenegro, Yugoslavia.

The focus of her research and practice is the presentation of archives through exhibition-making, seeking renewed modes of communication, engagement, and understanding through new interpretations and expanded forms. She has lead and curated this kind of work on a number of research projects and public presentations, such as:

Comrades / Women's Movement in Montenegro 1943 - 1953 / with Nataša Nelević

A research project and exhibition dedicated to the AFZ archive (the anti-fascist front of women in socialist Yugoslavia. Archive + contemporary art interventions and interviews.

"Why Have There Been No Great Men Artists?" Collections of the British Council in cooperation with the National Museum of Montenegro, (with a focus on women artists and their position in collections and in the art scene.

Missing Stories / Forced labor in Nazi Germany, organized by the Goethe Institute Belgrade / Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade).

She is the founder and director of the non-governmental organization, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Montenegro, which has been active since 2015, which is dedicated to contemporary art theory, education, research, and archives. The Institute established the first award for the young artists in Montenegro (in cooperation with Trust For Mutual Understanding New York). In the National Library of Montenegro, they are developing an alternative book collection that consists of art theory, philosophy, and humanistic science written in the last 3 decades (after Yugoslavia).

Her recent artist research is focused around Issues of life on the sidelines of global capitalism: the fatal transition of the Western Balkans and the neo-colonial politics and the occupation of natural resources on the Adriatic coast.

The book mentioned in the interview was; Breathing / Chaos and Poetry / Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

The study of Nature, Installation in public vitrine, 2020, mirror, textile, curtains, South south lets go south Biennale Serbia.

Body Installation, 2017, ceramic tiles, textile, wood. Nida Art Colony

Ellen Winkler is a print maker, painter and graphic designer who lives in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. She studied art during her undergraduate years at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That educational experience afforded her the opportunity to live and work in New York City as a participant in the Great Lakes Colleges Association "Semester in New York”.  She worked as an apprentice to the artist, Willard Midgette.She came to the Washington area in 1977 to pursue a graduate degree at George Washington University, where she focused on Graphic Design. She was Art Director of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Opinion and Arts weekly magazine, The Chronicle Review and is retired. She is a member of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society.Deeply influenced by the artist Jack Boul, she has spent much time exploring monotypes as a means of responding to the landscape. She has recently been working with drypoint, copper engraving and etching. Her etchings particularly reflect recent drawings which are explorations of seen and unseen places. Additionally, she has been rendering landscapes using oil paint on prepared board.

"Getting to There”; 2020; 6 5/8" x 7 1/2"; Oil on prepared board

“Tired Going Home”; 2020; 6" x 5; Drypoint and Engraving printed with Chine Collé

Thea Matthews is a Brooklyn-based poet, activist, and educator of Afro-Indigenous Mexican heritage.

Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Thea is the author of Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Lit, 2020).

Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Atlanta Review, The New Republic, and others. Currently, she is an MFA Poetry candidate at New York University and editor of For Women Who Roar magazine.

Links to purchase the book and have more info, click here and also here.

The following printed poem was read during this interview.

Dr. Milena Dragićević Šešić,  prof. emerita, former President of University of Arts, Belgrade, founder of UNESCO Chair in Interculturalism, Art Management and Mediation, professor of Cultural  Policy & Management, Cultural studies, Media studies. Diplomas: D.E.A. Paris-VIII 1977, Mag. University of Arts Belgrade (1981), and Ph.D. in literature and communication University of Belgrade (1990).

Commandeur dans l`Ordre des Palmes Academiques (French Ministry of Education) 2002.  ENCATC Fellowship Laureate 2019. University of Arts Laureate in 2004 & 2019.

Guest Lecturer at numerous world universities. Published 20 books and more than 200 essays: Vers les nouvelles politiques culturelles; Art management in turbulent times: adaptable quality management; Intercultural mediation in the Balkans (both with S. Dragojevic); Culture: management, animation, marketing (with Branimir Stojković); Neofolk culture; Art and alternative… Translated in 17 languages.

Expert for UNESCO, European Cultural Foundation, Council of Europe. Realized 50 projects in cultural policy and management (Europe, India, Cambodia, Arab countries, Central Asia).

The books mentioned in the interview were: The Art and Culture of Dissent

The Maaya entrepreneurship: the entrepreneurial model of the Festival sur le Niger  and

Devojka sa štapom.

In October 2019 Milena Dragićević Šešić became the first ENCATC laureat for her “outstanding achievements in cultural management and policy” ENCATC is a European network on cultural management and policy regrouping higher education institutions that have education and research in these areas. just a dot is missing in between two phrases - so it should be: In October 2019 Milena Dragićević Šešić became the first ENCATC laureat for her “outstanding achievements in cultural management and policy”. ENCATC is a European network on cultural management and policy regrouping higher education institutions that have education and research in these areas.

Milena Dragićević Šešić & Sanjin Dragojević, Intercultural mediation, in albanian language Priština, MM Publishing, 2007, Book cover and design, artist Dren Maliqi. Original edition in Bosnian-Serbo-Croat, OKO Sarajevo 2004. This book was translated in English, French, Georgian & Albanian language.

Milena Dragićević šešić and Sanjin Dragojević (2005) Art Management in Turbulent Times: Adaptable Quality Management, Amsterdam: Boekmanstichting

Suzan Shutan received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA studying with Judy Pfaff, Elizabeth Murray, Linda Benglis, Jonathan Borofsky, and so may other amazing artists who impacted her work. Her MFA was from Rutgers University Mason Gross, NJ where she studied with Leon Golub, Martha Rossler, Geoff Hendricks and a long list of great visiting artists. Her work has been shown throughout the United States, South America and Europe in 20 solo exhibits and 198 group exhibitions. She has received many grants, attended artist residencies, has been reviewed by the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, International Sculpture Magazine and published in the book Paper Art II by Artpower International Publishing.

Her work is in private and public collections with recent commissions by Log Me In, Boston Headquarters, MA and Sloan Kettering Hospital, NYC, NY. You can more of her work on Artsy and First Dibs with ODETTA Gallery NY, and on instagram #sshutan and on her website.

Her curating career began at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa where she curated exhibits for the Education Wing. Her first exhibit “Mouse Art”, miniature two and three dimensional work that got exhibited along the baseboards of the entire wing, was a huge hit, was picked up by the Associated Press and went viral. She has curated twenty exhibits in the last thirty years, the most recent being in 2019, MATERIALIZED ,at Hampton Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Shutan, 2018, Energy Grid, Arts & Cultural Center Hollywood, FLA, 4ftx 18ft, paint, wire, pompoms.

Shutan, 2019, Toxic-Stream, tar paper, handmade dyed paper, pins, 22ft x 5.5ft x 222_Flinn Gallery Greenwich, CT