Interviews by Brainard Carey

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and academic researcher, specialising in work around walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. With artist Helen Billinghurst, he is one half of Crab & Bee, who have recently completed an exhibition and walking project called ‘Plymouth Labyrinth (funded by Arts Council England), a short walking project in the Isles of Scilly and a residency at Teats Hill slipway. They are currently engaged in a series of walks across the UK researching their forthcoming book, ‘The Pattern’ (2020). With Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott, Phil recently published ‘Guidebook For An Armchair Pilgrimage’ with Triarchy Press.

He is currently developing a ‘subjectivity-protective movement practice’ with Canada-based choreographer Melanie Kloetzel. As a dancer he toured with Jane Mason in ‘Life Forces’ (2014-15). With Claire Hind and Helen Billinghurst, he co-organised the recent ‘Walking’s New Movements’ conference at the University of Plymouth. As company dramaturg and co-writer for TNT Theatre (Munich), he most recently premiered ‘Free Mandela’, co-authored with TNT’s artistic director Paul Stebbings, about the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Phil is a member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites, who recently published ‘The Architect-Walker’ (2018). As well as ‘Walking Stumbling Limping Falling’ (Triarchy Press, 2017) with poet Alyson Hallett, Phil’s publications include ‘Making Site-Specific Theatre and Performance’ (Red Globe/Macmillan, 2018), ‘Rethinking Mythogeography in Northfield, Minnesota’ (2018) (with US photographer John Schott), ‘Anywhere’ (2017), ‘A Footbook of Zombie Walking’ and ‘Walking’s New Movement’ (2015), ‘On Walking’ and ‘Enchanted Things’ (2014), ‘Counter-Tourism: The Handbook’ (2012) and ‘Mythogeography’ (2010). He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth.

The book mentioned in the interview that Phil was reading is Embodying the Dead.

‘The Murder of Sherlock Holmes (written by Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith) performed by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Theatre’.

‘TNT: The New Theatre’ by Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith (Triarchy Press)

VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery) is an artist working between Texas and New York, primarily in video, performance, sound, and sculpture. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes and spheres as she interrogates the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures.

VLM also works as a professional mind-map scribe, a Graphic Facilitator. Recent exhibitions include: "SKY LOOP," Lawndale Art Center, TX (2020), "SCREENS SERIES: VLM," New Museum, NY (2019), “HONEY MOON,” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY (2019); “PONY COCOON,” False Flag, NY (2019); “The Socrates Annual,” Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2018); “CRASH TEST: The Molecular Turn,” La Panacée-MoCo, Montpellier, France (2018); “An unbound knot in the wind,” CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, NY (2018); “Material Deviance,” SculptureCenter, NY (2017); and “The Particle Accelerator Memorial Project,” Physics Department, Yale University, CT (2015). 

BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED from VIRGINIA LEE MONTGOMERY on Vimeo.

Still from BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, 2020, 4K Digital Video, 5:35

MARBLE PONYTAIL I, 2019, Sculpture,  Marble, string, 20" x 4" x 20"

Maria Liebana is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City. Her practice involves collects pop-culture images and thrift-store finds to reassemble them with organic and abstract forms. Maria received her BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from Maine College of Art.

She is a recipient of 2018 and 2020 Queens Council on the Arts New Work Artist Grant. Her work has been exhibited at Field Projects (NY), Trestle Gallery (NY), ICA (Portland, ME), and Local Project Art Space (NY).

Liebana’s solo show ¿Tres Marias, Donde Esta Mi Felicidada?, was exhibited at Local Project Art Space. Her work has been featured in Hole History: The Origins of the American-Style from Little Leg Press, Studio Visit + Interview with Gallery Gurls, Queens Courier and About Themselves. In 2019, she was part of the Every Woman Biennial (New York).

https://www.instagram.com/p/CB1vq7aF-x7/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

Caren Beilin is the author of a nonfiction book on gendered medical gaslighting, Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), a memoir, SPAIN (Rescue Press, 2018), and a novel, The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014).

Her writing can be found in Fence, LA Review of Books, Territory, and New Life Quarterly. She teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the Berkshires.

Erik Beehn is an artist and educator working out of Las Vegas. Beehn received his MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (’15) and is currently adjunct faculty at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Beehn’s work employs painting, photography, printmaking and installation to investigate an arc of mark making techniques throughout the 20th century, and the evolution of observational painting into abstraction.

Beehn is the founder and director of Test Site Projects, a fine art publishing house located in Las Vegas.

The book mentioned in the interview is titled Composition in Retrospect by John Cage.

Beehn_FTG2020 For the Gram 2020 Acrylic, Ink and Solvents on Archival Inkjet Print 28" x 22"

Beehn_GBSIII #Getbettersoon_III 2019 Acrylic, Solvents, Graphite and Pigmented Ink On Photo Paper 44" x 60"

Andrej Bereta (1970) is a curator, art historian and cultural entrepreneur.

He is the Co-founder of ARTIKAL, Belgrade, since 2008. Since 2011 he is investing his strengths on the Project About and around curating/Kustosiranje (co-author with Srdjan Tunic), an educative and research curatorial project, based on the idea of lifelong learning, designed for professionals and students from the fields of arts and culture and open for general public. The mission of the project includes: developing toolbox and required skills, working on curatorial practices and on the technologies of preparation and realisation of independent exhibition project, education and supporting proactive attitude of young and future art curators, team work, developing entrepreneurship in the field of culture, spreading share culture.

Developed as a public program, it is strongly oriented on regional cooperation. This is an academic course for master studies at University of Belgrade in partnership with University of Vilnius and in cooperation with European Universities.

Since 2014 he is curator of Arts Kozara: international AiR, Art Laboratory in nature on mountain Kozara (BiH). In 2013

he was the director (with Srdjan Tunic) of Mikser Festival 2013 for Visual arts. In 2008 he co-created the Project ARTUR- Cultural tour for disabled persons. Andrej is co-creator and participant of Creative Mentorship. Finally, he is a lecturer on Visual Arts at Independent University of Banjaluka (BiH).

Mia Kang. Photo by Tiona Nekkia McClodden.

Mia Kang writes poems and other perversions. She is the author of City Poems (2020), a poetry pamphlet from ignitionpress.

Mia was named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, and her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America.

She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, and finalist for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Mia is also a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where her research focuses on the contested rise of U.S. multiculturalism and its failures. Recent publications include contributions to The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop (Skira, 2019), Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2020), Published by Lugemik: Printed Matter from 2010-2019 (Lugemik, 2019), and Plot magazine. Formerly a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she teaches as a lecturer at Yale College and Hunter College, CUNY, her alma mater.

City Poems (Oxford: ignitionpress, 2020)

Theresa, I Miss You (Rest) performance at garden––pleasure closing exhibition, February 8, 2020, Yale School of Architecture Gallery. Photo by Bek Andersen.

Canadian artist Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive artworks explore divination as a way of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Through collaborative and individual works, she creates relationships between the personal sphere and the landscape, particular to this time of ecological crisis.

A multidisciplinary artist with a B.F.A. from the University of Windsor (Canada) and an M.F.A. from Wayne State University (USA), she has been a visitor to Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Alberta in Treaty 7 Territory for five years. In 2019, she was longlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award representing the Prairies and North. Bartol’s work has been presented in festivals and galleries nationally and internationally including Esker Foundation Project Space, PlugIn ICA, Latitude 53, Walter Phillips Gallery, Berlin Feminist Film Festival, Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival, Brussels Independent Film Festival, Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, and Media City International Film and Video Festival, amongst others. Bartol currently teaches at Alberta University of the Arts.

For more research on this work visit Orphan Well Adoption Agency. Follow her residency with University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. Her upcoming 2-person exhibition at Viviane Art Gallery with Sandra Meigs in July-August 2020.

Alana Bartol, “Orphan Well Adoption Agency”, at Latitude 53 December 7 2018–January 26 2019. Photo by Adam Waldron-Blain.

Orphan Well Adoption Agency Promotion, 2017-ongoing. Postcards, signs, online advertising, various dimensions.

Leah Patgorski is a Pittsburgh-based artist who was born in Virginia Beach, VA. She earned a degree in Architecture at the University of Virginia followed by an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on a background in architecture and landscape architecture, she develops contextual textile installations for interiors as well as smaller sculptural works. Her work advocates for a connection to other humans and to history that natural fibers and colors can provide. She is particularly interested in plant-derived hues, seeking the resonance of subtle color variations within explorations of abstract form. She views the handmade and the hand-dyed as antidotes to the homogenization of architecture and of culture, which in her opinion is an unsavory trend.

Leah is also part of a collective with two other women who work together on the Other Border Wall Project, an ongoing creative resistance against harmful border practices. Their work has been supported by grants from Opportunity Fund and The Pittsburgh Foundation, and their work has been exhibited at Flatland Gallery in Houston, TX.

She has collaborated on projects with other artists including Michelle Litvin and Wafaa Bilal, and with design firms including Formwork and Studio Lithe. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with venues including the Strohl Arts Center in Chautauqua, NY; ADDS DONNA in Chicago, IL; SWDZ in Vienna, Austria; the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA, and Assemble in Pittsburgh, PA.

The book mentioned in the interview is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

Dr. Christine Mullen Kreamer is Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, where she has worked since 2000. Her exhibitions and publications explore art and ritual, gender, African systems of knowledge, and museum practice, and they bridge the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and museum studies.

In addition to research in Togo, she has worked on museum exhibition and training projects in Ghana and Vietnam. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University. Her more recent exhibitions and co-authored publications include Conversations: African and African American Artwork in Dialogue (2014); African Cosmos: Stellar Arts (2012); Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen (2013); Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007); and African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection (2007). She co-curated Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa’s Arts (2017, ongoing); she is also a contributing author for an essay on connoisseurship in the 2014 edited volume Visions from the Forest: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone and two essays in the 2011 edited volume Representing Africa in American Art Museums (University of Washington Press, 2011). In recognition of her outstanding achievements in the fields of art history and museum practice, Christine was named the Smithsonian Institution’s 2018 Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities.

Books mentioned in the interview include the following;  For the Caravans of Gold exhibition, organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, that was slated to open in April. Publications that the museum has worked on connected for the series on African contributions to the history of knowledge, readers could consider: Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007).African Cosmos: Stellar Arts (2012) and Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (2013). Dr. Christine Mullen Kreamer is currently reading newspaper articles and books touching on topics of provenance and questions of restitution.  One publication you might list includes an article she wrote that focuses on Africa's arts in the publication.

Ethiopian Orthodox; Ethiopia; 19th century; Leather, ink; H x W: 21.9 x 193 cm (8 5/8 x 76 in.)