Interviews by Brainard Carey

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College and is a 2020 Whiting Award winner.

They have been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs, and their writing has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II.

Publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, is out now from Vintage/Knopf in the US and Picador UK in the UK & Ireland.

For a free pdf of Position Papers chapbook, click here.

Claudia Alick is performer, producer, and inclusion expert. Named by American Theater Magazine as one of 25 theater artists who will shape American Theater in the next 25 years, Alick has served as the founding Artistic Director of Smokin' Word Productions, is a NY Neofuturist alum, published playwright, recipient of NYC Fresh Fruit directing award, TedXFargo speaker, the Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists, featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and former Community Producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At OSF for ten years she produced events such as “The Every 28 Hours Plays”, "The Green Show", The Daedalus Project, OSF Open Mics as well as producing/directing audio-plays with OSF such as the Grammy nominated "Hamlet". Her personal projects include her podcast “Hold On…Wait for it”, vlog “This Week in Cultural Appropriation”, StreetPoetry, and one-person Show “Fill in the Blank” exploring disability and the medical industry.

Claudia served on Oregon Arts Leaders in Inclusion, the steering committee of The Ghostlight Project, the steering committee for Black Theater Commons. She is currently managing content with The Crew Revolution black female leadership, serves as Co-president of the board of Network of Ensemble Theater, collaborated on Unsettling Dramaturgy (crip and indigenous international digital colloquium) and is on the advisory councils for the National Disability Theater and Howlround. Claudia Alick serves as founding executive producer of the transmedia social justice company CALLING UP whose projects include The Justice Quilt, Decolonizing Boards, Co-artistic direction of The FURY Factory Festival, and consulting and advising funders and companies around the country. Her latest project can be found at WeChargeGenocide.TV

Hadoucane: an ongoing photo series.  Blowing folks away with the power of the cane!

Andrew Woolbright is an artist, critic, and gallerist working in Brooklyn NY. Woolbright attended the School of the Art Institute Chicago where he was greatly influenced by the work of the alternative figuration of Ivan Albright and Mary Lou Zelazny before being taught by Angela Dufresne at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving his MFA in 2014. Woolbright has exhibited with the Ada Gallery, Nancy Margolis, and Coherent Brussels. His work has been reviewed in TimeOut New York, ArtViewer, Two Coats of Paint, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Reader, and the Providence Journal and is currently in the collection of the RISD Museum. In 2020, he will be curating a survey show of Kathy Goodell’s work at the Dorsky Museum, and he is currently planning a traveling show based on his article "Phantom Body: Weightless Bodies, Avatars, and the end of Skin" that was published in Whitehot Magazine. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and currently teaches at SUNY New Paltz.

The books mentioned in the interview are Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden and God Jr.

The Great Shrinebeast Furschlugginment (My Worries Going Super Saiyan (After Blake)). Oil on cut canvas, plaster, acrylic paint, wire, epoxy, Monster Energy Drink cans, masonite. 160 x 104 inches. 2018-2019

Sad Gundam Shrinebeast (Poem for Bill). Oil on poem. 19.5 x 11.5 inches. 2020

Warren Neidich is a conceptual artist and theorist based in Berlin and Los Angeles. He is the founding director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and the English editor of Archive Books, Berlin. He founded the website www.artbrain.org which includes the Journal of Neuroaesthetics in 1997. His Pizzagate Neon was exhibited as part of the 2019 Venice Biennial in the Zuecca Project Space. Recently published books include Glossary of Cognitive Capitalism, Archive Books, 2019; Neuromacht,Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2017. He has been guest tutor at Goldsmiths College, London 2004-2007 and the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin 2016-2018 as well as lecturing at such institutions as Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Brown University, University of Oxford and University of Cambridge

Pizzagate Neon, 2019, Neon Glass, Zuecca Project Room, Venice Biennial.

Phantoms of the Acephalous,KAI 10 Foundation, Dusseldorf,Neon Glass and Prosthetic Arms, 2020

The following video interview was done in November of 2020, discusssing Drive-By-Art -

Warren Neidich

Lawrence Weiner, 2020

Warren Neidich

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin

is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

In my work, I use manufacturing to reflect on human-machine dynamics, sexuality and gender queerness. I think about how the workforces’ relationship to their machinery lacks heartfelt conscious reflection. Personality and machinery are often separate. I challenge this, making work that shows how humanity, personal identity and machinery can be a reflection of one another. Human sexuality and machine movements are similar in their dynamics and relationships. In my latest body of work, I use my lathe to produce phallic objects that explore gender queer motifs relating to the machinery I work with and my own sexual expression. My work sifts through old places in our culture.Factories that have seen many years and parts made.

After attending Pratt Institute for sculpture, I received my Machinist Certificate from Housatonic College in Bridgeport CT. My interest in machine work is the catalyst for how I understand the world. Time was always an interest that I would express in mechanical terms. Eventually I began making clocks out of aluminum discs. Then I was in the group exhibition, Horology at Jack Hanley Gallery in 2019. My studio is in Brooklyn, NY, where I have a machine shop to produce my work. Crossdressing is something I have been getting into lately. Exploring femininity has been very expansive for my work. I am more in touch with who I am, which is inspiring me to make work that I’ve never made before.

Note - here is the link to the online show mentioned in the interview.

Also, here is a link to the book mentioned in the interview.

Aqueous (May 2020)

Bottle Butt Plugs (April 2020)

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

Her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in Queens.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015).

His work has garnered a Guggenheim, a Lannan, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

photo by Jonathan Hsu

Christal Brown has the distinction of being many things. She endorses a short list of these attributes that includes the titles mother, artist, educator, disciple and coach. Brown is most well known as a dancer and choreographer due to her 20+ year career as a performer and artistic director. Brown describes herself as a person with a servant heart and a workaholic mind, who has used dance to touch and be touched by others. Brown grew up in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, where she frequently accompanied her mother to NAACP, Black Caucus, and community board meetings. This early exposure to social movements and communal responsibility undoubtedly has influenced Brown’s work both on and off stage.

As an undergraduate, Brown studied Dance and Business at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Upon graduation, she went on to tour nationally and internationally with companies such as Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones, Chuck Davis, and Liz Lerman before founding her own company, INSPIRIT.

Brown has served as the Founding Artistic Director of INSPIRIT for 16 years. During her tenure Brown developed curriculum for the New York Department of Education, choreographed over 75 performance works, created the Liquid Strength training module for dance, and the Project: BECOMING, self-development program for women and girls.  While developing INSPIRIT Brown completed her MFA in New Media Art and Technology at Long Island University and joined the faculty of Middlebury College in 2008. At Middlebury, Brown serves as an Associate professor  of dance, the current chair of the Dance Program and former Faculty Director of MiddCORE.

Her dance career has continued to thrive in performances with the Bebe Miller Company, and her most recent choreographic works; The Opulence of Integrity and What We Ask of Flesh. Brown’s newest manifestation of love is Steps and Stages Coaching, LLC; where as a Life Mastery™ Consultant, certified by the BraveThinking Institute, Brown is able to coach, facilitate, and inspire other to pursue their dreams and create a life they truly love living.

photo by Maranie What We Ask of Flesh, Kelly Strayhorn Theater

photo by: Tayler Goodwin, The Project: BECOMING Box, available at www.christal brown.com.shop

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.

The Inky Blue, 2020, 48 x 48 inches, acrylic on canvas

Death / Life, 2019, One color screen print, edition of 15, 25 x 19 inches