Interviews by Brainard Carey

Jonathan Kalb is Professor of Theater at Hunter College, CUNY and the Resident Dramaturg at Theater for a New Audience. The author of five books on theater, he has worked for more than three decades as a theater scholar, critic, journalist, and dramaturg. He curates and hosts the theater-review-panel series TheaterMatters at HERE Arts Center and has twice won the country’s most prestigious prize for a drama critic, The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theater book from the Theatre Library Association. He was the founding editor of HotReview.org (The Hunter On-Line Theater Review), which published hundreds of reviews, essays and interviews by new and established theater writers from 2003-2016. He currently writes about theater on his TheaterMatters blog.

His books include Beckett in Performance, The Theater of Heiner Müller and Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, as well as two criticism collections, Free Admissions: Collected Theater Writings and Play by Play: Theater Essays & Reviews, 1993-2002. Kalb has been a theater critic for The Village Voice, New York Press, and The New York Times, and his writing has appeared in many other publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, Salon.com, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Modern Drama and Theater Heute.

Jules Rosskam is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and interdisciplinary artist interested in liminal spaces: the space between male and female, between documentary and fiction, between moving image and still. His interdisciplinary practice works to induce a perceptual shift in our understanding of how and what bodies mean in the context of documentary film, toward an apprehension of multiplicities. He is the director of transparent (2005), against a trans narrative (2009), Thick Relations (2012), Something to Cry About (2018), Paternal Rites (2018) and Dance, Dance, Evolution (2019).

Recent screenings include the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Arsenal Berlin, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and the Queens Museum of Art. Recent residencies include Yaddo, Marble House Project, PLAYA, ACRE, and ISSUE Project Room. Rosskam holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Film, Video, New Media, 2008). He is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Paternal Rites Trailer, NEW from Jules Rosskam on Vimeo.

Dance Dance Evolution Teaser from Jules Rosskam on Vimeo.

Amitis Motevalli is an artist who explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict and/or war.

This is her second interview, the first one can be found here.

Her experience as a trans-national migrant, is foundational in her work. Through many mediums including, sculpture, video, performance and collaborative public art, her work juxtaposes iconography with iconoclasm. Her work intends to ask questions about violence and historical documentation and canonization, while invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and critical cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artist and educators.

Masoul Performance

Ruquyya's Reverberation Performance Zanjir Back

Peggie “Batia” Lowenberg is a painter, public artist, and community arts educator. Born in New York City, Batia relocated to South Florida in 2015 after living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel for over 18 years. Lowenberg studied at Cornell University, SUNY at Purchase College (B.A.) and the School of Visual Arts, among others. She has exhibited her artwork and designed public art installations here and abroad. She has been invited to serve as an art juror for several arts panels.

Ms. Lowenberg was the 2016 recipient of the Dina Baker Fund, Cultural Council of Palm Beach County ($10,000 Grant). She was also a finalist for the Heritage Public Art Project for the City of Delray Beach in 2016. She was selected for both the 2017 and 2018 SIP Public Art Installations by the City of West Palm Beach. For their 2018 project, she incorporated paintings by clients and students of the Palm Beach Habilitation Center which was featured in the Boca/Delray Newspaper (July 2018). In 2019, Lowenberg has participated in the inaugural Off the Wall Live Murals through the Arts Council of Martin County. As a teaching artist, she has also completed a large variety of art projects with the young members of the Boys & Girls Club of Broward County.

She is currently working with Broward County’s Office of Public Communications, Broward Cultural Division, and the Broadview Park community to create two Li’l Libraries to be installed at Sunview Park in the near future.

Ms. Lowenberg’s solo art exhibitions include the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, Daggerwing Nature Center Art Gallery, Boca Raton, and Art Trax Gallery at F.A.T. Village in Fort Lauderdale. Lowenberg has been an Affiliate Artist-in-Residence and has participated in live art events at the Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach at their monthly ArtWalks. She was one of four artists selected to compete in their 1st Annual Art Throwdown.

She is planning to design more living art events that she calls “ClimbingTogether” with various local populations and has been meeting with local community organizations and grant-giving institutions in order to further this vision.

She is currently shortlisted for two large-scale paintings, 8’ x 12’, for Boynton Beach’s new Town Square City Hall/Library Project through their Art in Public Places Department.

Batia’s next solo exhibition/art installation is scheduled for January 2020 at the Daggerwing Art Gallery.

Her artwork is in public and private collections in the US, Israel, Europe, and Asia. Several of her projects and painting series can be seen on her website and Instagram. She is also available for private commissions.

"Breaking Dawn" from the "ClimbingTogether" Series. 8" x 10". Acrylic with Ink on Cradled Birchwood. 2019

"Demured" from the "ClimbingTogether" Series. 8" x 10". Acrylic with Ink on Cradled Birchwood. 2019

Simone Kearney was born in Dublin, Ireland, and grew up there until moving to the United States as a teenager. Moving countries foregrounded the spaces in-between, acts of navigation. The friction of what might not quite align promulgates kinds of foam.

I live in New York City, make work in my studio and in my bed, walk, teach, collaborate, act in my friend’s plays sometimes, make visual translations or write poems in response to their work. I’m currently reading Etel Adnan, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, and thinking about the relationship between enigmas and volume. Can an enigma sag?

Song of Amergin, Installation at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, Rabun Gap, GA, Acrylic, dye, muslin, rope, wood, cinder blocks, 2019

Song of Amergin, Installation at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, Acrylic, dye, muslin, rope, wood, 2019

 

Shawn Theodore at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC. Collages belong to the artist.

Shawn Theodore's (b. 1970) artistic practice merges real and hypothesized mythological black experiences set within contemporary, yet fading, black environments. While the intent of his work is to shift stereotypical frameworks and false representations of African Americans and African Diasporan individuals, his overarching goal is to center black individuals and their communities as trans-historical, transnational, and metaphysical entities mobilizing against erasure in all forms.

Set to the visual texture of black life, his work demonstrates physical and spiritual resistance to systematic oppression and provides a necessary metaphorical connection to African legacies and traditions in visual narrative form. The act of creating images and agency within predominantly black neighborhoods is meant to awaken the dormant identifiers attached to black places, culture, and attitude to illuminate how African Americans continuously express a cultural connection to the African Diaspora while fulfilling the need for African American myths as altered histories and shared memories.

In this regard this view of blackness resonates with a self-assured authority -- with or without the black figure present -- negating displacement, gentrification, and socio-economic disparity; the weight of assembled woes that dull the vibrancy of African American life, and demands a sustained attentiveness to the measurable agency brimming in the everyday African American neighborhood. These depictions weave together the ‘nigritudo in motu’; corporeal elements composed of the essential spirit, rich cultures, histories, and possible mythologies driving ‘black life’.

Shawn Theodore attended Tyler School of Art and received his BA in Journalism, Public Relations and Advertising from Temple University. He is currently enrolled at Savannah College of Art and Design for his MFA in Photography. He is currently based in Philadelphia and is a professor at the University of the Arts. Theodore travels often for photography assignments, research, lectures, exhibitions, and similar intellectual endeavors.

Not So Satisfactual, 2017, 40 x 60 or 60 x 90

A Portrait of Oluchi Oneya Unadorned No.1, 2018 40 x 60

M.R. Potato Head Painting #23

Mike Rader is a mixed media artist working in film, animation, painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Often mixing all of these elements into one work, he creates a creative playpen to flesh out an area of interest. Mike chooses his mediums by need rather than passion by asking the question of which medium will best articulate his current creative curiosity. Mike's work often reaches back into the past to create a dialogue with memories, while bringing influences along the way and reinterpreting them into the present. Past works include works which used the following as catalysts: Charlie Chaplin, Ultraman, and Godzilla. Mike is currently working on a film influenced by the relationship of the Three Stooges' personalities and how those different aspects combined and individually relate to the creative process.

His works have won the Vanguard Award for Best Experimental Film (Art of Brooklyn Film Festival), Best Art Direction (Manhattan Film Festival) and the Merit Award (Lucerne Film Festival). Mike Rader’s works have been shown in museums and galleries internationally including The Carnegie Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Hefei Museum of Modern Art in China. Rader has recently installed a permanent public sculpture in Newark, New Jersey and has just completed an artist residency in Tao Hua Tan, China. Mike Rader lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

 Reliquary #5 Acrylic and oil on linen with mixed media 15" x 32" x 4.5"

Reliquary #6 Acrylic and oil on linen with mixed media 12" x 29" x 2.5"

Caroline Cox creates process oriented installations and drawings. The installations evolve through an improvisational process that explores how materials interact with light, gravity and space. Through experimenting with materials that are optically interactive, pliable, and light weight she develops shapeshifting overlays and optical mutations. These coalesce into ambiguous environments that can range from the microscopic to outer space. Cox’s interactive installations contemplate the intricacies and poetic mutability of perception.  

Cox has shown at the Yale University School of Art, Wake Forest University, Old Dominion University, Pierogi, Lesley Heller, Smack Melon, Sculpture Center, White Columns, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Outpost, Governor’s Island, The Kitchen and had solo shows at Studio10, Long Island University Bklyn, FiveMyles, Another Year in LA, Sarah Bowen, Big & Small Casual, Het Apollohuis. She has completed residencies at Edward Albee’s, The Barn, The Clocktower and Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Cox has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Tree of Life Foundation, and Artist Space. Her work has been reviewed online at Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art Critical, Artweek, and in print in Sculpture Magazine, the New York Times, Time Out, The Village Voice and published in Alternative Histories, New York Art Spaces,1960-2010, MIT Press, Found Object,  a quarterly journal published by the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate School of the CUNY

Cox is from California and while living in San Francisco she was part of the women’s artist cooperative, Amargi, a live/work space for artists. After moving to NYC she played in the noise band, The Chairs, that performed at Roulette. While living in Brooklyn Caroline co-founded and ran Flipside, an alternative exhibition space, with Tim Spelios. Caroline has also curated shows at The Outpost, Sarah Bowen Gallery, Schroeder Romero Gallery, Century29, The Police Building (through OIA) the show traveled to William Patterson College.

Yellow, Blue, Green, 2018, installation at Studio10 from Cox’s solo show, horsehair fabric and monofilament, dimensions variable

Caroline Cox’s studio, the drawings are untitled, 2019, ink on paper, (R) 36” X  54”,  (L) 58” x  48”. The 3D works are in progress and made from monofilament, horsehair tubing and wire.

optical effects of glass balls & lenses from Caroline Cox on Vimeo.

Perdita Finn is the co-founder of The Way of the Rose, an inclusive fellowship of rosary friends dedicated to the Earth and to the Lady “by any name we wish to call Her.”

A former public high school teacher, she has written many chapter books for children including the Time Flyers series (Scholastic.) She lives with her family in the Catskill Mountains.

Patrick Dougher, photo by Marcus Hessenberg

Born and raised in Brooklyn New York, Patrick Dougher is a self-taught fine artist, musician, poet and actor.

Patrick has performed and recorded with Sade, the Grammy award winning Dan Zanes and many others. He has played drums with many notable reggae artists such as Black Uhuru’s Michael Rose and Steel Pulses’ David Hinds and Hip Hop star Chuck D of Public Enemy. Patrick also played drums on “The Dub Side of the Moon” one of the bestselling reggae LPs of all time.

He has performed his poetry for the WNET Open Mic series as well as BRIC TV and venues around NYC. Patrick was a lead actor in the Ping Chong 651 Arts theatre production “Brooklyn 63” which toured in 2014.

Patrick worked as an art therapist with HIV positive children at Kings County Hospital, a co-curator at the Museum of African Art, a youth counselor and teaching artist at Project Reach and Studio in a School and most recently as the Program Director of Groundswell, NYC’s premier community mural arts organization where he oversaw and directed over 300 public mural projects throughout the city. He is currently working as he Interim Director of Education for BRIC Arts Media and as a freelance consultant with The Center for Court Innovations. For over 20 years Patrick has used the arts to empower and support the socio-emotional growth of at-risk and disenfranchised youth of the city.

Patrick’s art reflects his life’s mission to inspire and empower by honestly and fearlessly holding up a mirror to society’s inequity and injustices. Through his art he seeks to celebrate the noble beauty and divine spiritual nature of people of African descent and to connect urban African-American culture to its roots in sacred African art and ceremony.

THE GOD SUPREME , 2019, Acrylic/ Mixed-Media on 4 attached canvases- , 44” x 60”

 

LITTLE BOY BLUES, 2018, Acrylic/ Mixed- Media on Canvas- 24” x 30”