Interviews by Brainard Carey

Photo by Kali Spitzer

Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Growing up in the colonized border town of Gallup, New Mexico, the evolution of DinéYaz´’s work has been influenced by their ancestral ties to traditional Diné culture, ceremony, matrilineal upbringing, the sacredness of land, and the importance of intergenerational knowledge.

Through research, mining community archives, and social collaboration, DinéYazhi´ highlights the intersections of Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist identity and political ideology while challenging the white noise of contemporary art.

They have recently exhibited at Portland Biennial (2019), Honolulu Biennial (2019), Whitney Museum of American Art (2018), Henry Art Gallery (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), CANADA, NY (2017); and Cooley Art Gallery (2017). DinéYazhi´ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award (2017), Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts (2018), and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (2019). Follow on Instagram @heterogeneoushomosexual

"Untitled (Sovereignty)" is a collaboration between Demian DinéYazhi´and artist Noelle Sosaya. The flag is inspired by Indigenous Diné American flag textiles and serves as a sacred object of peaceful protest and political distress in a colonized country. Courtesy: the artist and Cooley Art Gallery, Reed College. Photography: Evan La Londe

Demian DinéYazhi´, my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2019, glass, neon, aluminum frame. 106 × 56 × 58 cm. Courtesy: the artist and the Honolulu Biennial Foundation; photograph: Justen Waterhouse

The Landing of the Homophobes, 2016. Courtesy: R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment

I received my B.A., magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1980 in Visual and Environmental Studies and an M.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1983.  I am a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Artist’s Fellowship program.

I have been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Millay Colony , The Cité Internationale des Artes in Paris, The Golden Foundation and The Hermitage Artists Retreat in Florida.

My paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally for over twenty years, including solo shows in in Houston, Boston, Milan, Leipzig and San Francisco. In 2014 a five-year survey of my work was on exhibit at Colgate University. My most recent one-person show, Love, American Style, was in 2018 at Pierogi Gallery in the Lower East Side of New York.

In addition to individual work I also make collaborative drawings with my husband, James Esber. This work, exhibited under the fairly transparent pseudonym “J. Fiber” has been included in numerous group shows in the United States.

I have lived and worked in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 1986.

The books mentioned in the interview is by Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.

Rise Up, 2018, 78” x 64”, acrylic on canvas

Make Love Not War, 2018, acrylic on wood, 8” x 10"

Collaboration, by J. Fiber (aka Jane Fine & James Esber), Front and Back, 2019, acrylic and ink on paper, 30” x 22”

Dannielle Tegeder (Born in Peekskill, NY) received a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase (1994), and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1997). She is currently an Associate Professor of art at the City University of New York at Lehman College, and has held full-time university positions at SUNY Purchase and Cornell University.

For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has recently begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.

Since receiving her MFA in 1997 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York.

She has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her drawings have recently been purchased as part of the Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.

Lahm (high-density solid pump); gouache, ink, colored pencil, graphite, water-based spray paint, pastel on Fabriano Murillo paper, 79 x 55 in., 2016. Image courtesy of Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York.

Installation view of Dannielle Tegeder: Chroma Machine Suite: Forecasting Fault Lines in the Cosmos: Deconstructed paintings and stage; wood, plexiglass, and metal, 7 x 9 ft., 2018. Image courtesy of H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute.

The Last Thanks, 2006 Pigment print

Artist Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She served a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Dartmouth College, CalArts, Flagler College, and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs. In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2019 Red Star will have her first career survey exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark New Jersey.

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven) Artist-manipulated digitally reproduced photograph by C.M. (Charles Milton) Bell, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

Chris Bors was born in Ithaca, New York and received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. Solo shows include Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C. and Art During the Occupation in New York City.

His art has also been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, Freight+Volume, Arts+Leisure, Kustera Projects, White Columns, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Bahnwarterhaus in Esslingen, Germany and Bongoût in Berlin. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Brooklyn Rail and featured in Vogue Italia, K48 and zingmagazine.

He has written for Artforum.com, ArtReview, and Art in America, among many other publications.

Books mentioned in the interview were, J.G Ballard, Kingdom Come and Michael Craig-Martin, On Being an Artist.

Chris Bors, Orange, Acrylic, vinyl paint and griptape on cloth, 20 x 24 inches

Chris Bors, Born Low 2, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 45.5 x 34 inches

Julian Hoeber (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) holds a BA in Art History from Tufts University, Medford, MA, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA. 

Hoeber is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on themes such as the problem of the proximity of thought and form, intuitive processes within geometrical compositional systems, and the quest to combine conceptualist strategies (mind) with that which is experiential (body). For Hoeber, many of the binary categories used to define art, culture, and social relations are non-functional or imperfect. Rather than operating as polarities, categories such as interior and exterior, psychic and somatic, rational and irrational, are able to occupy the same space in his work. Hoeber harnesses rigor and exactitude in service of the emotional and idiosyncratic, revealing that his conceptual strategies and modes of inquiry are subjective and poetic. 

Going Nowhere, a years-long endeavor to design an architectural structure in the shape of the artist’s thinking is explored through tromp l’oeil paintings, architecturally inspired sculpture, and drawing. 

Hoeber’s work is featured in public and private collections internationally including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Western Bridge Museum, Seattle, WA.

Julian Hoeber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Installation View of Julian Hoeber at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 2019. Photo © Heather Rasmussen

Mood, Latex, enamel on plywood with polyester resin, fiberglass, bondo, epoxy, acrylic paint, 36 x 24 x 6 inches / 91.4 x 61 x 15.2cm, 2018. Photo © Heather Rasmussen

Des Moines studio at her loom, Spring 2019.

Olivia Valentine is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in textile construction, drawing, and photography, and in collaboration with composers, architects, and designers. Recent exhibitions include Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Danish Royal Academy (Copenhagen), and The American Academy in Rome (Italy).

Olivia received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University.

In this interview we discussed her sound collaboration with Paula Matthusen and also the books she is reading which are; Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett and Queer Abstraction a catalog by Jared Ledesma and David Getsy.

Field Edging #15 (Viking Lake), 2019, Photograph and thread on archival board.

From weeping or other cause shown with Walking Panorama (Skywalk), both 2019, from the series The Shadow is My Body. Plaster, Rabbit Skin Glue, Foamcore, Inkjet print.

Dana DeGiulio, 41, teaches painting in New York. Her book Nefertiti for the Blind was released by Attendant in February 2019.

oil on panel, 14x11" 8/14/2019

from Proposal for a Future Museum. Digital video still, 2013.

Astrid Kaemmerling, Ph.D., is a german-born artist, researcher, arts administrator, and educator based in New Orleans, LA. Her work spans the genres of visual, performance and media art and strives to connect place memories of the past, such as collected travel experiences, with a critical exploration of specific neighborhoods and selected urban places. Kaemmerling has been exhibited internationally in Germany, Italy, Korea and the United States.

She has won several awards and fellowships, and has had residencies at the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy, the Vermont Studio Center, VT, Enos Park, IL and Kala Art Institute, CA. 

Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals and publications. She is the founder of The Walk Discourse, a social practice art project, educational platform and research laboratory that provides room for exchanges about public space. Founded in San Francisco, CA and currently based in New Orleans, LA, the program sets out to playfully and critically engage participants to study the urban and rural fabric through the act of walking. Current artistic research projects include a series of works that investigate “processes of home-building.”

Kaemmerling, Astrid. Ordinary Walking Channels, 2017 - Ongoing Walking Project, + 60 videos documenting every day walks, max. 1 min. each, currently on view at Transiting 2, Group Exhibition, Organized by Lawrence Gipe & Brooke Grucella, Joseph Gross Gallery University of Arizona; May 20 - Sept 5 2019.

Kaemmerling, Astrid. Crossing Walls, Audio-Walk (2019), created for The Body Electric, curated by Cancance Huey/ Re.riddle, 41 Ross Gallery of the Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA

Based in Denver, Frankie Toan (they/them/theirs) is an artist working mostly with craft and DIY materials and techniques to create large plush sculptures, interactive works, and immersive installations.

Frankie holds a BFA in Craft/Material studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, with a minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies.

Their current body of work consists of elongated or engorged body parts tied, arranged, and installed in conversation with each other, creating fantasy bodies. Frankie has participated in many group shows and collaborations nationwide.

Recent projects include a commission for Meow Wolf’s Kaleidoscape immersive ride at Elitch Gardens and their public art installation “Public Body” for "Between Us Alleys"- a public art intervention project in downtown Denver. They have had residencies at RedLine (CO) and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN) among other places.

The books mentioned in the interview they are currently reading are Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown and Wussy Magazine.

One of the articles mentioned in the interview about queer gardening is Queer Undergrowth, by Jow Crowdy and Queer Gardens: Mary Delany's Flowers and Friendships, by Lisa L. Moore

Upcoming Shows: Harvest Moon show at Claude Haus, Denver CO 9/14

Voting Booth, installation at Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Colorado, September-December 2019 (exact dates TBA)

Altar(er) Hex, The Temple, Denver, CO 10/31/2019- 1/3/2020

Pulling a Thread, Jamestown Community College, Jamestown, NY October 11/1/2019-12/12/2019