Interviews by Brainard Carey

Scott Dolan started making Slight Headache comics in Iowa City in the summer of 1992 as a combination diaristic notetaking/money-making scheme. The small zines were quickly filled with images and text with the thought that any idea can be a seed for another idea, none too big, none too small. The original comics were sold at a few stores in town and traded widely through the mail with mail artists, zinesters and other collaborators and supporters. The comics were non-linear in layout, more a collection of briefly observed moments than a sequential story. Mostly, the images were light-hearted commentary on the events of the day, with special interest taken in language, customer service, alienation,  food, poetry, punk rock, loss, the ridiculous possibilities of being, and any other of the Big Ideas in art, such as may have arisen.

In 2016, working with Circadian Press in Brooklyn, he released a “completely remastered” limited edition Slight Headache box set, a few sets of which are still available on his website.

Alongside the comics grew a series of gouache and watercolor pictures, the "Kutch and Mancuso Drawings," which were loosely based on his own life experiences and stories heard from, and about, friends.

Currently he has been working on a series of pencil portraits, gouache paintings of an unknown (to him) deceased artist’s pencils, and other tools of the trade, which were given to him by a friend of a friend.

He was born in Minnesota, received his MFA from the University of Iowa and currently he lives, works and otherwise lingers in various parts of Brooklyn. He was a founding member of the legendary Speedboat Gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has been shown at Happy Lucky #1, Cellar Gallery, NYSG and Five Myles in New York City; Speedboat Gallery, CO Exhibitions and No Name Gallery in Minneapolis/St Paul; Lovey Town in Madison Wisconsin, and others. His work is in the permanent collections of the U.S. Library of Congress’s Monographs Section, the University of Iowa Special Collections, the University of Maryland, the University of Vermont, The Walker Art Center,  Carleton College, and the Franklin Furnace archives, among others. 

The book mentioned in the interview is Greek to Me, by Mary Norris.

Mongol 482, Gouache on Paper, 22” x 30"

Woodclinched, Gouache on Paper, 22” x 30"

Slight Headache Comics Special Circadian Press Limited Edition Box Set (edition of 100) Risograph printing on 60# Vellum Text 2.5” x 3” x 2.25" (book size 2.1875" x 2.8”)

Photo credit: Cedric Angeles

Reoccurring themes of technology and the manipulation of nature can be found in Brian Guidry’s paintings and installations. Guidry's paintings range visually from compressed lines of color to abstract eruptions. The artist synthesizes color, sound and texture to create “digitized” or “dissolved landscapes,” using a specific color palette sampled from a variety of natural sources. The injection of these “natural” colors into geometric planes and constructions creates shapes and voids suggestive of portals or slips in time, leading the viewer over the precipice of the normal, into the magical realism of the uncanny, peculiar and quantum.

Brian Guidry lives and works in South Louisiana. He received his BFA from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions include; The Bronx Museum in New York; Gana Art Space, Seoul, Korea; the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans; The Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans and the National Collage of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. His work has been featured and discussed in Time Out Chicago, ArtForum, The Times-Picayune, Gambit Weekly, Pelican Bomb, The New York Times, and New American Paintings. His work is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art; The Odgen Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA.; National College of Arts--Lahore, Pakistan; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn, NY; and Paul & Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette, LA.

The book mentioned during the interview was

"Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018” , Peter Schjeldahl

Blueshift 2017, Hand-lined acrylic on canvas 43 1/4 x 33 1/4 inches

Oxizion 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas, 40.5” X 33”

Tony Conrad’s pattern-centric paintings and drawings are the result of an ongoing interest in various cultural and historical movements including Persian textiles, Tibetan Buddhism, psychedelic rock culture, and meditative states.

Conrad received his MFA degree in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009.  Currently, Conrad is a Visiting Professor of Art at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Conrad’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in various solo, group, and invitational exhibitions and has won a number of awards including the Lawrence Rathsack Scholarship and the Frederick R. Layton Fellowship.

Tony is represented by the Frank Juarez Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Composition #35, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 inches, 2019

Composition #36, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, 2019

Kemi Adeyemi is assistant professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Director of The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing residency, at the University of Washington.

Her book manuscript on black queer women’s geographies of neoliberalism, and her co-edited volume Queer Nightlife, are currently in development. Adeyemi’s has forthcoming writing in GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, and has published in Women & Performance, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking.

She has contributed exhibition essays for Tschabalala Self (Seattle), This is Not a Gun (Los Angeles), black is a color (Los Angeles), Impractical Weaving Suggestions (Madison), and Endless Flight (Chicago); and writings on artists including Liz Mputu, Adee Robinson, Brendan Fernandes, Oli Rodriguez, and Indira Allegra. Adeyemi co-curated the unstable objects exhibition at The Alice Gallery in 2017 and is curating Amina Ross’ October 2019 solo show at Ditch Projects.

photo: Ola Kjelbye

Roy Scranton is the author of I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015).

He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, the New Republic, The Baffler, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013).

He grew up in a working-class family in Oregon, dropped out of college after his freshman year, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army and served four years, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army at the rank of sergeant, he completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then earned a PhD in English at Princeton. His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction.

He currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his partner and daughter, and is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing.

Maimuna Adam in front of "(M)atrimony", VI São Tomé Bienal, CACAU. Curator: Adelaide Ginga. São Tome, 2011.

Maimuna Adam grew up in Sweden and Mozambique. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2008. She creates mixed-media paintings on paper, book sculptures and video artworks using materials such as coffee, ink, banana fibre paper, charcoal, acrylic paint, canvas, found books and objects.

As an artist, she enjoys exploring notions of identity and memory, emotions related to perceived gains and losses brought by contemporary and historical migration of individuals and groups. She often makes reference to fictional as well as historical narratives, questioning the role of images and objects in relation to memory and the act of re-membering events that relate in a personal and universal way. She held her first solo exhibition “Bon Voyage” in Maputo, in 2013.

In 2014 she spent 4 months at IWALEWAHAUS at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, as a curatorial fellow through a scholarship awarded by the Alexander Rave Foundation/IFA. In 2017 she was invited to take part in the ‘180º Artists of the South’ (‘180º Artistas ao Sul’) residency at HANGAR - Centre for Artistic Research in Lisbon, with funding from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Maimuna is a member of Kulungwana Association in Maputo, where she takes part in and collaborates periodically on exhibitions and workshops. The latest project she participates in, ‘Giniceu’, opened its first exhibition in May 2019. It had the participation of creatives Carmen Maria, Djamila de Sousa, Gracinda Percina Cumbe, Lica Sebastião, Maimuna Adam, Ulica Abrantes, Suzette Honwana (Tiassu) and Wacy Zacarias, and was curated by Maria Elisa Chim.

Currently, Maimuna is working as a tutor alongside Ângela Ferreira in UPCycles 2019, a PALOP* Residency funded by FCGulbenkian and organized by ‘Associação Amigos do Museu do Cinema em Moçambique’ (AAMCM). Participating artists are Ângelo Lopes, David Aguacheiro, Eliana N’Zualo, Mariana Carrilho, Marilú Námoda, Samira Vera-Cruz and Sofia Yala Rodrigues. After a period of long-distance tutoring and individual development of video projects based on images and audio from personal and public archives, participants will meet to finalize their projects, install and present an exhibition at Nossa Senhora da Conceição fortress in Maputo, opening on 7th September 2019.

*PALOP : Portuguese-speaking African countries (Portuguese: ‘Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa’)

"Empress III" (from the series "The Empresses"), 2018. Coffee and charcoal on paper. 21 x 29 cm. Ⓒ Maimuna Adam.

"Self-portrait (No Coffee)", 2018. Coffee and charcoal on paper. 29 x 21 cm. Ⓒ Maimuna Adam

photo by Marlon James

Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and writer, author of Trick Vessels (2012), BURN (2015), Pitch Lake (2017) and The City of Dreadful Night (2018).

They served as a judge in the 2018 Small Axe Literary Competition and the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

They will read at Carifesta XIV on August 17, and conduct a poetry workshop at the National Library, Port of Spain, on August 23. Their new film poem, ‘Langston Dreams of Fancy Sailors’ will screen at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival from August 19 to August 23 at Medulla Art Gallery, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

Their poetry has appeared in Almost Island, Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, St Petersburg Review, Poetry, and The Poetry Review. 

BURN (Shearsman, 2015)

Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree Press, 2017)

Simonetta Moro is a visual artist, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on painting, drawing, and mapping practices. Through the interpretation of the phenomenological world, places become repositories of memory, points of departure for imaginary journeys, vectors of time and space, and sites of exploration and intervention.

Moro’s research in cartographic aesthetics informs many of her artworks and academic papers, including a book she is currently writing, Cartographic Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art (forthcoming by Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies in 2021).

Moro holds a PhD in Fine Arts, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK; MA, Winchester School of Art, UK; and BFA Painting, Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, Italy. She currently lives in New York City, and she is the Vice President for Academic Affairs, Director, and Associate Professor at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).

Installation view of six works on paper from Theatrum Mundi, Galleria del Carbone, Ferrara (Italy), 2019From left to right, top to bottom:“Palmyra (I)”; “Aleppo; Samaria-Sebaste (Augusteum)”; “Palmyra (II)”; “Jerusalem”; “Mosul” Pigment, pastel, graphite, and gouache on paper, 30 ½ x 43 in. each

“Kut”, 2016Graphite on paper, 40 x 60 in.

Emmy Thelander was raised in Massachusetts and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. As an artist, she devises idiosyncratic systems that give rise to drawings, paintings, video and sculpture.

Emmy received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2014 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships including the Lighthouse Works, the Fountainhead at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling grant in addition to residencies at ACRE, Signal Culture, and the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Art.

She has exhibited solo projects at Practice (Philadelphia, PA) Los Ojos (Brooklyn, NY), In The Pines (Jackson, WY), and Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA). She currently teaches at Hostos Community College and Hunter College, and in 2018 was a visiting professor at Washington U. in St. Louis.

The books mentioned in the interview that she is currently reading are Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects and Manifestly Haraway.

Love and Intimacy, Freedom, Relating Positively to Myself, Having Income, 2018, Colored pencil, graphite, and marker on paper, 9 x 9"

Untitled (In a Good Year Drawing), 2017, Inkjet print on matte paper, 25 x 23"

Dan Paz is a Latinx visual artist and scholar. Dan's research into histories and processes of image-making explores queerness, racialized identities, the complications of nationality, and the impact of migration in the Global South.

Paz’s research encompasses image technology, the performance of representation, and the relationships inspired by the pursuit of making art. Their overall creative practice is invested in curatorial, educational, and community-building practices, working towards a more equitable future.

Dan completed a BFA in Video with minors in Photography and Art History at The Atlanta College of Art (Atlanta, GA), and an MFA from The University of Chicago (Chicago, IL).

The sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building 4k Film, HD video, Photograms, Bleachers 2018-present

Lectern at the former Queer Pier (from the body of work Monument a Surface) White oak, coral automotive paint 6’ H, 24” W, 22” D 2018