Interviews by Brainard Carey

Renee Luna Bebeau is a versatile artist who cannot be pinned down to one medium as variety drives her practice.

As a henna artist, she engages with the community and uses art as a way of connecting. As a painter, she is focused on the impermanence of life and of appreciation for the present moment through wilting bouquets or compost scraps.

Luna is also a curator and instructor who lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She shares a studio with her husband, Todd Mrozinski in The Nut Factory in the Riverwest neighborhood.

 

Books she is reading now include How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan and Organumics: an Epigenetic Reframing of Consciousness, Life, and Evolution by Ben L.Callif.

henna/mehndi, 2019

henna art on wood, 2019

"Flower Forest ", 2019 acrylic on canvas from the COMPOST series

photo by Cat Stevens

Nissa Nishikawa works with performance, ceramics, painting, glass, and film. Her practice interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate the current crisis in ecology and community. She engages with alchemical and animistic practices through the use of elemental base materials, forging processes of transformation that are intuitively informed by a close observation of the intelligence of nature and the non-human as systems of navigation. This ongoing fascination extends to the embodied principles of movement while bringing together many disciplines in one space.

She studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Stage Arts at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and holds an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths College. Experiences stemming from time with Min Tanaka, Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin and dervish turning of the Mevlevi tradition are paramount to her practice. Recent workshops have been held at the Architectural Association (London), Camden Arts Centre (London) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

DEN, Regents Place, London, 2019

DEN with BOMS: 108 strategies of soil renewal on charred wood table, Regents Place, London, 2019

DEN with performance Tenko no Seishin / The Familiar Earth, Regents Place, London, 2019

Photo Credit: Rachel Stern

Sheila Pepe is a cross-disciplinary artist employing conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Her most recent solo exhibition, Hot Mess Formalism, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, traveled 2017 - 2019 to the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. A book with essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elizabeth Dunbar, Lia Gangitano, and curator Gilbert Vicario accompanied the exhibition. Three more books, released 2019, that feature her work are Vitamin T: Threads, and Textiles in Contemporary Art, the revised Art and Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, (both published by Phaidon) and  Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft: Shadows of Affect by John Corso Esquivel  (Routledge). Pepe’s  work has also been included in many group exhibitions—from the first Greater New York at PS1/ MoMA; The 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale; Fiber:Sculpture 1960- Present, organized by the ICA/Boston, to the current Queer Abstraction at the DesMoines Art Center.

 "Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism” installed at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY. This gallery includes drawings, tables of  “Votive Moderns” and “Red Hook at Bedford Terrace,” 2008, collection of the Smith Art Museum, Northampton, MA

Sheila Pepe Short Stack, 2017 wood, paint, and gloss medium 4 3/4 × 5 1/2 × 6 in. (12.1 × 14 × 15.2 cm)

Born in 1942 into an intellectual family with Western influence. Teacher of literature in high school since 1965. Journalist since 1973. Imprisoned for 39 months (1982-1985) for keeping poems in manuscript considered “anti-revolutionary”. After the “Renewal Policy” of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1986-1987), resumed journalist job and publishing poetry & translation, poems of prison experience excepted. Poems translated into French, English, Swedish and published in France, the US and Sweden. Western poems translated and published by Hoang Hung include Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, Harry Martinson, Nelly Sach.

In 2014, Hoang Hung and colleagues found the “underground” Independent Union of Vietnamese Writers & its website vanviet.info

Hoang Hung divide his time between Saigon (Hochiminh City) Vietnam and Plano TX, USA where lives his son.

Alison McNulty is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages the fragile, entangled nature of our relationship to the material world through a practice rooted in spatial and material poetics. She excavates and examines ubiquitous traces to speculate on the constructs underlying how we make meaning, assign value, and participate in social and ecological systems. McNulty often works with ordinary, but ontologically specific, reclaimed materials like brick, dust, hair, spider webs, architectural remnants, bits of eraser, plants, and rocks. Through a processing of matter that allows materials to interpret each other and their contexts, McNulty seeks to access the ambiguity and agency of things, knowledge, environments, relationships, and bodies as a way to shift consciousness towards ways we might know ourselves and surroundings as vulnerable, reciprocal, and more than human.

McNulty’s projects emerge from an interdisciplinary research perspective and are informed by the natural sciences, ecology, archeology, poetics, theory, and philosophy. Animated by a deep sense of embodied attentiveness and curiosity toward the contexts she works within, she cultivates a collaborative attitude toward the human and non-human bodies and forces, entangled web of relations, and natural processes her work intersects through place and site. The ephemeral and contingent nature of her work is meant to exhibit an interrelated and evolving fragility, and to reveal and explore the ways we participate in larger material cycles and configurations through human and geological time.

McNulty’s work includes ephemeral and interactive sculpture, architectural interventions, installation, site-responsive indoor and outdoor projects, video, photography, writing, and works on paper using salvaged and organic materials, which she calls “Embodied Drawings”. McNulty presents her work in a range of contexts, including university and commercial galleries and museums, alternative venues, unique private commissions, and mixed-use or unsanctioned sites.  She has participated in residencies at Stoneleaf Retreat, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and created House Project, a self-made residency in an abandoned house, formalized with its owner.  She has had solo exhibitions at BAU Gallery, Beacon, NY and George’s Meet & Produce, Gainesville, FL.  Selected group exhibitions include venues such as Art Lot in Brooklyn, The Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz, NY, Theoretical Archeology Group Conference, Syracuse, NY, Dusklit Interactive Art Festival, Sugar Loaf, NY, Wilderstein 5th Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Rhinebeck, NY, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, Collaborative Concepts Farm Project, Garrison, NY, Simultan Festival, Timisoara Romania, Des Lee Gallery St. Louis, and The Florida State Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL, among others. She is currently producing work for Ineligible, a project associated with the initiative Art/Archeologies, as well as Whiterock Center for Sculptural Arts Summer Invitational, Holmes, NY, and Highbrook Studios Sculpture Garden, Pelham, NY.

McNulty teaches at Parsons School of Design at The New School and the French-American School of New York.  She has also taught at Whitman College, the University of Florida, and Brooklyn College. McNulty earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and received an Alumni Fellowship from the University of Florida, where she completed her MFA. McNulty is currently based in the Hudson Valley, NY.

The books mentioned in the interview are; Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. 

untitled (Hudson Valley Ghost Column 1) Dry-stacked historic Hudson Valley-made Lahey bricks and unprocessed Cormo sheep wool from a historic Hudson Valley fiber farm. Sited on a farm in Garrison,

Garth Amundson & Pierre Gour have lived and worked together for over thirty years. Their projects incorporate found and archival imagery, physical and digital manipulation, collage, installation, and their own photographs. They have participated in dozens of residencies across the globe. Their work has been exhibited internationally, and has been recognized with awards including a Santa Fe Art Institute Residency (2016), Rockefeller Foundation Award, Bellagio, Italy (2014), Fundación Valparaíso Residency Award, Mojácar, Spain (2013), Artist Trust Grant (2011).  Amundson received his MFA from Syracuse University and Gour from The University of New Mexico.  Both are faculty in the Department of Art at Western Washington University.

Amundson & Gour met at the Banff Center of Fine Arts Residency in 1985, they have collaborated as a team in various degrees for the last thirty-four years. Some bodies of work are literal collaborations, conceived, developed, and actualized side-by-side. At other times, they serve one another in a support role: one-person sewing panels together, applying photographic emulsion, or realizing the design and installation of the work. In either context, they are truly a collaborative team of artists who insist on continuing to produce work that is stimulating and provocative.

Their work explores the perceptions and politics surrounding immigration, home, domestic motifs, and identity. Using the technique of collage/montage, photo scanning, and craft to speak metaphorically about social and cultural construction, their installations invite the viewer to think about one’s own position in relation to the broader community by psychologically projecting themselves into the images. In each project they seek to explore and dissect identity using their own experience as a point of departure. For example, during Garth’s eight-month Fulbright in Mexico in 2007, their own sense of home was put into question. After being forcibly separated at the U.S. / Canada border, and after twenty-two years as a couple, they were faced with the prospect not having a home together. Underlying all of their work, are these recent experiences with immigration laws, which have threatened their sense of home. Although legally married in Canada, the US Federal Defense of Marriage Act barred same-sex couples from all federal benefits conferred by marriage, including the right to sponsor an immigrant spouse for permanent residence. Same sex bi-national couples were often forced to separate because the U.S. government viewed them as strangers under the law.

Penetrating Cuts, installation view at the UT Arlington Art Gallery, altered pigment prints, 44” x 144.”   Description: Using the historical archive as a point of departure, this exploration was spearheaded by our collaborative investigation into the historic application and use of vintage photographs. Over the last five years we have been working side-by-side on topics ranging from domestic motifs to immigration and identity politics. For this work, we have created large-scale prints using hundreds of vintage photographs found in thrift stores and antique shops as well as personal snapshots that we have been collecting for the past 24 years. These photographs metaphorically become historical evidence of our own lost identity. Social historian Judith Gutman expressed that ‘photographs may be our most perfect cultural artifact.’ We are interested in this notion of artifact / evidence not as a means of looking at the past but an expression of the present day.

HEAD(S), installation view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, altered pigment prints mounted on bank pins, dimensions vary.   Description: This installation is a by-product of both Cut-It-Out and Penetrating Cuts, which are scanned images of thousands of photographs and snapshots, both vintage and contemporary. In this project, we have selected to use the cut-out male faces...

Sarah Anne Carter is the Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture (CDMC) and Visiting Assistant Professor in Design Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously served as the Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While at Chipstone, she collaboratively curated many innovative exhibitions, including Mrs. M.-----‘s Cabinet at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Florence Eiseman: Designing Childhood for the American Century at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and directed Chipstone’s Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice. Carter’s recent book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press 2018) was published last fall.  She is also co-author of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford University Press 2015), which is the foundation for an EdX course. Carter received her Ph.D. in American Studies and her MA and BA in History from Harvard University, as well as an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

View of Mrs. M.-----’s Cabinet, curated by the Chipstone Foundation at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 2016.

Cover of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press 2018)

The author of Starshine & Clay (2017), featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards, Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. A 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook, she has featured nationally at conferences, festivals and universities including the Library of Congress and Princeton University.

She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.

Her books are available for purchase here.

photo by Carly Ann Faye

Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch, forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2020, and Wig Heavier than A Boot, a collaboration with photographer David Johnson, forthcoming from Kris Graves Projects in October 2019. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice investigates spiritual, queer power, ecological shift, and questions of home. Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust, Hemera Foundation, and Wormfarm Institute.

He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16, he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and community-directed action. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.

David Johnson, "N.C. 012," Wig Heavier than a Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019)

Philip Matthews, "Self-portrait" (handwritten), Wig Heavier than a Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019)

Ariana Vaeth is a Baltimore raised artist focused on contemporary realism through the self-portrait.  Graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, she fulfilled an exchange program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Following undergrad, Vaeth completed a studio based Artist in Residence program at her alma mater. She has shown locally at the Portrait Society Gallery, Charles Allis Museum, as well as in Chicago at Woman Made Gallery and the Museum of Science and Industry for ‘Black Creativity.’  Vaeth is a 2017 Mary L Nohl Fellow in the Emerging Artist category, leading to her first museum represented solo exhibition, “Close Contact,” at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art. Last autumn, Vaeth was selected as an inaugural cohort recipient of Fellowship.art, a visual arts grant modeled on Gener8tor’s nationally recognized entrepreneurial program.  Her work will appear in the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art opening October 18th.

The book mentioned in the interview was Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel.

Dye Party, oil on canvas, 48X72 inches, 2019

PreGame, oil on canvas, 72X48 inches, 2019