Interviews by Brainard Carey

Amitis Motevalli is an artist born in Iran.

This is her first interview with Yale radio and she did a second one which you can hear with this link.

She explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict and war. Through many mediums including, sculpture, video, performance and collaborative public art, her work juxtaposes iconography, with iconoclasm, asking questions about violence, domination, occupation and the path to decolonization , while invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. Motevalli is invested in research, collaboration, and the potential of art to expand thought. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artists and educators.

photo by Sam Gehrke.

Ashley Stull Meyers is a writer, editor, and curator. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the west coast, including those in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR.

She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta).

She is currently Northwest Editor for Art Practical and has contributed writing to Bomb Magazine, Rhizome, Arts.Black and SFAQ/NYAQ.

In 2017 Stull Meyers was named Director and Curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University.

Currently, she is co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. She is based in Portland, Oregon.

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Margaret Smithers-Crump is a Canadian artist based in Houston, Texas. Her work addresses the vulnerability and interconnectedness of Earth’s diverse life forms and ecosystems as impacted by global warming, pollution and loss of habitat. Fittingly, she creates her spatial artworks with recycled plexiglas, a material that evokes fragility and human consumption.

Smithers-Crump has exhibited nationally with recent solo exhibitions at the Grace Museum, Abilene; Pearl Fincher MFA, Houston; Galveston Art Center; Imperial Center for the Arts, Rocky Mount, NC; Penn College of Technology - Penn State and Manifest Art Gallery, Cincinnati. Her upcoming solo exhibitions include Rudolph Blume Fine Art / Art Scan Gallery in conjunction with the 2019 Sculpture Month Houston and the Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont in 2020.

She received her BFA in Painting from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1973. Smithers-Crump grew up on her family’s island in Canada and lived in the south Pacific in her early twenties. This early experience nurtured her respect and awe for nature. She maintains that the planet is her best educator.

The book mentioned in the interview is Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Vital Signs, Gallery view, exhibited at the Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas, 2016. This image features “In Silence” in the foreground and “Code Blue” on the back gallery wall. Art materials are recycled plexiglas, paint, and wood.

Detail from A Question of Balance, incorporating 135 hand cut and fabricated recycled plexiglas dodecahedrons with a circular reverse painted plexiglas support, anthracite and black sand. 72” x 72” x 15”, 2016 - 2018

Michelle Bolinger received her MFA from the University of Washington in 2005, and her BFA from Indiana University in 2003. She has had solo shows at Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle, WA as well as Roman Susan Gallery, The Presidents Gallery and DIG all located in Chicago, IL.

Recent group exhibitions include Soak. Stroke. Scratchat Melanee Cooper Gallery, Chicago, and New American Paintings: Midwest Editionat the Elmhurst Art Museum. She has taught at Northwestern University, Loyola University, Lake Forest College and Harold Washington College. In 2012 she was a Visiting Professor & Artist in Residence at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She has been awarded multiple grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Artists Assistance Program.

The books mentioned in the interview are Becoming, by Michelle Obama and The Gruffalo.

Light Tuck, 2018, Oil on canvas, 17"x14"

Crescents, 2018, Oil and graphite on board, 15"x14"

Paul Genega is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and five chapbooks. His latest, Sculling on the Lethe, was published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2018 and was a Finalist for the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. Moordener Kill, a chapbook of recent work, will be published by Finishing Line Press this year.

Over a forty year career, his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines including Poetry, North American Review and Narrative Northeast and has received such honors as the Lucille Medwick Award (New York Quarterly), The Discovery Award (The Nation), Charles Angoff Award (The Literary Review), and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He is co-author with Patricia Lee Stotter of the multi-media theater piece Paging Doctor Faustus, which was presented in a staged reading at FiveMyles Gallery, Brooklyn, in April, 2019, and is currently in development. Under the auspices of Arts-by-the-People’s Moving Words project, his poem Pharaoh was turned into a short animation by Israeli artist Omer Mizrahi and was shown at the 2018 Animex Festival, in Tel Aviv. Also in 2018, his poetry was included in Katja Dryer’s play Ophelia Comes to Brooklyn, which premiered in Brussels and toured Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

Perhaps, a collaborative portfolio of poems with original etchings by Boston artist Aaron Fink, is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Block Museum at Northwestern, among others.

Genega taught for many years at Bloomfield College, New Jersey – one of the most diverse private colleges in the Northeast - where he founded the creative writing program and served as chair of Humanities. His legacy continues at Bloomfield through the Genega Endowed Scholarships in Creative Writing.

Lisa Bulawsky is an artist and printmaker known for her works on paper and temporary public projects. Recent exhibitions include the Bruno David Gallery, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Miami Dade Public Library. Recent collaborative projects include Portable Memories in Rising Seas with Fifty-Fifty art collective and Oyster Boat, Volume 1 with Small Craft Advisory Press. Lisa is a Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and is also the director of Island Press, a research-based printmaking workshop in the Sam Fox School. Lisa received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA with honors from the University of Kansas.

You can find Lisa and her work on Instagram and Artsy.

The Doubt of Being (from the bottom up), 2019 Lisa Bulawsky Collage, monotype, and inkjet on Evolon 44” x 60”

Portable Memories in Rising Seas, 2018 Sanger Gallery at The Studios of Key West. Fifty-Fifty art collective (Lisa Bulawsky and Laurencia Strauss) Installation view of exhibition and participatory event set-up including 18” x 24” inkjet prints on wall adapted from participants’ scratchboard drawings, screening area with chairs for film viewing, blank scratchboards, and archive books of all original scratchboards made at previous PMRS events. Not pictured: underwater video of artists sharing scratchboard drawing with fish.

Heather & Vincent, November 2018

Heather Rasmussen was born in Santa Ana, CA in 1982 and lives in Los Angeles. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2007 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, CA in 2004. She grew up dancing classical ballet spent summers at intensive programs around the country. While in high-school, she was part of the professional company, Ballet Unlimited, who participated in the Southwest Regional Dance America Festivals. While at UC Irvine, she discovered photography and left the dance world. She was encouraged to apply to CalArts, where she was then was mentored by the artist Allan Sekula. She currently works in the mediums of photography, video, sculpture and installation.

Rasmussen’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Weingart Gallery, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA (2015); California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2015); and Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA (2012) and a three-person exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2011). Solo gallery exhibitions include Pile/Plié at The Pit, Glendale, CA (2018) and Body Variations at ACME., Los Angeles, CA (2017). Her work has been featured in thematic exhibitions such as Solar Flare, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance (2018);  Touchpiece, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Input/Output, Sycamore Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH (2014); Trouble with the Index, California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2014); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; (2014); Horizon Variations, Camera Club New York, NY (2012); Curious Silence, Brand Library & Arts Center, Glendale, CA (2011); Exposure, The Art Institute of Chicago, (2011), 31 Women in Art Photography, Affirmation Arts Foundation, New York, NY (2010); and Salty Dog Bites the Hand, Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA (2008).

As a dancer, woman, and new mother, Rasmussen’s work asks the question “How does this body move and rest within spaces among accumulated objects?” Her work can be thought of as still-lifes, but they are also documents of deterioration, movement and experimentation using her body alongside other objects. A vegetable echoes a limb, something cumbersome becomes sexual, something inanimate becomes invigorated. Sometimes just the act of moving a mirror so it reflects a fragment of a photograph on the opposite wall of the studio changes the content of an image. Recently Rasmussen photographed her changing body through the stages of pregnancy and post-birth, linking further the relationship of life and death with the life cycle of the large vegetables. She gains inspiration from the artists Hans Breder, René Magritte, Simone Forti, JoAnn Callis, Yves Tanguy and Andre Kertész.

Notable awards include an Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Art in 2014 and the Dean’s Reserve Fund award for the School of Art at CalArts in 2007. Press includes reviews in 2017 in the Los Angeles Times and Hyperallergic.com and ArtSlant, as well as The New Yorker in 2015. Rasmussen’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Rasmussen has 4 videos currently on view at Ray’s + Stark bar monitors at LACMA through August 6, 2019, and will be showing an installation of works in Cindy Rehm’s show These Creatures, at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in San Bernardino, opening September 9, 2019, reception for the artists on September 10 from 6 to 8pm.

She is represented by The Pit, LA.

Videos at Stark Bar - check the museum for an update.

The book mentioned in the interview is by Sally Mann - Hold Still.

Untitled (Butterfly legs on pillow)
, 2018
. Pigment print,

Kelda Martensen, born in Tacoma, Washington is a visual artist known for her work in printmaking, collage, book arts and murals. Awards include the Larry Sommers Fellowship, Bell Cramer Award in Printmaking and the Conceptual Visionary Award from Pratt Fine Art Center. Her teaching awards include the Dan Evans Innovation in Teaching Award, the John and Suanne Roueche Excellence Award and Association of Women Faculty Graduate Award. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France in 2011 and at Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle in 2016. Her prints and artist books are in private and public collections including King County, the City of Tacoma, Google, Washington University in St. Louis Special Collections Library, Southern Graphics Council International Archive, Bokartas Contemporary Art Center, University of Missouri and Willamette University.

Martensen is tenured faculty of art at North Seattle College where she teaches printmaking, drawing, book arts and mural art. Martensen earned a BA in Studio Art from Willamette University and an MFA in Visual Art with a focus in Printmaking and Book Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Seattle, Washington and is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery.

The books mentioned in the interview are Sista Tongue by Lisa Linn Kanae, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom by Amy Hempel and Becoming by Michelle Obama.

Starting Again, 2019, Woodblock, Monotype, Solvent Transfer, Collage, 30 x 22 inches

This Is Our Moment, 2019, Woodblock, Solvent Transfer, Digital Print Artist Book, 22 x 18 inches

Colleen Woolpert’s interactive objects and installations are rooted in photography and explore vision—both as concept and perceptual phenomena. An identical twin born on Halloween, Colleen’s life and work draw on the uncanny and on author John Stilgoe’s notion of directed serendipity. Raised in Michigan and currently based in Kalamazoo, Colleen has lived in seven states; in Syracuse, NY, she was inspired by late 1800s pre-cinema inventors who worked at the same site where her studio was located to pursue her own patent, which was awarded in 2018 for her exhibition stereoscope, the TwinScope Viewer.

Colleen’s TwinScope project promotes stereograph display and addresses topics like binocular vision, invention as art production, and her identity as a double image whose twin has a visual impairment, strabismus, which affects her depth perception. Relatedly, Colleen’s Persistence of Vision project stems from her work with blind artists and explores how we visualize the unseen and navigate the unknown, and reframes disability.  Colleen holds a BA from Western Michigan University and an MFA from Syracuse University. Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, California Museum of Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, and Light Work, among other venues, and her TwinScope Viewer has been acquired by numerous institutions, collectors, and artists internationally; it is currently touring Alaska to enable an exhibition of stereographs by pioneering photographer Edweard Muybridge.

Red Twin Blue Twin (Stereograph No. 7 & TwinScope Viewer), 2017, archival inkjet print and papers, museum board, frame, 11 x 1.25 x 14 inches; wood, rubber, glass optics, hardware, 4 x 7 x 4 inches

TwinScope Viewer Patent Sketches and Document, 2019, archival inkjet print, 11 x 28 inches

M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self (Coffee House Press, 1996), novels One Tribe (New Issues Press, 2006) and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery (Coffee House Press, 2013), the nonfiction work Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War (Curbstone Books, 2017), and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003).

Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for ONE TRIBE, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices).

Protesting on Women’s International Day in Manila with the women of Liga ng mga Lolang Pilipina. March 2002.

Lola Cristina Alcober shows M. Evelina Galang the site of her home in Tacloban prior to WWII. May 2002.