Interviews by Brainard Carey

Rosanna Warren, photo by Joel Cohen

Rosanna Warren teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011).

She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others.

She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Negarra A. Kudumu works simultaneously as a healer, essayist, curator, and independent scholar of contemporary art. She engages with pre- and post-colonial artistic and spiritual outputs of West and West Central Africa, the Americas, and South Asia.

She is interested in cultural products as evidence of in tact connectivity to indigenous knowledge systems and pre-existing non-western cultural canons. Negarra investigates the ways in which contemporary makers continue to adapt their ancestral knowledge and technologies - consciously and subconsciously - and (re)invigorate generative discourses around art, trauma, healing, liberation, spirituality, and sexuality.

Negarra earned a BA from Dartmouth College and her MA from Leiden University. She holds the title of Yayi Nkisi Malongo (priestess) in the Brama Con Brama lineage of the Afro-Cuban spiritual tradition Palo Mayombe. She is a lay practitioner in the Pimienta lineage of the Afro-Cuban, Lukumi spiritual tradition. Negarra is also a level II Reiki practitioner and herbalist. She lives and works in Seattle where she is Manager of Public Programs at the Frye Art Museum.

Learn more here - Social Media - IG: @negarraakudumu, Twitter: @negarraakudumu, FB: facebook.com/NegarraAKudumu 

Mike Wagner, Mike, seated exposed breast (hyper sexualized), 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of artist.

Lina Iris Viktor, The Dark Continent Series, No 09, 2016. Image courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

Shari Mendelson is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She looks to art history for inspiration for her work — especially ancient Greek, Roman, and Islamic glass and ceramic objects. With equal parts reverence and play, she reinterprets these ancient works using recycled plastic bottles. Conceptually her interest is in the dialogue between the rare, ancient works we value in museums and our contemporary throw-away plastic culture. Formally, her interest is in the exploration of structure, scale, color, opacity and translucency.

Mendelson lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She has been the recipient of a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2017), four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1987, 1997, 2011, 2017), and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989). She has participated in residencies including Yaddo (2018, 1990), The MacDowell Colony (2018), the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2014), UrbanGlass (2014), Corning Museum of Glass (2015), and The Toledo Museum of Art GAPP residency (2017).

She has had solo exhibitions at UrbanGlass, Pierogi, Black + Herron Space, and Todd Merrill Studio; NYC, and John Davis Gallery; Hudson, NY. She has participated in numerous two-person shows including a 2017 show at The John Molloy Gallery, NYC, and has been included in gallery and museum exhibitions including The Aldrich Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum. Her work is in the permanent collection of The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia. Mendelson's work has been featured in publications including in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Modern Magazine, Ceramics Now, Glass Quarterly, and NY Arts.

Deer Askos, Repurposed plastic, hot glue, resin, acrylic polymer, paint, mica, 8x7x3, 2018, photo by Alan Wiener

Glasslike installation at UrbanGlass Brooklyn 2018 photo by Nils d'Aulaire

Eden holds a masters degree in Art Psychotherapy  and a certification in Trauma Informed Expressive Arts. She offers innovative arts based approaches to healing that inspire creativity and empowerment. Eden came to the field of art therapy by way of her international humanitarian work (edenorfanos.org). She believes art can be a tool for social change, recovery / discovery and healing. As an artist Eden has exhibited her painting and photography  in galleries across the USA and the UK. Her experience in the entertainment and fashion industry contributes to her dynamic skill-set. She has worked as an art director, special effects makeup artist, stylist and producer, and she has performed on stage. Eden is passionate about the wellbeing of people who have been traumatized, stigmatized or socially disadvantaged and is committed to the powerful healing of Expressive Art Therapies.

Animal Muse Exhibition @ No Format Gallery, London, 2018

EAO, Blood for Oil - On the Souls of the Unborn: Holy Money War, 2012, 60 X 40 Acrylic on canvas

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over 20 collections of poetry, prose and criticism including two volumes of his selected work Please No More Poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (2013) and Konzeptuelle Arbeiten (2017). His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel was published by Paris’s Jean Boîte Editions and he recently edited Nights on Prose Mountain: The Fiction of bpNichol.

Beaulieu has spoken, performed and exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. Derek Beaulieu was the 2014–2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary, Canada and is Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Page 254 from Finnegans Wake

excerpt of a letraset-based visual poems

Pedro Lasch (Mexico/US/Germany) is a visual artist, Duke professor, and 16 Beaver organizer. He is also director of the FHI Social Practice Lab at Duke. Solo exhibitions and presentations include Open Routines (QMA), Black Mirror (Nasher), Abstract Nationalism (Phillips Collection), Art of the MOOC (Creative Time), A Sculptural Proposal for the Zócalo (Casa Wabi); group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA (USA); RCA, Hayward Gallery, Baltic (UK); Centro Nacional de las Artes, MUAC, National Palace Gallery (Mexico); Prospect 4 Triennial New Orleans (2017), Gwangju Biennial (2006), Havana Biennial (2015), Documenta 13 (ANDANDAND, 2012), and 56th Venice Biennale (Creative Time Summit, 2015). Author of four books, his work has appeared in numerous catalogues, as well as journals like October Magazine, Saber Ver, Art Forum, ARTnews, Cultural Studies, The New York Times, and La Jornada. His online pedagogical artwork ART of the MOOC has had over 30,000 enrolled participants in 134 countries since it launched in 2015.

Pedro Lasch, A Sculptural Proposal for the Zocalo (1999/2004/2018). Architectural model exhibition at Casa Wabi Santa Maria, Mexico City, 2018-2019.

Pedro Lasch, Phantom Limbs paintings (2001-2011). Selection: WTC Kabul, WTC Paris, WTC Baghdad) at ‘Politics of Fiction’ solo exhibition at Espacio Mexico, Montreal (March 2nd - June 9th, 2019)

Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles and shedding light on overlooked dimensions of the place, its people, and their cultures.

She is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Steerforth Press and Broadway Books) and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press). A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and won the UK’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize.

She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken / Nextbook), which was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year. In 2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published her Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, which the Los Angeles Times called “brave and often beautiful” and Haaretz described as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” Her Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures has just been published by Yale University Press.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she was named one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell prize. She lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.

A portrait of the artist as a young woman, painted by her mother.

Andrea Belag is a visual artist educated at Boston University, Bard College and New York Studio School, Faculty at School of Visual Arts since 1995.

Her solo exhibitions include: Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY:  Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects;DCKT, NYMike Weiss Gallery, NY, Galerie Heinz Holtmann, Cologne, Germany; Bill Maynes Gallery, NY, Richard Anderson Gallery, NY. Awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, Rockefeller Foundation Residency at Bellagio, Italy; National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship, New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Fellowship.

Selected Group Exhibitions: 2019, Notebook, curated by Joanne Greenbaum, Henry Gallery, NY; 2018, Gardening On The Moon, artist and curator, George Lawson Gallery, Emmeryville, CA; 2017, Only Small Paintings, Fortnight Gallery, NY; 12 Painters, The Studio School, 1974-2014, Steven Kasher Gallery NY; 2013, Painting Advanced, Edward Thorp Gallery, NY; 2012, Broken/Window/Plane, Curated by John Yau, Tracy Williams Gallery: 2011, Reverie, Curated by Stephen Westfall, Zurcher Gallery, NY: 2009, OCTET: Selections from the Fine Art Department at the School of Visual Arts, Pera Art Museum, Istanbul, Turkey. 2002: The Endurance of Art, Westport Arts Center, CT, The Belles of Amherst: Contemporary Women Artists in the Collection of the Mead Art Museu, at University Gallery, Univ. of Mass., Amherst, MA. 1999: Gesture and Contemporary Painting, Warren Robbins Gallery, The Univ. of Michigan, School of Art and Design, Ann Arbor, MI. 1997: After The Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, SI, NY.

The books she mentioned reading in the interview are Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr, Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin, and Becoming by Michele Obama.

Pink Marble, 2019, 60x70 inches, oil on linen

Sunday Painter, 2018, 66 x 72 inches

Bellows is the bedroom recording project of songwriter and producer Oliver Kalb. The sound of Bellows is sensory and delicate, subtle and quiet, but erupts with frantic wobbling drums, large orchestral sections and bursts of noise that push the conventions of pop and folk. Started in late 2010 in a bedroom in upstate New York, Bellows has since blossomed from a solo recording experiment into a large-scale rock band, employing the help of friends to bring Kalb's intimate home recordings to life on stage in sweeping, loud, and intense live performances.

Bellows has been writing and self-producing records for the better part of the last decade, recording four full length albums and multiple shorter collections of song-a-day projects in the years since 2011’s As If To Say I Hate Daylight, a quietly brooding album recorded on a single microphone, for which Kalb challenged himself to create a large, fully orchestrated blanket of sounds without the use of synthesizers or any digital sounds. Over the next eight years, Bellows’ palate of sounds has expanded and changed with each successive album. On Blue Breath (2014), which Kalb recorded over the course of three years in several cities across the United States, dozens of strange sounds were layered over would-be humble folk songs, resulting in a soaring pop record that tread the line between minuscule and gigantic. Blue Breath was named one of Bob Boilen of NPR's All Songs Considered's favorite records of 2014. Bellows’ third album Fist & Palm (2016) meditated on the ending of a friendship, contrasting its stark and gutting lyrics with warm pop and dance-music based orchestrations of fluttering synthesizers, drum machines, choir harmonies and strings. Fist & Palm was featured twice on Stereogum’s 100 Best Songs of 2016 list. Bellows' latest album The Rose Gardener was released on Topshelf Records in February 2019.

Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lost Horizon (UDP 2019) — a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals — and Newcomer (UDP 2014), a lyric personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign.  He teaches college composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis.  He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City.An excerpt of Lost Horizon was published in the Brooklyn Rail.

Taking as a point of departure the retail utopia of the American mallscape — a composite of town square, garden and space station — Lost Horizon spirals out through interstate and rail to touch national parks, local attractions, truck stops, big box stores, strip malls, tattoo parlors, oil rigs. flower shops, and baggage claims. Throughout the incessant movement of the book-length poem, unbroken by stanzas or sections, Farrell privileges observation over judgment and seeks out the crossroads between cultural myth and brand image. The poem speaks from between the mall fountain and the wishing well, the Disney princess and Spenserian queen, the noble hero and the voyeur. Lost Horizon is a poem that catalogs and indexes the collision between fantasies of high and low.

Excerpt pages from Lost Horizon