Interviews by Brainard Carey

Richard Turley is a designer living in NYC.

In this interview he talks about design and Civilization.

Learn more about book 1 book 2 book 3 , insta , about civilization1 about civilization 2, or go to the store.

Images below are from copies of Civilization.

A native New Yorker, Griffis received her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (Montpelier, VT). She has had solo exhibitions at Anna Kaplan Contemporary (Buffalo, NY) the Pamela Williams Gallery (Amagansett, NY), Lizan Tops Gallery and AE Gallery (both East Hampton, NY), Whitney Art Works (Greenport, NY), The Re Institute (Millerton, NY) and 571 Projects (New York, NY).

Her work has been included in group shows at Edward Thorp Gallery (New York, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Bowman/Bloom Gallery (New York, NY), Michael Steinberg (New York, NY), Silas Marder (Bridgehampton, NY), Ille Arts, (Amagansett, NY), Sara Nightingale Gallery, (Sag Harbor, NY) and Boltax Gallery (Shelter Island, NY) among others. Griffis has received fellowships from Le Moulin à Nef (Auvillar, France), Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany), the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, (Ithaca, NY), Schloss Pluschow (Mecklenberg- Vorpommern, Germany), The Edward F. Albee Foundation (Montauk, NY) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA). That Melora’s work depicts the dramatic and mines the psychological is no surprise since she is also a professional actor and performance artist. Griffis is also a graduate of The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York City and has worked extensively in theatre, television, and film.

After starring in the feature film blessing, (Sundance Film Festival Spirit Award) with her father Guy Griffis, she moved to Los Angeles, where she attended The Santa Monica College of Design, Art, and Architecture’s mentor program. Melora has written, designed, choreographed/directed, and performed in over a dozen performance art works in New York City and abroad. She visits similar themes that inhabit her painting in her performance work and writing.

Doug McClemont, Linda Yablonsky, and the late Robert Long, have written about her work which is psychologically charged and dedicated to authentic expression, drawing on intimate and universal concepts. Griffis’ figurative works lean toward abstraction encouraging the viewer to engage with her paintings prismatically. Melora makes oil paintings as well as mixed media works, both flat and sculptural, that combine found textiles pieced together with intentionally uneven hand stitching in various colored threads. Alluding at once to the fragility of loss and the subsequent process of grieving, it proposes a kind of celebratory mending. Griffis states, "an inherent, intuitive occupancy of an interior psychological world exists [in my work], and I trust in the gravity of the personal paralleling public import." Just as a play pulls back the curtain on a particular physical and psychological locus through set and character, Griffis' work animates the canvas with a similar appetite. Critic Doug McClemont says, "With their (...) dramatic use of color, Griffis' works convey the impression that memories and retellings can be strangely cloaked and yet, nevertheless, poignant." Delving into our shared humanity, Griffis' energetic paintings are personal, provoking an emotional response in her pursuit of truth.

Melora lives and works in New York City. Learn abut a recent show here.

la mer prière 2018 acrylic, marker, glitter, feathers, hair, sand, leather, latex, mixed fabric, digital print and thread on muslin 56 x 72 in.

grief cave 1 (his) 2018 acrylic, glitter, mixed fabrics and thread on muslin 30 x 42 in.

Sharon Mesmer, photo: Esther Levine

Sharon Mesmer’s most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Place (Bloof Books) was voted one of Entropy’s “Best of 2015.” Her other collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008), and Half Angel, Half Lunch(Hard Press, 1998). A chapbook, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, was published by Belladonna in 2006. Four poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition). She has also published several collections of short fiction, including Ma Vie á Yonago(Hachette, in French, 2005). She has had essays in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Paris Review and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches literature and creative writing at NYU and the New School.

Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place, poetry collection, Bloof Books, 2015

Ma Via à Yonago -- Illuminations, fiction collection, Hachette, 2005, French translation by Daniel Bismuth

Sylvia Arthur at Libreria Ghana

Sylvia Arthur is a British-Ghanaian narrative nonfiction writer whose work explores identity, diaspora, politics, and place. She lives in Accra where she has turned her vast collection of books into Ghana's only lending library, Libreria Ghana. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, the BBC, and The British Journalism Review and her essay, “Britain’s Invisible Black Middle Class” appears in the anthology, Know Your Place: Essays by the Working Class for the Working Class. She has been awarded fellowships to Hedgebrook and Santa Fe Art Institute and received a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation via 516 Arts to produce a publication on immigration and art produced in and about the US-Mexico border region.

Her short play, Haze, had a six-night run at The Vaults theatre in London and her one-woman show, Obama & Me, was performed in London, Brussels, and San Francisco to a sold-out audience. She holds an MA in Narrative Nonfiction Writing and, for four years, was a consultant to the European Commission on communicating Freedom of Movement. Much of this experience of living and working in mainland Europe informs her writing. She's currently working on a collection of interconnected narrative essays called African, & Other Curse Words. She is a passionate literacy advocate for those from low-income, marginalised, and vulnerable groups.

To find out more about Libreria Ghana, visit libreriagh.com/impact-projects/ or follow us on Instagram @libreriagh.

Creative Writing Class at Gem Star School

Market Akenkan (Market Reading) for the children of Dome Market women

Tobe Carey is an independent film producer and director and photographer.

His Catskill Mountains/Hudson Valley documentaries include Luis Moses Gomez and His Mill House, The First Artist in America, Rails to the Catskills, The Catskill Mountain House and The World Around, Sweet Violets, Woodstock Summer of '94, and Deep Water (with Robbie Dupree and the late Artie Traum).

Carey's projects also include a 20-year collaboration with performance artist Linda Mary Montano. Additional projects include docu-memoirs  Stanley's House and School Board Blues as well as Poetry of a Watershed Stream, Waste, Fraud and Abuse and Paper or Plastic, available online. 

He is president of Willow Mixed Media a not-for-profit arts organization working on issues of social concern, like Sing For the Silenced with musician Marc Black and All Politics is Local, documenting two years of political events in Woodstock and Kingston. Many of  Carey's short productions are available on his two YouTube Channels and Vimeo.

Carey's latest project is “Tight Lines” a history of fishing in the Esopus Watershed, now in production, with photographer and Catskills guide Mark Loete.  His documentaries and art projects have been seen in film festivals and on cable and broadcast television and are available as DVDs and for streaming on Vimeo-on-demand.

Beth B exploded onto the New York film scene in the late ‘70s, after receiving her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1977. These breakthrough films, such as Black Box, Vortex, and The Offenders (co-directed with Scott B), were shown at Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s, the New York Film Festival and the Film Forum. These and more recent films have been shown at, and acquired by, the Whitney Museum and MoMA. Her early films, along with those of Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe, were the focus of the documentary film, Blank City. Her films have been the subjects of several books and other documentaries, including The Cinema of Transgression; Art, Performance, Media; and No Wave: Underground 80; Downtown Film and TV Culture. Beth B’s career has been characterized by work that challenges society’s conventions, and that focuses on social issues and human rights.

Throughout her prolific career, Beth B has produced over 30 films within the documentary, experimental, and narrative genres. B worked in television as an Executive Producer, Producer, and Director for eight years. She has mounted largescale media installations for the Hayward Gallery and the Wexner Center, and created a theater production for BAM’s Artist in Action series. Her films have been shown at museums and cinemas worldwide as well as film festivals including: The New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Nuremberg Int’l Human Rights Film Festival, DOC NYC Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival and many others.

Currently, Beth B is directing and producing the feature length documentary film, LYDIA LUNCH: The War is Never Over, about iconic musician and performance artist, Lydia Lunch. In 2016, B released her feature documentary film, Call Her Applebroog, with Zeitgeist Films as distributor. The film had its world premiere at The Museum of Modern Art at Doc Fortnight and opened at the Metrograph Theater in NYC as well as other theatrical venues. The film reveals renowned artist Ida Applebroog’s groundbreaking artwork that has been a sustained enquiry into the polemics of human relations, but more intimately, it is about her dramatic struggle to overcome adversity. Her personal story is one that Beth B knows well—Ida is her mother and colleague.

In February 2017, B mounted a new interdisciplinary exhibition, VOYEUR, at the HOWL! Gallery in New York City. The show combines video installation, photographs, and a large-scale sculpture.

In 2013, B produced, directed, filmed and edited EXPOSED, a documentary feature film about 8 New York performance artists who use their bodies in provocative and comedic ways to question the very concept of “normal.” The film premiered in the Panorama section at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival where it was nominated for Best Documentary Film and has been screened in over 30 countries.

From 2000-2008, Beth B began a new phase of her career, producing and directing television and educational documentaries and docudramas, which she continues to do. Breathe In, Breathe Out, a co-production with Open City/Blow Up, Dune and ZDF Television, had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival, its US Premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and was subsequently broadcast in several countries. B has a prolific career producing and directing television documentaries including Positive ID: The Case Files of Anthony Falsetti; Death of a Rising Star; The Black Widow; An Unlikely Terrorist; and several other programs. B worked as Senior Series Producer on a six-part reality television series, Crime Scenes Uncovered, about the “real CSI” shot in Miami for TLC. She produced and directed two of the episodes. For ZDF/Germany, ARTE/France, the Sundance Channel and PBS, she has created various short subject documentaries, including Breasts for PBS's Egg the Arts Show, segments for Nerve for the HBO series and website; High Heel Nights for ARTE/France, and segments for AfterEffects,

Ly Hoang Ly, photo: Trịnh Vĩnh Phúc

Ly Hoàng Ly a multidisciplinary artist working across poetry, painting, video, performance art, installation and public art. She studied painting in Vietnam, later earning an MFA in Art in Studio (sculpture) through The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Fulbright Scholarship. She also works as an editor of Youth Publishing House in Ho Chi Minh City. Ly is the first women visual artist in Vietnam doing performance art and poetry performance. Her installations incorporate a level of performance or activation between subjects and objects that unlock sensual affects in the human-materiality nexus.

Ly’s previous works make bodily references to women’s cultural experiences of maternity and ministrations as well as highlight human emotions and our relationship to place and nature. Since 2011, Ly has explored the relationship of freedom and surveillance, inherited trauma, the ephemeral materiality of memory, the dislocation and the importance of community and human connection. Her art raises questions about the general human conditions, the critical states of society, and our shared issues of migration and immigration. It speaks not only on a personal level, but also on a global scale: of (mis)understandings and (mis)placement, of (trans)forming identity and being rootless, of adaptation and acceptance, of division and union, and of being human.

Learn more about her ongoing projects with these links - HUGGING TREES – HUGGING YOUR LOVED ONES – HUGGING YOURSELF, and a Solo Exhibition, and Faithfully Flat Installation, and BOAT HOME BOAT Public Sculpture.

Hugging Trees - Hugging your loved ones - Hugging yourself - An on-going multimedia project since 2015 - Photo Credit: Võ Thị Thanh Tuyền

Title: Boat Home Boat - Public Sculpture 2017 - Part of "0395A.ĐC" - an on-going multimedia project since 2011 - Photo Credit: Trần Thế Phong

Kate Enters is a contemporary renaissance woman. As a painter, she responds to her contemporary life in London creating paintings that depict moments in time through stylised compositions borrowing from vintage scenes, quotations, book titles as well as taking a wry look at social media, all conveyed through her own mix of wit and pathos.

Responding to the need for more opportunities for artists to show work on their own terms, Kate set up ArtCan, innovatively positioning the organization as a peer network with the opportunities to take part in exhibitions. As the director of ArtCan she builds on her ability to produce and manage art events, honed through her background in events management for high end art museums and celebrity charity events and arts PR.

ArtCan has enabled Kate to develop both her curatorial vision and her writing voice. She has also written about art, championing organizations and individuals she is keen to shout about, most recently for Wall Street International and STATE magazine.

The book mentioned in the interview was by Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison.

Captured: A Moment In Time 2018 London Streets Acrylic on canvas 8”x12”

Captured: A Moment In Time 2019 Road Trip! Acrylic on canvas 14”x14”

Ted Riederer recording Gamelan Gent Kasturi in Kansas City, photo by EG Schempf

Ted Riederer was interviewed previously, that first interview can be heard by clicking here.

A “one-time refugee from punk and sometime band member,” Ted Riederer has armed himself with painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits, hard disk recorders, photography equipment, a vinyl record lathe, and long-stemmed roses as he’s ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center, Bangladesh. His “Never Records” project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, to New Orleans, to Texas, and to London, which was sponsored by the Tate Modern.

Ted Riederer is the Director of Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project, non-profit gallery/performance space in the East Village. The New York Times has described Howl! Happening as, “Instrumental to the history of the area.” Howl! Happening’s thriving publishing imprint A/P/E has included essays by: Ai Wei Wei, Dan Cameron, Anthony Haden-Guest, Robert Nickas, Michelle Grabner, Michael Musto, C. Carr, Nicole Rudick, John Lyons, and James Wolcott.

Callisto: The Dead Moon, 2019, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable

Callisto: The Dead Moon, 2019, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable

Jillian Mayer is an artist and filmmaker living in Miami, Florida.

Through videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, performances, and installations, she explores how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities. Mayer investigates the points of tension between our online and physicals worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two.

​Solo exhibitions include Tufts University, Boston, MA (2018); Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2016); LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT (2014); and David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL (2011 & 2016). She has exhibited and performed at  MoMA PS1 (2017); MoMA (2013); the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL (2013); the Bass Museum of Art, North Miami, FL (2012); the Guggenheim Museum (2010); and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec as a part of the Montréal Biennial (2014). Mayer’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art Papers, Art in America, ArtNews, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Mayer is a recipient of the Creative Capital Fellowship, South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban Artists, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine.

Mayer's films have screened at festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Rottenberg, and the New York Film Festival. She is a fellow of the Sundance Institute's New Frontiers Lab and New Narratives on Climate Change Lab. She is the co-director of Borscht Corp, a non-profit film and art collaborative in Miami, Florida.

Mayer is represented by David Castillo Gallery, in Miami, FL.

Slumpie 9 - Knee Hole, 60" x 40" x 55"

Slumpie 7 - Arm Hole, 75" x 46" x 38"