Interviews by Brainard Carey

Storme Webber is a Two Spirit Sugpiaq/Black/Choctaw poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work is cross genre, incorporating text, performance, audio and altar installation, archival photographs and collaboration in order to engage with ideas of history, lineage, gender, race and sexuality. Her practice explores liminal identities, survivance and decolonization, and does so in a blues-based experimental manner, often incorporating acapella vocals.

She has received numerous honors and residencies; including from Hedgebrook, Ragdale and Banff Arts Centre, and recently was honored with the James W Ray Award. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Casino: A Palimpsest”, was presented at Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Minh Nyguyen, in Art in America, wrote:  “Rather than erect divisions between personal art and historical archives, “Casino” considered the intangible properties by which art and poetry are connected to family, ancestry, language, and public memory, revealing intergenerational, underground histories of resilience.”

Her most recent book, “Blues Divine” is available from her website, along with its companion CD recording. Currently at work on the next touring iteration of the exhibition, “Casino: A Palimpsest”, and it’s manuscript.

Picture making is both my vocation and passion. For me the process of capturing the still image is magical. My continually evolving style integrates artistic and commercial pursuits. It is not unusual for the former to become the basis for the latter and visa versa. People are my primary subject matter. I enjoy interacting with my subjects and encourage their input and ideas. My photographs have been widely exhibited and reproduced in a range of publications.

I’ve always enjoyed working on my own and have also had the opportunity to be part of some very provocative groups. Both types of experiences have been fundamental to my aesthetic development.

I was part of the late ‘70s NYC downtown art world. It was a charged environment that expanded the parameters of art making. I was also a founding member of Colaborative Projects. The quirky-themed shows were not curated and took place in venues outside of galleries and museums. I participated in many Colab shows including the Real Estate Show and Times Square Show. The A More Store featured cleverly designed inexpensive items. My husband, Richard Miller, and I produced Spanner NYC, a magazine of art. The then unknown artists we published were encouraged to use the print medium as a creative resource.

Begun incidentally in the late ‘80’s Mixed Doubles are black & white studio portraits of pairs – people connected by birth, marriage, social, business or other ties. I’ve taken the project into many different environments and the results have always been interesting. In 1992 I was part of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC). Photography provided a way to be involved. Hundreds of smart, creative women met weekly. Our demonstrations featured outstanding graphics and targeted women’s issues as well as the presidential election.

What’s interesting is how much of what I’ve done continues to resonate. It’s a real affirmation that my work from the past is still so vital. I am continually asked to provide photographs from past events and affiliations. There have been recreations of Colab shows and Printed Matter’s recently published book A Book About Colab …and Related Activities perfectly captures the era. Spanner/NYC continues to sell, and my WAC photos are frequently published and exhibited. Excerpts from the Mixed Doubles - Red Hook Brooklyn series were recently exhibited and received with such enthusiasm that I am exploring ways to continue it. - Terise Slotkin

Anthony Philip has a passion for sharing art with the public, specifically helping both emerging artists and novice collectors develop a more meaningful relationship to fine art in their lives.

His more than 20 years' experience working in every capacity of the business, from planning and executing more than 65 exhibitions, to client services, sales and curatorial research, as well as being both an artist and collector himself, allows a unique perspective that he brings to his position as Director of Anthony Philip Fine Art.

Anthony has been involved in fine art since the 1990s. He began as an artist working in multiple disciplines, and then spent 14 years at one of the top commercial fine art galleries in St. Louis, Missouri before relocating to New York with his wife, Brandi Wills.

In 2015, they founded Anthony Philip Fine Art, with the belief that artists should make a good living by their trade, and that anyone who loves art should be able to own it. They have combined these two principles into a business that creates opportunities and builds advocacy for emerging artists, while allowing clients of all means to build investment-grade collections.

Bob Clyatt and Anthony Philip

Anthony Philip and Brandi Wills In the gallery

Margaux Crump is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the slippery relationship between power and the body—specifically how it manifests in language, taxonomy, and intimacy. Currently, her practice examines the constructs of gender and nature, focusing on hunting and courting as a way to trace the complex movements of power between bodies.

She has exhibited nationally, most notably at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis; The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, DC; Women & Their Work, Austin, TX; and Artspace, Raleigh, NC. She received her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX and her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

Margaux was born in 1989 under a dark moon and is based in Houston, TX. She enjoys long walks, the smell of musky roses, playing with kittens, and perusing the grocery store for phallic produce.

The book mentioned in the interview was Braiding Sweetgrass.

Detail from Rock Hard, Sex-safe silicone, minerals historically consumed as aphrodisiacs, display table. 60 x 42 x 13 inches, 2016-18.

The Lure, Gallery view, exhibited at Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, 2018.

photo by Karla Conrad

A Mississippi native, Jennifer Drinkwater is an assistant professor with a joint appointment between the department of art and visual culture and Iowa State University extension and outreach. She has a B.A. in both studio art and anthropology from Tulane University and earned an M.F.A in painting from East Carolina University. Her paintings have been exhibited nationally in juried and group shows, and she has had solo exhibitions in various venues all over the United States. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and Studio Visit magazine. Her personal work and teaching often explore how we bring artwork from the studio into the world, and accordingly, how this work can both build and shape community. During the past few years, she has partnered with communities in Iowa and Mississippi in various community art projects, programming and theatre productions. She helped to organize a community-wide steamroll printmaking event in Perry, Iowa, created installations in restored prairies in Nebraska, collaborated on public art projects in vacant sites on Iowa main streets, spearheaded a community knit-bombing project, and painted two murals with middle school children on a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta.

Intertwine installation, 1200 knit/crocheted squares, Ames, Iowa, 2016.

Drones (February 11, 2013: Part I), embroidery floss/cotton, 10.5" x 7.5", 2013

A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Santee Frazier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University.

His collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009), was published in the Sun Tracks series of the University of Arizona Press.

Frazier’s honors include a Fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship and 2011 School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and was the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation literature fellow.

His second collection of poems Aurum will be released in the Fall of 2019 by The University of Arizona Press.

Jennifer Steinkamp (American, b. 1958) is a Los Angeles based media and installation artist whose video animations explore nature, architecture, contemporary social issues, and the passage of time. Nature, twisted and changed through technology, is Steinkamp’s signature subject, and since the late 1980s the artist has produced a wide range of computer-generated realities. By manipulating existing computer code, primarily using the 3-D animation software Maya, Steinkamp transforms architectural spaces with light, dematerializing walls and filling the constructed environment with hyperreal and, simultaneously, clearly artificial mimicry of organic forms. Steinkamp’s colorful moving images disorient and lull the viewer into a sense of calm—a world both familiar and foreign, real and virtual.

This is her second interview with Yale University radio by Diana Lehr, she was also interviewed by Brainard Carey in 2013.

The Blind Eye, 2018 The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, curated by Esther Bell, June 29 - October 8, 2018 Photos James Ewing courtesy Green Grassi, London, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong

Winter Fountains an art installation set along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by artist, Jennifer Steinkamp. Installation is part of several installations created around the 100 Anniversary of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Photograph shot by Meredith Edlow for the Association for Public Art

Rebecca Siemering was born in Omaha, NE, and lives in Pawtucket, RI. She is an artist and arts admin who works for the Handicraft Club in Providence.

Her paper based work is in the collection of Fidelity Investments, and has traveled in exhibitions with the Fuller Craft Museum, Fiber Art International and the Roger C. Williams Paper Museum.

To learn more about her work, please go to rebeccasiemering.com or follow her on Instagram @rsiemering.

Race to the Top, 2018 Hand pressed paper from lottery tickets, hand pulled paper from betting slips and theatre tickets, paper clay from lottery tickets and mail, stove pipe wire, polished Czech glass beads found in abandoned jewelry business, binders board, cotton batting. Photo at Wheaton College by artist. 144 x 120 inches

Well-Suited Senator, 2018 Portrait of Senator Tammy Baldwin for “In Her Hands” at Robert Mann Gallery. Hand sewn couture grade felt from pattern,  approx 4,000 oval,  die cut images of  Suffragette’s from Wisconsin, words from Senator Baldwin’s legislation and public record, photos of the state flower of Wisconsin(violet), Suffragette clothing in prison; hand knotted individually to the suit with violet colored thread. Embroidered rosette badge attached to lapel. 65 x 26 x 13 inches

Photo by Alex MacNaughton

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired from 2009 till 2015.

She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them thirteen doctor honoris causa, over 25 named lectures, named one of the hundred women in science, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

In each of the four major completed projects that comprise her 30 years of research, Sassen starts with a thesis that posits the unexpected and the counterintuitive in order to cut through established “truths.” These projects engendered four major books and a new major project “An Ethics of the City.” There are also a few smaller books and about 40 academic articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Her first book was The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988). Her thesis went against the established notion that foreign investment would prevent emigration from less developed countries. She posited and documented that foreign investment in less developed countries actually tends to raise the likelihood of emigration if that investment goes to labor-intensive sectors and/or devastates the traditional economy. In brief, her thesis went against established notions that such investment would retain potential emigrants.

In The Global City  (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2001) her thesis is that the global economy needs very specific territorial insertions, notably in cities. This went against the dominant notion that leading sectors could locate anywhere given digitization. Further, in a counter-intuitive move she posits that this need for well-defined urban insertions is at its sharpest with highly globalized and digitized sectors such as finance –precisely those sectors seen as not needing cities. This went against established notions at the time (the 1980s and 1990s) that the global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas, and that the most advanced sectors would leave cities. At its tightest, her proposition is that global cities are shaped/fed by the rise of intermediation functions at scales and in ways that go well beyond what we saw in earlier phases of capitalism.

In Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006), her thesis is that today’s partial but foundational global transformations, from economic to cultural and subjective, actually take place largely inside thick national settings and institutions. But they do so in ways that denationalize the national. She conceptualizes denationalizing dynamics as operating in the shadows of the more familiar globalizing dynamics. This denationalizing of what was historically constructed as national is more significant than much of the self-evidently global. A guiding question running through this book is how complex systems change. One key finding is that in complex systems such change is not necessarily highly visible: it often consists of existing systemic capabilities shifting to a new set of organizing logics -- in ways that make those capabilities look as more of the same.

Her most recent project is developed in two books: Expulsions: Br...

Stephen Kieran is a partner at KieranTimberlake, an award-winning architecture firm established in 1984 and a leader in practice-based architectural research and innovative buildings. He received a Bachelor of Art from Yale University, a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, 1980-81. He has co-authored six books on architecture, including the influential book, refabricating Architecture. In addition to his architectural practice, Stephen has held professorships at University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Yale University, University of Michigan, and Princeton University.

Cellophane House™ is five-story, fully recyclable, and transparent dwelling assembled in just two weeks on a site in midtown Manhattan. © Peter Aaron/OTTO

The US Embassy in London encompasses the democratic ideals of transparency, openness, and equality. © Richard Bryant/Arcaidimages.com