Interviews by Brainard Carey

David Brody is a painter, filmmaker, and writer. He showed paintings and a collaborative film with Elliot Green in 2016 at Studio 10 in Brooklyn.

His 2014 installation 8 Ecstasies at Pierogi/The Boiler, in Brooklyn centered on an 11-minute digital animation (a collaboration with composer Zig Gron). He has also had solo painting shows at Pierogi (Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Planet of the Archbuilders) and at Sometimes Works of Art (James Siena's project gallery in Chinatown).

Brody’s digital animations have been included in programs at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, MoMA, The Reina Sofia Museum, and the Centre Pomidou, and he has made wall drawing installations for the Brooklyn Museum and the Drawing Center.  Brody’s critical writing appears in Artcritical.com, and he has written for Cabinet, Bomb Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. For information about the 2014 exhibition at the Boiler, click here.

For a preview of a new animation (in collaboration with Zig Gron) to be premiered at the Punto Y Raya festival in Oct. 2018.

abateurs-2, 2018 (discussed in the interview, and possibly in progress.) 42x36” oil on linen

Untitled 2018, 60x50” oil on linen

Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Sky Country (BOA Editions, 2017) and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House, 2011), and co-author of the oral history collection Who You: The Issei (JCCH / University of Hawaii Press, 2018).

She teaches at Ithaca College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Recent work is published in Portland Review and The Massachusetts Review.

Marguerite Van Cook toured with The Clash with her punk band The Innocents, then came to NYC where she opened the noted installation gallery Ground Zero.

Her own work is in many public collections, including MOMA, the Whitney Museum and Harvard. She won the Van Rensselear poetry prize while at Columbia University, where she was also acclaimed as the star of the play “On Religion”.

She was nominated for an Eisner award for her color for 7 Miles a Second, a graphic memoir done with James Romberger and the late artist/AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, which is in its third edition in America.

Her own graphic autobiography The Late Child and Other Animals was nominated for an Ignatz award. Both books have been translated and published in France. Currently, Van Cook stars as herself in the upcoming documentary feature “The Brezinski Project.” She has also shown collaborations with her son, ClockWork Cros and her partner James Romberger in galleries in NYC and abroad.

At the time of this interview Marguerite Van Cook is a PH.D Candidate French, at the Graduate Center CUNY. She is also an Adjunct Professor, at Hunter College, CUNY.

"Secret Trouble" Video print 36"X 24"

Pages from "7 Miles a Second" with James Romberger and David Wojnarowicz

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s most recent book of poetry is The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017).

Her previous books include Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize.

She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize.  In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson/Longman, 2011).  Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and others.  She is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Find more of her poems in The American Literary Review, Prairie Schooner and The Account Magazine. To connect on Twitter:  @Hadarabar

Brittany Moira Powell was born in Naples, Italy. Since then, she has lived in many parts of the country, including New Orleans and the Washington, DC area, thanks to her military father and accommodating mother. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to study photography at California College of the Arts, and graduated in 2003. In 2015, she earned an MFA from San Francisco State University. Brittany is currently the Associate Director of the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and an Adjunct Professor of Art at Norwich University. In her free time, Brittany can be found surfing, camping, eating delicious foods and working on personal shooting projects, including the debt project.

Exhibitions, commissions and publications have included: ICP Museum, Flux Factory NY, Smack Mellon NY, Politico, the Washington Post, Slate.com, the Huffington Post, Fast Company, StubHub, Levi's, National Geographic, Converse, Hunter Public Relations, the American Red Cross, Chronicle Books, Inked Magazine, Tencue Productions, Renegade Pictures UK, BMW, Farallon Films, St. Mary's College, Edible San Francisco, Yoga Journal, University of CA, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Abdul Mazid is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Working across a wide range of media, Mazid incorporates - sculpture, drawing, video, installation, and painting –to explore the underlying complexities of identity and intersectionality as determined by micro and macro economic systems.

A first generation American of Syrian and Mexican decent, Mazid draws upon his own personal experiences growing up in a hybridized cultural environment. Using these intersectional experiences as a point of reference, he transforms materials and imagery to further investigate concepts surrounding socioeconomics, globalization, and the hybridization of identity.

Mazid studied economics at the University California Santa Barbara (2003) before obtaining his MFA at Claremont Graduate University (2014). Mazid is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles.

I am, 2016, artist’s body hair, adhesive on canvas, 20” x 30” Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles

Dark Inventory II, 2015, wood, paint, found object, wire, 144” x 144” x 122” Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles

Lior Shamriz was born in Ashkelon on the East Mediterranean, spent a decade in Berlin and now lives in California.

Shamriz creates essayistic narrations that utilize cinema as performance and the cinematic languages as a process of reflexive documentation. A prolific filmmaker, churning out experimental shorts and two features, they channel the trickster spirit of the 60's auteurs in his cinema of humorous/political deconstruction, using cinema as the perfect space to discuss ideas - about being, truth, class, sexuality and the Other.

At 18, skipping the army, moved to Tel-Aviv and started making films, music and taking part in collective art projects. Studied film at the Jerusalem Film School and media at the UdK, Berlin.

Their work was shown at numerous festivals including Berlinale (2013,14,15), Locarno, Sarajevo, MoMA’s ND/NF, BAFICI, Torino, awarded at the the Achtung Berlin festival and multiple awards in Oberhausen (2013,14,15) among others and had retrospectives at the Thessaloniki Intl FF, Berlin Israel Film Festival and Ars independent Katowice.

Japan Japan from spektakulativ on Vimeo.

Saturn Returns from spektakulativ on Vimeo.

Photo: autoportrait by James Romberger

James Romberger is a fine artist and  cartoonist who lives and works in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the mid-1980s, he was co-founder of the seminal East Village installation gallery Ground Zero. Romberger's pastel drawings are in many private and public collections  including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.   "Post  York", his multimedia graphic novel/flexidisc collaboration with his son Crosby was nominated for an Eisner award in 2013. In 2015, Fantagraphics Books published The Late Child, his graphic novel collaboration with Marguerite Van Cook. Currently, he teaches at Parsons; and a revised paperback edition of  the critically acclaimed graphic novel 7 Miles A Second, Romberger’s collaboration with Van Cook and the late multimedia artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz is available from https://groundzerobooks.com/

James Romberger, Digestive System 2 (detail), pastel on paper, 2017

Cover of 7 Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook

Margaret Crimmins is a NYC based sound designer/editor working primarily in historical, social and political documentaries.  Some of the films she has worked on include;

This is Home-A Refugee Story, Letters from Baghdad, Hot Girls Wanted, How to Dance in Ohio,  Into the Amazon, Back on Board, American promise,

The New Black, Soul Food Junkies, Semper Fi-Always Faithful. To Be Heard, Freedom Riders, The Last Truck, Boy Interrupted, Patti Smith: Dream of

Life, Gonzo: The life and Work of Hunter s. Thompson, Taxi to the Dark Side, Jesus Camp, Mad Hot Ballroom, My Architect, The Murder of Emmett Till,

LaLee's Kin, Atomic Cafe, The War at Home, and many more.

She has also earned three Emmy nominations for:

The Farm-Angola USA dir. by Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack

Judy Garland-By Myself dir. by Susan lacy

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib dir. by Rory Kennedy

Born in Istanbul in 1985, Refik Anadol lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA degree from the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, as well an MFA in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University. He is a media artist and director working in the fields of live audio/visual performance and immersive art-in-architecture installations. In particular, his work explores the hybrid spaces of the digital and physical worlds, using technology to create a relationship between architecture and media art.

 An award winner in the fields of both art and technology, Anadol has served as artist-in-residence and guest lecturer around the world. His past site-specific audio/visual performances in the public space include The International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Arts Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), Santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), and the City of Sydney (Australia).

Infinity Room, 2016, Immersive Room

Interconnected, Charlotte Douglas Airport, Public Art Project, 2018