Interviews by Brainard Carey

Alice Dalton Brown

Alice Dalton Brown was raised in Ithaca, New York, studied at L’Académie Julien, Paris; Cornell University, New York; and received a BA degree from Oberlin College, Ohio.

She has had over twenty solo exhibitions in New York City, in addition to several nationally and internationally. In 2018, February - April, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown Ohio presented a solo show of her work. An overview of her career is in the catalog, Summer Breeze, which accompanied her 2013 solo exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Her work is in private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Allen Art Museum, Ohio; The Johnson Museum of Art, New York; The Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio.

Alice resides in the Hudson Valley and in the Finger Lakes, New York. Recently Alice was a visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and since then has been creating paintings and pastels derived from her stay in Rome. Her subjects have evolved in the course of her career, invariably invoking images with psychological significance and composed with a focus on light and spatial relationships.

View her catalog from the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University - Summer Breeze: Paintings & Drawings by Alice Dalton Brown.

Azure Blue, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 48"

Rome #20, Capitoline Museum, 2017, oil on canvas, 56x30"

Photo: Jide Alakija

Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense.

In recent years, Odita has been commissioned to paint several large-scale wall installations including The United States Mission to the United Nations in New York (2011), the Savannah College of Art and Design (2012), New York Presbyterian Hospital (2012), New Orleans Museum of Art (2011), Kiasma, Helsinki (2011) and the George C. Young Federal Building and Courthouse in Orlando, Florida (2013).

Odita has had several solo exhibitions in museums and institutions across the globe including Savannah College of Art and Design; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Studio Museum in Harlem; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and Princeton University.

Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria and lives and works in Philadelphia. He has been the recipient of a Penny McCall Foundation Grant in 1994, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2001, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 2007. Also in 2007, his large installation Give Me Shelterwas featured prominently in the 52nd Venice Biennale exhibition Think With The Senses, Feel With the Mind, curated by Robert Storr.

GREAT DIVIDE, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 74 X 90 1/4 X 1 5/8 INCHES

CODE SWITCH, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 92 1/8 X 68 X 1 5/8 INCHES

Alice Gray Stites is Museum Director and Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels. A multi-venue museum located in Louisville, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Durham, Lexington, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Kansas City, 21c was founded by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, collectors and preservationists who are committed to expanding the audience for contemporary art. Stitescurates exhibitions, site-specific installations, and a range of cultural programming at all 21c Museum Hotels. 21c also collaborates on arts initiatives with artists and other cultural organizations worldwide, including Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, North Carolina Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, FotoFocus, Creative Time, and others. Since opening in Louisville in 2006, 21c has presented over 100 exhibitions. Recently, Stites has curated Hybridity: The New Frontier; Aftermath: Witnessing War, Countenancing Compassion; Seeing Now; Wild Card: The Art of Michael Combs; Dis-semblance: Projecting and Perceiving Identity; Albano Alfonso: Self-Portrait as Light; Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art; Labor&Materials, Fallen Fruit: The Practices of Everyday Life; The Future is Female; Truth or Dare: A Reality Show; The SuperNatura; Refuge, and others.

Prior to joining 21c as Chief Curator in 2012, Stites was director of artwithoutwalls, a non-profit, non-collecting public arts organization, and from 1995-2006 was adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. Stites has lectured at universities and conferences such as Art Basel Conversations, Leaders in Software and Art, TEDx Stockholm, Moving Image Spotlight, PULSE Perspectives, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, NewInc at the New Museum, and has served on juries including ArtPrize, PULSE Prize, and Moving Image New York. She has been active on advisory boards at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design and at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and is an adjunct member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Louisville. Stites graduated magna cum laude from the University of Virginia, and holds an M.A. from Columbia University.

Interview note: For artists interested in getting involved, learn more here.

Ebony G Patterson (Jamaican), Gully Godz in Conversations Revised I, II, and II, 2010. Wallpaper, fake flowers, bedazzled shoes, cinder blocks.

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian). Oil Spill #1, REM Forza, Gulf of Mexico, May 11, 2010. Chromogenic print.

photo credit: Brian McCabe

Emily Schuck is an editor-in-chief of Foothill Poetry. She is a PhD student in English at Claremont Graduate University and teaches writing at University of La Verne.  

Directed by students at Claremont Graduate University, Foothill Poetry is an annual print and online poetry journal that features the work of poets enrolled in graduate programs around the world. Foothill’s decennial issue will be out in October 2018.

Foothill Poetry, volume 7 issue 1

“MACHINE GIRL IS A MACHINE BOI IS A MACHINE BAND IS A MACHINE FUCK IS A MACHINE GHOST IS A MACHINE GOBLIN IS A MACHINE DEMON IS A MACHINE ASS IS A MACHINE LORD IS A MACHINE CAR IS A MACHINE SEX IS A MACHINE CORP IS A MACHINE VIRUS IS A MACHINE STENCH. 

the world is dead to me and im dead to the world. blech”

Brent Budsberg is a professional artist, exhibition designer, educator, and woodworker based in Milwaukee WI.

Since 2013, Budsberg has designed nearly a dozen exhibits for the Chipstone Foundation including Mrs. M___’s Cabinet, an ornate period room at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Budsberg teaches furniture design, sculpture, and travel study courses at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He is part owner of Current Projects, which offers custom design and fabrication services for artists, filmmakers and arts related institutions.

As an artist, Budsberg works in collaboration with his partner, Shana McCaw. Their multidisciplinary practice employs sculpture, performance, photography, and installation to examine the psychology of place, ancestral memory, and the passage of time. In 2014, they received the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists. They have exhibited nationally and internationally and have participated in numerous artist residencies including the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, UT, and Goldwell Open Air Museum in Death Valley, CA.

“Skew” 2019, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, White Pine, 13’x17’x13.5’ Currently on view as part of Sculpture Milwaukee in Downtown Milwaukee WI, Photo by Kevin Miyazaki

“Reaction” 2008, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, mixed media, 36x36x36” In the collection of The Chipstone Foundation - currently on view at the Rockford Art Museum. Photo by Brent Budsberg

I grew up in Olympia, Washington, attending punk shows and making fanzines since high school. My community was activist, engaged, and mostly working and lower middle class. Only after I moved away for the last time, at age 30, to attend graduate school in Chicago, did I begin to comprehend the utopian dimensions of Riot Grrrl, and the adjacent punk scenes of the turn of this century in the Olympia area. Now, I am a painter working with textiles, historic print materials from Playboy, R Crumb comics, Mad Magazine and other mass market desire machines from the past 40+ years. Everything is collage: I cast a wide net and trust that my experience will filter. I fondle materials - the relative weight of color and texture, brittle papers, the sag of velvets, and the rustle and slippery quality of silks and polyesters. Destruction and repair are integrated into the work through cutting and sewing bits and pieces together in a process related to but not quilting. Poetry and subjectivity drive my practice. I have curated exhibitions and led workshops on listening. Walks in the woods with my partner and dog. Teaching. Grocery shopping and reading. I place my paintings in front of the windows of our large industrial loft, so they shatter the light through colored cloth -  an absorbent prism. How can we repair the soul lag? I am mopping up the rear guard. And I am writing; poems and essays, and frequent, somewhat performative lectures, sometimes in my role as "teacher" and sometimes as "artist."  - Molly Zuckerman Hartung

A window in my studio in Shelton CT, with textile painting as screen.

This painting is in a group show at Rachel Uffner  this fall celebrating ten years on the Lower East Side of NYC, I am pulling out an older oil painting to think again about this kind of abstraction, and circle back to it. Untitled, 2013, oil and enamel, 22x25 inches

Tsuneko Taniuchi portrait © Adagp, Paris 2018 Photo © Atsushi Nakamichi / Nacasa &PartnersINC.

Tsuneko Taniuchi Born in Hyôgo, Japan. Since 1987, she has lived and worked in Paris.

She graduated from Kobe college, Sociology department, where she majored in the History of Western Culture. Then she moved to Paris to enroll the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, Paris. She is a performance artist who works with photography, video and installation.

Since the first Micro-Events which occurred in 1995, Tsuneko Taniuchi’s work has critically engaged with contemporary society. Constructed with great precision, each Micro-Event questions the relationships between individuals and societies.

By reconstructing specific situations, each of her Micro-Events redefine space and time, between the work, the public, and the artist. These tensions, these engagements between the artist and the public through their shared experiences, here and now, constitute a work and, in their immaterial character, inscribe the memory of the Micro-Events (Performances). The Micro-Events question the boundary between reality and art; thus, it is a question of upsetting reality, traditions, representations, and overturning codes, from the point of view of intersectionality and post-colonial and global capitalism among other topics.

These micro-events were born from urban social networks which are coming together and coming apart every day, continuously moving their frontiers. It is precisely the idea of frontier that is interesting to Taniuchi and that she is trying to highlight, as the limit between art and reality, but also the one that prevails in the sharing of identities (the multiplicity of identities), whether they are based on sexual orientation, gender, social classes or culture.

Taniuchi had shows in many public and private institutions around the world, and regularly participates in events in France and internationally—Micro-Events: Tsuneko Taniuchi (Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2014), Rendez-vous du forum (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010) La Force de l’Art 01, 02 (Grand Palais, Paris, 2009 & 2006), and Tokyorama (Palais de Tokyo, 2001).

Her installation “Micro-Event /Weddings Anniversary” is currently held at MAC Musée d'art Contemporain, Marseille, France in Quel Amour !?, set up after her performance at the Centre Pompidou Paris 2010 (Public collection of the CNAP - Centre national des arts plastiques in 2013). She has created to date forty-nine micro-events since 1995.

She is currently working at the Micro-Event n° 50 for which she obtained the grants from the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques) 2018 and the FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques and Plastiques) 2017.

Micro-Event n°49 /Space Oddity – The Artist and Her Studio. Frasq #8, Le Générateur, France, 2016; The Emily Harvey Foundation, NY, USA, 2017; Traversées Ren@rde, Transpalette, Bourges, an exhibition for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, 2017. Tsuneko Taniuchi © Adagp, Paris 2018     Photo © Lu Wang

Micro-Event n°5 /Nine Female Characters + Queen Béatrice, Theater aan Vrijthof, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2018 Tsuneko Taniuchi © Adagp, Paris 2018     Photo © Renner Volker

Micro-événement / Anniversaire de mariages, Centre Pompidou, Paris from Tsuneko Taniuchi on Vimeo.

Video “Micro-Event / Weddings Anniversary”, Centre Gorges Pompidou, Paris, 2010

“Micro-Event / Weddings Anniversary”, Centre Gorges Pompidou, Paris, 2010

Tsuneko Taniuchi organises wedding ceremonies completed with officiant and sealed by a certificate authenticating the exchange of vows. In these fictive weddings, conducted like bona fide, solemn celebrations, Tsuneko Taniuchi 'ties the knot' with her chosen partner who maybe a man, a woman or even several persons.

Marietta Bernstorff is a cultural promoter, artist, and curator who utilizes her 30 years of experience in the arts, in both Mexico and the United States to help build bridges so that people can communicate through the arts on important issues that we face today in both countries. She develops innovative and creative art exhibitions and educational programs that deal with complex social issues in both countries such as migration, environmental, racism, and sustainability in social art projects. She has developed over 35 exhibitions in numerous cultural institutions and museums in both countries and is currently working on a traveling exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, Mexico (MACO) with Oaxaca Artisans and artist from the United States. She is the founder of the Women's Collective MAMAZ (women artists and maize) which is a global internetwork of women artist in Canada, Mexico, USA, and Cuba who work on environmental issues such as native seeds, Founder of the Tanivet Project in Oaxaca, Mexico, and ArtNetwork.

Tanivet Project, Hormigas Bordadoras of Tanivet

Migration story

Migration story

Pushing into the liminal spaces that make us most uncomfortable, Larassa Kabel regularly traverses the emotional and intellectual space between life and death, love and loss, and the powerful and the powerless. Through the drawing, painting, performance and sculpture of her solo practice and her collaborative work with photographer Ben Easter as The Belle Morte Collective, she confronts viewers with that which makes us most uncomfortable: all white Americans’ relationship to racism, the dynamic tension of power and desire between men and women, our view of ourselves as “outside of Nature”, and our desire to distance ourselves as much as possible from the knowledge of our mortality. The Any Minute Now series of life size colored pencil drawings of horses splayed and falling through blank white spaces are meditations on how to Be with death. Tightly cropped POV drawings of fellatio rehumanize the individual pornographic players who had been become flattened in their commodification. Lush photos of dead animals being tenderly embraced by Kabel illustrate the continued relationship between the living and the dead, acknowledges that death is the great equalizer, and reinforces our place in Nature.

Larassa Kabel was born in 1970 and received her BFA with honors in 1992 from Iowa State University with an emphasis in fibers. She currently lives in Des Moines, IA where she works as a full time artist and curator. She has received numerous grants and awards including an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and her work has been shown nationally and is in several corporate and private collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the White House and the World Food Prize.