We had the great opportunity to sit down with Stephen Towns in August.  We talked about his artistic practice, his residency at Falling Water, and his upcoming show at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art curated by Kilolo Luckett.  Tune in!!

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Stephen Towns was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina and lives and works in Baltimore. He trained as a painter with a BFA in studio art from the University of South Carolina, and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice. In 2018, The Baltimore Museum of Art presented his first museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning.

His work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Cultured, AFROPUNK, HYPEBEAST and American Craft. Towns was honored as the inaugural recipient of the 2016 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore Travel Prize, and in 2021, Towns was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award.

Towns’ work is in the collections of The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Art + Practice, Artist Mark Bradford’s nonprofit based in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, The Petrucci Family Foundation, The Baltimore Museum of Art, the City of Charleston, South Carolina, The Nelson Atkins Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, and is held in private collections nationally and abroad.

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More about Stephen Towns:

@ The Westmoreland Museum of American Art

https://thewestmoreland.org/exhibitions/declaration-and-resistance/

https://thewestmoreland.org/blog/baltimore-artist-stephen-towns-on-declaration-resistance-and-fallingwater-residency/

https://www.debuckgallery.com/the-westmoreland-museum-acquires-work-by-tina-williams-brewer-and-stephen-towns/

https://triblive.com/local/westmoreland/westmoreland-museum-gets-grant-for-2022-exhibit/

@ Fallingwater:

https://www.golaurelhighlands.com/articles/post/artist-stephen-towns-in-residency-at-fallingwaters-high-meadow-for-june-2021/

https://fallingwater.org/webinars/live-from-fallingwater-stephen-towns-and-kilolo-luckett-in-conversation/

A fantastic video:

https://youtu.be/iokg6uTJSpE

His website (under re-construction)

http://stephentowns.com/

In August, Tereneh had the great pleasure of speaking with Kilolo Luckett.  It was a very special conversation between just the two of them, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!  This is part of our Season Two series that is focused on looking at what the Westmoreland Museum of American Art is doing to build bridges both internationally and regionally.  Kilolo plays a big role in this story!

Kilolo Luckett is a Pittsburgh-based art historian and curator. With over twenty years of experience in arts administration and cultural production, she is committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented visual artists, specifically women and Black and Brown artists. Luckett is founding executive director and chief curator of ALMA|LEWIS (named after abstract artists Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis), an experimental, contemporary art platform for critical thinking, dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black culture. She recently served as an Art Commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh’s Art Commission for twelve years. Luckett is guest curator of the upcoming exhibition titled, Stephen Towns:  Declaration & Resistance, which opens January 30, 2022 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. She is also currently writing an authorized biography on Naomi Sims, one of the first Black supermodels.

For more information on some of the many wonderful things discussed in this conversation, please follow these links:

https://www.almalewis.org/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/what-it-s-like-to-be-a-city-s-only-black-arbiter-of-public-art

 https://thewestmoreland.org/about/press/press-releases/stephen-towns-in-residency-fallingwaters-high-meadow/

https://www.wqed.org/fm/podcasts/voice-arts/stephen-towns-kilolo-luckett

https://studiomuseum.org/

https://blackrocksenegal.org/

https://www.phillipscollection.org/event/2021-10-30-exhibition-alma-thomas

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/lewis-norman/

https://wwd.com/beauty-industry-news/beauty-features/naomi-sims-model-wigs-fragrance-beauty-entrepreneur-1234706850/

We had the great opportunity to be in conversation with Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo earlier this summer.  It was a real treat to get them both on the call and hear their thoughts on Border Cantos | Sonic Border as well as bigger larger questions and complexities that come with being alive on planet Earth today as artists and humans.  They spoke of their collaborative process as well as their individual artistic practices.  The entire conversation was refreshing, illuminating, and very fun.  Lots of laughs and humor as a bridge through the heaviest subjects.  Enjoy!  This episode is co-hosted by Leah and Jenn.  Tereneh was away.

Border Cantos I Sonic Border runs through September 5, 2021 at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art.  It will then travel on to other museums throughout the country.

Border Cantos I Sonic Border is a unique collaboration between American photographer Richard Misrach and Mexican American sculptor/composer Guillermo Galindo. Photographer Richard Misrach and composer/artist Guillermo Galindo began collaborating in 2011, after both artists had created bodies of work inspired by the Mexican-American border region and its human impact.

Misrach’s large-scale photographs beautifully capture the various types of landscapes, textures, and experiences found across the almost 2,000-mile dividing line. But, by showing moments of disruption on the land, they also introduce a complicated look at policing the boundary. Galindo’s installation Sonic Border is an original score for eight instruments, created out of discarded objects found and collected at the border.

The composition embraces the pre-Columbian belief that there was an intimate connection between an instrument and the material from which it was made, with no separation between spiritual and physical worlds. Based on the Mesoamerican “Venus calendar,” Sonic Border plays for a total of 260 minutes and is separated into 13 cycles of 20 minutes. Within these cycles, the instruments play in small groups of two or more, or all together as an orchestra.

https://thewestmoreland.org/exhibitions/border-cantos-sonic-border/

http://bordercantos.com/

https://www.galindog.com/

https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/richard-misrach

Hello! We are wrapping up our first season with a conversation between us three co-founders here at Other Border Wall Project and Podcast - Tereneh Idia, Leah Patgorski, and Jennifer Nagle Myers.  We are sharing our thoughts on the many creative pivots we had to do in 2020 and what it all felt like, as well as more in depth conversation about what our own creative practices look like.  Join us!

And here's a deeper look into who we are individually and what we do....

Tereneh Idia...works on issues of social justice especially in environment, design, arts and culture as designer and writer.  She launched IdiaDega, a global eco-design collaboration of Indigenous women artisans in 2014 and became a journalist in 2018.  The IdiaDega eco-design collaboration has presented work in Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, Nairobi, Copenhagen and Pittsburgh, including exhibitions at August Wilson African American Cultural Center, The Frick Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Tereneh was Pittsburgh Style Week’s Designer of the Year for 2019, an inductee into the Taylor Allderdice High School Hall of Fame inductee and awarded the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist.  As a writer, Tereneh began publishing regularly in 2018 and her work has appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh PublicSource, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - among others, she is a multiple award-winning writer: Winner of the Golden Quill 2019 and 2020 for best columnist in daily paper and nominated again in 2021; The Robert L Vann Pittsburgh Black Media Federation Award; and the Billy Manes Award in 2020.

https://www.idiadega.com/

Leah Patgorski...is a Pittsburgh-based artist who was born in Virginia Beach, VA. She earned a degree in Architecture at the University of Virginia followed by an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her studio practice includes sculptures, partitions, and painting-like objects made of textiles. Her work process moves back and forth between rule-following and improv, color experiments and found hues, and it reflects on intangibles like growth, loss, intimacy, shadows, and the history behind materials. Leah enjoys collaboration with other artists and designers in order to realize large-scale projects. She is part of a collective known as Other Border Wall that is focused on creative resistance to harmful border practices. She has also been exhibiting her individual work with many venues over the years including the Strohl Arts Center in Chautauqua, NY; Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA; and ADDS DONNA in Chicago, IL. 

https://leahpatgorski.com/

Join us for a powerful conversation with Alberto Tlatoa: food justice advocate, social entrepreneur, historian, artist, and community organizer based in South Central, Los Angeles.  When Alberto was a child, his family had a farming plot in the largest urban farm in the nation in South Central Los Angeles. However, it was destroyed in 2006. Since that time, he has helped organize community residents to challenge irresponsible developments. He co-founded the South Central Farm a grassroots organization that promotes the establishment and preservation of green and open space in South Central Los Angeles, a community where green and open space is rare, as well as promote urban farming, public health, and effective participation in the planning of developments that intimately affect every one of the residents that reside nearby.

Be sure to follow Alberto and South Central Farm on IG:

https://www.instagram.com/betotlatoani

Watch The South Central Farm Film (MUST SEE)

We recently spoke with Asa Martinez: writer, immigration-support worker, and creator of Brushfire Press - a small-scale zine press and information distro centered on QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color).  Their message is Fight Back: Read Radical, published out of Pittsburgh, PA.   Their recent work has focused on mutual aid, immigrant rights, and harm reduction.

Asa is our friend and ally.  In 2020 we commissioned Brushfire Press to dream up a project with a small amount of funding we had available, and what was born is the ongoing, growing Pittsburgh Solidarity Guide.  This Solidarity Guide was created as a directory of groups that center the most marginalized among us and work to make Pittsburgh a more livable city for all. 

What follows is an open, honest, and extremely urgent conversation between all of us.  Asa speaks truth in each breath and it was a great treasure to have them in conversation.

Here are just a few of the many amazing things we touched on that we wanted to include in the show notes:

BrushFire Press on Instagram

Join us in rich conversation with Houston-based artist and collaborator David Janesko. As the former curator of Flatland Gallery in Houston, he invited us in 2018 to present our work as Other Border Wall Project.  Speaking in February 2021 with Jenn and Leah (Tereneh was not on this call), we touched on many topics including art and mental illness and collaboration.  David Janesko is an artist exploring the emergence of complexity using an experimental approach that encompasses a wide array of mediums, technology and subject matter. He is specifically interested in the genesis of life, and death, from the early Earth, the emergence of the Self and how the senses and mental illness shape reality. David grew up in Western Pennsylvania and worked for a number of years as a geologist before attending the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 2013). From 2013 to 2015 David was a Graduate Fellow then Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Artist in Sausalito California, and the curator for Flatland Gallery in Houston from 2017 to 2019. David is represented in Houston by Gray Contemporary.  From 2019-2021 he was a Studio Artist in Residence at the Lawndale Arts Center in Houston, where he collaborated with the choreographer Jacqueline Boe on a series of work and explorations at the intersection of dance and art.  

www.janeskodavid.com

https://lawndaleartcenter.org/studio-artist/jacquelyne-boe-and-david-janesko/

www.instagram.com/djanesko

This week, we spoke with Shellee Laurent: an activist, artist, mother, and a proud Guatemalan-Mexican-American woman/queen living in Laredo TX. We first met Shellee during our visit to to Laredo in 2018. We stayed connected via social media and then profiled her on our Laredo on the Line publication. We wanted to speak with Shellee here as well, to find out more about how her roles intersect and learn about her work with the No Border Wall Coalition. This is a grassroots organization based in Laredo that works to counteract border wall construction through protests, education, legal action, and art. They sometimes travel to join forces with other allied groups in the Rio Grande Valley who share common interests in resisting the wall and protecting communities and the environment.

Symbolic of this moment in which Covid has brought so many of our spheres to overlap in one space: the home… Shellee sat down to speak with us from her kitchen where her kids were nearby doing their tasks. So we ask for your patience with the sounds as we move through our conversation with a true QUEEN!

Shellee IG/FB

https://www.instagram.com/leelaurent22/

https://www.facebook.com/artofshelleelaurent/about/

Cultiv-Arte Group:

https://www.cultiv-arte.org/

No Border Wall Coalition

Hello!  In Episode 6 we are sharing our rich conversation with Zhiwan Cheung: artist, educator, and podcast host currently living and working in China.  We know Zhiwan from Pittsburgh, and Tereneh has been a guest on his podcast 'Seeing Color' twice now.  So we thought it was time to have him as the guest to talk about all things art, politics, identity, and life.  

https://www.zhiwan.is/bio/

He is also the host of the Seeing Color Podcast, a show that talks with cultural workers and artists of color in order to expand the area of what is a predominantly white space in the arts.