Peachy Keen

Hannah Tarr and Vivian Liddell

Peachy Keen met up with artist Hannah Tarr on a sunny Saturday morning in July to talk shop. An Atlanta native who grew up under the influence of major art collector and patron Frances Cocke, she left town to attend RISD and drifted through stints in Oakland, Chicago and Ox-Bow before the film industry lured her back to her hometown with its tempting day jobs—where else can you be a standby painter on set by day and go to Def Leppard shows with Dave Bautista by night? 

We talk about why men should wear yoga pants, why Tarr prefers surf shorts, the zen of skateboarding, and how hard it is to resist clicking on butts on Instagram. All of this is, of course related to art. 

How do you stay focused on the process when there are so many images out there? How do you participate in internet culture without letting it dictate your path? Why are we still talking about John Berger’s writing from 1972? Find out—if not the answers—then at least our opinions on these topics and more in this week’s episode.

Hannah Tarr Studio

Related Links:

Hannah Tarr, The Frances and Emory Cocke Collection of English Ceramics, Ox-Bow Residency, Important Projects, PDF of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing", Sheida Soleimani at the Atlanta Contemporary, Camayuhs, Poem 88, Muchacho, 

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Hannah Tarr Studio

A little irony for the end here: follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 🤓👇

For this episode, Peachy Keen stayed close to home to talk to Athens, Georgia artist, Yvonne Studevan. Having gained some local fame for painting the proprietor of Vic’s Vintage shop downtown as “Black Jesus”, Studevan explains how deeply that portrait— commissioned by St. Philip Monumental AME Church in Savannah—is related to her own history and desires to increase the representation of black people with black features in portraiture.

A seventh generation descendent of Richard Allen, the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Studevan recounts how she only became interested in history after she began to uncover a historical record that she could relate to. 

We talk about how she’s come from making paper dolls with darker skin tones as a child to plein air painting local sites of black historical significance, her technical growth as a painter, and her astute observations of color and changing light.

Vivian Liddell and Yvonne Studevan

Yvonne Studevan's Studio

Yvonne Studevan's Plein Air Paintings of historical buildings in Athens, GA

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Vivian Liddell and Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz

Peachy Keen headed down to Orlando, Florida for Spring Break and met up with local artist and educator Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. Bronx-born to Puerto Rican parents, Raimundi-Ortiz talks us through her teenage years attending the fabled “Fame” school (LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and creating her Wepa Woman superheroine.

She explains how she got schooled at Skowhegan and Rutgers (hanging around with such highfalutin art-world characters as Robert Storr) where she learned to use her own body to tell her own story on her own terms as a performance artist. She breaks down how her hilarious "Ask Chuleta" character ended up on YouTube and we talk at length about teaching with what she calls "cultural spackle" to fill in the gaps that may be missing in students' education.

Ever wonder what to say when your Uber driver finds out you’re an artist and asks “What’s the big deal with Mondrian?” Raimundi-Ortiz knows how to walk the lines and switch the codes and she’s got your answer.

Studio view of work in progress from the Reinas (Queens) Series

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz performance: The Pietà Project.

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz as "Ask Chuleta"

Related Links:

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery IDENTITY: Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, SkittLeZMusicTV, Townie Tourist

Contemporary artists referenced in this episode: Abigail DeVille, Tara Donovan, Gabriel Orozco, Wangechi Mutu, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Fred Wilson, Whitfield Lovell, Rackstraw Downes, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Nikki S. Lee, LaToya Ruby Frazier

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Peachy Keen spent a rainy, coffee-fueled morning talking with Atlanta artist Karen Tauches about her fine art practice in her East Point studio. This is the perfect episode to listen to on your Spring Break road trip. Look out your window at what Tauches refers to as "the greatest hits" of our landscape (the Florida beaches and the Georgia mountains, for example)—how do they compare to the billboards, architecture and graphic design that have infiltrated them?

Tauches explains how she arrived as an astute observer of the American landscape, her desire for a mobile office (like she had as a child!), and prompts us to question our role as colonizers as we prepare to take over outer space. 

We look at her work's relationship to graphic design and the environment; she breaks down her process and the invented language she uses to describe it  (What is a jumble? A power spot? A disappeared house?). Ultimately, it all comes down to the big thinking she requires of her audience, who most likely won't even realize they're looking at contemporary art when they start to consider their "SOUL PURPOSE" while driving by her most famous repurposed sign— a guerrilla work which has become an Atlanta landmark since it's installation on Moreland Avenue in 2012.

Zipporah Camille Thompson and Vivian Liddell

Peachy Keen met up with Atlanta visual artist and sculptor Zipporah Camille Thompson on the week of the rare super blue blood moon eclipse—notable in the context of Thompson's work, which often deals with lunar activity as a subject. What would happen if the moon decided to up and leave us? 

We chat about this and other pressing questions amongst looms, a kiln, shelves of thread and various containers of materials in her Stone Mountain home/studio as she prepares to move everything to The Goat Farm Arts Center to begin her two year studio residency with The Creatives Project. We discuss process, starting with source imagery and materials, and moving into working methods. She gets technical with some loom talk, and we ponder the guilt associated with the refusal to "commit" to one medium, as well negotiating labels when crossing between high and low materials and techniques. 

We find out that the artist blood runs deep in her large, supportive family from North Carolina, and we talk about how her education took a turn from psychology to the visual arts.

Zipporah Camille Thompson's studio; idea boards.

Materials in the studio.

Works in progress.

Related Links:

Zipporah Camille Thompson, Zipporah Camille Thompson on Instagram, whitespace gallery, Idea Capital Grants for Atlanta Artists, The Creatives Project, The Goat Farm Arts Center, P O C O A P O C O Residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts Residency in Newcastle, Maine

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Amelia Briggs and Vivian Liddell

Amelia Briggs' Studio

Inspiration

Peachy Keen spent the evening talking art (and drinking a little wine) in the Nashville studio of artist Amelia Briggs. We discuss the gendered psychology of the found imagery she uses from vintage comics and children's coloring books and how she subverts narrative in her formal process, which is split between object making and painting.

Briggs talks about the subtler role that feminist content plays in her work since she's moved away from the figure as a subject, and the relationship between her materials and her viewers. While the work can be seductive on the surface, we get "deep" into some childhood memories that may inform a more sinister reading of her "Inflatables" series. 

Related Links:

Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", CAA "An Interview with Linda Nochlin", We Home Podcast, Amelia Briggs Website, Beth Edwards, David Lusk Gallery, Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss, Native Magazine, Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Weight of Play at Lipscomb, Amelia.Projects on Instagram

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Amelia Briggs' Studio

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Kelly Kristin Jones and Vivian Liddell

Detail, corner of framed work

Kelly Kristin Jones' Works on her Studio Floor

Peachy Keen visited Kelly Kristin Jones in her studio at the Atlanta Contemporary just before the opening of her solo exhibit Cotton is Still King at the Sandler Hudson Gallery (November 2 - December 8, 2017).

Jones explains how her Midwestern background informs her current practice, including her years teaching film photography to digital natives, and how her MFA program at the Art Institute of Chicago challenged her to confront her own position on the supposed “truth-telling” nature of photography as a medium.

She gives us the lowdown on using her own work as a bridge to understanding both familiar and unfamiliar locations, her interest in “flipping the script” on urban landscapes, and how she adjusted to the "Mars" that is Rush Week in Athens, GA, after a lifetime in Chicago.

Jones explains the process of collecting and producing images at Civil War historical marker sites that culminated in her current series of photographic “counter-memorials,” and why documenting seemingly small or personal events is worth the effort.

Related Links:

Kelly Kristin Jones, Sandler Hudson Gallery, Kelly Kristin Jones at the Atlanta Contemporary, MINT Leap Year, Brainfuzz Podcast, ParlorATL

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Kelly Kristin Jones' Studio at the Atlanta Contemporary

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Flora Rosefsky's Studio

Photographic cutouts by Flora Rosefsky

Peachy Keen visited Artist Flora Rosefsky at her studio in Decatur, Georgia. Rosefsky has been an active member of the Women's Caucus for Art of Georgia since the chapter's inception in 2000, and discusses the organization's development and impact on her practice as an artist and activist through its thematic exhibitions.

We discussed faith and family as they relate to her art-making, storytelling, and connection to the South. She explains her process working with collage techniques, and the concept of cutting, saving, and (sometimes) leaving behind material manifestations of memory.

The accessibility of collage lends itself to her community workshop classes, where she specializes in reaching “non-artists." Rosefsky shares some teaching tips (such as the importance of closing a class with critique) and explains how her professors helped her transition from "a mother who likes to draw" to an artist. 

Related Links:

Flora Rosefsky Art, Women's Caucus for Art of Georgia, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Sycamore Place Gallery, United for Puerto Rico, MIRIAM SCHAPIRO AND MELISSA MEYER
Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled--FEMMAGE (1977-78) 

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Flora Rosefsky in her studio

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Veronica Kessenich & Vivian Liddell

Veronica Kessenich

Atlanta Contemporary between exhibitions

Veronica Kessenich, Executive Director of the Atlanta Contemporary, took a break from preparing for Art Party 2017 to take Peachy Keen on a behind the scenes tour of the capital improvements currently underway. We talked about her thwarted childhood dreams to become a dancer, her experiences as a student then professor at women's colleges, and her secret writing habits. 

Kessenich explains how she landed at the Contemporary, showing some love for her mentor, Fay Gold, along the way. And of course, she gives us the scoop on what to expect at Art Party.

Related Links:

Atlanta Contemporary, ART PARTY 2017

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇

Chakura Kineard invites Peachy Keen into her spacious, glitter-filled studio at the Atlanta Contemporary to talk shop. She reflects on her experiences as a woman of color navigating public education in the South, her rebellious tendencies as they relate to art-making, and the job prospects for millennials in a baby-boomer's world. 

We geek out discussing her use of found objects in an art historical context, but keep it real by using the all-knowing eye of Instagram as a touchstone. Kineard shares some hilarious insights on some not-so-hilarious situations—like how to win the racists vs. non-racists "competition"—and educates us on the difference between a "loc" and a "townie" in the Athens scene.

Chakura Kineard & Vivian Liddell

Chakura Kineard Studio, Atlanta Contemporary

Chakura Kineard Studio, Atlanta Contemporary

Chakura Kineard Studio, Atlanta Contemporary

Chakura Kineard Studio, Atlanta Contemporary

Related Links:

Chakura Kineard at Atlanta Contemporary, Chakura Kineard Website, ART PARTY 2017

Want to support Peachy Keen? Leaving a review on iTunes is a great way to help our podcast get heard by more folks—it’s free and anonymous! Want to take your support to the next level? As a Patreon subscriber to the podcast you can help Peachy Keen to continue to document and uplift the voices of Southern women in the arts for as little as $1/month. Recurring donations from subscribers like you are essential in ensuring that the podcast continues. Want a good cobbler recipe? Some Peachy Keen swag? An on air shout out to YOU on our next episode? Check out our Patreon page now for subscriber tiers and their rewards:

Follow @peachykeenpodcast on Instagram for announcements, news & of course, more pics. 👇