The Boston Art Podcast

In which Brian & Theo sit down with Yolanda He Yang, artist, performer, and curator.

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Yolanda He Yang is a Boston-based artist whose practice encompasses both personal studio work and public art.

Through her explorations in body movement performance and three-dimensional works, Yolanda delves into the hidden layers of emotional experience, offering poetic presentations that invite the viewer to experience space beyond its surface appearance - the total rupture of the boundaries imposed between inside and outside, space and time. Drawing from her extensive background in meditation practice, Yolanda's studio work focuses on exposing the factual realities of change that often go unnoticed. Her pieces often convey a mournful beauty, speaking to the process of healing and the embrace of vulnerabilities. Using humble everyday materials, she skillfully reframes details and moments of everyday experience, offering new perspectives and insights.

In her public art work, Yolanda seeks to engage communities through civic projects. By responding to site conditions and the realities of our contemporary world, she creates urban artwork installations that explore concepts of beauty, equity, and communication. Her practice aims to nurture sensibilities of feelings, awakening people's awareness of interconnectedness. Examples of her recent public artwork include Winter Optics - Sculptures with Lights at The Rose Kennedy Greenway recommended by Boston Globe Tickets, Blank Paper - Public Art Demonstration in Responding to Censorship in China covered by WBUR and The Harvard Crimson, and Napalm Test #1, which was featured on The Harvard Crimson.

Yolanda is also the initiator and caretaker of "Behind VA Shadows" - a community-based project that highlights working artists in art museums.

Through her multifaceted practice, Yolanda continues to push boundaries and explore new ways of engaging with art and the world around us.

(Text sourced from the artist's website)

https://www.yolandayanghe.com/

In which Theo & Brian discuss Theo's curatorial debut, plus a terrible experience Brian had at the dentist.

Holding Space is on view now until June 25th 2023 at Assemblage Art Space in the Seaport at 70a Sleeper St. Boston, MA.

In which Brian & Theo talk about MRI's, tailbones, Taylor Swift, and horrible internet stuff.

In which Theo & Brian make a quick run to Target before departing on a plane to London, England.

In which Theo & Brian get into some arguements, discuss embarrassing party stories, and talk about pokemon cards.

https://www.bostonartpodcast.com/

In which Theo & Brian engage in some petty squabbles.

In which Theo & Brian sit down with curator, writer, and arts professional, Michelle Millar Fisher.

"Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts within the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next book and exhibition, tentatively titled Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit which is taking her across 48 contiguous US states via train over the course of a year. The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

She has long been interested in the confluence of gender and design. She has written widely on care work, mothering, and reproductive labor, including parenting in museums (and hiding care work at work), being childfree, grief and mothers, and the architecture of maternity. Since 2017, she has co-organized an independent team of collaborators around a book (MIT Press 2021), exhibition, curriculum, and program series called Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood. In 2017, she co-organized an exhibition and book, I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment, in conjunction with muca-Roma, Mexico City.

Previously, she was the The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she co-organized Designs for Different Futures (book and exhibition, 2019), helped rethink the display of nineteenth century European decorative arts, and engaged in research for the PMA’s new Gehry galleries which center contemporary art and design production at local and global levels. From 2014-2018 she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized, amongst others, the exhibitions Design and Violence, This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good, From the Collection, 1960-1969 and Items: Is Fashion Modern? as well as accompanying catalogues.

Before that, she worked for four years as a museum educator at the Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum and as a research intern in Arms & Armor for a year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She frequently lectures at conferences and symposia, and has been an adjunct lecturer at many schools, including Parsons The New School for Design, CUNY’s Baruch College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Graham Foundation Award, a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage project award, a Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Award, a full CUNY Graduate Center Enhanced Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship, several Kress Foundation Institutional Grants for Digital Resources, a DAAD Summer Language Fellowship, and an Arts & Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship.

Collaboration and mentorship is at the core of her practice (see the open-source PPT for crediting museum teams here). Here are some of the amazing folks she’s worked with of late, check out their work and/or ask them to speak about it: Chenoa Baker (emerging curator extraordinaire), Dr. Juliana Rowen Barton (architecture and design historian), Adrianne Edwards (maternal child health advocate) Tekara Gainey (doula), Zoë Greggs (activist and arts administrator), Porsche Holland (birth advocate) Gabriella Nelson (urban planner and maternal policy expert), Sabrina Taylor (children’s author and early childhood education expert), Amber Winick (design historian and childcare expert), Maternity Care Coalition (Philly), and the Neighborhood Birth Center (Boston).

In 2011, she co-founded ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress Foundation-funded project now used in over 185 countries. In 2019, she co-founded Art + Museum Transparency, dedicated to supporting critical conversations on the intersections of art and labor, and home to the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet."

Biography sourced from https://michellemillarfisher.com/About

https://www.instagram.com/michellemillarfisher/

Episode Artwork by Brigitte Lacombe

https://www.brigittelacombe.com/

In which Brian & Theo sit down with artist, curator, and gallerist, Frankie Symonds for their third appearence on The Boston Art Podcast. Since their solo show 'Gate of Heaven' at Distillery Gallery in South Boston last year, Frankie has opened an art gallery in Salem, Massachusetts.

https://shoebonesboston.info/about/

https://www.instagram.com/shoe.bones/

https://www.instagram.com/realslimfrankie/

In which Theo & Brian discuss first kisses, first dates, and other fun stuff.

We're also launching a Patreon !!!!!!!

In which Brian & Theo talk with artist Ryan Dempsey.

Ryan Dempsey is a 20-year old artist from Arizona who is receiving his BFA in painting at the highly acclaimed College of Fine Arts at Boston University. Ryan has had multiple solo shows across the west (his first being at the age of 9), and participated in a number of group shows in Arizona, California, and Boston. Ryan first picked up a brush at the age of 5, and built a technical ability over years of hyperrealism painting (see high school works). He paints from life and from experience, taking ordinary events/objects and transforming them into tactile artifacts that reflect his way of seeing with an emphasis on mark making and surface quality. Varying the speed at which he works, Ryan’s fusion of various painting languages manipulates how the eye moves across one of his canvases. A typical painting of his will include realism, broad flat spaces, gestural mark-making, and forms of printmaking all coexisting in one world. Ryan Dempsey works to develop an internally niche language of poetics through developed motifs and textual elements with an aim on achieving maximum aesthetic convention and making paintings good enough for your guest bathroom.

above text sourced from the artist's website.

https://www.ryandempseyart.com/