Artists Till Witwer and Netta Sadovsky discuss the art of creating, facilitating and executing a live action role-playing game--by artists, for artists. This isn’t your standard ogre-in-the-woods, dressing up as a knight with a sword in the middle of nowhere kind of LARP-ing, but rather a fully immersive investigation of the career-building workshop format. With alternately paralyzing, cathartic, and surprising outcomes, Witwer and Sadovsky are interested in discovering what stands between artists and “The Great Success Machine.”

Forrest Kirk is a figurative painter based in Los Angeles; as this episode releases, he has a sold-out show at Parrasch Heijnen gallery. In the Conversation, Kirk doesn’t back away from describing the pressure the art world has placed on Black creators to make “Black Art.” He also talks about his living room-studio setup; discusses collecting -- both as a collector and an artist being collected; his experience in the art world as a black man and a painter; and he lets us in on part of how he's risen to success in the art world within just four years.

Ayana Evans discusses her 7-year career as a fashion designer (between being a painter and a performance artist), her impressive endurance-based performances, being part of a community of performance artists who are all on the same playing field (unlike the hierarchical art worlds), her first experiment/performance, in which she walked around MoMA in her signature catsuit while a friend covertly filmed (mostly) white women taking pictures of her exploitatively, and her frustrations and struggles with justice for black artists and women of color at large.

Nomadic curator Kate Mothes of Young Space talks about the pros and cons of curating shows in pop-up spaces; how as a curator she's always wanted to be part of an artist's community, the bottleneck of younger artists trying to get their work out into the world, and how she's built Young Space into a major virtual gallery platform - especially on Instagram - that many galleries pay attention to, and sometimes even borrow from.

Joanne Greenbaum talks about her time in Berlin, being one of the few young artists of her time to have a full-time day job, showing up for friend’s art shows but intentionally not having an extensive art world network beyond that, being able to live off of her work, the exhausting parts of being an adjunct professor, the hellscape that is being a mid-career female artist, and her steadfast belief that not everything has been done, especially within Abstraction.

In part two, Brooklyn-based artist and activist William Powhida talks about the ivory tower syndrome that accompanies working at an ivy-league institution, his project Store-To-Own,  which allows people to store his work in their home for free under contract, his exhibition After The Contemporary, which satirizes life after contemporary art, his ongoing critique of the art world and its service to and for the ultra wealthy, and the 'Dirtbag left,' which promotes left-wing politics through vulgarity and online attacks.

Brooklyn-based artist and co-host of the Explain Me podcast talks about the highs and lows of being the art world court jester (including alienating art world players along the way), what it’s like when your visibility as an artist dissipates, our various complicities in an art world that’s tied to tremendous wealth, and how activism, even in art, relies on activating the media to accomplish its objectives…

Central California artist and professor Elizabeth Folk discusses the pros and cons of online higher education during the boom of Zoom. Folk also touches on performance art, being able to access it virtually through Instagram Live, as well as performing a little piece live, here, on the podcast. 

Danielle Baskin discusses how being an artist and app developer has, now more than ever, helped her create experiences and fulfill the needs of her patrons. Her latest projects include: a platform called ‘Quarantine Chat’ that pairs callers with random people all over the world, addressing facial recognition technology challenges via personalization, tarot readings and spells over the phone.

This episode of The Conversation we discuss the profile of artist Jordan Wolfson in the March 16  issue of The New Yorker magazine by Dana Goodyear, which in part follows a thread Deb and I talked about in a recent episode about social justice and censorship in contemporary art; because neither of us have actually experienced Wolfson’s work in person, we focus on the story arc of Wolfson’s career as portrayed in the piece, as well as the context in which the art has been received; in remarking on the way Wolfson’s work has been described as capturing certain sensibilities of the internet, Deb says that “so much of internet culture is like a different kind of internalized road rage;” Deb talks a bit about the Netflix movie Velvet Buzzsaw, in which Wolfson’s work is quoted; and we wrap things up by discussing the phenomenon of artists who are ‘cranking work out,’ including when they say ‘no’ when asked for greater production, when it makes sense to make that extra work for vital art fair opportunities, and being grateful for being on the ‘carousel’ (as Deb calls it) in the first place.