The Create! Podcast

What if the missing ingredient in your creative life isn't more productivity, but more loafing?

In this solo episode, Kat shares a personal update from her summer and an honest reflection on burnout, rest, and the radical act of doing less. Drawing from the book Writing, Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd, she introduces the concept of creative loitering, and makes the case that your imagination actually requires aimless, unstructured time to do its best work.

Kat reads from the chapter "Creative Loitering," explores why slowing down is not laziness but a prerequisite for original thinking, and shares how she has been building more space into her own life, from beach reads and Paris Review issues at the hair salon to long European-style dinners and mornings with no agenda.

This episode is an invitation to reclaim your human mind, protect your creative energy, and trust that stepping back is sometimes the most productive thing you can do.

In this episode:

• Creative loitering: what it means and why it matters for artists and makers
• Excerpts from Writing, Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd and Joie: A Parisian's Guide to Celebrating the Good Life by Ajiri Aki
• The analog bag trend and other small ways to reduce scrolling and add presence

Join the conversation on Substack: https://createmagazine.substack.com

Share what you're reading, how you're resting, and what you'd like to hear more of on the show.

Follow Kat:

Instagram: @ekaterinaspopova | @createmagazine

This episode is two things in one: an honest, personal check-in from Kat as we head into summer, Q&A from our community. followed by a conversation with San Diego-based Mexican painter Yahel Yan, a Create! community member whose 100-day challenge journey ended in a full solo exhibition.

Kat opens by sharing what has been on her mind lately, from the turbulence in the art world and the economy to a growing sense that artists deserve more privacy, more mystery, and more protection of the creative and intellectual work they have built over years. She reflects on the pressure to share everything online, the times that oversharing has cost her, and why she is choosing to reclaim some intentional secrecy, not as gatekeeping, but as a form of boundaries and self-respect.

She also answers questions submitted by listeners through the Create! broadcast channel on Instagram, covering practical topics like what to do when you do not have a mailing list at an exhibition, how to approach interior designers as potential clients, how to identify your ideal collector when you are just starting out, and where collectors are actually discovering new artists today.

Then Kat sits down with Yahel Yan, a Create! Magazine featured artist and community member, for a conversation about her winding path to painting, the deeply personal chair series that became her signature work, and what it felt like to complete and exhibit 100 paintings in 100 days.

Yahel grew up in Mexico City, surrounded by color and the energy of a sprawling metropolis. After pursuing graphic design and building a family, she arrived in San Diego in 2000, pregnant with her third child, navigating a new country, a new language, and a new life. Art became her anchor. When her youngest started preschool, she returned to the studio and has been painting ever since.

Her "Chairs Are People" series began in 2012, almost by accident. Yahel had always collected small chairs, filling her home with so many she joked there was nowhere left to sit. When she began painting them, something shifted. She started seeing chairs as personalities, as stand-ins for human presence, romance, grief, and memory. Many come from the street, discovered and abandoned, each one a mystery she gets to invent. Others she takes on what she calls field trips, photographing her own chairs in new environments before bringing them back to canvas.

Earlier this year, Yahel participated in the Create! 100 Day Challenge, painted all 100 pieces, and turned them into a solo exhibition, presented as grids of nine that let viewers spend hours discovering objects they had not noticed at first glance. She shares why she never planned to show the work publicly until she simply had to.

In this episode, you will hear:

Kat's solo Q&A segment:

• What is weighing on her in the art world right now, and how she is choosing to respond
• Why she is reclaiming privacy and mystery in her practice and her business
• What to do when you do not have a mailing list at a show (and how to start one)
• How to approach interior designers as potential clients for your work
• How to identify your ideal collector when you are just starting out
• Where collectors are actually finding emerging artists today

Conversation with Yahel Yan:

• Growing up in Mexico City and how that shaped her palette, energy, and sense of movement
• Why she chose graphic design over fine art, and how that path served her
• Moving to the United States with two children and one on the way, and how creativity helped her build community in a new country
• The origin of "Chairs Are People" and how chairs became characters with stories and feelings
• Finding chairs on the street and taking her own chairs on "field trips" to photograph in new environments
• Joining the Create! 100 Day Challenge and discovering unexpected joy in painting food, hot sauce, and other overlooked objects
• Exhibiting all 100 paintings as a grid installation and the experience of seeing them as one complete body of work
• What is next: a ceramics workshop in Maine with her daughter

Links mentioned in this episode:

Yahel Yan on Instagram: @yahel.yan.art Yahel's website: yahelyan.com

Create! Substack (subscribe free or paid): createmagazine.substack.com

Create! broadcast channel: follow @createmagazine on Instagram

Join the next 100 Day Challenge cohort waitlist: www.createmagazine.myflodesk.com/challenge

Content creation burnout is real, and if you have ever hit a wall with showing up online, this episode is for you. Ekaterina sits down with Nicole Bedard, brand photographer, video storyteller, and strategist who specializes in helping makers, artists, and designers capture their authentic studio flow and process.

Nicole shares how small, consistent commitments and intentional visual storytelling can help you attract the clients, collectors, and opportunities you actually want, without the overwhelm.

In this episode:

• Why content creation feels so hard for artists and how to move through it
• How to capture your process in a way that feels natural and authentic
• The role of brand photography and video in building trust with collectors
• Practical strategies for showing up consistently without burning out

Links: Nicole Bedard: www.nbphotog.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nbedardphotog

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nicolebedardphotovideo

Brand Visual Checklist: https://bit.ly/brand-visuals

Sponsor: Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2026, over $77,000 in prizes including a $10,000 grand prize. Deadline July 17, 2026. Enter at https://beautifulbizarreartprize.art/

Substack: createmagazine.substack.com

Independent curator, cultural critic, and co-founder of ARTNOIR, Larry Ossei-Mensah, joins us for a deeply reflective dialogue on his dual identity as a high-profile champion of the arts and a dedicated ceramic artist. Larry pulls back the curtain on his stunning debut ceramic solo exhibition in New York, What Survives the Fire, and shares invaluable wisdom on the patience it takes to build a practice that stands the test of time.

Whether you are an emerging creator navigating the contemporary landscape or an established practitioner looking to protect your studio time, this conversation is a rich, peer-to-peer exploration of what it truly means to live a life dedicated to art.

In this episode, Larry and Kat discuss the shift from photography and global curatorial projects to discovering a profound, tactile language in ceramics, how clay continually humbles you and why that is a beautiful metaphor for life, practical strategies for protecting studio time while balancing high-profile community work, making decisions driven by intuition and discernment rather than spectacle, how strategic international travel and cross-cultural dialogue shape a creative practice, and why doubling down on maker culture is one of the most important things we can do right now.

Connect with Larry: Instagram: @larryosseimensah ARTNOIR: @artnoir.co | artnoir.co All About Clay: @allaboutclayny

Subscribe to our Substack for exclusive behind-the-scenes articles, exhibition highlights, and digital resources: createmagazine.substack.com

Ready to share your work with the world? View our latest open calls at createmagazine.co/call-for-art

Jo Gamel is back, and this conversation covers a lot of ground. A Philadelphia-based fine artist, gallery liaison, teaching artist, science fiction writer, and member of the music project Medal of Jupiter, Jo embodies what it looks like to follow genuine curiosity across disciplines without apology. In this episode, we get into her participation in the 100 Day Painting Challenge, how she built a consistent studio practice around a fully funded medical billing program, and what it actually takes to show up for your work when your schedule is packed.

Jo shares how she used block scheduling to protect her 5 a.m. studio hours, how pre-selecting a limited palette and 300 reference photos from her phone set her up for creative flow rather than decision fatigue, and how her miniature series became a portal into memory, travel, and her great-grandmother's immigration story. We also talk about the sensory, cafe-style exhibition she mounted at the Jane Gallery, the power of immersive art presentations, and why she believes every artist should be loudly celebrating their wins so others know what is possible.

Jo has shown at the Louvre during Paris+ Art Basel, Chelsea Old Town Hall during London Art Week, and the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona. This fall, she is directing the Arts League gallery for Collective Futures (a citywide Philadelphia collaboration, October 2 to 23, themed around Bohemia as a trans-historical state of mind), and she announces something she visualized years ago: she will be showing at the Stockholm Affordable Art Fair this September.

This one is full of practical insight, ancestral warmth, and a lot of encouragement to say the big dream out loud.

In this episode:

• What it means to be pluridisciplinary and why the old masters were too
• Building a block schedule that actually holds up during a demanding program
• How the 100 Day Painting Challenge became a meditation on petite pleasures and personal history
• Creating a fully immersive, sensory gallery experience on your own terms
• The role of community and mutual aid in a sustainable art career
• Why sharing your achievements is just as important as achieving them
• Jo's upcoming exhibitions in Philadelphia and Stockholm

Links and resources:

Join us on Substack: https://createmagazine.substack.com

Jo Gamel: www.jogamel.com

Jo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jogamel/

Join the Create! Collective: https://createcollective.mykajabi.com/collective

Free Studio Workbook and Workshop: https://createmagazine.myflodesk.com/studio-party

100 Day Challenge Waitlist: https://createmagazine.myflodesk.com/challenge

Connect with Jo: www.jogamel.com

Past episode: https://createmagazine.substack.com/p/mixed-media-magic-embracing-a-multi-245

There is a next-level version of you already waiting and this episode will help you step into it.

Drawing on a decade of running Create! Magazine and watching hundreds of artists grow, Kat (Ekaterina Popova) lays out exactly how to graduate to the next stage of your career, whether you are a visual artist, a maker, or a small business owner. The identity shift that unlocks real momentum, a framework for choosing opportunities worth your time, and a clear five-step action plan you can start this week.

• The identity shift behind every real level-up
• Why your behavior follows your identity, and how to update it
• How the art world defines career stages, and why you get to decide what counts
• The three kinds of opportunities, and which ones actually move you forward
• A five-step action plan to step into your next level this month

1. Audit where you actually are
2. Define your next level specifically
3. Do the mindset and presentation work: bio, website, CV
4. Get into a solution-oriented room
5. Become generous and give from your experience

This episode is brought to you by Blue Green Galleria Fine Art, specializing in Chinese and Asia-Pacific contemporary artists. Catch them at the first-ever Salt Lake Art Show, May 14 to 17 at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy, Utah. Find them at booth A202 with a duo presentation by Yana Hu and Long Han.

https://bluegreengalleria.com | Blue Green Galleria on Artsy

Your environment shapes what you believe is possible. The Create! Collective is our membership community of artists and creative entrepreneurs winning grants, opening galleries, and building bigger tables. Join ours or build your own, but find a room that lifts you up.

https://www.createmagazine.co/collective

Create! Dispatch on Substack: Studio Sundays, open calls, and tips every week. Free tier available. Support independent publishing for $10 a month. https://createmagazine.substack.com

Submit to Studio Sundays: our free Sunday feature spotlighting your workspace. https://airtable.com/apptRl5pIcdTzhYLt/pagcaZN4AGQpEUkjy/form

@createmagazine | https://www.createmagazine.co

Indira Cesarine is an artist, curator, and the founder of The Untitled Space, one of New York City's most vital independent galleries. She has built a practice that refuses to be contained by a single role, and this conversation is a behind-the-scenes look at how she does it.

We sat down to talk about her current exhibition "In Full Bloom," a group show featuring 34 women artists working with floral and botanical imagery as a vehicle for transformation, identity, and power. But we went much further than the show itself.

Indira shares what it took to open and sustain an independent gallery in New York, how she thinks about building a curatorial vision that is both intellectually honest and visually compelling, and what it means to remain a practicing artist while running an institution. If you have ever wondered what it looks like to hold multiple creative identities at once and build something meaningful across all of them, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• What led Indira to found The Untitled Space and what the early years actually looked like
• How she develops a curatorial concept from first instinct to finished exhibition
• The way her own studio practice informs how she reads and selects the work of other artists
• What she looks for in a group show and how individual voices come together into something larger
• Sustaining creative leadership over the long term without losing the work that started it all

Links and resources:

"In Full Bloom" is on view at The Untitled Space, 45 Lispenard Street, New York, NY through May 22, 2026. Visit www.untitled-space.com for full details.

Submit your work to Create! Magazine. We are currently accepting submissions for upcoming issues and exhibitions. Visit https://www.createmagazine.co/call-for-art to apply.

Free masterclass: Sell More Art. Build a sustainable practice and start earning consistently from your creative work. Register at https://courses.createmagazine.co/sell-more-art-free-training-2026.

Ekaterina Popova sits down with Liz Lidgett, gallery owner, art advisor, and author of the newly released book "Art for Everyone: How to Collect Art and Personalize Your Space on Any Budget." Liz has built a thriving gallery and design practice in Des Moines, Iowa, and has spent her career making the art world feel welcoming, joyful, and genuinely accessible to collectors at every level.

In this conversation, they explore the business side of building a sustainable art career, including how artists can better connect with collectors by focusing on home-ready presentation and offering varied price points. Liz also shares what she wishes more artists understood about the collector relationship, and how she turned her location into a superpower rather than a limitation.

Whether you are an artist looking to grow your career or someone who has always wanted to bring more art into your home, this episode is full of practical insight and genuine encouragement.

In this episode:

• What inspired Liz to write "Art for Everyone" and who it is for
• How artists can make their work more collector-ready
• The importance of varied price points and accessible entry pieces
• Building a gallery and creative career outside of major art hubs
• What collectors are really looking for when they walk into a gallery

Links and Resources:

• Get the book: Art for Everyone by Liz Lidgett
• Liz Lidgett Gallery: lizlidgett.com
• Follow Liz on Instagram: @lizlidgett
• Submit your work to Create! Magazine: createmagazine.co/call-for-art

In this episode of the Create! Podcast, host Ekaterina Popova sits down with Amy Cavanaugh Royce, the Executive Director of Maryland Art Place (MAP). Amy shares her journey from a professional touring cellist and recording artist to a leader in arts administration, providing a candid look at the resilience required to sustain a major contemporary arts hub. The conversation explores the intersection of creative empathy and executive leadership, emphasizing why protecting physical space is vital for the health of a city's creative economy.

The Evolution of a Practitioner: Amy explains how her background as a freelance musician allowed her to bring a unique level of empathy to her leadership role.

Understanding the Process: She highlights the importance of leaders understanding what it takes for artists to get to a final product to effectively advocate for them.

Protecting Creative Real Estate: A discussion on Amy's commitment to retaining MAP's 20,000-square-foot building in downtown Baltimore to ensure artists stay within the context of general commerce.

Fundraising and Resilience: Amy offers insights into the different funding landscapes of DC and Baltimore, noting that persistence is key and that a "no" from a potential donor often simply means "not now".

Creating Artist Opportunities: From the "Out of Order" annual auction to managing the Maryland State Arts Directory, Amy explains how MAP connects artists with collectors and public art projects.

The Bromo Art Walk: Amy previews the upcoming event on May 14th, featuring a New York–Baltimore exchange curated by Jim Condren and Glenn Goldenberg.

Maryland Art Place (MAP) inspires, supports, and encourages artistic expression through innovative programming, exhibitions, and educational opportunities while recognizing the powerful impact art can have on our community. MAP creates a dynamic environment for artists of our time to engage the public by nurturing and promoting new ideas. MAP has served as a critical resource for contemporary art in the Mid-Atlantic since 1981.

Submit Your Work: Visit the Create! Magazine Call for Art to find current opportunities to get your work in front of a global audience.

Support the Mission: Learn more about Maryland Art Place, become a member, or donate by visiting mdartplace.org.

Visit the Gallery: Explore the current exhibitions at 218 West Saratoga Street, Baltimore, MD.

Ten years ago, I took the leap into full-time creative entrepreneurship with no roadmap, no guarantee, and a lot of hope. This episode is my honest look back at what actually got me here, and it is not a highlight reel.

I recently had the honor of spending two days at Michigan State University as a guest lecturer and juror for the undergraduate senior show. The organizers asked me to speak about failure, not success. That invitation sent me into a real reflection on the moments that broke me open and ultimately built everything I have today.

In this episode I share what I wish I had known at 27, including why I stayed too long in projects that had expired, how learning to quit strategically changed everything, why your non-negotiables have to come before your goals, how I learned to stop shrinking under criticism without losing my empathy, the difference between goals that are truly yours versus ones you inherited from someone else's definition of success, and why every significant thing I have built grew directly out of a previous failure.

I also talk about losing our first book deal, a solo show that nearly got canceled, the shadow side of stubbornness, and why knowing what hill you are willing to die on matters more than any strategy.

This one is personal. It is also practical. I hope it meets you exactly where you are.

Did this resonate? Let's chat! Tag me over at @katerinaspopova on IG

To join the Create! Collective membership community, visit createmagazine.co/collective.

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