The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.

This week, The Open Call Podcast is happy to host Jodi Hays. Jodi is a Southern-identifying artist whose abstract paintings bring together new and reclaimed materials that she dyes, paints and assembles into  works ranging from small to mural sized paintings. Her work pulls from a Southern vernacular and she pulls some of her imagery from care-worn and dilapidated aspects of the Southern landscape. She deftly layers formal, emotive, and conceptual elements as she explores ideas of gender, history, identity, and place. 

Hays’ materials are often drawn from her environment, sometimes suffused with family history and sometimes chosen for their formal qualities like stripes or grids. She manipulates these materials and mines them for their inherent content, informing her interest in abstraction. Her paintings draw on her research into regional history, family, and land use. In this episode we  caught up with Jodi in Nashville, Tennessee where she lives and works. Listen as she shares about her studio,  working process, and the ideas that inform her work.

 We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of our guest's artwork. We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks. Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants:  Ally Price,  Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller  who provide production support, web, and social media design.