The Remix Podcast

In this exciting episode, we talk with our Season 4 co-host, Eva Mayhabal Davis. She takes us from the University of Washington to her first job in NYC at the Guggenheim Museum where she learned to spend significant time with art and facilitate conversations. We talk about her three partners in curating: the space, the artist, and the audience; how collaboration comes naturally to her; and how art is a path toward empathy and understanding. Eva walks us through the origin and trajectory of El Salón, a monthly program where she brings people together for food, company, and feedback. She reveals her hosting personality, how she chooses artists to work with, and how her choices resonate with her personal history. Does she have a secret white board full of artist names? Is she done with her education? Does her day job feed her curatorial work? Did she call her mom in advance of this conversation? You must listen to find out.

Eva Mayhabal Davis has curated exhibitions at BronxArtSpace, En Foco, Expressiones Cultural Center, MECA International Art Fair, Photoville NY, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon, and Ray Gallery. She is currently a Co-Director at Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial initiative, and in 2020 she will be the Curator-in-Residence at Kunstraum LLC. Based in New York City, she works with artists and creatives on the production of exhibitions, texts, and events. Her personal immigrant narrative drives her work in advocacy to advance equity and social justice values through the arts and culture. Born in Mexico and raised in the United States, she studied art history at the University of Washington. She is a founding member of El Salón, a meetup for cultural producers based in NYC. She has spoken on her curatorial work at the AC Institute, Artist Space, Queens Museum, The 8th Floor, Brooklyn College, Queensborough Community College, and NYC Crit Club. Her writing has been featured in Hemispheric Institute’s Cuadernos, Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal, CultureWork Magazine, and the Guggenheim Museum Blog.

evamayha.com

@evamayha

Welcome to The Remix podcast Batch 4! This season, The Remix co-founders Courtney Colman and Heather Bhandari continue their research into new models in the art world by focusing on the sustainability of independent curators. Fortunately, the most perfect co-host agreed to join them: Eva Mayhabal Davis, an independent curator and organizer who cares deeply about the capacity of art to inspire empathy and understanding. In this introduction, they talk about common threads in the eleven interviews they recorded in the summer/fall of 2019 with a diverse array of curators who’ve forged their own paths and figured out ways to sustain their practices. You’ll meet founders, partners, and truly independent spirits who are breaking new ground in the art world.

Music theme by Marina Murayama

Marina Murayama’s musical writing explores themes of mixedness, decolonization, and accountability. Though Marina has roots in the classical tradition, their current music weaves together synthesized electronic textures and lush orchestral soundscapes. Follow them at www.murayamamusic.com

In this episode, Anita Durst takes us from her performances in the Meat Packing District in the 90s to managing Chashama’s 30+ spaces across diverse neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey in 2018. The Remix asks her to reveal everything from the logistics of running art programs in so many empty spaces to her vision for the future. Listen to the conversation transition from real estate to alien probes.

Anita Durst has been a star, a muse, and a patron of the avant-garde performing arts and emerging arts scene in New York City, since she was 18. She founded chashama in 1995 following the death of her mentor and artistic professor Reza Abdoh. While performing and working in his company, Dar A Luz, she learned the value of unbridled expression and how to value art objectively. In the wake of Reza’s absence she was driven to create a place for artists free of financial and subjective constraints. Anita has worked tirelessly for over 20 years to secure over one million square feet of space in New York City for artists.

She believes programs like Chashama are the vital building blocks to ensuring cultural capital in New York City. Anita was born in New York City and was the flower child to hippy parents living in New Foundland Canada, Ibiza Spain, and the suburbs of New York City. As a precocious teenager she resisted conventional schooling. Shortly after graduating high school she moved back to New York City to help care for her grandfather. Today, Anita sits on the boards of the Tai Chi Chuan Center and Bindlestiff Family Cirkus.

She is a proud mother who ensures her entire family eats healthy, practices mindful movement, and lives in the moment. True to her ability to be in the moment and greatest strength of objective thinking, she believes all art to be valuable.

Courtney and Natalia speak with Zeelie Brown—multidisciplinary, multidimensional artist, cellist, and community builder. Zeelie talks through her move to NYC from the south (where her art stems from), and showing up in contexts historically reserved for straight, white participants. Listen to hear which institutions were particularly welcoming to her unorthodox practice.

Through sound, textiles, and installations, Brown “depth charges wells of Afro-Atlantic dynamism to conjure up works which provoke a sense of environmental and cultural shifts. Her work meditates black freedom in the 21st century, and the renegotiation of the parasitic networks of power and privilege weft into the global, colonial world order. She was born in San Antonio and was raised between San Antonio and Pollard, Alabama. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Africana Studies (Fine Arts) which they used to open their heart and soul to jazz, philosophy, and other great arts of the black world.”

Conceptual artist Chloe Bass comes to talk with The Remix about building relationships and kindness. Her new project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is the culmination of years of working around the topic of intimacy. We discuss the challenges of translating experiences and memories into objects and the memes that poke fun of conceptual art. What does a studio day and a submission look like for Chloe? Listen to find out. Can she foster intimacy on the scale of a metropolis? We think so.

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.

chloebass.com

@publicinvestigator

Leah Triplett Harrington joins The Remix to talk about The Rib, an online publication covering artists and artwork outside major city centers.  We talk about filling a void in the art world and amplifying the voices of art communities across the country. Which state has the most impressive apartment galleries? Listen to find out.

Leah Triplett Harrington is curator, editor, and writer. She is the founding editor of The Rib, a publication dedicated to contemporary art and its communities outside of major urban centers. Her writing has most recently appeared there as well as Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism. In 2018 she opened Under a Dismal Boston Skyline at Boston University Art Gallery. In 2019, she became assistant curator for Now + There, a Boston-based public art non-profit. Leah has lectured at Boston University, Montserrat College of Art, Stonehill College, Tufts University Art Gallery, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nathan Sinai Rayman started by founding the smallest, most inconsequential gallery in New York City (most likely the world). Now he’s exploring a franchise-ready, modular, flat pack gallery as an MFA candidate at Hunter. Can he populate the country with GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY? In this episode, listen to him explain his business plan that sells galleries, rather than art. 

Rayman is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates different bodies of work. One repurposes capitalist systems as readymades and another blends the collisions of circumstance that make up one’s mundane existence. As an artist-in-general, he works in a variety of media: tapestries, photograms, sculpture, installation, performance, video, PowerPoint, and text.

Established in 2013, and recently relaunched as GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY, it sells the franchise GALLERY by GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY, which positions him as a dealer of galleries rather than art. Rayman has exhibited both domestically and abroad in solo and group shows and curated over 60 shows in his capacity as GALLERY Director. He has participated in the Vermont Studio Center residency in 2009 and the Santa Fe Art Institute residency in 2010.

gallerycubed.com

@gallerycubed

Kelani Nichole talks to The Remix about her gallery, TRANSFER, and her involvement in The Current, a museum for digital art with a new model for collecting and showing the work. Kelani talks mentors and aspects of the traditional gallery world she flatly rejects. This is a must-listen conversation for everyone making digital work and anyone interested in showing, buying, and selling media art.

Kelani Nichole is a design strategist and exhibition maker based in New York City. Nichole is director of the Current Museum of Art, a cooperative collection of contemporary media art that examines technology's impact on the human condition. She is the founder and owner of TRANSFER an experimental gallery supporting artists with exhibitions of challenging variable media formats. Since 2016, TRANSFER Gallery in Brooklyn has been dedicated to women refiguring technology through exhibition and curation.

@transfergallery

@current.museum

Willa Köerner leaves the internet to visit The Remix. She talks about why The Creative Independent exists to share creative challenges—including creative anxiety and making a living—and ways of paving your own path. We also delve into her new upstate NY residency, The Strange. It’s a place where artists can live in a remodeled barn in the woods without losing their internet connection. Listen to find out what makes The Strange so beautiful and strange.

Willa Köerner is the Creative Content Director of The Creative Independent, a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for practicing artists. Before TCI, Willa directed editorial and content strategy at Kickstarter, and before that, she managed digital engagement at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is currently a NEW INC mentor, and was formerly a founding member of Grey Area Art + Technology’s Cultural Incubator. Willa has worked as a creative strategist for a wide range of arts organizations including the Smithsonian, Electric Objects, and Art21, and has been known to write, edit, curate, and otherwise create for all sorts of cultural projects. She’s currently working with her partner, Daniel Morgan, to establish The Strange Foundation, an internet-infused creative space in the woods of New York’s Catskill Mountains.

thecreativeindependent.com

thestrange.foundation

@willak

Meet Kristen Dodge, founder and curator of September gallery and mom to several farm animals. The Remix talks with her about why she left NYC and the space it’s provided to her personal and professional lives. After showing 200 artists in the last two years, she has sage advice about measuring success.

Founded in 2016 in Hudson, New York, SEPTEMBER is an evolving platform for artists of diverse disciplines. The gallery is committed to engaging the surrounding community, while hosting artists predominantly from Upstate to Brooklyn to Boston. In the first two years, over 200 artists have exhibited at the gallery. The spirited ethos and activity of SEPTEMBER includes performers, academics, activists, chefs, curators, writers, and other creative thinkers, makers and doers.

She previously founded DODGEgallery, which held 56 exhibitions on New York’s Lower East Side between 2010-2014.