The Remix Podcast

Camilo Alvarez joins us from Boston to discuss his trajectory from working at nonprofits to owning his own gallery to closing the space in an effort to rethink his relationship to the gallery system. After many years working in the art world, getting a master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard was a first step in positioning himself differently in relation to artists and audiences. What’s coming next? Listen to find out.

Camilo Alvarez was born in 1976 in New York, NY and resides in Boston, MA. He was born to Dominican parents and lived in Santo Domingo for 7 years. He received a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) and a Masters of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). 

He has worked at Exit Art (NY, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), MIT’s List Visual Art Center (Cambridge, MA) and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (NY, NY & Skowhegan, ME). He is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and is on the National Advisory Council of Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum. 

He is the Owner, Director and Preparator at Samsøñ formerly Samson Projects, founded in 2004. He has given solo exhibitions to William Pope.L (2010), Rebecca Morris (2006), Kader Attia (2008), and Beverly Semmes (2017) among many. Samsøn’s programs and exhibitions have been reviewed by the New York Times, ArtForum, the Boston Globe and Flash Art. The gallery has participated in art fairs including ARCO (Madrid, Spain) MACO (Mexico City, Mexico), NADA (Miami, FL & NY, NY) and the Armory (NY, NY). Samsøñ placed works in the permanent collections of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Boston among others. In 2010, Samsøñ commenced sübsamsøn, a form of artist’s residency. As of 2017, Samsøñ became itinerant. 

www.samsonprojects.com

@samsonprojects

Welcome to The Remix podcast Batch 3. This season, The Remix co-founders Courtney Colman and Heather Bhandari are joined by Natalia Nakazawa, artist and assistant director of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program. In this intro they talk about the ten podcasts they recorded, covering everything from new commercial gallery and residency models to strategies for navigating the art world with art that challenges current structures. They continue on their quest for viable new models in the art world, while meeting fascinating people along the way.

Many thanks to Niki Nakazawa and El Triple Filtro for our intro music!

theremix.nyc

@theremix.nyc

#theremixpodcast

In this grouping of episodes, we turn our attention to artists' expanding definitions of success and the reliance on a multidisciplinary approach as a means to survival. We discuss artist-run spaces, community-driven nonprofits, and the current state of art criticism. Batch 2 features interviews with artists Leah Tinari, Caroline Woolard, Matthew De Leon, Molly Surno, and Alex Paik; writer Paddy Johnson; and Recess founder Allison Weisberg.

What Are We Drinking? by The Remix

Paddy Johnson says she's learned some of her most important lessons through trial and error, or in some cases error upon error. In her early years in New York, this meant repeatedly taking gallery assistant jobs and then losing them. She learned a lot about the business through this process including the fact that you can always blog when you can’t find a job. And thus, in 2005, she founded Art Fag City.

Art Fag City was Paddy’s way to participate in the art world and get immediate feedback. When Facebook became a thing, Art Fag City became Art F City. Professionalism kicked in while she managed to retain a fresh and candid perspective. We talk about income inequality, valuing time, speaker fees, and the belief that art and artists can contribute greatly to communities. While talking about artist-run projects as a movement we talk cat boxes, microwaves, puppies, and new models.

Paddy Johnson is the founding Editor of Art F City and an active independent curator. She has published in magazines such as New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Economist and lectures about art at venues such as Yale University, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2010 and 13, she was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards. Curating highlights include the Columbia MFA show at Judith Charles Gallery in 2015 and a retrospective of the work of Carol Cole at The Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina in 2018. She also has a podcast, Explain Me, with the artist William Powhida.

http://artfcity.com/category/podcast/

After Cooper Union, Caroline Woolard started a shared studio space with friends and discovered a healing community that was necessary to sustaining an artistic career. She embodies the solidarity economy and explains how that is different from the sharing economy. We discuss online platforms, power, transformative justice, and believing in something. She is an artist and cultural organizer who imagines better futures.

Caroline Woolard employs sculpture, installation, and online networks to study the pleasures and pains of interdependence. Woolard has co-founded barter networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop (2008-2016), the Study Center for Group Work (since 2016), BFAMFAPhD.com (since 2014), and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative (since 2016). Recent writing on her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. Woolard’s work has been featured twice in the PBS / Art21 documentary series New York Close Up.

http://carolinewoolard.com

Alex Paik is a community builder. He talks to us about why he co-founded TSA with friends in Philly and how it grew to be a network of spaces in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Chicago (the Gagosian of the artist-run world?!). We learn about the nuts and bolts of running the four spaces including dollars and cents, dispersing the workload, and why TSA chose to be a nonprofit. We also learn how Alex balances his art practice with his many administrative roles.

Alex Paik is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been shown at galleries and art fairs nationally and internationally. He is the founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces; Curator of Satellite Art Show, an alternative art fair in Miami; and Chief Curator at Trestle Gallery, a non-profit arts organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

www.alexpaik.com

Matthew De Leon takes us from Connecticut to art school to becoming the drag performer, Untitled Queen. He gives credit to people along the way and talks about making community, redefining his practice, and resisting categorization. He samples and embodies everything from anime to art history to create social sculpture while working full time. The necessary element he added to his practice since getting his MFA: fun.

Matthew De Leon aka Untitled Queen is a visual artist, drag queen, and graphic designer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He creates elaborate, colorful handmade DIY costumes and sculptural body props that are used in intensely emotional and narrative performances. Through these means, he twists and explores themes of vulnerability, gender, race, and self-empowerment.

De Leon was born in 1984 on Governors Island, New York. He is the recipient of the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag Queen of the Year 2015. He has shown in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Kitchen, Boston Center for the Arts, Honey Ramka, and the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, among others. Residencies include Urban Glass and the SHIFT residency at EFA.

www.matthewdeleon.com

Allison Weisberg started her career in the arts managing lines outside MOMA in the rain, and after a few key steps along the way, went on to start a nonprofit with deep community roots and a mission of inclusion. She is game for supporting and facilitating difficult, critical art where people can touch, participate, and be loud. Recess’s spaces in Brooklyn are hubs for intensive residencies and artist-initiated programming including Assembly, the organization’s diversion program for court-involved youth.

Allison Freedman Weisberg received a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Visual Culture from NYU. She worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art and then the Whitney Museum of American Art. Managing Youth and Community programs at the Whitney, Allison began creating inroads to contemporary art for audiences from diverse backgrounds. Her work uniting artists and publics lead her to start Recess in 2009. She has given lectures and presentations at venues such as Hunter College and the New Museum and contributed writing to wide-ranging publications from artist books to Art in America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her two children, and a disgruntled mutt named Edgar.

https://www.recessart.org/

It’s a Leah Tinari love fest! She discusses the stages she went through when her gallery closed and how her expectations of the art world changed dramatically over the last two years. She talks sales over Instagram (once she figured out what a DM was) and going it on her own as an author/illustrator and the founder of Avenue Sea Creatures. Once she became a mom and questioned the arbitrary line between painter and illustrator, her world opened up.

Leah Tinari has a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After graduation, she moved to New York City and since that time has been a scenic painter; a freelance illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vice, Spin, Elle, and Paper magazines; a teacher at Parsons New School; and a restaurant owner. Leah has also created campaigns for Nike and Mini Cooper automobiles. Her fine art has been shown in galleries around the world and is also privately collected. Harlan Coben’s The Magical Fantastical Fridge was the first children’s book she illustrated. Leah is author-illustrator of Limitless, 24 Remarkable American Women of Vision, Grit and Guts, published by Simon & Schuster, with a publication date of November 6, 2018 and available in pre-sale now. Leah has also been breaking into the custom sneaker game and launched her custom sneaker biz “Avenue Sea Creatures” in the summer of 2017 and has been making kicks for the likes of Adriana Lima, Mark Hamill, Adrian Grenier, Caroline Vreeland, and Yves Durif. She lives and paints in the East Village with her husband and son.

www.LeahTinari.com