In this episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Elizabeth Dee, founder of the Independent Art Fairs, to talk about what it means to build the kinds of platforms the art world doesn’t yet know it needs. The conversation begins with Dee’s early years at Deitch Projects and the founding of Elizabeth Dee Gallery, then moves through formative exhibitions with artists such as Adrian Piper and Ryan Trecartin; the broader New York generation that emerged around shows like Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; and the delicate question of how to honor artists’ histories while helping their work find the right present-day context, audience, and future.

They dig into the origins of Independent: how a handful of conversations among like-minded dealers became a different kind of New York art fair, designed for slower, more intentional looking and often centered on tightly curated, narrative-driven presentations. Elizabeth traces how the project has since grown into a larger architecture—one that includes editorial publishing, research initiatives, and an invite-only press bureau. She talks about stewardship in practice: commissioning English-language scholarship for artists from Latin America and other underrepresented contexts; using the fair’s platform to encourage collectors to look beyond a narrow “I only buy contemporary” mindset; and treating press and criticism as part of the historical record, not merely a PR afterthought.

Along the way, Elizabeth speaks candidly about what it meant to build a gallery, close one, and reinvent herself through Independent—and how those experiences reshaped her thinking around risk, responsibility, and visibility. She describes the fair and its related projects as an “architecture” for showing work, where exhibition formats, commissioned texts, and press coverage all have to align. Again and again, the conversation returns to a central question: how to use that structure to give artists from different places and generations meaningful visibility, without reducing their work to another short-lived market story.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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In episode five of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Marc Brown, the creator of "Arthur," to explore how a bedtime story told during one of the lowest moments of his life became a beloved book series and the longest-running children’s animated show in U.S. history. Starting with the night the first book was born as a story for Brown’s young son—whose delight gave him permission to keep going—they move through Elwood City and the evolution of Arthur’s world: how real algebra teachers, childhood friends, and the family living room became characters and settings, and how humor paired with emotional honesty became the “secret recipe” that helps children feel seen while they learn.

In a first for any interview he’s done, Brown reads two books—"Arthur’s Nose" and "Arthur’s Teacher Trouble"—from beginning to end, in full character, making the episode feel like live storytime with the person who drew your childhood. He talks about insisting on hand-drawn, watercolor continuity even as digital tools entered the industry; collaborating with PBS to keep the show educational rather than purely commercial; and what it took to let go of control and trust a team of animators with a character who had once been his alone.

Later, Brown reflects on creative partnerships, including his collaborations with "Goosebumps" author R.L. Stine. He recalls how they met on Air Force One, en route to a children’s book festival in Moscow hosted by Vladimir Putin’s then-wife—a story whose details are as surreal as they are hilarious. He also talks about drawing monsters that suspiciously resemble old gym teachers, attorneys, and ex-agents, and the pleasure of exercising a very different creative muscle.

The conversation closes with life lessons about detours, kindness, accepting help, and staying open to change—shaped by influences like his grandmother Thora and his friend Fred Rogers, and by the conviction that true success is doing what you love for as long as you’re lucky enough to do it.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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Adam Hanft is a brand strategist, writer, and cultural critic who’s spent decades decoding how language, persuasion, and creativity actually work—from his early days writing jokes for Garry Marshall, to coining the “Flick Your Bic” campaign, to advising brands like Match.com, Microsoft, Sony, and Obama’s 2008 digital team. In this episode of The Russi Hive, he joins Alejandra to talk about what generative AI is doing to creativity, branding, and our sense of self as makers. They start with dueling on‑air definitions of creativity and use them to ask whether large language models can ever be more than dazzlingly derivative synthesizers, or if the real shift is how they rewire our expectations of speed, volume, and authorship.

Drawing on his work across advertising, consulting, and media such as Fast Company, Adam traces how AI has changed the texture of cultural production, why “no ChatGPT touched this” may someday sit alongside “GMO‑free” as a marketing label, and what gets lost when we treat process as expendable and only care about the end product. They dig into AI as collaborator versus crutch, the coming “slow creativity” backlash that may mirror slow food after fast food, and how these tools unsettle everything from branding’s supposed North Star to the authority of parents and teachers when kids can just ask a bot. Threaded through the conversation is a more personal question: how to decide what to automate and what to protect, so that the skills, limits, and inner worlds that make us human don’t get flattened into just another dataset.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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Sarah Theresa Lee paints domestic scenes that feel like stage sets for the psyche: living rooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms where women, animals, and masked children share the same charged air—unsettling, off-kilter, and strangely familiar all at once. In this episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra and Sarah talk about how a self-described doodler and lifelong horror-movie obsessive went from ballpoint pen drawings at the kitchen table to a debut New York solo show at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, while still working as a psychiatric nurse in London.

From there, they move from lockdown boredom and a reluctant first Instagram post to an outpouring of small drawings and paintings that strangers instantly recognized themselves in, and to the discovery that her “naive” style—flat bodies, puppet-like figures, skewed perspective—wasn’t a flaw to correct but the very thing that made the work feel unique. They explore her inner “cabinet of curiosities,” the mental archive where childhood perfumes, cheap shampoos, bunny slippers, horror VHS covers, and awkward family interiors all get stored and later recombine into images that collapse nostalgia, menace, and deadpan humor on a single surface.

Along the way, Sarah reflects on growing up around serious mental illness, why working in psychiatric care has taught her how thin the line is between “normal” reality and overflowing inner worlds, and how art-making functions as a form of escape that lets her process without turning patients into material. They talk about being self-taught as both freedom and “box,” why she prefers to leave interpretation open, and the importance of laughing—even in the darkest stretches of life.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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Ian Ferguson—aka Hydeon—builds worlds where time folds in on itself: street‑level present, layered pasts, and speculative futures all coexist like screenshots from a game your childhood brain only half-remembers. In this episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra and Hydeon talk about alter egos as creative engines—how Hydeon “fuses” with Ian, why his musical persona Vonson needed its own name, and what happens when you perform Tropicana‑electronic pop with a scavenged Radio Shack keyboard, a children’s autotune box, and an unplugged mic.​

They trace his path from San Diego kid obsessed with historical detail to Brooklyn-based artist, using alter egos to expand the work’s mythology. From there, they move through his paintings and his project “Adrift in the Corners of Time,” first conceived as a series of works for his debut exhibition at Ricco/Maresca and now evolving into a survival adventure video game built with longtime friends—where each island lives in a different historical era and the player travels between them, solving puzzles and fighting demons.

Along the way, they return to childhood wonder, the brain’s blurry line between imagination and perception, and the feeling that our inner worlds sometimes register as vividly as what’s in front of us. Now 40, Hydeon reflects on dead‑end jobs, refusing to give his life over to "the system," and what it means to arrive not in crisis but with a hard‑won, quietly grounded sense of having built your own universe on your own terms.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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In the debut episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Frank Maresca, co-founder of Ricco/Maresca Gallery and one of the most influential champions of vernacular, self-taught, and outsider art of the last four decades.​
They trace Maresca’s path from Brooklyn kid and obsessive collector to fashion and beauty photographer and, eventually, full-time art dealer whose instinct for the unnamed and overlooked has quietly reshaped art history. Along the way, Maresca reflects on why knowing your limitations can be a creative superpower, how fear of failure can fuel great work, and what he learned about fearlessness by watching outsider artist William Hawkins “let the painting make itself.”​
The conversation moves through his sci-fi and monster-movie obsessions, the formative magic of museum back rooms with his eccentric Uncle Fred, and the darkroom “alchemy” that first made images feel like miracles. Maresca also talks about the tension between appreciating art and needing to possess it, the deep personal logic behind his collection (and new book devoted to it), and why, if he’d followed his father’s advice and become a dentist, none of this—the photography career, the gallery, the book, or this very podcast—would exist.​
If you’re interested in outsider art, collecting, creativity, or simply how one unconventional life comes together, this intimate, often funny, and deeply reflective conversation sets the tone for everything The Russi Hive hopes to be.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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Welcome to The Russi Hive—where we stay with the moment creativity meets the world, and listen to how an idea turns tangible… then keeps changing once it has to exist.
Hosted by Alejandra Russi, The Russi Hive was born inside Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City—an ecosystem shaped by four decades of refusing hierarchies and blurring the line between vernacular and fine art, impulse and mastery, the established and the overlooked.
The guests range from artists, writers, curators, and performers to people you wouldn’t expect: someone whose life is built like a creative practice even if there’s no “product,” or anyone who understands creativity from a completely different angle.
New episodes every other Thursday, with bonus episodes and stray creative dispatches in between.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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