Unibrow Radio

As an artist or creative known around the world for a thing—a style, icon, color scheme, character—you may be held or beholden to that aesthetic because of viewer pressure or even financial concerns. Knowing the Low Bros, the Hamburg-based duo (yes, yes, they are, indeed, brothers), they have a particular iconography and body of work that is so instantly recognizable, so sought after for murals, installations and exhibitions that we almost tend to take it for granted. A mixture of clean skate graphics, plays on 3D imagery and broadening scope when it comes to interactive installations, the Low Bros have established themselves as one of Europe's great duos that were born out counter-culture scenes and grown into hallmarks on the evolutions of street art practices.

And yet this summer, as they were preparing their new solo show, CON.TXT, now on view at Urban Spree in Berlin, and with the George Floyd murder dominating the streets of America and moving toward Europe's own social activist and justice narratives and needs for change, the Low Bros began to change the scope of their work. With an instant change to monochromatic images on their social media accounts, the process seeped into their work for CON.TXT.  The show  became not just the Low Bros own relationship to race and their  understanding of their white privilege (and in some cases,  our collective lack of understanding) but Germany's own conversations regarding race the Black Lives Matter movement and the evolution of social justice reforms in their home country.

Influenced by the book Exit Racism by Tupoka Ogette and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Low Bros  partnered with IDB's (Institute for Non-Discriminatory Education) Josephine Apraku and Jule Bönkost for the exhibition. As the Bros and Urban Spree noted, the partnership served as "an educational starting point, this exhibition aims to amplify and continue the conversation surrounding white privilege and asks questions of how it can be better utilized in institutions, as well as private & public spaces. While the search for answers is ongoing, the artworks aim is to highlight the problems of unchecked whiteness, especially when it is being recognized as a default perspective in society. By debunking the concept of privileges and problems, the context of this exhibition aims to engage whiteness as an ally to the BIPOC community."

Today on Radio Juxtapoz we speak with Low Bros from Berlin as their show was opening, as well as share an in-depth conversation with IDB's Josephine Apraku about the evolution of the show, collaboration and the history of the brothers aesthetic through the years. As 3x Juxtapoz Clubhouse installation participants, the Low Bros are extended family.  We are so excited to share their process and new direction on the Radio Juxtapoz podcast.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 052 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Berlin, August 12, 2020. Follow Low Bros at @lowbros

Dan Witz is a pioneer man in so many ways, and has lived so many different lives that speaking with him in any setting that isn't 6 hours would prove to be difficult. He was painting Baroque style realism at Cooper Union in the late 1970s when Neo-Expressionism was becoming the craze, was painting hummingbirds and doing street art in lower Manhattan when graffiti was becoming part of an art mainstream consciousness, was a Punk when Hip Hop was taking over NYC and was painting his iconic "mosh pits" when no one would dare touch realism again. Now in 2020, he is back with political street art, in the belly of the beast in the battleground states with powerful messages about the Trump administrations diabolical policies toward immigrant families at the border between Mexico and the USA. And every step of the way, the Brooklyn-based Witz is ahead of the curve.

His most pit and rave paintings are iconic, his hummingbirds and small scale street art works the same, but what makes Witz such a fascinating interview is not only how long he has been at it, but the multiple genres and mediums he has worked in. From music and photography, street art activism to fine art painting, Witz  hasn't shied away from exploring all the avenues of creativity, and discovered an underbelly of Americana in the process.

In the 51st episode of the Radio Juxtapoz podcast, we find Witz at home after trips to the midwest, fresh off his #isitsafe street project and stories to tell. From his research at a Trump rally, to documenting mosh pits with camera in hand and transforming them into beautiful energy on canvas, to seeing the chaos and uncertainty of America this summer to surviving Punk style in Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s, this is one of our favorite podcasts ever.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 051 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Brooklyn, July 30, 2020. Follow Dan Witz at @danwitzstreetart

It's not everyday you get to celebrate a few milestones on a podcast, but here we are: Radio Juxtapoz not only has its 50th episode to share but our first trip up north to the good people of Toronto, Canada and our guest this week, Maria Qamar, aka Hatecopy. To call us mega-fans of the Toronto-based author and artist is an understatement. That Qamar has taken the comic book cel and transformed it into a bold, Bollywood style, humorous and honest portrayal of Desi culture in the 21st century makes her one of the most unique voices in contemporary art.

As she "virtually" opened her newest solo show, ME, MERASELF & I, with Richard Taittinger in NYC this summer, we decided to finally catch up with the painter to discuss a wide-range of topics, from her career in marketing and advertising, to her first forays into painting and her growing up in a post 9/11 suburb of Toronto that helped shape her content she makes today. Born in Karachi, Pakistan to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother, Qamar's career has been a modern look at the Desi culture as well as modern look at immigration from Asia to North America. By using the comic book style, her works are personal stories and overarching narratives of contemporary life in one of the most diverse cities in the world in Toronto. By mixing the aesthetics of Roy Lichtenstein paintings and what she has called Indian soap opera style dialogue, her works have continued to bring a new generation of South Asia artists to the forefront and into the contemporary art landscape. And there may have been a K-Pop fan account, a food blog and a best friend call out in this podcast...

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 050 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Toronto, July 21, 2020. Follow Maria Qamar at @hatecopy

Just one look at curator and cultural visionary Larry Ossei-Mensah's "LinkTree" on his Instagram, and you can see the breadth of what the man is working on. And this was supposed to be the year for the "collective pause"! A break! As the co-founder of ARTNOIR and curator of various exhibitions, fundraisers and projects, the Ghanaian-American Mensah is an example of how independent curators and art's organizers can utilize their talents and skill set in a year that has had in the art world curious and wondering what to do next. From the pandemic to the immense spark created by the George Floyd murder, this contemporary art world needs new voices and relentless visionaries, and in many ways, individuals who can break down the almost "fantasy narrative" that is built around a curator. You know, that conversation you have had at a gallery when someone says they are a curator and you want to know what that entails and you want to be one, too. Mensah is the perfect art world navigator for these uncertain times.

In this wide-ranging interview, the Bronx-based Mensah talks to the Radio Juxtapoz podcast about how he got started in curation, his early forays into organizing art shows in Brooklyn and his ambitious projects that he has on display from anywhere to the web pages of Artsy to the halls of MOCAD in Detroit with the recent Peter Williams exhibition. His story is not just about what means to be an art lover with a good idea, but how to tell stories through curation, how to better equip the art world with new vision and voices from artists around the world and how to still be as active as possible as the art world itself goes through a transition. Mensah also talks about his recent foray into making art himself, and how cooking helped him through the earliest months of the pandemic. The conversation is both a blueprint for a younger generation to be involved in the arts, but also how to engage with contemporary art on every level. If you can't travel the world in 2020, you can still globetrot through the arts, and Mensah is the guide.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 049 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Bronx, July 2, 2020. Follow Larry Ossei-Mensah at @youngglobal

Absurdist reality. This is probably the best way to sum up 2020. You put your head down, phone down and take a nap and 20 minutes later you have Kanye West running for president, Donald Trump spending 15 minutes on leather bottom shoes and the twists and turns of a global pandemic that is shifting the way we experience public life. Almost nothing about our life 10 years ago even exists now as we slide further and further into a digital reality, and we ponder what comes with this evolution as we try and make sense of, and experience, truth and reality.

Within our new technological and digital lives is a lot of misunderstanding. How does big tech mine our personal information, what is a deep fake, what are my rights and what are the laws that protect me. One of the artists who is challenging this lack of understanding is British artist, Bill Posters, an activist who spent years on the streets with his "Subvertising" interventions and now famous the world over for Spectre and his series of Deep Fakes that portrayed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and others as true-tellers of the 21st Century. As most certainly... they are not.  "My work is about raising awareness of human rights and critically interrogating power relations between corporations, governments, people and the artist," Posters told us earlier this year in our Summer 2020 Quarterly. "With deep fakes, you are operating ethically in a difficult space. There are insufficient laws in place to appropriately protect people’s personal data."

In this wide-ranging and engaging conversation, Radio Juxtapoz spoke with Posters to learn how graffiti informed his subversive works on the street in the form of Subvertising and Brandalism, how he began to critique and utilize tech in his practice and the ways that activism can create empowerment in the face of Big Tech. "I also think that deep fakes are the perfect art form for our absurdist reality," Posters says... and he couldn't be any more correct.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 048 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Manchester, July 2, 2020. Follow Bill Posters @bill_posters_uk

"It’s important to talk about why I make the paintings I do, and why there is a focus on ensuring that within each painting, the black figure is central," Queens-based painter Marcus Brutus told the Juxtapoz team back in the Spring 2020 Quarterly issue. "However, I don’t want to focus too much on specific histories or specific events because I think it then takes precedence in the conversation around the work. To me, these are really just images of humanity. The only politics about them is the fact that I’ve uniquely used black figures. But they’re just scenes of everyday life, everyday situations."

When we initially became aware of the works of Marcus Brutus, through gallery shows with Harper's Books and their subsequent book/catalog of Brutus' works, The Uhmericans, there was something so quietly elegant and yet so perfectly connected with the issues of social and political turmoil in the United States that we wanted to investigate further. What we found was a self-taught artist who returned home to Maryland after a stint in marketing in NYC and found himself compelled to create figurative paintings that told the story of everyday existence as a person of color in America. Immediately, the subtle storytelling of the paintings caught the attention of the fine art world, and Brutus began to showcase these unique works to a broader audience. In the vein of Jacob Lawrence and a more literal interpretation of Robert Frank's The Americans, Brutus entered a long standing tradition of portraiture, with elements of social realism, in American art.

On this episode of the Radio Juxtapoz podcast, Juxtapoz editor Evan Pricco speaks with Brutus about the origins of his painting career, these subtle political qualities in his work and how the recent protests around America will affect his paintings. Also, co-hosts Doug Gillen and Pricco speak at length about how the art world has responded to the George Floyd murder.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco.  Episode 047 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/NYC, June 11, 2020. Follow Marcus Brutus at @marcusjbrutus

If there was ever a Juxtapoz Hall of Fame, James Jean would be a first ballot inductee. Everything this magazine has stood for, whether it be reinventing the comic book form, learning the expertise of illustration, commercial design and projects to channeling all those skills and benchmarks into a fine art career, James Jean has carried the torch like few other artists of his time. He's massively popular, with museum shows now opening across Asia, famous clients and a one-of-a-kind ability to paint entire worlds onto a single canvas. His imagination and way of internalizing stories and narratives into lush, bright and bold paintings continues to marvel.

Yes, there are a ton of extraordinary compliments we could give the 3x cover artist.  The Taiwanese-born, New Jersey-raised and now Los Angeles-based painter has a career arch that is so fascinating to listen to. From award-winning comic book artist, to a career altering collaboration with Prada to his latest Eternal Journey exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea that opened in 2019, Jean has rewritten his own artistic path in multiple ways since he left the comic world 2006. And he still finds time to throw in a movie poster every now and again.

Radio Juxtapoz caught up with James Jean in the midst of a pandemic and slight change in his schedule. Eternal Journey's opening in Beijing was pushed back, a new book slated for the summer delayed as well. But he himself was still busy in the studio, fresh with new commissions and what he calls a good pause for his to focus on the new works. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his first forays into comic book covers, the bold move to leave it behind, advice from Takashi Murakami, how he always considered himself a painter and how his practice is a process of internalizing everything he sees (and hears) around him.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco.  Episode 046 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Los Angeles, May 22, 2020. Follow James Jean at @jamesjeanart

Blame (or credit) Covid-19, but it’s as if, more than ever, we are attracted, and thus connected, by a good story. Many of us have spent the last 10 or so weeks attached to the news, or reports from far away places told through IG stories, and even though we may feel cloistered in place, if we seek them, there are connections to be made. In a vast terrain that comprises the 3,000 miles traversing America,  there seems to be worlds within a world, countries within a country, all with experiencing ranges of interaction or isolation ... and everything in between. For one physician living in the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona, life has been an ongoing epic, but in a time of confusion and uncertainty, his life's work appears more in focus.

This week on the Radio Juxtapoz podcast, we speak with Chip Thomas, doctor, activist, street artist, organizer and in so many ways a collective storyteller, who has spent the last 30+ years living and working in the Navajo Nation. From his early childhood years in North Carolina, attending a Quaker school in the Smoky Mountains, to medical school and eventual travels around the globe, Thomas's lifelong interest and participation in the arts has gone hand-in-hand with his work as a doctor. His practice now focuses on physical health, as he incorporates psychological health, utilizing public art as a prescription for positive mental outlook and participation with the community.

Through a career-spanning conversation, we talk about Thomas's early love of the graffiti and hip-hop scenes of NYC, a chance bike ride through Africa that inspired annual travel, discovering the potential of street art in South America and how collaborations with Icy & Sot, Monica Canilao and others have brought international art to the Four Corners region of the USA. We talk about how the coronavirus has ravaged the Navajo people and how his practice has expanded beyond his office walls. Throughout this podcast, Thomas's stories reaffirm our belief that, deep down, the implementation of the arts into daily lives creates an essential, healthy dialogue. And, simply, it creates a crucial connection to the place we live.

For more information about some of the organizations that Chip mentions in this podcast, visit www.kinlanimutualaid.org and navajohopisolidarity.org

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco.  Episode 045 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Navajo Nation, May 9, 2020. Follow Chip Thomas at @jetsonorama

There is a controversy that will surround works based on violence and war. For Cleon Peterson, the story of his works are as old as time. The powerful abuse power create false narratives and press us  a sense of authority that is often violent and sometimes subconscious. Cleon's work balances that explicitness with a sense of timelessness and historical overview. We don't know what eras these atrocities, but they still feel familiar.

But with his 2018 solo show, Blood & Soil,  there was marked change in Cleon's approach: he began to find a literalness that was not in his previous paintings. Channeling the likes of Goya, Washington monuments and Donald Trump emerged. Where Cleon felt like his paintings worked best in metaphor, there was no longer a vagueness to be had. There was something real in front of him, a theater of war happening in America and the world that changed Cleon's work.

And yet throughout our Radio Juxtapoz conversation with the Seattle-born, Los Angeles-based painter, there was a personal uncertainty to create work that was without allegory. We talked at length about this shift, about how the epidemic has brought him back to the studio alone to begin to focus on new directions. We talked about his childhood connection to the amazing painter, Jacob Lawrence, and how Lawrence's narrative works inspired a young Cleon. And we address Cleon's relationship to street art, and how a controversy with a  fellow artist in late 2019 has not been discussed until now. It's a lively and insightful conversation, one with one of contemporary art's most-talked about artists.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco.  Episode 044 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Los Angeles, April 28, 2020. Follow Cleon Peterson at @cleonpeterson

We have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about humanity, and in many ways it's a conversation about our relationship to the natural world around us. Climate change and the ways we traverse and use our Earth has been the most important issue our lifetimes, a real-time global event that we see in melting ice caps, rising seas, massive fires, droughts and extreme weather hitting every region of our world. For that reason alone, talking to an artist like NY-based Zaria Forman, whose life work is to "convey the urgency of climate change" and "recreate the wonder of the natural world" is vital. She has been on personal and scientific journeys to Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and the Maldives to observe and create artwork, and has worked closely with the likes of National Geographic and NASA as an artist-in-residence to help create a visual language for climate change.

When COVID-19 took hold of the world, we wanted to talk to Forman about her lifelong relationship with painting natural landscapes. "Drawing" painstakingly with pastels over massive paper works, she focuses on the beauty as opposed to destruction, developing a relationship with the viewer that is about love and care of our resources. By appealing to our emotions through painting beautiful landscapes , Forman believes we can enact action of what is at stake for all of us.

And that is why we wanted to talk to Forman, on an April afternoon in the midst of shelter-in-place, as her own city of NY was so heavily impacted by the coronavirus. Her perspective and access to the far reaches of Earth are both wise and her temperament is positive. We talked about her career as an artist, how her mother's dedication as a nature photographer continues to drive Forman today and how her interactions with scientists and experts in the field has come to shape her understanding of climate change. Her works are stunning reminders of what we could lose in this fight, and yet she finds so much to be proud of from the even slight changes humanity as made in recent years.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco.  Episode 043 was recorded via Zoom from San Francisco/London/NY states, April 16, 2020. Follow Zaria Forman at @zarialynn