Artist David Lloyd joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on a career that spans CalArts in the early 1980s, formative years at Margot Levin Gallery, and decades of navigating the shifting landscape of the Los Angeles art world. Known for his commitment to formalist abstraction, Lloyd discusses what it means to sustain a painting practice over forty years while adapting to the changing priorities of galleries, art fairs, and collectors.

The conversation delves into his most recent body of work, where Lloyd integrates his own archive of paintings, drawings, and ceramics into AI image generation. By transforming these digital hallucinations into trompe l’oeil abstractions through resin, collage, and material experimentation, he considers how technology can challenge conventional definitions of painting while remaining rooted in physical process.

Other topics include the legacy of CalArts conceptualism, the burdens of postmodern theory and art education, the precarity of mid-level galleries, and the paradox of elitism within the contemporary art market. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the importance of generosity, resilience, and longevity in sustaining a life in art.

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Artist Kristen Huizar joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on drawing, printmaking, and the act of documenting Los Angeles. Born and raised in Commerce, CA, she traces her path from community college to Cal State Long Beach, where persistence and community shaped her practice.

Working with wax pastels on plastic vinyl, hand stitching, and large lino cuts, Huizar explores repetition, process, and the archival impulse. Her drawings function as reportage—capturing overlooked city views, everyday details, and the rapid changes of East L.A.

The conversation considers Chicana identity, community studios, and the politics of representation, offering insight into how artists both preserve and reimagine the city.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Emma Christ, editor at Artillery magazine and gallerist working between Portland and Los Angeles. Christ reflects on her beginnings in photography, formative years at Bard and Reed, and her transition from artistic practice into gallery management, editing, and writing.

The conversation traces her early influences—from Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston to mentorship under No Wave photographer Barbara Ess—before moving into immersive installation work and a graduate thesis on trans-corporeality and the porous body. Christ discusses her experiences in institutions such as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, her role in supporting artists within commercial gallery structures, and the gendered dynamics that continue to shape the field.

Throughout the episode, Christ shares candid insights into navigating the hierarchies of the art world, balancing writing and curating, and the importance of advocating for emerging voices across both editorial and exhibition platforms.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles printmaker Israel Campos shares how his work bridges Mesoamerican codices, Mexican revolutionary art, and the mural traditions of his South Central upbringing. Known for his meticulous intaglio prints, Campos reclaims visual histories disrupted by colonization—collapsing linear perspective, weaving ancient mythologies, and drawing on the political legacies of artists like José Clemente Orozco.

From growing up in a garment factory household to exhibiting at Charlie James Gallery, Campos has shaped a practice that circulates both within galleries and directly to his community, merging economic sustainability with political intent.

🎧 Listen now to hear how Campos’ art collapses past and present into a single visual language of resistance.

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In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles–based artist Jackie Castillo, whose practice transforms the overlooked landscapes of Southern California into sculptural, spatial interventions that challenge how we see, inhabit, and remember place.

Born and raised in working-class neighborhoods of Orange County, Castillo’s perspective is deeply rooted in the lived realities of the region—its immigrant histories, economic divides, and the architectural patchwork that defines its suburbs. Trained as a film-based photographer, she has evolved her practice to merge photography, sculpture, and installation, creating works that slow the act of looking and demand sustained engagement. Her use of reclaimed materials and references to site-specific histories reframes the photographic image as an object in dialogue with its environment.

Castillo traces her influences to classic cinema, the New Topographics photographers, and the conceptual rigor she developed in community college and at UCLA. Through these intersecting frameworks, she examines the formal language of geometry, light, and tonality while embedding questions of class, labor, and urban change. From photographing the quiet interventions of working-class residents in limited outdoor spaces, to producing large-scale installations that reference architecture, demolition, and construction, Castillo captures the poetics of transition—whether in a falling roof shingle or the shifting demographics of a neighborhood.

The conversation traverses the sensory memory of California light, the politics of housing and displacement, and the role of critique in art education. Castillo speaks candidly about her commitment to making the work she wants without bending to external pressures, and the importance of artist-to-artist support networks in sustaining a creative practice.

Her current exhibition, The Return, is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through August 31, with additional work featured in the group show Back to the Earth at Roberts Projects.

Discover how Jackie Castillo transforms the overlooked corners of Southern California into a visual language of place, memory, and resistance.

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This week on What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by Ann Shi, a nomadic curator and founder of a poco art collective, whose deeply intuitive curatorial practice bridges Chinese literati aesthetics, feminist mysticism, and contemporary Asian diasporic identity. With roots in China, academic training in Oxford and at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and early career experience on Wall Street, Ann’s nonlinear path defies institutional expectations, illuminating how curating can become both an embodied ritual and an act of cultural translation.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Ann reflects on growing up as the daughter of a classical inkwash painter and an opera singer, both devoted Buddhist practitioners who observed the Five Precepts, embodying compassion and discipline in daily life—a grounding that continues to shape how calligraphy, voice, and ritual manifest in her exhibitions. Drawing on her time as Associate Curator at Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies, she reflects on how oral histories and immigrant archives shaped her curatorial voice and informed her efforts to platform Asian art beyond the Western gaze.

Together, Ann and Javier unpack the tension between authenticity and market sustainability, the legacy of the literati tradition in Chinese art, and the complicated dynamics of Asian representation within museum and gallery systems. They also explore Ann’s use of feng shui, the five elements, and feminine archetypes—like the goddess Nüwa—as curatorial frameworks that honor the unseen and elevate spiritual intuition over spectacle.

The episode closes with a discussion of “Nüwa’s Garden: A Summer Offering in Clay, Fire, and Water,” Ann’s recent show at Charles Arnoldi Studio in Venice Beach, and its irreverent, ritual-infused closing celebration featuring live performances and feminist mythologies.

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In this resonant episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist and educator Kim Garcia joins host Javier Proenza for a layered conversation about memory, community, and the personal and political frameworks that shape diasporic identity. Garcia, whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, and community-based collaboration, reflects on her evolving relationship to artmaking—from early experiments in artist-run residencies to recent work that channels intergenerational trauma, familial mythology, and the slow grief of dementia.

Raised in San Diego and based in Los Angeles, Garcia traces her trajectory through California’s UC system, from UCSD to a transformative MFA at UC Irvine. Her sculptural installations—once flamboyant and cartoonish in scale—have given way to more introspective, materially restrained works, driven by the shifting health of her aging parents. A recent series based on her mother’s ever-changing retellings of ancestral folklore evolves into a meditation on storytelling as a haze: unstable, affective, and resistant to conquest. In new work, she confronts her father's long-term cognitive decline following a near-death experience, positioning art as a form of both documentation and private processing.

The conversation moves fluidly through Garcia’s participation in Gallery After Hours (a collaborative curatorial experiment with Amy MacKay), reflections on her return to the Philippines after 24 years, and the psychic legacies of Spanish and American imperialism embedded in Filipino identity. Garcia speaks candidly about her family’s pursuit of Spanish ancestry as a means of aspirational assimilation and the radical shift in consciousness that comes from recontextualizing that lineage within histories of violence and extraction.

With poetic clarity and humility, Garcia frames her work as a refusal of mastery—an intuitive archive that honors contradiction, transformation, and the limits of language. This is an episode about the power of not knowing, and about what it means to hold grief, resistance, and joy in the same gesture.

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In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by artist Lauren Goldenberg Longoria for a conversation that traverses personal memory, studio practice, and the tender labor of transformation. Known for her materially rich works that fuse paper, performance, and poetic intuition, Goldenberg Longoria speaks candidly about the healing logic of her process—and the quiet revolutions that can occur through repetition, care, and tactility.

Trained in traditional printmaking and now immersed in the world of handmade paper, Goldenberg Longoria discusses how she builds meaning through destruction—tearing and pulping paper from past works, using the remnants to seed new ones. Her practice becomes a kind of emotional composting: nothing is discarded, everything is metabolized. Whether she’s embedding hair into a fresh sheet of paper or excavating the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, her work investigates how memory and material collapse into one another.

Throughout the episode, Goldenberg Longoria shares stories of childhood, loss, and creative perseverance, always returning to the primacy of the hand. From squishing “gross things” as a kid to the meditative choreography of the studio, she makes a compelling case for process as a form of knowing—and for art as a space where grief can be held, rather than solved.

This episode offers a rare look at how artists turn vulnerability into methodology, and how even the most fragile materials can carry a resilient kind of weight.

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In this candid and moving conversation, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles-based artist Dena Novak, whose sculptural paintings and ceramics challenge the rigid codes of minimalism through what she calls “aggressive feminism.” Drawing from a rich personal archive of experience—one shaped by Orthodox Judaism, motherhood, neurodivergence, and trauma—Novak’s work reimagines historically male-dominated art historical tropes with unapologetic sensuality and material intensity.

A recent recipient of the Simon Gad Foundation Award and an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, Novak shares how a life-altering diagnosis of autism at age 50 reshaped her understanding of herself, her past, and her artistic practice. Her tactile impasto paintings, often described as “candy-colored” and “irresistibly edible,” subvert the pristine aesthetic of artists like John McCracken, replacing “fetish finish” with riotous layers of piped oil paint. As she explains, “The first response people say when they see my work is, ‘I want to touch it. I want to smell it. I want to eat it.’”

The conversation traces Novak’s evolution from a punk activist in Chicago to a ceramicist “boxing with Pollock,” and unpacks her years spent in Orthodox communities in Israel and Los Angeles, where gendered restrictions collided with a creative urgency that could not be contained. Today, her practice is a full-throated reclamation of space—for herself, for disabled artists, and for queer, neurodivergent joy.

Upcoming exhibitions include her MFA thesis show at Otis College (September 2025) and a group exhibition will support the Simon Gad Foundation’s work with disabled artists.

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Diana Taylor: A practice where research and materiality meet.

In this illuminating live conversation recorded at DON’T LOOK Projects, UK-based artist Diana Taylor joins host Javier Proenza (What’s My Thesis?) for a deeply textured discussion around her first solo show in the United States, Flotsam and Jetsam. Organized by DON’T LOOK Projects in association with SLQS Gallery in London, the exhibition draws on Taylor’s research-intensive practice, exploring time through the fusion of research and materiality. Her work employs a remix logic, echoing Sigmar Polke's 1980s period.

Currently in a short-term fellowship at The Huntington, Taylor speaks about her practice-based research. Her PhD was in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, where she focused on how historical craft, screen-printing, and reproducibility inform her contemporary approach to painting. With roots in both rural Wiltshire and Cyprus, Taylor's early exposure to English landscape painting, tapestry, and devotional patternwork creates a foundation for her ongoing material inquiries into time, collapse, and visual culture.

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Also discussed is Taylor’s current work at The Huntington, where she’s engaging with historical plant taxonomies, rare botanical prints, and Morris’s medieval utopian socialism to produce a new body of work and a forthcoming article in The Journal of William Morris Studies.

Flotsam and Jetsam is on view at DON’T LOOK Projects through August 30, 2025. Please email [email protected] to schedule a private viewing.

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🎧 Listen now and step into the layered, fragmented, hyper-contemporary world of Diana Taylor.

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