Art Restart

Rebuilding Ballet on New Terms: Choreographer Ja’ Malik

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Ja’ Malik is just wrapping up his fourth year as the artistic director of Madison Ballet in Madison, WI, but his path to leadership has been shaped by decades inside the field. A former professional dancer with a 25-year performing career, Malik danced with companies including Cleveland Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre, BalletX and Ballet Hispánico, performing a wide range of classical, neoclassical and contemporary repertory. Trained at the Joffrey Ballet School and holding a BFA from The New School, his artistic voice draws equally on rigorous classical technique and socially engaged contemporary practice. He also continues to serve as the artistic director of Ballet Boy Productions, an organization he founded in 2007 that provides young men of color access to classical and contemporary ballet performing opportunities and that also offers training and mentoring.

Since arriving in Madison, Ja’ has led a period of significant artistic and organizational change, and the results are more than encouraging. At a moment when many ballet companies nationwide are grappling with shrinking audiences, Madison Ballet is growing its own, responding to programming that places contemporary work alongside the classics and reflects the community it serves. Six months into his tenure, Malik also stepped into the additional role of interim executive director, guiding the organization through a demanding transition with a small staff and limited resources.

In this interview, Ja’ reflects on the risks involved in reshaping a regional ballet company, from extending dancer contracts to rethinking programming and institutional structure. He also speaks candidly about leadership during the in-between phase of change and the emotional, physical and ethical demands placed on artists and arts leaders alike.

https://www.madisonballet.org/about/staff/ja-malik

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Indigenous Americas, Indigenous Lens: Photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:30:00 +0000

For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book by photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke, directly challenges that legacy, not by rejecting photography’s past but by radically re-centering who controls the archive, who tells the story and who the work is for.

Adams, an Iñupiaq photographer based in Anchorage, and Stacke, a Brooklyn-based photographer, writer and archival researcher, approach photography less as image-making than as long-term relationship-building and storytelling. Their collaboration grew out of “The 400 Years Project,” an expansive initiative marking the anniversary of the Mayflower by foregrounding Indigenous photographers across generations, geographies and the full range of photographic practice — from 19th-century studio portraits to contemporary conceptual work.

In this interview, Adams and Stacke discuss the ethical and logistical choices behind “In Light and Shadow,” the politics of archives and representation and what it means to be storytellers accountable to the people whose lives and histories they photograph.

https://brianadams.photoshelter.com/index

https://sarahstacke.com/

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Free Art, Real Value: The Zero Art Fair Story

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:30:00 +0000

For more than a decade, conceptual artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have collaborated on sharp, often darkly funny critiques of the art world’s economic and political machinery. One of their earliest projects together, a satirical telethon staged during the Great Recession, planted a seed they later returned to: What would happen if you ran an art fair where every work of art was free? That question eventually evolved into Zero Art Fair, a real, fully functioning event that uses a radically different contract to redistribute both artworks and power within the art market.

Zero Art Fair invites participating artists to place selected works into a five-year “store-to-own” agreement with collectors who take the work home at no cost. During those five years, ownership vests gradually; if a collector later decides to sell the work, the artist receives half of the sale price as well as a 10 percent resale royalty. The result is a system that clears storage, builds new relationships across class lines, and asserts one of the Fair’s core beliefs, namely that price does not equal value. So far, Dalton and Powhida have staged two editions — the first in a barn in the Hudson Valley as part of Upstate Art Weekend, the second this fall at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan — together seeding more than 400 works of contemporary art into new homes.

In this interview, Dalton and Powhida explain how the Fair’s unconventional contract works, why prioritizing access for people who “need help to live with art” reshaped their second New York edition, and what kinds of unexpected relationships and ripple effects have emerged along the way.

https://www.zeroartfair.com/

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Ariel Fristoe’s Community Theater Actually Changes Communities

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:30:00 +0000

For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater, she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and neighborhood groups to spark dialogue and move people toward collective action.

Out of Hand’s work is now studied and replicated across the country, in part because it offers an alternative path at a moment when many arts organizations are searching for new models. Instead of focusing on season planning or ticket sales, Ariel and her team design programs that integrate theater with data, storytelling with civic participation and performance with tangible next steps for audiences who want to make change in their communities.

In this interview, Ariel reflects on how this approach emerged, how her own leadership evolved alongside it, and why she believes artists are uniquely equipped to work on the most urgent social issues of our time. She also gives a glimpse into Out of Hand’s next chapter — including a major 2026 national initiative — and shares what she’s learned about building trust, building partnerships and sustaining purpose-driven work over the long haul.

https://www.outofhandtheater.com/

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Byron Au Yong Composes a New Kind of Leadership

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:30:00 +0000

For more than two decades, composer and educator Byron Au Yong has created music that bridges performance, ritual and activism. His highly collaborative works have been presented by such varied institutions as the Seattle Symphony, BAM, the Smithsonian, the American Conservatory Theater and Nashville Opera. Among his many large-scale projects is his long partnership with writer and rapper Aaron Jafferis, with whom he created the “liberation trilogy”: “Stuck Elevator,” “The Ones” and “Activist Songbook.”

Byron is also Associate Professor and Director of Arts Leadership at Seattle University, where he’s reimagining arts education as a space of equity, imagination and community. His teaching encourages artists to consider leading beyond or outside institutions and to learn from one another as collaborators in liberation. His many honors include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Building Demand for the Arts Grant and a Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship.

In this interview, Byron reflects on how his art and teaching are both rooted in listening, whether it’s listening through the feet to the language of trees to compose his newest work or listening deeply to students and collaborators to imagine new, more equitable forms of leadership.

https://byronauyong.com/

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Damian Stamer Paints with Intelligence, Artificial and Human.

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society.

Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process.

In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines.

https://damianstamer.com/home.html

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Inside and Outside the Box with Sherrill Roland

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:30:00 +0000

When artist Sherrill Roland returned to grad school at University of North Carolina at Greensboro after nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he found himself haunted by the invisible weight of his experience. Determined to confront how incarceration had reshaped his body, psyche and place in the world, he — with the encouragement of then-faculty member, artist Sheryl Oring — turned that burden into "The Jumpsuit Project," a performance in which he wore an orange prison uniform on campus every day for a year. The project soon expanded beyond the university to public spaces across the country, where Roland sat inside a 7-by-9-foot square of orange tape, an echo of a prison cell, and invited passersby to step inside and talk with him, transforming uncomfortable encounters into moments of shared reflection and empathy.

In the years since, Roland has become one of the most prominent conceptual artists in the South, translating that raw act of endurance into a studio practice that explores the architecture of confinement, the language of data and the humanity hidden within systems of control. His work, which is now in the collections of major museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the North Carolina Museum of Art, asks how objects and numbers can embody both memory and freedom.

In this interview, Roland speaks about the fear and necessity of donning the orange jumpsuit, the emotional toll of transforming personal pain into public conversation, and how his practice continues to evolve toward accessibility, dialogue and compassion.

https://www.sherrillroland.com/

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Valuing the Invisible: Esther Hernandez on Artists’ Labor

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:30:00 +0000

In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work, to give back, to support the community, to hold the weight of healing or justice when most of us aren’t even resourced to pay our bills, let alone afford health care or rest.” She also lamented that nonprofits were, in a time of admittedly frightening fiscal precarity, leaning on underfunded artists for financial support.

Esther clearly hit a nerve with artists everywhere, and her rants amassed thousands of views and messages of commiseration and support. She can also rant with some authority because not only is she an artist, but she has also worked in the arts nonprofits sector. A self-taught maker of stop-motion animation and movable or mechanized sculptures and zoetropes, she is currently Chief Curator at Union Hall, a six-year-old nonprofit in Denver, CO that provides support and professional development to emerging artists as well as curators.

In this interview, Esther reflects on the inequities that drove her to speak out and on how her posts sparked broader conversations about the invisible labor of artists. She also shares how her dual perspective as both artist and curator informs her ideas for more sustainable funding models and healthier creative practices.

https://www.instagram.com/esther.hz/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxcWHfyhpb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxdIksyoRh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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Indigenous Ingenuity in Architecture: Wanda Dalla Costa

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Wanda Dalla Costa, a proud member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, has built a groundbreaking career by weaving Indigenous knowledge systems into contemporary design. As the first First Nations woman to become a licensed architect in Canada, she is Principal and Founder of Tawaw Architecture Collective, which has offices in Calgary and Phoenix. Through her leadership, Tawaw has shaped cultural, civic and educational projects across North America, from Calgary’s Arts Commons Transformation to Toronto’s David Crombie Park Revitalization.

Her work is defined by deep engagement with communities. Over the past two decades, she and her team have conducted hundreds of sessions in dozens of communities, ensuring that every project reflects the lived experiences, cultural practices, and aspirations of the people it serves. At Arizona State University, where she is a professor and directs the Indigenous Design Collaborative, she mentors emerging Indigenous architects and demonstrates how architecture can carry forward cultural continuity while also addressing the urgent realities of climate change.

In this interview, Dalla Costa discusses how she is redefining what it means to design “in a good way,” what she has learned from decades of listening to elders, youth and knowledge-keepers and how Indigenous ingenuity offers crucial lessons for building in a rapidly changing climate. She also shares how her firm reimagines the business of architecture itself through an Indigenous ethos.

https://www.tawarc.com/about

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Dancing in All Senses: Davian Robinson

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Davian Robinson’s artistic journey has never followed a straight line. As a student at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC, he discovered ballet and tap, launching a lifelong relationship with dance even as his vision continued to fade. At the same time, he was excelling in competitive athletics, eventually earning medals on the national stage as a para-cyclist. Years later, he returned to dance at UNC Charlotte, where he recommitted to the artform that had first taught him how to express his strength and resilience through movement.

Since then, Robinson has emerged as both a powerful performer and an advocate for more inclusive ways of teaching and experiencing dance. His “Sensory Beyond Sight” workshop encourages participants — whether artists, athletes or professionals far outside the arts — to move beyond vision and tap into the body’s other senses. He also continues to expand his creative reach through collaboration, most recently with celebrated multimedia artist Janet Biggs in “Misregistration,” on view through September 22, 2025, at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte.

In this interview, Davian reflects on how he developed his methodology as a dance student, the breakthroughs that shaped his teaching and choreography philosophy and how the world of dance can make itself more welcoming to visually impaired dancers and audiences alike.

https://www.empower23.net/about

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Wellspring of Change: Shanai Matteson on Art and Place

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Few artists have woven their creative practice so seamlessly into the fabric of their home place as Shanai Matteson. A visual artist, writer, community-based researcher and environmental-justice organizer, Shanai works in northern Minnesota’s rural Aitken County, where she was born and raised. Her projects — whether they take the form of printmaking, collaborative public art, documentary storytelling or social gathering spaces — are grounded in reciprocity, ecological care and the conviction that creativity can help repair the frayed relationships between people, land and water.

Over the past two decades, Shanai has co-founded and led some of the region’s most inventive and socially engaged cultural initiatives. Her celebrated Water Bar & Public Studio has invited thousands in her community and around the state to “belly up” for a free tasting flight of water while discussing water equity and environmental health with scientists, activists and even policymakers. Her mobile mine-view platform, Overburden/Overlook, offers overlooked histories and community perspectives on the extractive industries that have shaped the Iron Range. And her newest collaboration, Fire in the Village — co-led with Anishinaabe artist Annie Humphrey — bridges Native and non-Native communities through art, music and the radical act of gathering around metaphorical and literal shared fires.

In this interview, Shanai reflects on what it means to create art that belongs to a place and its people, how frontline activism reshaped her approach to community organizing and why persistence matters more than perfection. She also shares lessons from years of linking art, science and public policy and explains why, in her corner of rural Minnesota, tending to one another may be our surest path to a more just and sustainable future.

https://shanai.work/

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The Art of Virtual Interventions: Angela Washko

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated?

With a practice that spans performance, social engagement, video games and film, Angela has spent more than a decade doing just that. Her work doesn’t just critique digital culture from the outside; it embeds itself within it, creating space for dialogue in places not usually known for nuance. Whether she’s convening feminist councils in the fantasy worlds of online gaming or crafting interactive experiences from the textures of real life, her projects ask how we behave when no one — or everyone — is watching.

In 2012 she launched The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an in-game social practice project that sparked multi-hour dialogues between initially hostile players. Later she created The Game: The Game, an RPG in which a player could try to negotiate a bar packed full of male pickup artists following the same seduction playbook. And just last year, fascinated by the allure and promises of reality television, she directed her first documentary, “Workhorse Queen,” about a few members of the tightknit drag community in Rochester, NY and their complicated relationship with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the commerce of 21st century drag celebrity.

In this interview, Angela, now a full professor and the MFA Program Director at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, reflects on how she found her voice as an artist inside a male-dominated gaming culture, why she continues to work in and not against the media she critiques and how becoming a mother during a global crisis reshaped her ideas of creativity, care and time.

https://angelawashko.com/home.html

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Immersive Theater Wins 21st-Century Fans: Artistic Director Graham Wetterhahn

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:30:00 +0000

At a time when theaters everywhere are competing with an ever-expanding array of at-home entertainment and struggling to fill seats, some artists are asking not what plays to produce but how to produce them differently. Graham Wetterhahn’s answer was to found his own company, After Hours Theatre Company in Los Angeles. With a background that spans traditional theater, theme parks and digital media, he has spent recent years creating “immersive-enhanced” productions that invite audiences not just to watch a story unfold but to step directly into it.

In After Hours’ 2018 production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for instance, audience members were admitted to a fictional 1960s psychiatric hospital and cast as patients, free to explore hidden rooms and interact with characters for a full hour before the scripted performance even began. The production cleverly merged immersive design with a fully staged, licensed play, creating an experience that theatergoers of all stripes — and with varying levels of comfort with the notion of participation — could embrace. And it worked, selling out night after night and drawing in an audience that was overwhelmingly under 40.

After Hours has gone on not only to produce a broad array of successful immersive-enhanced productions but also to organize the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational, a collegial competition that brings together the city’s most adventurous immersive storytellers under one roof and gives them 48 hours to create a new 10-minute piece based on a single prompt. The L.A. Invitational just completed its fifth iteration, and After Hours is now producing Invitationals in other American cities.

In this episode, Graham shares why he believes After Hours’ hybrid experiences may hold the key to live theater’s future, how the company has built a sustainable — if still scrappy — for-profit model, and what his journey has taught him about turning casual eventgoers into passionate theater fans.

https://www.grahamwetterhahn.com/

https://www.afterhourstheatre.com/

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Conductor Jessica Bejarano Wields a Bold Baton

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:30:00 +0000

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of the 25 largest American orchestras has a female music director — but she is also Latina and lesbian. When Jessica Bejarano steps onto the podium, therefore, she doesn’t just conduct; sporting visible tattoos — her favorite conductor Tchaikovsky is prominently featured on her right forearm — and projecting a down-to-earth warmth and grit she learned from her immigrant mother in working class East L.A., she redefines what leadership can look like in the orchestral world.

By 2019, Jessica was already building a solid resume, leading community orchestras in the Bay Area as well as accepting freelance directing gigs around the world. Continually faced with the glacial pace of change in the classical music world, however, she took a leap of faith and founded her own ensemble, the San Francisco Philharmonic. The SF Phil’s mission is to center diversity, equity and inclusion not just as a tagline but as a lived experience for musicians and audiences alike. In the last six years, under her leadership, the SF Phil has collaborated with everyone from Grammy-winning composers to local rap icons, while also offering masterclasses for emerging conductors and commissioning new works by underrepresented composers.

In this interview, Jessica shares the winding, impassioned path that led her from East L.A. trumpet player to visionary conductor and founder. She discusses how she built the SF Phil from scratch — including funding its first concert out of her own savings — and how she continues to push the boundaries of what a 21st century orchestra can be.

https://www.sfphil.org/about

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Choreographing First-Gen Stories: Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, inspired by early seasons of “So You Think You Can Dance,” taught himself pirouettes in secret in his parents’ garage. Both men eventually studied dance at UC Riverside (UCR), where they also first came out to their families, not only as queer but also as dancers. UCR is also where the two met and fell in love.

It was during graduate school that Alfonso and Irvin, along with fellow dancers Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier and Patty Huerta, realized the creative power of coming together. Each brought a unique movement background and a shared desire to explore and celebrate their Mexican American identities on the concert stage. The resulting collective, Primera Generación, now almost ten years strong, continues to challenge conventional notions of contemporary dance with work that is joyous, confrontational and often intentionally messy. That messiness is key. The collective embraces the concept of “desmadre,” a Spanish term that can refer to disorder, exuberance or both, as both a choreographic strategy and a call to reflection and social change.

In this interview, Alfonso and Irvin, now professors at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, discuss the origins of Primera Generación Dance Collective, how they’ve navigated nearly a decade of creative collaboration and why their messiest pieces are often their most meaningful. They also reflect on what it means to be first-generation artists in the Midwest today and how they hope the next generation of dancers can shape the collective’s future.

https://www.instagram.com/primerageneraciondance/

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Choreographing First-Gen Stories: Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 11:30:00 +0000

https://www.instagram.com/primerageneraciondance/

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Trust, Joy and the Cello: Joshua Roman on Music and Healing

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Even before his diagnosis of long COVID in 2020, cellist Joshua Roman had carved a unique niche in the classical music world. A former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony turned soloist and curator, Joshua built a career that combined artistic excellence with a passionate commitment to making music relevant and accessible. Whether premiering bold new works or improvising in unexpected settings, he was—and remains—a restless innovator with an unshakable belief in music’s power to heal, connect, and transform.

Long COVID has altered nearly every aspect of Joshua’s life, from his physical stamina to how he plans his days to the way he relates to his instrument. Yet instead of sidelining him, the illness has led Joshua to reevaluate the very foundations of his artistry. The result is a new clarity and focus—not only about which projects deserve his limited energy but also what kind of artistic legacy he wants to build. His latest initiative, “The Immunity Project,” exemplifies this shift: a collection of performances and reflections that foreground music’s emotional and restorative capacity, drawn directly from his personal experience of illness and recovery. The project now also includes a recently released album titled “Immunity.”

In this interview, Joshua opens up about the physical and existential recalibrations he’s made in order to keep performing, why he now only practices when he truly wants to and how chronic illness has deepened his artistic mission. He also shares his hopes for a classical-music ecosystem that makes space for artists to be fully, honestly human — onstage and off.

https://www.joshuaroman.com/

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Filmmaker Cyrus Moussavi Finds Stories Where the Music Lives

Wed, 21 May 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Cyrus Moussavi has carved out a career that is as improbable as it is original. Raised in Iowa in a bicultural Iranian American household, Cyrus grew up spending summers in Iran and the rest of the year steeped in his father’s love of prog rock and his mother’s passion for traditional Iranian music. That early immersion in disparate sound worlds laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with music—not as a performer, but as a listener, connector, and storyteller. After studying economics and philosophy in college, Cyrus gravitated toward filmmaking, not to make conventional movies but to explore how visual storytelling could capture, preserve and transmit music and the lives of those who make it.

As a filmmaker, Cyrus has developed a body of work that’s both deeply collaborative and boldly inventive. His films include “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” a science-fiction documentary co-directed with the visionary artist and musician Lonnie Holley that screened at Sundance and BlackStar, among many other festivals and galleries, and the upcoming “Somebody’s Gone,” a feature-length film about gospel legend Brother Theotis Taylor that he is co-directing with Brother Theotis’ son, Hubert. And as a music archivist and promoter, since 2019 Cyrus has led the influential reissue label Mississippi Records, where he works closely with artists and their families to bring overlooked and under-celebrated music from around the world to new audiences.

In this interview, Cyrus discusses how his early experiences shaped his eclectic sensibility, what it means to ethically archive music across cultures and how he sees his work as both creative practice and cultural preservation.

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Curator Coka Treviño Talks Big Medium, Huge Loss

Wed, 07 May 2025 11:30:00 +0000

It’s no secret that arts non-profits across the country are struggling to survive, but few closures have hit their communities as hard as the recent shuttering of Big Medium in Austin, TX. For more than 20 years, Big Medium was one of the most influential visual-arts organizations in the city. It produced the beloved and sprawling Austin Studio Tour, presented exhibitions that championed historically marginalized artists and served as an essential convener for the city’s creative community. At the heart of its work for many years was curator and, more recently, artistic director Coka Treviño, whose passion for equity and for platforming emerging artists helped shape the organization’s inclusive mission.

In this conversation, Coka, who continues her own curatorial work via her company The Projecto, reflects on her tenure at Big Medium and the complex web of challenges that led to its sudden closure. From shifts in city grantmaking priorities to the skyrocketing cost of living that made staffing nearly impossible, the interview offers a candid window into just how difficult it has become for arts organizations—even in culturally rich, economically booming cities like Austin—to maintain operations.

https://www.theprojecto.org/

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Ryan J. Haddad Claims His Spotlight and Access for All

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright whose work across theater and television consistently challenges outdated narratives around disability, queerness and identity. He made a striking Off-Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories” at The Public Theater, which enjoyed a sold-out, extended run and earned him the Obie Award for Best New American Play. His autobiographical solo show “Hi, Are You Single?” has become a defining part of his artistic voice, touring nationally and earning critical acclaim. Ryan’s television credits include memorable appearances on Hulu’s “A Murder at the End of the World” and Netflix’s “The Politician.”

In addition to performing, Haddad is a dedicated writer and access advocate. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and Out Magazine, and he is a contributor to the anthology “Disability Intimacy,” curated by Alice Wong. His creative work and activism have earned him a Drama Desk Award, a Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre and a Disability Futures Fellowship. He is also a proud alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group.

In this interview, conducted just a few days before he premiered his latest solo piece, “Hold Me in the Water,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, Ryan reflects on the pivotal experiences that shaped his journey as an artist, from performing fairy tales in his childhood living room to commanding major stages and screens. He speaks candidly about navigating the entertainment industry as a gay man with cerebral palsy, building a career on his own terms and advocating for authentic representation and accessibility in the arts.

https://www.ryanjhaddad.com/

https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/about/production-history/2020s/2425-season/hold-me-in-the-water

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Filmmaker Carlos López Estrada Uplifts Indie Voices with Antigravity

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to direct his first full-length feature film, “Blindspotting.” That well-reviewed film landed him his first studio feature when Disney hired him to co-direct the animated film “Raya and the Last Dragon.”

He is nonetheless the first to point out that a number of elements, including a film-school education and supportive parents, made his path to success easier than what awaited most of his cohort of up-and-coming filmmakers. He therefore focused on a new kind of creative endeavor: Antigravity Academy.

Founded by Carlos in 2023, Antigravity is a hybrid business. It offers a range of educational initiatives designed to provide young, aspiring filmmakers — particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds — with the tools, mentorship and opportunities to develop their voices and tell their own stories. It also has a producing arm devoted to developing and bringing to life projects that would otherwise have difficulty finding funding. Antigravity’s first produced film, “Dìdi,” a glowingly reviewed coming-of-age story by Sean Wang, proved that Carlos’ mentoring and producing instincts are spot-on. “Dìdi” recently won two awards at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.

In this interview, Carlos describes how his experiences in Hollywood shaped Antigravity Academy’s mission and programs and explains why empowering new voices is not only helping to bring surprising stories to the screen but also making him a better artist.

https://antigravityacademy.co/

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Every Stitch an Immigrant Story: fiber artist Maria Amalia Wood

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Trained as a fiber and textile artist, Maria Amalia Wood has in recent years been working with paper, manipulating and dyeing wet wood pulp to build richly layered pieces. As important to Maria’s creativity as her raw materials, however, is the community of Latina immigrants like herself that she has fostered through a series of creative workshops in her hometown of Madison, WI. Her latest communal and artistic enterprise is Unidas por Hilos (United by Threads), a monthly gathering of diverse Latina immigrants who embroider their stories, often learning new stitches along the way, in fellowship with one another.

In this interview, Maria shares how her current work is a natural extension of the comfort and energy she found among skilled seamstresses in her native Honduras. She extols the power of embroidery as both a meditative practice and a form of storytelling and reminds us that no matter the activity, homemade food remains the one ingredient guaranteed to bring people together.

https://www.mariaamalia.com/

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Small School, Big Vision: JP Reuer’s New Educational Path for Artists

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:30:00 +0000

For the last two decades, architect and educator JP Reuer has been exploring how artists can become vital, integrated members of their communities rather than isolated figures working on the fringes of society. That ethos now fuels his most ambitious project to date: Small School, a Raleigh-based arts organization that reimagines advanced arts education as more accessible, collaborative and deeply embedded in local culture.

Through Small School, JP has rejected the traditional MFA model in favor of a nimbler, community-driven approach. The organization brings renowned visiting artists to the Triangle area to engage with local artists through workshops, public events and one-on-one studio visits, an exchange that empowers both emerging and established artists while fostering a richer creative ecosystem.

In this episode, JP traces his journey from academia to founding Small School, sharing what he’s learned about the evolving role of artists in society. He discusses the power of bringing artists out of ivory towers and into the heart of their communities and why rethinking arts education is essential to supporting a more inclusive and dynamic creative landscape.

https://smallschool.org/

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The Art of Land Back: James McAnally and Anita Fields on a historic rematriation to Osage Nation

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:30:00 +0000

In November of 2024, Counterpublic, a St. Louis-based arts and civics organization, and the Osage Nation made a historic announcement. After three years of negotiations, the entirety of historic Sugarloaf Mound, the oldest human-made structure within the City of St. Louis, was being rematriated to the Osage Nation, whose ancestors built this and other mounds in the region.

Counterpublic was not only a crucial negotiator in the process. In 2023, the organization, which every three years produces a three-month-long city-wide arts festival commissioned new work to be displayed at a site near Sugarloaf Mound in order for the city to engage with the site’s cultural and historic significance. One of the artists Counterpublic commissioned was noted Oklahoma-based clay and textile artist Anita Fields, who is herself Osage.

“Art Restart” reached out to James McAnally, Counterpublic’s Executive and Artistic Director, and Anita Fields to learn more about why and how an arts organization as well as a range of artists were crucial to this successful Land Back effort. After all, what’s a more striking example of arts and artists shaking up the status quo in their communities than this historic example of an arts-centered process of rematriation?

In this interview, James and Anita share how art played a pivotal role in the historic rematriation of Sugarloaf Mound, from fostering trust and dialogue to reimagining the site’s future. They reflect on the power of creative practice in Land Back efforts and offer insights for those looking to merge artistic vision with meaningful action.

https://www.anitafieldsart.com/

https://www.counterpublic.org/team/james-mcanally

https://www.osageculture.com/culture/historic-preservation-office

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Art 25: a collective with joy and independence at its heart

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:30:00 +0000

What happens when best friends in different disciplines decide to formalize their creative relationship and then invite a third artist into their artmaking experiment? A vibrant, equitable and joyful collective by the name of Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is born.

Art 25’s core artists are poet Lehua M. Taitano, visual artist Lisa Jarrett and multi-disciplinary artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng. Separately, Lehua, who is CHamoru; Lisa, who is Black; and Jocelyn, who has Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese roots had been exploring similar themes of identity and diaspora in their artistic practice. Fusing their talents and perspectives, however, allowed them access to an even deeper well of experience and imagination from which to draw inspiration.

Since Art 25’s founding, the collective’s work has been seen at several institutions, including the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and in February of 2025 it will be exhibited at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum in Long Beach, CA.

In this interview, Lehua, Lisa and Jocelyn describe how they joined their creative forces and explain the core anti-capitalistic values of Art 25 that not only place it firmly outside the artistic mainstream but continue to bring them joy.

https://www.lehuamtaitano.com/art-25

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Violinist Johnny Gandelsman gets scared ... and new music benefits.

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Johnny Gandelsman is not only one of the world’s finest violinists, as comfortable playing contemporary works as he is interpreting pieces from the Western classical canon. He is also an inveterate musical innovator. A long-time member of Silkroad Ensemble and a co-founder of string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this past year, Johnny has long championed the dissolution of genre boundaries to celebrate music’s unique power to bridge cultural divides. Over the years he has collaborated with and played the works of musicians from the Middle East to Appalachia, along the way stretching his own skills to adapt his instrument to a host of musical traditions.

Johnny has also been a driving force in the commissioning of new works for the concert stage, founding his own label, In a Circle Records, to produce and release new compositions. In the doldrums of the COVID lockdown, when musicians saw a year’s worth of scheduled work vanish, he hatched a plan. He set out to find dozens of arts institutions and music presenters to partner with him to commission 22 composers from all over the country to create new works for the solo violin.

Four years later, the project has now resulted in an album titled “This Is America: an Anthology 2020-2021,” a three-CD set with a 40-page booklet produced by In a Circle Records. Pitchfork raves, “This Is America stirs feelings about our country that are almost hard to recognize: pride, hope, and the simple relief of consensus reality.” Since the album’s release, Johnny himself has been playing sections of the album all over the country in marathon performances at many of the institutions who partnered with him on the project.

In this interview, Johnny describes how he shifted from being a young talent focused on a traditional soloist’s career to becoming an adventurer, challenging classical music’s conventions to prove that experimentation and community are as essential to music as technique.

https://johnnygandelsman.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-america-an-anthology-2020-2021-icr023

https://www.inacircle-records.com/

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Americana duo Chatham Rabbits thrive on authenticity and generosity through thick and thin.

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 12:30:00 +0000

The year 2020 was looking to be a banner year for musical and life partners Sarah and Austin McCombie, aka Chatham Rabbits. They had just made the biggest financial investment in their band, namely the purchase of a tour van, and were looking forward to months of being on the road and performing to promote their second album when the pandemic hit and their bookings vanished.

What they did next, though, exemplifies their resourcefulness, generosity and innovative spirit. They installed solar panels on top of the van to power a sound system, hitched a flatbed trailer to their new vehicle and played free concerts in scores of neighborhoods around North Carolina. In the middle of lockdown, when the prospect of hearing live music seemed years away, you could email Chatham Rabbits a request, and chances are they’d show up on your street and give you and your neighbors a joyful, free concert.

Happily, their professional life has resumed at full tilt. They recently completed their third album, titled “Be Real with Me,” which is scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day in 2025, and they will spend February and March performing in venues all over the country.

In this interview, Austin and Sarah describe how a commitment to community and authenticity has allowed them to keep taking risks and navigate a music industry that has yet to catch up to the needs of up-and-coming artists and their fans.

https://www.chathamrabbits.com/

https://www.pbsnc.org/watch/on-the-road/

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Access is the art itself: Kinetic Light’s disability-centered revolution

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:30:00 +0000

To describe Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson as dancers is to name only a small sliver of their creative portfolio. To be sure, they are proficient, trained dancers and have created and performed several works for Kinetic Light, the disability arts ensemble that Alice founded in 2016 and continues to lead. In Kinetic Light’s first piece, titled “Descent,” Alice and Laurel danced in their wheelchairs on a raked stage with a large ramp — stage design by Laurel — and since then have proved to be increasingly adventurous in exploring their relationship to gravity. In recent pieces, they have boldly moved into the vertical axis, sometimes flying into the air — in or out of a wheelchair — thanks to ingenious mechanisms, likewise created by Laurel.

Because accessibility is central to Kinetic Light’s artistry rather than a supplemental consideration, Alice and Laurel have also become accessibility and technological innovators. Kinetic Light is a disability arts company created by disabled artists for audiences with disabilities, and as such every performance is created from the ground up for everyone to fully enjoy. For instance, the company’s lighting designer, Michael Maag, who uses a wheelchair, lights mobility devices with the same care he lights a human body and also pays attention to the needs of neurodiverse audiences; some seats are equipped with haptic devices to allow an audience member to feel the vibration of the score; and Laurel has developed Audimance, a multi-track audio-description app that gives blind and visually impaired guests control over how to experience and enjoy the performance.

In this interview, Alice and Laurel describe the path that led them to Kinetic Light and explain why artists and institutions, rather than viewing accessibility as a requirement or need, would be wise to embrace it as an aesthetic principle.

[post-interview edit: Laurel started working in tech in 1996, not 2016 as she accidentally states in the interview.]

https://kineticlight.org/

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Aaron McIntosh’s quilts archive queer Southern history

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:30:00 +0000

For fiber artist Aaron McIntosh, quilting is an act of defiant documentation. Growing up in an Appalachian family with a generations-deep tradition of quilting, he learned the craft as a boy and went on to develop his own ethos and mission, studying first at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee and then earning his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

In recent years, Aaron has placed his own personal history and metaphorical body into fabric sculptures that blend his familial and cultural background with his identity as a queer Appalachian artist. His work has been exhibited in a variety of institutions, from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Toledo Museum of Art to Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul. In 2015, he started the “Invasive Queer Kudzu” project, a community storytelling, archiving and art-making project focusing on queer communities, past and present, in America’s Southeast.

In this interview, Aaron, who is currently an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal, describes why and how he claimed the South’s most notorious weed as his artistic inspiration and clears up any misconceptions about the fiber arts ever having taken a back seat to other fine arts throughout human history.

https://aaronmcintosh.com/home.html

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Kickstarting Classical: Composer Christopher Tin keeps fans close on his musical adventures.

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Christopher Tin is an award-winning and genre-bending classical composer whose work has been featured in a variety of settings and media, from august concert halls to the world of video games.

His orchestral piece “Baba Yetu,” which Christopher originally composed for the game “Civilization IV,” was the first ever musical work written for a video game to win a Grammy Award. It has since become a staple in choral and orchestral venues. He received his second Grammy for his debut album, “Calling All Dawns,” a multilingual song cycle.

Christopher has been as adventurous in his producing as he has been in his composing. He turned to Kickstarter to help him create his subsequent two albums, “To Shiver the Sky” and “The Lost Birds,” both of which explored ecological themes. Through his crowdfunding, he not only raised all the funds necessary to pull off both expensive projects but also deepened his relationship with his many ardent fans while making new ones, bringing them along on intimate tours through his entire creative and production process. “The Lost Birds,” which features the acclaimed British vocal ensemble VOCES8, was nominated for a 2023 Grammy and has been performed all over the world.

This past spring at the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera premiered Puccini’s unfinished masterpiece “Turandot” with a new ending composed by Christopher and written by Susan Soo He Stanton. The production and its new ending was a hit with critics and audiences alike.

In this interview, Christopher reveals how after decades of experimentation and success he’s finally stopped worrying whether his work was too popular to please the classical-music establishment, and he explains how he’s cultivated a legion of fans who encourage him to take ever bigger risks.

https://christophertin.com/

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What urban-rural divide? Matthew Fluharty supports art across geographies.

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Matthew Fluharty is the founder and executive director of Art of the Rural, an organization that works to support and promote the work of artists and culture bearers across the country and that also aims to bridge cultural divides across urban and rural areas.

Initially created as a blog in 2010, Art of the Rural has since then developed several long-term projects in collaboration with artists and community leaders, particularly in the upper Midwest (Art of the Rural is based in Winona, MN) and in Kentucky Appalachia. Projects have included “High Visibility: On Location in Rural American and Indian Country,” a collaboration with the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND, the first major museum exhibition highlighting contemporary art practice across these geographies; and two cultural-exchange programs – the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange and the Minnesota Rural-Urban Exchange – that have afforded scores of artists a chance to immerse themselves meaningfully in settings once unfamiliar to them.

In this interview, Matthew offers an eye-opening look at the connections between rural and urban communities, challenging the idea of a “divide” and showing how collaboration and cultural exchange are reshaping how we think about art, place, and belonging. He also details the kind of shift in perspective institutions and funders must embrace to ensure that the many artists in rural America and Indian Country continue serving their communities.

https://www.artoftherural.org/

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From land to stage, Groundwater Arts nurtures justice in the arts.

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Theater artists Annalisa Dias and Tara Moses are the co-directors of Groundwater Arts, an organization they founded in 2018 — along with Anna Lathrop and Ronee Penoi — to braid together goals that at first might seem disparate: decolonizing the arts-and-culture field and striving for a climate-just future.

Guided and inspired all along by an advisory council as well as a youth council, Groundwater Arts has created countless opportunities — whether through creative projects, consulting or virtual and in-person gatherings — for cultural institutions to learn how they can start dismantling structural inequities that for generations have exacerbated the climate crisis and have primarily harmed communities of color. Groundwater Arts adheres to the principles listed in “Green New Theater,” a document the co-founders wrote to guide American theaters in responding to the climate crisis.

In this interview, Annalisa and Dias describe the diligence and integrity with which they created and continue to run Groundwater Arts, offering a blueprint for artists and institutions looking to align their practices with justice, sustainability and true collaboration.

https://www.groundwaterarts.com/

https://www.groundwaterarts.com/green-new-theatre.html

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Truly Appalachia: Author/theatre-maker Robert Gipe holds safe spaces through the toughest times.

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Calling Robert Gipe an author or novelist is a bit like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson a YouTuber. Yes, Robert wrote a widely praised self-illustrated trilogy of novels — “Trampoline,” “Weedeater” and “Pop” — that follows the travails of a young woman growing up in rural Appalachia. He completed that authorly feat, however, after decades working as an educator, community builder and theater-maker in and around Harlan, KY, where he continues to reside.

Originally from Kingsport, TN, Robert moved to Southeastern Kentucky in the late ’90s after receiving his master’s in American studies at the University of Massachusetts. Initially he worked in marketing and fundraising for the legendary community media organization Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY and then became a professor and program coordinator of the Appalachian Center at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in Cumberland. Soon thereafter he created Higher Ground, a community theater organization that since 2002 has created and produced plays with and for the community on local topics ranging from opioid addiction to environmental degradation.

In this candid interview, Robert describes the challenges of encouraging community-wide fellowship in a politically divisive era and celebrates the role of art and artists in creating safe spaces for people of all stripes to celebrate their authentic selves.

https://www.robertgipe.com/

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Piano/percussion duet SHHH! Ensemble makes contemporary classical a blast for a new audience.

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:30:00 +0000

You might be forgiven for guessing SHHH! Ensemble to be a collection of musically minded librarians, but you’d be way off the mark. Because SHHH! Ensemble makes noise. A lot of it. On a variety of instruments. And people are loving it. Which might be especially surprising given that SHHH! mostly plays contemporary classical works, a genre that can be intimidating to many audiences. So how do they do it?

SHHH! comprises Ottawa-based life partners Edana Higham, a pianist, and Zac Pulak, a percussionist, making them possibly the world’s only professional piano/percussion duo. Since launching their ensemble in 2016, Edana and Zac have made waves in Canada’s classical-music scene, playing in venues and festivals from coast to coast and garnering raves from critics and audiences alike. They have collaborated with renowned contemporary classical composers, including John Beckwith, Monica Pearce and past Art Restart guest Frank Horvat.

Here they explain how they decided to join musical forces and how they’ve developed the “avant-accessible” style that at each performance invites an audience to take a meticulously curated and delightful musical journey with them.

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Norms-busting choreographer Aszure Barton uses joy as the foundation for her work.

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 11:30:00 +0000

On January 26 of 2024, San Francisco Ballet premiered a commissioned work by Canadian American choreographer Aszure Barton. It was titled “Mere Mortals” and explored the science and ramifications of AI through the ancient myth of Pandora. With a brand-new score by world-renowned British electronica composer Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, and video and sound design by Barcelona-based Hamill Industries, “Mere Mortals” was a big gamble for new artistic director Tamara Rojo as she closed out her first season with the Ballet.

It paid off. Not only was “Mere Mortals” a hit with critics, with the San Francisco Chronicle calling it “a passionate success,” but it also proved to be a box-office bonanza, so much so that San Francisco Ballet brought the production back to the stage just three months later for several encore performances. Perhaps more importantly, many in the audience were first-time ballet-goers, many of whom saw the piece more than once.

In this arts climate when so many dance companies are struggling to get even their regular audiences back in the door, what was it about “Mere Mortals” that made it such a hit? In this interview, Aszure opens a window into her choreographic practice and how it may have contributed to an event equally invigorating to her dancers and her audience.

Aszure is the artistic director of Aszure Barton & Artists, which she founded very early in her career as a creative outlet for the collaborative and anti-hierarchical instincts she’d had to repress in her dance education. Two decades later, Aszure Barton & Artists, which includes a core staff of creative collaborators, has created work all over the world with a wide array of artists and institutions, including Mikhai Baryshnikov, Nederlans Dans Theater and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Aszure is currently the choreographer in residence at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and is also developing a new piece in partnership with trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire.

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Alexander Lloyd Blake's Tonality: a choral call to social change

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 11:30:00 +0000

In 2016, while earning his doctorate in music at the University of Southern California, Alexander Lloyd Blake founded the choral group Tonality. His initial aim was to create a choral ensemble that would represent and celebrate the full diversity of Los Angeles’ population. That done, Tonality started to focus each concert on social-justice issues, from global warming to gun violence, always providing audiences with an array of resources to encourage activism and change.

Tonality’s repertoire is as varied as its membership, ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary pieces in a variety of styles and genres, but Alex’s commitment to harnessing the power of choral music to foment social change has remained central. In just eight years, Tonality has garnered nationwide attention. In 2020 Tonality received the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, and in 2022 Alex and Tonality’s work were featured on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” They’ve released two albums, and just this past spring, Tonality won its first Grammy for performing on composer Carla Patullo’s album “So She Howls.”

The ensemble has collaborated with a number of world-renowned composers, including Reena Esmail and Michael Giacchino, and has performed with such artists as Pete Townsend, Lara Downes and Björk. They have also sung for TV and film soundtracks, including “Space Jam: a New Legacy.”

Here Alex explains what led him to found Tonality and details the intricacies of leading a choral ensemble that has to remain increasingly nimble and focused.

https://www.ourtonality.org/

https://alexanderlblake.com/

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Conscious Costume's Kristen P Ahern builds networks of ethical designers.

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Costume designer Kristen P Ahern has been thinking about sustainability since childhood, when her parents, her mother in particular, instilled in her a passion for environmental responsibility. As an adult, she has centered that passion in her art, in 2018 founding Conscious Costume, an information-and-resources clearinghouse with a clear vision: “Every costume created in harmony with people and planet.”

Although Kristen now lives in Pittsburgh, PA, she still has deep roots in Chicago, where she designed for several theaters and also managed a few costume shops in the area. Chicago is also where Conscious Costume’s costumes-rental facility continues to operate, giving area designers and theaters greater access to reusable materials and costumes. It is also in Chicago that Kristen, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, created Artist Resource Mobilization (ARM), an organization that matched out-of-work designers and costume-shop artists with mask-production opportunities. In the pandemic’s most dire year and a half, Artist Resource Mobilization was able to provide garment artists with $35,000.

In this interview, Kristen explains what responsible costume design and production entails and offers a primer in how designers and costume shops can take small-to-large steps to ensure they protect the well-being of their onstage and behind-the-scenes artists as well as the environment.

https://www.kristenp.com/

https://www.consciouscostume.com/

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Launch a sumptuous arts complex in this arts climate? Bill Rauch’s vision is already bearing fruit.

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Of all the tasks to undertake in the current arts climate, leading a brand-new multimillion-dollar performing-arts center through its opening and first season must be one of the most daunting. Yet, Bill Rauch, the inaugural artistic director of the Perelman Arts Center (usually referred to as PAC NYC) in Lower Manhattan managed to launch with a bang through an astonishing array of music, dance, theater and opera performances. He also capped the first season with a personal triumph, co-directing with Zhailon Levingston an inventive reimagining of the musical “Cats” set in New York’s drag ballroom scene. The production, titled “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” garnered enthusiastic reviews and was immediately extended.

Although Bill has decades of experience as an artistic director and producer, his previous posts were markedly different from the current. Right out of college, he founded Cornerstone Theater Company, a firmly community-centered company that was initially nomadic, creating theater with and for small and often rural towns before it put down roots in Los Angeles in 1992. Cornerstone continued to make homegrown community-partnered theater in Los Angeles as well as in satellite projects around the country.

Then in 2007 Bill became the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is a bit of a unicorn in the American theater ecosystem as one of the very few theaters in the U.S. with a full-time acting company. It is also one of a handful of destination theaters in North America, with patrons traveling from all over the country to rural Southern Oregon to enjoy a theatrical vacation. At OSF, while still centering Shakespeare’s works, Bill diversified the theater’s offerings and bolstered its new-play development program.

“Art Restart” was eager to speak with Bill to learn how he has adapted his heavily community-centered vision to the demands of leading New York’s newest cultural landmark, which opened during a particularly perilous time for so many of the city’s performing-arts institutions. Here he describes why and how PAC can thrive in today’s New York as a singularly welcoming hub for the countless communities throughout New York City and its environs.

https://pacnyc.org/

https://pacnyc.org/bio/bill-rauch/

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Once a refugee himself, photographer Tariq Tarey honors our newest arrivals.

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Tariq Tarey is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Columbus, OH. Over the years, he has captured thousands of portraits of refugees from around the world whom the U.S. government resettled in Central Ohio.

Tariq himself arrived in the States in the mid ’90s as a refugee from his native Somalia. He therefore has a particular empathy for his subjects, many of whom like him hail from Somalia but also from a myriad global locations, from Nepal and Iraq to the Democratic Republic of Congo and more recently Ukraine.

His passion is not only for his work’s artistic expression, though, but also for its documentary value. Tariq wants to ensure that the refugees’ faces and the histories they contain are photographed and then archived with the same care shown to their antecedents who in centuries past arrived largely from Europe through Ellis Island.

Tariq has also conducted photographic projects in refugee camps around the world and has directed documentary films, including "Women, War and Resettlement: Nasro’s Journey" and "Silsilad," which have been featured on PBS, and most recently "The Darien Gap," which was showcased at the 2nd United States Conference on African Immigrant and Refugee Health. His photos have been exhibited in several institutions, including the Ross Museum and Wright State University, and several are now part of the permanent collections at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Ross Museum.

His deep knowledge of the refugee experience stems not only from his own personal excellence. For years now he has worked as the Director of Refugee Social Services at Jewish Family Services in Columbus, Ohio. He also serves on Ohio’s New African Immigrants Commission and the Franklin County Board of Commissioners' New American Advisory Council.

In this interview, Tariq describes how he launched his photographic career soon after arriving in Ohio and explains why his work remains crucial as history keeps repeating itself.

https://tariqtarey.com/

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Florida-based Antonia Wright channels her rage into boundless discovery—and hope.

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Antonia Wright is an award-winning Cuban American multimedia artist based in Miami, FL whose work has been exhibited all over the world, from the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Pérez Art Museum in her hometown to the Havana Biennial and the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires. The focus of her work tends to be the human body and how it responds to extremes of emotion, control and violence promulgated by systems of power, and in the past, she has often used her own body — often in startling and violent ways — to illustrate her themes.

Her tools are varied, including video, photography, light and sculpture, and are constantly evolving. In 2021 she transformed a cement mixer into a giant musical instrument for her project “Not Yet Paved,” and recently she has been creating site-specific installations with the kinds of barricades that have long been used as methods of crowd control at protests the world over.

Her interest in examining the autonomy – and lack thereof – of the human body, particularly the female body, extends to her personal life. She has long been an advocate and activist for reproductive rights and serves on the board of Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida.

Art Restart was eager to speak with Antonia soon after Florida banned abortion after six weeks of gestation. We wanted to hear how a changemaking artist continued or recommitted to her work when the sociopolitical winds around her shifted dramatically. In this interview she explains how she’s long channeled her anger into her practice and describes how she remains committed to the curiosity and fearlessness that initially launched her from poetry into performance and installation art.

https://antoniawright.com/

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Phil Chan makes ballet a contemporary artform for all Americans.

Tue, 28 May 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Phil Chan is a choreographer, director and ballet scholar who seven years ago decided to turn a longstanding frustration into a wellspring of activism. Although American entertainment had made great progress in eliminating the use of blackface, demeaning and wildly inaccurate depictions of Asians and Asian-ness continued to appear on ballet stages.

He therefore teamed up with prima ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin to create Final Bow for Yellowface, an organization that started working with ballet companies in America and Europe to eliminate offensive depictions of Asians in their repertoires and help them find inventive and respectful ways to stage culturally problematic ballet classics.

Their work has paid off, notching up notable successes here and abroad and changing the culture in ballet companies to value and welcome a broad array of artists. Phil distilled his ethos and tactics in his book “Final Bow for Yellow Face: Dancing Between Intention and Impact.”

As a director and choreographer, Phil has put his own stamp on once-problematic Orientalist standards. Last year, he directed “Madama Butterfly” at Boston Lyric Opera in a production that The Boston Globe called “an invigorating and meaningful reclamation of Puccini’s beloved opera.” Earlier this year he co-choreographed with Doug Fullerton the ballet “La Bayadère” at Indiana University, maintaining Auguste Petipa’s choreography but moving the setting from a 19th century India sprung from a European imagination to the homegrown American exoticism of 1920s Hollywood.

In this interview, Phil describes how he developed the mission and methods of Final Bow for Yellowface and explains how reexamining the standard ballet repertoire through a multicultural contemporary lens honors and benefits the artform as a whole.

https://www.yellowface.org/

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Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate brings the sounds of Indian Country to the concert hall.

Tue, 14 May 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s compositions are finding evermore ardent fans among the public and musical institutions alike. This interview took place just days after his return to his Oklahoma City home from an eventful week in New York. While there he heard the New York Philharmonic play the string-arrangement premiere of his piece “Pisachi.” He also not only experienced the Carnegie Hall premiere of his “Clans” performed by the American Composers Orchestra; he also performed in it, singing alongside his 10-year-old son, Heloha. Onstage as well were several fellow members of the Chickasaw Nation dressed in traditional regalia.

Jerod’s work has been performed all over the country, and the rest of this musical season will remain busy for him. Dover String Quartet is touring his new quartet, “Woodland Songs”; Oklahoma’s Canterbury Voices premieres his first opera, “Loksi’ Shaali’ (Shell Shaker);” and he will curate an all-American-Indian program in Washington D.C. for the PostClassical Ensemble.

In this interview, Jerod, who is a 2022 inductee into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame, describes how he developed his distinctive multi-traditional composition style as well as his hyper-local and collaborative ethos.

https://jerodtate.com/

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Griff Braun makes ballet dancers union-strong.

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

A major theme that reappears in episode after episode of Art Restart is the fact that audiences/consumers, institutions/businesses and sometimes even artists themselves often fail to recognize that art is labor, not a pastime or an unconventional way to earn a living. A recent labor action by America’s premier ballet company served as a fresh reminder.

On February 6 of this year, by an overwhelming majority, the dancers and stage managers of American Ballet Theatre voted to authorize a strike. Among their demands were an increase in wages that had been frozen since the Great Recession of 2008 as well as an adjustment to their working hours.

Represented by their union, AGMA (American Guild of Musical Artists), after approximately three weeks of negotiations, the ABT company members and management were able to reach an agreement and avert a strike. The terms of the new agreement include cost-of-living increases of between 9 and 19% (varying by rank) across three years, their workday being shifted a half-hour earlier and reduced by one half-hour on Saturdays and new parental-leave benefits and a commitment to keep pregnant dancers on contract until the time of the dancer’s choosing.

In this interview, Art Restart speaks with Griff Braun, AGMA’s national organizing director, who was himself once an ABT company member. He speaks about the nuts and bolts of how and why dancers unionize and describes the challenges and opportunities of organizing as an artist in 2024 America.

https://www.musicalartists.org/griff-braun-national-organizing-director-professional-bio/

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From rural southern Oregon, Ka'ila Farrell-Smith fights for and paints with Native land.

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

For painter Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, the land on which she lives and works is the raw material for her art, both metaphorically and literally.

In November 2016, ten days spent at Standing Rock, ND protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and meeting and working alongside fellow Native artists changed her life. Ka’ila, who is Klamath Modoc, learned about the Jordan Cove Energy Projects, a liquid natural gas LNG pipeline that was threatening her ancestral homeland in southern Oregon, and in 2018, she moved to Modoc Point, where she jump-started a new chapter in her activism and artistry journey, scoring a couple of big wins in the first year. She created her “Land Back” series of paintings, in which she started incorporating pigments and minerals from the land around her, and she was successful in blocking the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

Now, in 2024, represented by the Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, she’s had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, including at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. One of her pieces is also in the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. On the activist front, she is suing the State of Oregon for illegal surveillance and is also combating lithium mining in Native regions of Southern Oregon and Nevada.

In this interview, Ka’ila explains why she left the artistic hub of Portland to live in rural southern Oregon and describes how her activism and artistry have evolved hand in hand.

https://www.kailafarrellsmith.com/

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For Rising Appalachia, time off is the newest tool in their slow-music toolbox.

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

In February of 2024, after a year of touring the country, the musical group Rising Appalachia, an ensemble that marries American folk music with a wide array of world influences, made an announcement that might have been surprising only to those who don’t know them well. Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, who created Rising Appalachia over 15 years ago, had decided to take a sabbatical year, though they would honor the concerts already on the books in 2024.

Longtime Rising Appalachia fans have been supportive because they know this is a band that has never taken shortcuts in how they manage their artistry and their lives. Since early on in their careers, Leah and Chloe have been advocates for and practitioners of the slow music movement, an ethos of touring and music-making that places sustainability, local engagement and creative control at the heart of their business. The current sabbatical is the latest tool in their slow music toolbox.

Yet though last year’s tour was hugely successful and they’ve just released an album titled “Folk and Anchor,” Chloe and Leah’s decision was undeniably gutsy and far from conventional in the music industry. In this interview, the sisters, speaking from their homes in the North Carolina mountains, discuss why this was the right time for a yearlong break, how they prepared for it and the ways in which they and their bandmates keep the slow music ethos at the heart of their artistic practice.

https://www.risingappalachia.com/tour

https://www.risingappalachia.com/

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Equity in collecting? April Bey has a plan.

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Through her wildly multicolored and multitextured interdisciplinary work, April Bey loves to explore speculative realms. For example, in a recent installation of hers, titled “Atlantica, the Gilda Region,” she invited the viewer to imagine they’d just landed as aliens on the faraway planet Atlantica, an opulent galactic wonderland full of Black and Brown bodies savoring luxury and leisure. First exhibited at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the show then traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno this past fall.

Art Restart was eager to speak with April specifically because of a project she created to transform one particular speculation into reality: What if the people who collected her art looked like her and/or had similar backgrounds to hers? What if the world of art collecting invited collectors who for a host of reasons had felt excluded from or intimidated by it? She named the new venture the Equity in Collecting Program, and it is already bearing fruit, with April currently reviewing the third round of applicants to the program.

April spoke to Art Restart from Los Angeles, where she lives and works, including as a tenured professor at Glendale College. Here she explains why and how she created her singular program and explains how her radical invitation to new collectors is changing not only the art-collecting culture but also her relationship with her fans as well as with her own art.

https://www.april-bey.com/

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Film composer Sultana Isham's curiosity takes her from horror to the stars.

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 12:30:00 +0000

For New Orleans-based film composer Sultana Isham, plunging into research on her subject matter is as important as creating her score. Trained as a classical violinist, she moved from her native Virginia to New Orleans to steep herself in one of her passions, the peoples, history and culture of Créolité throughout the Americas and abroad.

Once in New Orleans, Sultana Initially busked in various venues around New Orleans and then started playing with Les Cenelles, an ensemble devoted to Creole folk music and work by composers of color. She began to write her own pieces, and in 2017 she put out her first EP, “Blood Moon,” a mixture of avant-garde classical and pop fusion, attracting the attention of director Zandashé Brown, who hired her to write the score for the horror short “Blood Runs Down.” Other directors soon came knocking on her door.

Director Angela Tucker hired her to be both researcher and composer on the documentary, “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk,” a PBS documentary about a historic New Orleans mayoral race between two Black women. Among Sultana’s other credits are “The Neutral Ground,” which also aired on PBS and received an Emmy nomination for best historical documentary, and the PBS series “Making Black America,” narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Sultana’s scholarship continues unabated. LSU Press is developing an essay she co-wrote with Dr. Denise Frazier – “Mémwa Nwa: Agency, Sound and Women in AfroCreole Louisiana Folk Music” – into a book. A month before this interview, she concluded her residency at Ace Hotel New Orleans by co-curating an exhibit titled “Them Handy Sisters,” celebrating the careers of noted performers and musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy Southall and D. Antoinette Handy.

Here, Sultana explains how she developed her musical skills hand-in-hand with her research practice and why heeding her heart and feeding her curiosity continue to open incredible new doors for her.

https://www.sultanaisham.com/

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"Water is memory": Zeke Peña illustrates the Rio Grande and our changing southern border.

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Zeke Peña is a Xicano cartoonist and illustrator who, for most of his professional life, has focused on the lives and stories of El Paso, TX, where he grew up and lived for decades. A self-taught artist with an undergraduate degree in art history from UT Austin, he has built a rich portfolio of varied works that, as he describes them, are “a mash-up of political cartoons, border rasquache and hip-hop culture.”

He has illustrated several award-winning books, including “My Papi Drives a Motorcycle,” which The New York Times called a best children’s book of 2019, and “Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide,” a Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award Winner and a Moonbeam Children’s Book Gold Award Winner. Both were written by Isabel Quintero, who has become a close collaborator. In 2023 he illustrated bestselling author Jason Reynolds’ “Miles Morales Suspended: A Spider-Man Novel.” His editorial work has appeared in a wide array of publications, including VICE, ProPublica and Latino USA.

Here he describes the evolution of his ambitious journalistic endeavor, “The River Project,” about the increasingly politicized Rio Grande and all it represents. He also discusses how he’s adapted to the latest moral book-banning crusade and how he wishes for publishers to honor their writers’ and illustrators’ collaborative spirits.

https://www.zpvisual.com/

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Shayok Misha Chowdhury on the bracing success of his "Public Obscenities"

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

One of the bona fide theatrical hits of 2023 was a play titled “Public Obscenities” by director-turned-playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury. It opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan in January of 2023 to the kind of glowing reviews and audience responses a playwright can only dream of. The same production was remounted that fall at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., and as of this writing, it is currently running at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.

A New York Times Critic’s Pick from its first outing, the play continues to draw raves in its latest iteration. Helen Shaw of The New Yorker calls it a triumph. A few days after this interview, Misha won an Obie for his direction of the play, this after the play’s cast received a 2023 Drama Desk Award for best ensemble.

What makes the success of “Public Obscenities” so remarkable is that that there’s nothing about the play that screams “Guaranteed Surefire Hit!” For one thing, with its relatively large cast of seven and with its multimedia elements, it’s not cheap to produce. Then also it is bilingual, partly in English, partly in the playwright’s native Bangla. Granted, Bangla is the sixth most spoken native language in the world (thank you, Wikipedia), but it is not a language familiar to most Americans. Plus, though sections of the play in which Bangla is spoken are supertitled, there are other scenes without any translations at all.

Also, the play is very queer. It follows an Indian-American PhD candidate as he returns with his Black American boyfriend to a family home in Kolkata, India. There he plans to interview sexual minorities for his dissertation. The play is therefore very frank about sexuality and features two non-gender-conforming characters.

And it’s three hours long.

But despite these details — or maybe exactly because of them — the play is an unqualified hit.

Here Misha details how he hewed to his vision for the play no matter its evolving demands and hints at a road map for struggling theaters and the artists who wish to create work for their stages.

https://www.shayokmishachowdhury.com/

https://www.tfana.org/current-season/public-obscenities/overview

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Dimensions Variable plays it smart and cool in Miami's red-hot art market.

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

In 2009, while expecting their first child, visual artists and life partners Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova and Frances Trombly co-founded a new artist space in their hometown of Miami. They named it Dimensions Variable after their short-lived visuals-only blog that had showcased the kind of challenging art they rarely saw supported or valued in their city.

Using a donated space in Miami’s Design District, Leyden and Frances worked in their personal studios in the back, and in the small front space, Dimensions Variable started curating exhibits. Leyden was committed to imbuing their new venture with the ethos that had guided a previous Miami-based venture named Box that he’d co-run years before. Dimensions Variable would support great art and artists without placing the demands of the market ahead of the artists’ needs or aspirations.

Since its founding, Dimensions Variable has had to relocate several times for reasons beyond their control due to the increasingly treacherous real estate market in Miami. Since 2019, though, they have operated out of their largest space yet comprising 4,500 square feet in Miami’s Little River/Little Haiti neighborhood. In 2019 they also registered as a non-profit organization and since then have continued to support a wide range of artists with residencies, exhibits and, since DV is also a gallery, sales.

Here Frances and Leyden discuss very frankly the lessons they’ve learned in the last 14 years in how to make Dimensions Variable sustainable through thick and thin while remaining as welcoming and enriching as possible to the art and artists they are passionate about supporting.

https://dimensionsvariable.net/

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Chicago's Floating Museum: "We don’t bring culture to people; people already have culture."

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Architect Andrew Schachman and multidisciplinary artist and educator Faheem Majeed are two of the four artists who, along with poet avery r. young and sculptor Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, co-lead Chicago’s Floating Museum. As its name suggests, the Floating Museum does not have a brick-and-mortar fixed space; rather it creates inventive projects through which to explore and strengthen the relationship between art, community, architecture and public institutions in sites throughout Chicago.

One example of past Floating Museum projects is “Cultural Transit Assembly,” which activated not only the Chicago Transit Authority’s green line but also parks and spaces along its track. Some green line CTA cars served as pop-up performance spaces and galleries, and giant movable sculptures as well as community-art events could be spied from the train throughout its route, inviting riders to visit neighborhoods that perhaps were new to them.

Another example is “River Assembly,” which over a month saw an industrial barge dock at different sites along the Chicago River, bringing a host of performances and interactive exhibits to several neighborhoods, celebrating the entire city as one giant museum campus, all corners of which have always been hubs of culture and art.

In a sign of the Floating Museum’s cultural influence not only citywide but also nationally and abroad, its four leaders were tapped to be the co-directors of the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial, one of only two architecture biennials in the world, the other being the century-old Biennial in Venice, Italy.

Here Faheem and Andrew describe the municipal savvy and community trust they had to cultivate for the Floating Museum and its many projects to move throughout Chicago. They also discuss how as a quartet they manage a growing institution that must remain nimble and responsive enough to continually engage with its home city.

https://floatingmuseum.org/

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Cellist Leo Eguchi makes classical music inviting, immediate and personal

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 18:45:00 +0000

Cellist Leo Eguchi has played all over the world in a variety of settings, from frequent appearances with the Boston Pops and the Portland Symphony to playing for some of pop music’s biggest stars, including Demi Lovato and Peter Gabriel. A career as a performer only, however, did not satisfy his itch to make music that would move an audience with its intimacy and immediacy, so he co-founded not one but two chamber music ensembles and began commissioning work from a broad array of contemporary composers.

He continues to co-lead Sheffield Chamber Players, which is based in Boston and performs in community members’ homes throughout the region, and the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, which performs in several Oregon wineries through its August season. The commissioning and performing of new work remain central to both ensembles.

Leo created the “UNACCOMPANIED” project, through which he commissions immigrant and first-generation American composers to create solo cello pieces that explore the very notion of American-ness. Among the commissioned artists are well-known composers such as Gabriele Lena Frank and William Bolcomb as well as newer talents, including Milad Yousufi, a recent refugee from Afghanistan whom Leo met while completing a residency in Kabul in 2012.

He also commissioned a suite titled “Shared Spaces” that pairs new work by composer Kenji Bunch with the personal recollections of David Sakura about his time imprisoned with his family in a WWII internment camp. As for the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, in each season it highlights the work of a different composer in residence.

Here Leo explains how he developed the ethos that drives his artistry and leadership and details how he continues to put his passion into practice.

https://www.leoeguchi.com/

https://www.sheffieldchamberplayers.org/

https://www.wvchambermusic.org/

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Midnight Oil Collective: Tech connects creators with venture capital, so why not art?

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valuable? Can and should art be treated like widgets? Or like a new app?

To the second question, Frances Pollock and Keith Hamilton Cobb might answer, “If the artist is up for it, why not?” Frances, an opera and musical-theater composer, is the CEO of a nascent company called Midnight Oil Collective (MOC) that cribs from the funding practices of tech accelerators, which after all are hubs of creativity, to connect creators with money not from nonprofit sources but from private investors. MOC also trains its artist partners to regard their creative work as intellectual property akin to the tech innovations of an inventor. This means that an artist working with MOC learns how never to relinquish the rights to her work from start to finish and also learns how to scale it as needed. The artist does not wait for a producer or non-profit entity to determine if and how the project will grow, turning over the reins to the project in the process; she remains its captain and determines what the project requires in its own startup lab, so to speak.

Keith, an actor and playwright with a lengthy and distinguished television, film and stage resume, is not only on MOC’s artistic board; he is also in the first artist cohort to fund and develop a new piece through the company. He is the director of “The Untitled Othello Project,” a hybrid theater-making-and-education innovation endeavor that brings together creative minds of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine and interrogate the esthetic, moral and pedagogical values promulgated by the Western canon, using the Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. “The Untitled Othello Project” is currently in residence at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.

Here Frances and Keith explain why this is the perfect moment for MOC’s brand of disruption in the art world and describe how the company funds and supports the projects under its wing.

https://www.midnightoilco.com/

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For social sculptor Philippa Pham Hughes, a meaningful conversation between strangers is a gorgeous work of art.

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

The raw materials of Philippa Pham Hughes’ art are human bodies and minds. Since 2007, when she hosted her first gathering of strangers, Philippa has worked as a social sculptor and cultural strategist. What this means is that, through methods drawn from the arts and the humanities, she curates what she calls creative activations. These are carefully planned spaces and events to which groups of complete strangers from different walks of life meet face to face and break bread, often quite literally.

In these activations, with Philippa’s guidance, participants can touch the third rails of polite discussion, whether they be politics or religion, because the intent is always to keep everyone safe and increasingly aware of and committed to open communication and the makings of a better world. In a time when the bully pulpit of social media makes it easy to dehumanize the perceived enemy, Philippa’s work centers our shared humanity.

Philippa is currently Resident Artist at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and is Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins. She has worked with several institutions in her current hometown of Washington, DC and in a variety of settings all over the country, in activations both large and intimate.

Here she describes how she refined the work of others to create her own practice of social sculpting and explains how she maintains her optimism and vigor when it seems like all Americans want to do is scream past one another from vast distance.

https://www.philippahughes.com/

https://umma.umich.edu/

https://snfagora.jhu.edu/

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Steven Melendez, the new a.d. of New York Theatre Ballet, on his plan to create the most accessible dance company ever

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

In 2022, Steven Melendez was named artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet, becoming only the second person to lead the institution. In several ways, he was destined to become its next leader since his relationship with the company started when he was only 7 years old and founding artistic director Diana Byer recruited him to train at NYTB’s school through the company’s LIFT scholarship program. As an adult he then went on to dance professionally with NYTB for 15 years. His dance career also included numerous international stints, including as a soloist dancer with Ballet Concierto in Buenos Aires, Argentina and as a principal dancer with the Vanemuine Theater Ballet Company in Tartu, Estonia.

In other ways, however, Steven’s rise to his current leadership position has been extraordinary, if not highly improbable. When he started studying at NYTB, Steven was living with his mother in a homeless shelter in the Bronx and would reside there for three years. Thanks to the LIFT program as well as his inborn talent, he was able to traverse innumerable barriers as he crossed several times a week from the South Bronx to the rarefied world of Park Avenue and back again.

Steven’s own journey is explored in the feature documentary film “LIFT: a Journey from Homelessness to the Ballet Stage,” which was released earlier this year. The film, which spans six years, tracks Steven as he works with three young dancers in the LIFT program who, just as he himself once did, have to traverse the minefield of economic insecurity to study an artform that in ways financial, cultural and historical would have normally been completely inaccessible to them.

Here Steven candidly describes the new barriers he is having to overcome in his new role as a cultural leader and envisions how to make ballet a thrilling and relevant artform for all audiences across cultures and backgrounds.

https://stevenmelendez.com/

https://nytb.org/

https://www.liftdocumentary.com/

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With a clear and trained voice, Precious Perez advocates for herself and other blind artists

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Precious Perez is a singer, songwriter, educator and disability activist who has recently been performing and recording under the moniker “La Reggaetonera Ciega,” the Blind Reggaeton Singer. A graduate of the Berklee School of Music, she has already released one album, 2 EPs, one cover and eight singles, with a ninth on the way. Her single “Sin Preguntar” won Best Latin Song just last month at the Latin Music Awards KY.

Precious is also President of RAMPD, Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities, whose mission is “to amplify Disability Culture, promote equitable inclusion and advocate for accessibility in the music industry.” Founded just two years ago by recording artists Lachi and Gaelynn Lea, RAMPD has already succeeded in making the last two Grammy Awards more accessible than ever to participants, audience members and viewers alike.

Here Precious describes how from a very young age she learned to be adamantly her fullest self in private and in public so as to advocate for her needs and those of the blind musicians who will follow in her footsteps.

https://preciousperezmusica.com/

https://www.afb.org/consulting/afb-accessibility-resources/afbs-social-media-accessibility-standards

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Three TX artists on creating with and for Meow Wolf

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

To describe Meow Wolf as an artistic juggernaut might not be entirely hyperbolic. Founded in 2008 by a group of Santa Fe-based artists looking to show their work outside of the traditional art ecosystem, the collective created its first permanent exhibition in Santa Fe 2016 when famed author George R.R. Martin pledged $2.7 million to purchase an abandoned bowling alley. Meow Wolf titled the installation “House of Eternal Return,” and the surreal, immersive, semi-narrative, multi-artist, multimedia and multi-room experience it provided quickly garnered many fans and repeat visitors. Since the success of “House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf has opened several more gigantic installations: two in Las Vegas, one in Denver and as of July 2023 one Grapevine, TX titled “The Real Unreal.”

Meow Wolf continues to be artist-run and employs artists both in their headquarters in Santa Fe and also in the locales where they install their new exhibits. In order to understand the extent to which the company’s model of audience engagement and artist support might be a gamechanger nationally, “Art Restart” interviewed three Texas-based artists who contributed their talents to the creation of “The Real Unreal.”

Kwinton Gray is a composer and sound designer based in Dallas; Will Heron, who is based in Austin, is a graphic designer and muralist; and Katie Murray is a painter and muralist based in Fort Worth.

https://meowwolf.com/visit/grapevine

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Executive producer/screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry ("The Handmaid's Tale," "Extrapolations") on why the WGA strike matters to everyone w...

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:30:00 +0000

When the Writers Guild of America strike began in early May of 2023, screenwriter, playwright and essayist Dorothy was in the middle of promoting an Apple TV+ mini-series titled “Extrapolations,” on which she’d worked as executive producer and writer. As a result, she had to cancel all appearances relating to the show, which was especially disappointing to her given that it was the first major scripted TV show about climate change. Instead, she braved the blistering heat of summer in Burbank, CA and started walking the picket lines.

Dorothy’s TV producing and writing credits also include the acclaimed Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The 100” for the CW network. Her work on “The Handmaid’s Tale” earned her not only multiple Emmy nominations but also a Producers Guild Award as well as a Writers Guild Award.

Her plays have been performed all over the country, including at the sadly now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, KY; IAMA Theatre in Los Angeles; and the Red Fern Theatre Company in New York City.

Here she describes how in 15 years streaming channels went from being a writer’s playground to an ever more precarious means to earn a basic living. She also explains why the current strike is crucial not only for Writers Guild members but also any worker whose profession is in danger of ever becoming just another gig.

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SAG-AFTRA Chicago local president Charles Andrew Gardner on strutting your stank through a strike

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Actor and educator Charles Andrew Gardner is starting his fourth term as president of the Chicago local branch of the union SAG-AFTRA.

He grew up in Chicago and studied acting at Northern Illinois University. He is a company member with TimeLine Theater and has acted on several of Chicago’s important stages. He has appeared on the Chicago-filmed TV shows “The Chi” and “Chicago P.D.,” and his film credits include “Long Ride Home” and “Olympia.” He has also shot several national commercials for brands including Hyundai and Liberty Mutual, and he has many credits as a voiceover artist.

This interview took place a little over five weeks after SAG-AFTRA, having failed to reach an agreement with AMPTP (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), went on strike on July 14, 2023. At the core of the disagreement between the actors and the producers is the amount of residuals actors should receive for streamed content. Also on the negotiating table are the burdens on actors of self-taped auditions, the amount producers should contribute to the union’s healthcare and pension funds and how the use of AI-generated likenesses of performers should be regulated.

Here Charles explains why he chose to remain in his hometown as he set out on his acting career and how a passion for education continues to inform his leadership style as he shepherds his fellow union members through this latest challenge.

https://www.charlesandrewgardner.com/

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Jazz legend, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, changed how she listened and then centered gender inclusivity in her artistic practice.

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Terri Lyne Carrington is one of the most respected jazz musicians in the world. Her drumming career started at the age of 10, which is when she officially got her musicians’ union card, and in the decades since, she’s earned countless accolades, including four Grammys, a Doris Duke Artist Award and an NEW Jazz Masters Fellowship. She has performed on over 100 recordings and has toured and recorded with jazz legends, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz and Esperanza Spalding.

In recent years she has turned her attention to correcting gender inequities in her field. In 2018 she founded the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at her alma mater, Berklee School of Music in Boston. She remains the Institute’s artistic director, ensuring that new generations of female, trans and non-binary musicians are welcomed to contribute their talents to the genre.

She’s also passionate about recognizing the contributions women have already made to jazz. To wit, she edited a recently published collection of music titled “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.” Alongside that project, she recorded an album titled “New Standards, Vol. 1” that features several compositions in the book. “New Standards” won Terri Lyne her most recent Grammy, and not surprisingly she plans eventually to record all 101 compositions.

Terri Lyne also recently curated a multi-artist multimedia installation titled “New Standards” that initially opened at the Carr Center in Detroit, where she is artistic director. This interview took place the morning after the closing party celebrating the exhibition of “New Standards” at Emerson Gallery of Contemporary Arts in Boston.

https://www.terrilynecarrington.com/

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Woodworker and furniture-maker Aspen Golann likes having rules to both heed and push back against in her craft, but she's also working to...

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Woodworker, furniture-maker, artist and educator Aspen Golann trained at the renowned North Bennet Street School in Boston and specializes in building furniture with the techniques of 18th and 19th century American fine woodworking. Her pieces aren’t mere modern iterations of a centuries-old tradition, however. They also often exhibit very modern feminist touches that acknowledge and subvert the power and function of furniture, traditionally made by men, that is created for domestic spaces, historically the domain of women.

Aspen’s work has earned her the admiration of the arts-and-crafts establishment. Her work has been featured in American Craft magazine, Fine Woodworking magazine and Architectural Digest. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Mineck Furniture Fellowship from the Society of Arts and Crafts, and this year The Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation gave her one of its prestigious $100,000 unrestricted Awards in Craft. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and in national and international craft workshops.

Three years ago, thanks in part to the Minreck Fellowship, Aspen created The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, a three-pronged project that provides free tools, education and mentorship for BIPOC, gender-expansive and female chair- and toolmakers seeking to build sustainable businesses.

Here Aspen describes how she herself homed in on her exact passion and explains the inventive ways in which The Chairmaker’s Toolbox makes a career in woodworking a little less daunting for craftspeople who have traditionally been excluded from the field.

https://www.aspengolann.com/

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Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's new artistic director, Adam W. McKinney, sets the stage for the company to thrive one hundred years from now.

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Barely four months into his tenure as the artistic director of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Adam W. McKinney is already implementing revolutionary ways to build on the company’s existing strengths with his gaze firmly set on its overall health a hundred years from now.

Adam has a remarkable resume as a ballet dancer, a choreographer, a professor, an activist and an arts leader. He danced with some of the world’s most renowned ballet companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Béjart Ballet in Lausanne, Switzerland.

He was the co-founder and co-director of DNAWORKS, an arts-and-service organization based in Fort Worth, TX, dedicated to dialogue and healing through the arts. Among DNAWORKS’ many projects is the interactive “Forth Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse.” Thanks to an app with augmented-reality features, the tour allows audiences — whether in person or virtually — to visit four sites in Fort Worth associated with the December 11, 1921 lynching of Mr. Rouse. DNAWORKS also produced “The Borders Project,” which uses a variety of creative performances and events to explore the histories of manmade borders and their effects on the human spirit and body. “The Borders Project” has so far worked on the U.S./Mexico and Israel/Palestine borders.

Adam was also awarded the NYU President’s Service Award for his dance work with populations who struggle with heroin addiction.

Before accepting his new post in Pittsburgh, he was the Associate Professor of Dance and Ballet at Texas Christian University, a tenured position he took on after having served as the inaugural Dance Department Chair at New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe.

In this interview he describes the core beliefs and practices he believes will make ballet a rigorous, sustainable contemporary artform accessible and welcoming to all for generations to come.

https://www.pbt.org/

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Designer Norma Baker-Flying Horse's fashions are acts of defiant storytelling.

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Norma Baker-Flying Horse’s designs are the stuff of fashion runway dreams. They display the sophistication, impeccable tailoring and gorgeous lines of her fashion idols, including Chanel and McQueen, but what makes them exceptional is that they incorporate gorgeous details that bespeak her Native heritage.

Norma Baker-Flying Horse, whose company, Red Berry Woman, bears her given Native name, is a member of the Hidatsa, Dakota Sioux and Assiniboine tribes, and her creations often bear designs from these cultures rendered via traditional techniques, including intricate beadwork and/or appliques of smoked hide, sometimes even feathers or shells. And all in a spectacular color palette.

Norma has been designing bespoke pieces in and for her community for years, but recently her reach has gone national and international. She showed at Paris Fashion Week in 2019; in 2022 she won Designer of the Year at Phoenix Fashion Week and was also the co-recipient of a Cultural Recognition Visual Arts Grammy; and just in the past year Miss Minnesota wore a Red Berry Woman gown in the Miss America pageant.

Here she explains how she wed her forebears’ cultural skills and know-how with a taste for glamor she unexpectedly cultivated as a little girl in toy heels on the North Dakota prairie to create a singular brand. She also describes the rigors of being a self-taught and self-guided business owner who won’t even let a C-section keep her from delivering a gown on schedule.

https://redberrywoman.com/

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For dancer/choreographer Michael Manson, Detroit Jit is not only a dance; it is also a key tool for cultural preservation and celebration...

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:25:00 +0000

Dancer/choreographer Michael Manson is an internationally recognized authority in Detroit Jit, a dance genre birthed in his hometown over 50 years ago. His talent earned him a national audience when he appeared on “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2015, and as a performer and teacher he has worked all over the States and as far away as Paris and La Paz. Once a student of famed dancer/choreography Rennie Harris, he now tours with Rennie Harris Puremovement in performances of “Caravan,” starring jazz scholar Terence Blanchard.

Last year, Mike, in conjunction with the non-profit Living Arts, was one of five recipients of a prestigious Joyce Foundation grant for artists working in the Great Lakes region. Thanks to the grant’s support, Mike has been able to commit to his passion, namely teaching young people in Detroit about their city’s rich cultural history and ensuring that Detroit Jit is recognized, respected and studied as a distinctive American dance genre.

The Joyce Foundation grant also allowed him to create “Rhythm of the Feet,” a concert-length dance production that not only centers Detroit Jit but also, thanks to a cast of professional dancers from around the country, places it in the context of other seminal American footwork styles, such as tap, Chicago footwork, House, Memphis Jookin and Lindy Hop.

Here he describes how he developed his passion for cultural preservation in tandem with his dance skills and explains why he takes pride in seeing his students overtake him … as long as they remain respectful of the Jit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSSGccDQNXM&t=51s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ioq0MK1mhdg

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p7ZHQqOEX_0

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Maura Brewer makes art by laundering money...through art!

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 16:37:24 +0000

Early in her career, Maura video essayist and performance artist Maura Brewer explored the relationship between representations of women in Hollywood films and the structures of contemporary capitalism. Through several often-tongue-in-cheek video pieces, she focused on the actor Jessica Chastain, who at the time was being typecast in films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” as a steely go-getter who paid a steep personal price for her ambition.

In recent years, Maura’s focus has shifted from representations created by capitalism to the underlying financial structures that uphold it. To wit, she is deep into a years-long project titled “Private Client Services” that explores how the rich launder money through art acquisition and sales. In this project, which Maura is documenting meticulously through video and writing, she herself is doing the very thing she is studying, namely laundering money through art.

Maura is not entering this world entirely dewy-eyed, however. For several years, in addition to being an artist, she has worked as an experienced professional private investigator, garnering skills that are proving invaluable in her forays into the world of money laundering.

Her work has been exhibited at spaces including MoMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her projects have appeared in The Guardian, CBS News and The Paris Review. She is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow, a 2022 Creative Capital fellow, and a recipient of the Fellowship for Visual Artists at the California Community Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Master Artist Fellowship.

In this interview, she details how she, once a fiber artist, harnessed her own investigative talents to create performance and video art about a crime that uses art as its primary instrument.

https://maurabrewer.com/

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Pro-wrestling aficionada, comedian Robin Tran, on how she's stayed in the comedy ring when it seemed likely she'd go over the top rope

Tue, 30 May 2023 11:34:31 +0000

Robin Tran has been performing standup comedy for the past 11 years, but it is only in the last eight that she has been performing under the name Robin. Before her transition in 2015, she presented as male and used the name Robert.

During the pandemic, she gained a sizeable and loyal following via TikTok, and in 2021 she was featured as one of the “New Faces” of the year by the influential Just for Laughs festival. In the last couple of years, she’s enjoyed some very prominent appearances on various TV and streaming platforms, including “Comedy Central Roast” and Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring.” Last year she also appeared on the Netflix show “That’s My Time With David Letterman.”

In this episode, Robin describes how she’s managed to cultivate and grow her career despite an industry that at first didn’t know what to do with her and explains why, when all is said and done, she may always remain “a pro-wrestling bad guy. “

https://www.instagram.com/robintran04/

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Actor/dancer/choreographer/DASL Alexandria Wailes on why you can't just hire one ASL interpreter and call it a day

Tue, 16 May 2023 15:17:35 +0000

Alexandria Wailes is an accomplished actor, choreographer and dancer who just this last season appeared on Broadway in the acclaimed revival of Ntozake Shange’s seminal play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The production, directed by UNCSA alum Camille A. Brown, held one notable surprise, the use of American Sign Language, since Alexandria, who is Deaf, played the Lady in Purple, a part that had not originally been written as a Deaf character.

This was not her first time on Broadway. She understudied Marlee Matlin in the revival of “Spring Awakening,” and then she went on in the part for the run’s final month. Before that, she acted in the legendary Deaf West Theatre production of “Big River,” which after its Broadway run toured throughout the U.S. and even played not once but twice in Tokyo.

She’s acted in some of the country’s most respected regional theaters, from Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theater to Los Angeles’s Kirk Douglas Theater, and she has also been featured in several popular TV shows, including “Nurse Jackie” and “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.” She is a member of Heidi Latsky Dance Company, and she is the co-founder of BHO5, a company whose mission is, “to usher in a new era of authentic artistic representation of American deaf people.”

In this episode, Alexandria describes how she crafted her remarkable career as a multidisciplinary performer and explains the work that must still be done to ensure that not only Deaf but also hearing performers can feel fully informed and bolstered in work that features Deaf artists and/or subjects.

http://www.alexandriawailes.com/home.html

https://www.bho5.org/

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dots: three visionary scenic designers swap individual plaudits for the creativity and security of a business partnership

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:03:42 +0000

Perhaps the hottest ticket on Broadway right now is to the starry revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. Should you be lucky enough to score that ticket, you will find an unusual credit in the Playbill: scenic design by dots.

Barely two years old, dots is a collective of three talented international designers who decided soon after earning their MFA’s at NYU to create a unique partnership. They are Andrew Moerdyk, who hails from South Africa; Kimie Nishikawa, born in Japan; and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, a native of Colombia.

Their partnership, truly unique in the American theater, is clearly paying off. Not only are they about to make their Broadway debut at a very early stage in their respective careers but their work has also been seen in some of the highest-profile theatrical projects of recent months, including “Dark Disabled Stories” at the Public Theater and Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull.”

In this episode, the three designers explain how they developed the initial idea for their partnership during the pandemic lockdown and describe how the stability the collaboration provides more than makes up for no longer seeing their individual names in the production credits.

https://designbydots.com/

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Director Sean Daniels plans an intervention for the performing-arts industry, which is failing its most vulnerable artists.

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 12:06:00 +0000

Theater director Sean Daniels has outstanding credits to his name. He co-founded the company Dad’s Garage, which is now a cornerstone of Atlanta’s theatrical scene, and then went on to lead Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts. He also spent four years as associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville where he oversaw the sadly now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays and directed many of its world premieres over five years.

The credit that brings him the greatest pride, however, is just a tad more recent, however: person in long-term recovery. For almost two decades as he charted his remarkable artistic path, he was also increasingly hobbled by his addiction to alcohol, and as is so common for people with substance-abuse disorders, it took him several tries before he was finally able to manage his disease. Sean detailed his painful, absurd and often surprisingly hilarious journey to sobriety in his play “The White Chip,” which enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run in 2019.

Now, over a decade into his sobriety, he has added a new credit to his resume: advocate. After a widely lauded stint as artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, Sean recently became the associate director of Florida Studio Theatre. At FST not only will he head the theater’s new-play-development program, but he will also work as the inaugural director of his brainchild, The Recovery Project. The Recovery Project is an initiative working to heal the stigma of addiction and recovery through the development of new plays, theatre-education programs and outreach.

In this interview, Sean explains why those working in the performing arts are especially vulnerable to substance-abuse disorders and details how he hopes his advocacy will establish new support systems to catch struggling artists long before they fall as far as he once did.

https://www.floridastudiotheatre.org/

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Chef J Chong has built her business not with bricks and mortar but with fundamentally artistic values

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 10:30:00 +0000

J Chong was a well-respected chef in her community of Asheville, NC for years before she suddenly acquired a national profile thanks to her participation in HBO Max’s cooking-competition show, “The Big Brunch.” Suddenly J, who only recently had decided to strike out on her own by creating J Chong Eats, had a new platform on which to extol the flavors of her bedrock cuisine, traditional Cantonese.

She also had a platform on which to express her unique perspective as a Canadian Asian queer woman making food and creating a business in the American South. In “The Big Brunch,” her talent, honed from years of working in some of the finest kitchens in foodie-destination Asheville, is on full display, as are her resourcefulness and kindness. Watching her at work, it is easy to understand why her craft is known as a culinary art. Furthermore, her vision for J Chong Eats, which relies on pop-ups rather than a bricks-and-mortar restaurant to sell its creations, bespeaks a nimbleness and commitment to community outreach that are hallmarks of so many of the artists we feature on “Art Restart.”

Which is why it was surprising to discover that J, upon receiving an invitation to appear on “Art Restart,” did not initially consider herself an artist.

In this interview, J takes a deep dive into her artistry and explains her unique take on how she intends to share her talent with her community.

https://www.instagram.com/jchong_eats/

https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GY0WzfASbP4OEqQEAAACX

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Drag clown Anthony Hudson celebrates horror onstage -- and stands up to homophobic horror off-stage.

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Anthony Hudson might have earned the tongue-in-cheek title of “Portland OR’s premier drag clown” even if he were not Portland’s – and perhaps even the country’s -- only drag clown. He has delighted and terrified Portland audiences in equal measure as his alter-ego Carla Rossi for over 12 years, performing carefully honed satire in a variety of venues, including the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.

At Portland’s historic Hollywood Theatre, both Anthony and Carla program and host “Queer Horror,” the only LGBT horror screening-and-performance series in the country. Anthony also co-hosts with writer Stacie Ponder the queer feminist horror podcast “Gaylords of Darkness.”

A member of the Confederated Grand Ronde Tribes, Siletz, he recently was one of four Indigenous artists to present work in an exhibit titled “Always Here” at The Arts Center in Corvallis, OR. In the exhibit, he and his fellow artists separately and collaboratively created conceptual pieces that upended perceptions of what Native art can or should be.

Anthony also wrote the solo autobiographical play “Looking for Tiger Lily,” which he has performed in theaters all over the country and has toured internationally, from Melbourne to Vancouver. He is currently adapting the play into a book.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Anthony explains how he developed Carla Rossi and her particular flavor of drag performance and describes the joys and dangers of being an outspoken queer clown when drag in particular has become such a dangerous cultural flashpoint.

https://www.thecarlarossi.com/

https://theartscenter.net/always-here/

https://www.grandronde.org/history-culture/culture/chachalu-museum-and-cultural-center/

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Bassoonist Brian Petkovich on leading San Antonio's musical phoenix, the brand-new San Antonio Philharmonic

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Last summer, bassoonist Brian Petkovich lost his job and then got a job that had never existed before. Not long after the San Antonio Symphony, with whom Brian played for 25 years, shut its doors, he became the inaugural president of the nascent San Antonio Philharmonic, which as of this writing is seven months old.

For a brief moment in 2022, it seemed like San Antonio, the nation’s seventh-largest city, might not have a major orchestra. The musicians of the San Antonio Symphony, protesting significant personnel and salary cuts demanded by the Board, had gone on strike in September of 2021, and nine months later, on June 16, 2022, the Symphony Society of San Antonio declared it was shutting down the 83-year-old institution for good, declaring a Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The musicians had not been idle throughout this tumult, however. They had founded the Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony (MOSAS) through which they raised private funds that allowed them to perform through the spring and early summer of 2022 in venues throughout the city. When the Symphony’s demise was finalized, they set about creating a new permanent ensemble, appointing Brian as its president, and on September 16, 2022, the brand-new San Antonio Philharmonic played its first concert to a rapt audience at First Baptist Church of San Antonio.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Brian reveals some of the assumptions and miscalculations that led to the Symphony’s dissolution and discusses his and his fellow musicians’ dreams for how their new classical-music ensemble will serve San Antonio for years to come.

https://saphil.org/team/brian-petkovich/

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Sound artist Brian Harnetty plays the beauty of Appalachian Ohio back to itself.

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 11:30:00 +0000

For sound artist and ethnographer Brian Harnetty, listening is perhaps even more important than composing. He is passionate about capturing the essence of a place through his creations, and his work therefore involves venturing into towns and landscapes armed with his microphone and recording everything from ambient sounds to oral histories. It also involves in-depth research in archives and libraries to discover a community’s often forgotten history, images and archival recordings.

The geographic area to which he is most devoted is Appalachian Ohio. His parents and their forebears hail from those mountains, and though he currently lives a 90-minute drive away in Columbus, OH, over the years he has spent enough time in the area not only to gain a deep understanding of its landscape and people but also to earn the community’s trust, an essential component of his work.

He wishes his compositions — sound collages might be a better description — to have a social impact. Not only do those who listen to his creations gain a rich appreciation for a region that for decades has been marked and scarred by extractive industries, but the community members who contribute their memories hear the richness of their culture and history echoed back to them.

Brian, who is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, has released nine albums. The influential music magazine MOJO gave two of his most recent albums, “Shawnee, Ohio” and “Words and Silences,” five stars out of five, and “Wire” magazine placed “Words and Silences” at position number five on its top 10 list of 2022’s modern-composition albums.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Brian explains how he arrived at his sonic ethnography practice and what strategies he uses to make his work with the utmost integrity.

https://www.brianharnetty.com/

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Each cut in Sukanya Mani's paper sculptures tells part of a deeply researched story.

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:32:00 +0000

Sukanya Mani’s works seem light as air, intricate and mesmerizing paper sculptures that can move and twirl with the slightest breeze. What may not be immediately apparent, however, is that Sukanya has made each irreversible cut in her material with the intention of representing — albeit abstractly — a weighty story or theme she’s explored in depth. The way gravity affects light; the relationship between physiological, psychological and cosmological time; how clothing and adornment affect how a woman’s sexuality is perceived: These are just a few of the themes Sukanya has researched before picking up her scissors and utility knives to start her next site-specific project

In recent years, the self-taught artist has made quite an impression on her hometown of St. Louis, Mo and the region around it. She has been commissioned to create public works for several Missouri cities — including Poplar Bluff, Lee’s Summit and Brentwood. Last year a piece of hers was displayed in St. Louis’ international airport, and she was commissioned to create a piece for Florissant Performing Arts Center.

After a lengthy research-and-interview process, she’s currently completing “The Beside Between Beyond Project,” an installation that explores domestic abuse, particularly as it impacts immigrant and refugee populations.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Sukanya explains how her immigrant story led to her picking up the utility knife and what might make it easier for other newcomers to the country to express their artistic selves.

www.sukanyamani.com

https://camstl.org/exhibitions/teen-museum-studies-presents-sukanya-mani-weight-of-shadows/

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Despite a devastating flood, visual artist Lacy Hale burrows her roots even deeper into the Appalachian community that has supported her...

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 16:57:46 +0000

When the devastating floods of July 2022 tore through the mountain communities of Southeastern Kentucky, visual artist Lacy Hale lost her studio and a trove of works in progress. Since that tragic and deadly night, though, even as many of her neighbors in Whitesburg have been forced to move away, one thing she has not lost is her determination to remain in the mountains where she grew up. They are in her blood, and they inspire her art, just as she intends for her art to inspire the people of her corner of Appalachia.

Lacy has been making art in Whitesburg since returning from her studies at Pratt Institute in New York City in the early 2000s, and it has become her full-time occupation since 2017. In addition to being a painter and a muralist, she is also a printmaker and over the years has created and sold an array of items bearing her designs. One of her most recognized designs is “No Hate in My Holler,” a graphic she created in 2017 in response to a scheduled neo-Nazi gathering in a nearby town. “No Hate in My Holler” quickly appeared on billboards and T-shirts and also became a popular hashtag, garnering attention from national media outlets.

Lacy’s murals can be seen in communities throughout Kentucky and Virginia. Among the honors she has received are the Eastern Kentucky Artist Impact Award as well as grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Great Meadows Foundation and the Tanne Foundation Award. In 2016 she co-founded EpiCentre Arts, which supports and advocates for art and artists throughout the Appalachian Mountains.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Lacy explains why and how her artistry is inseparable from her community and the landscape in which it nestles. She also describes that devastating July night and what it’s taken to recommit to her art, her business and her home despite losing almost everything.

https://www.lacyhale.com/

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Don't tell choreographer and photographer Trey McIntyre what success is. He knows it when he feels it.

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Described by The New York Times as “one of America’s most peculiarly original dance poets,” choreographer Trey McIntyre has made a habit of defying expectations throughout his career. A graduate of UNCSA, he went on to the Houston Ballet Academy where upon finishing his training, he was given the position of Choreographic Apprentice at the Ballet, a post created specifically for him.

As his freelance career started to take off, he did something completely unexpected. Rather than tether himself to a large coastal metropolis or a European capital, he decided to settle down in Boise, ID, where he created Trey McIntyre Projects, a vibrant dance company that quickly garnered the world’s attention, spending up to 22 weeks a year on national and international touring. Then 10 years later in 2014, at the height of the company’s success, Trey decided to fold the company and return to freelancing.

He continues to be an in-demand choreographer around the world — just before the pandemic he created works for Queensland Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and The Washington Ballet — but lately he has also been diving into a new artistic passion. He has a photographic practice, creating kinetic and often erotic tableaux of the human body, that he supports through a network of fans via a Patreon account. In 2018 he also directed “Gravity Hero,” a documentary about his journey with his Boise-based dance company.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Trey discusses why and how he has always pushed himself past comfort zones in order to feed his voracious curiosity and wonders what it will take for dance companies to remain equally curious and nimble in the digital age.

www.treycool.com

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Siblings Crystal and Rico Worl honor Tlingit and Athabascan tradition with ultra-contemporary design

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Siblings Crystal and Rico Worl have been making art together in Juneau, AK since they were children, and as adults, not only are they thriving as professional artists, they also co-own a successful online business, Trickster Company, whose mission is to promote innovative Indigenous art.

Members of the Tlingit and Athabascan clans, Crystal and Rico continue to explore the cultural traditions of their heritage, studying at length with master craftsmen and artists, and the formline style prevalent in the Pacific Northwest lies at the heart of their practice. However, whether using new technology in their art or applying traditional design to everyday objects from basketballs to playing cards — Trickster Company is currently featuring the “Cards Against Colonialism: Western Expansion” set — they remain committed to keeping Indigenous art a living, breathing and evolving cultural touchstone.

The scope and reach of their work continue to expand. In July of 2021, the U.S. Postal Service issued the Raven Story stamp bearing a Rico Worl design, and in the last year Crystal has painted two enormous murals – one in Anchorage, the other in Juneau — that with striking vibrancy counteract a long tradition of whitewashing Alaska’s history.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Rico and Crystal delve into the many ways they are working and playing together and apart to ensure that all Alaskans, as well as the millions of visitors to the state, learn to celebrate the value of authenticity.

https://crystalworl.com/

https://ricoworl.com/

https://trickstercompany.com/

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Glass artist Cedric Mitchell on joining an exclusive club...and then throwing its doors wide open

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Cedric Mitchell is a glass artist based in Los Angeles who for the last 10 years has created an array of both decorative and functional pieces. He has completed residencies at some of the most prestigious craft institutes in the country, including Penland School of Craft, Pilchuck Glass School and Corning Museum of Glass. In 2018 he officially launched his own business, Cedric Mitchell Design, through which he continues to create blown glass for retailers nationwide.

Cedric is also the events-and-resource manager for Crafting the Future, a nonprofit that works to diversify the fields of art, craft and design by connecting BIPOC artists with opportunities that will help them thrive. In the last three years, Crafting the Future has provided 70 scholarships for artists and craftspeople to attend instructional programs throughout the country.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Cedric, who to this day remains one of the very few Black glass blowers in the field, describes how a combination of curiosity, initiative and generosity has led him to be an admired professional as well as a mentor in the field.

https://cedricmitchelldesign.com/

https://www.craftingthefuture.org/

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Theater artists Mallory Catlett and Aaron Landsman on remaining unique and humble

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 10:30:00 +0000

While working on a project in Portland, OR over a decade ago, theater-maker Aaron Landsman accepted a colleague’s invitation to attend a city-council meeting. In between moments of boredom typical to such meetings, Landsman, who had made a career of making works of theater in a variety of unusual settings, glimpsed inherently theatrical moments. The clincher came when a well-dressed sixtysomething by the name of Pete Colt, clearly well-known to and barely tolerated by the city councilors, testified about the drug-related paraphernalia that littered a children’s park in the city. At the end of his testimony, to make his point, he dumped the contents of his briefcase — the very litter he'd railed against — on the table in front of him.

Thus was sown the seed of what would become “City Council Meeting,” a participatory theatrical event that Aaron — along with his collaborators, director Mallory Catlett and theater artist and visual designer Jim Findlay — mounted in several American cities, including New York City, Tempe, AZ and Houston, TX. Just this past summer, University of Iowa Press published Mallory and Aaron’s “The City We Make Together: City Council Meeting’s Primer for Participation,” a thorough and galvanizing examination of their process that is sure to inspire a new generation of artists looking to engage communities in the intricacies of making democracy.

Since “City Council Meeting,” Mallory and Aaron have continued building their remarkable and eclectic careers. Mallory is now the co-artistic director of the legendary Mabou Mines theater company and is developing several new operas, and Aaron is artist in residence at Abrons Art Center in New York and is preparing the premiers of “Night Keeper,” a new work commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, and “Trouble Hunters,” a performance created in collaboration with artists in Serbia.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Mallory, who studied dance as a high schooler at UNCSA, and Aaron describe how they developed their unique theatrical viewpoints and esthetic and how throughout their careers they’ve succeeded in hewing to their iconoclastic artistic passions.

https://mallorycatlett.net/

https://www.maboumines.org/

http://www.thinaar.com/

https://perfectcity.org/

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For bassoonist Midori Samson, holism beats so-called excellence hands-down.

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 10:30:00 +0000

With a bachelor’s degree from Juilliard and a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Midori Samson is not only exquisitely trained in her instrument, the bassoon. Throughout her education she also studied social work, even minoring in the field as she earned her Ph.D. For Midori — who describes herself as equally a bassoonist, educator, activist and scholar — her commitment to equity and social inclusion is inseparable from her artistry.

She is a longtime member of Arts Ignite, a non-profit that works with artists to unlock children’s imaginations and potential. Arts Ignite works throughout the country and as far away as India and the Philippines. She is also the proud co-founder and artistic director of Trade Winds Ensemble, a group of professional musicians who teach workshops incorporating music composition, songwriting, interactive games and creative writing to children around the world. Midori’s most recent educational foray abroad took place a few days after this interview when she flew to Turkey to take part in past Art Restart guest Sahba Aminikia’s Flying Carpet Festival, where she was looking forward to creating music with refugee children.

In this conversation with Pier Carlo Talenti, Midori explains why her musicianship relies on her social-justice work and vice-versa and discusses the many ways in which the teaching and performing of classical music could be transformed to be radically welcoming.

https://www.midorisamson.com/

https://artsignite.org/

https://www.tradewindsensemble.org/

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Sekou Cooke translates hip-hop culture into built form

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Though Sekou Cooke did not invent the term or the theory of hip-hop architecture, he is one of its leading proponents and practitioners. An architect, urban designer, researcher and curator born and raised in Jamaica and educated at Cornell and Harvard, he currently serves as the Director of the Master of Urban Design at UNC Charlotte. He also owns and operates Sekou Cooke STUDIO, which recently earned a 2022 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York.

Sekou’s recent projects include “Grids + Griots,” an architectural intervention commissioned for the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the soon-to-be-built Syracuse Hip-Hop Headquarters that will convert a derelict building in the city’s Near Westside into event and performance venues and a variety of education and office spaces. Two of his designs are also now included on the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety’s list of Approved Standard Plans for Additional Dwelling Units.

In 2021, Bloomsbury published Sekou’s “Hip-Hop Architecture,” a monograph that, true to its title and inspiration, is a manifesto and exploration constructed more like a music album combined with expansive liner notes than a traditional academic tome, with its foreword written by noted sociologist and author Michael Eric Dyson.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Sekou draws a line between the fluid and inherently anti-authoritarian nature of hip-hop culture and the kind of equitable and fully participatory built environments hip-hop architecture envisions.

https://www.sekoucooke.com/

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hiphop-architecture-9781350116146/

https://www.archdaily.com/435952/keep-talking-kanye-an-architect-s-defense-of-kanye-west

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Rural and proud: In Green River, UT, Maria Sykes and Epicenter place creativity in service to their small community.

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Maria Sykes earned her architecture degree from Auburn University just as the 2008 recession paralyzed the nation. Unable to find a job right away, she decided to join a classmate who was volunteering with AmeriCorps in the small town of Green River, UT. The plan was to spend a summer in Green River before buckling down to launch her architecture career. That summer turned into her own yearlong commitment to AmeriCorps, which then turned into a second year, with Maria always thinking she’d leave when the economy turned around.

What she hadn’t planned on was falling deeply in love with the place and its people. To wit, thirteen years later, she remains not only an enthusiastic Green River resident but also an invaluable community leader. In 2009 she co-founded Epicenter, a community-service nonprofit that over the years has served Green River in a number of ways, from offering low-cost home-repair services to elderly, disabled and low-income homeowners to rehabbing abandoned community parks. Today she remains Epicenter’s executive director.

Maria’s own artistic imagination drives much of Epicenter’s work, but she has established a pipeline that guarantees a steady influx of fresh creative visions. Through its Frontier Fellowship program, Epicenter has welcomed scores of artists from around the country and as far away as the UK to reside in Green River, develop their own work and engage with the community in creative, respectful and galvanizing ways.

This year the team at Epicenter will proudly mark the culmination of their deep investment in the community when they break ground on Canal Commons, their first multi-unit affordable-housing development, planned in close partnership with Green River stakeholders.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Maria explains the intricacies, joys and challenges of serving a remote, rural community through artistic engagement.

www.ruralandproud.org

https://vimeo.com/161476495?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=2213578

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Photographer Shedrick Pelt on capturing the January 6 attack on the Capitol through a Black lens

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 10:30:00 +0000

On January 6, 2021, hearing that Trump supporters were descending on the U.S. Capitol, freelance photographer Shedrick Pelt grabbed goggles, a respirator and his Canon 5D Mark 4 and ran to the scene to document the event. The arresting images he captured on that terrifying day constitute “Attack on Democracy: Through the Lens of a Black Photojournalist,” a traveling exhibit that opened at Gallery O in Washington, DC one year after the attack on the Capitol.

Shedrick’s instinct to run towards the danger of that day was based in a bone-deep commitment to community and local storytelling. Moving to D.C. in late 2017, he quickly embedded himself in that city’s artistic community, working with such arts organizations as Exposed DC and Dupont Underground, where he serves as cultural ambassador. He currently sits on the board of Focus on the Story, an internationally recognized non-profit dedicated to promoting the work of leading photographers and providing education and resources for visual artists.

His work has been featured in Washingtonian magazine and in exhibits at such institutions as the International Center of Photography in New York and at the Phillips Collection in D.C. He also curates the Look Hear Gallery, which is a revolving gallery that features the Black experience in DC through the lens of Black photographers. And as of 2022, he is a contributing photographer for Getty Images.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Shedrick describes the artistic journey that led him to the Capitol on that fateful day and makes a case for supporting hyper-local artists and storytellers.

https://www.sdotpdotmedia.com/home

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"Don't be ashy!" -- Performance artist Ayo Janeen Jackson pivoted her dance career to honor and care for the Black body through art as we...

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Ayo Janeen Jackson enjoyed an enviable dance career after earning her BFA at UNCSA. She danced with two of the world’s most renowned contemporary companies — Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Ballet Preljocaj — before joining the company of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

Yearning to learn more ways to express herself, though, she shifted her career path. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a Master’s in Interdisciplinary Arts, and today she remains a performing artist firmly rooted in her body with the difference that she has added several skills to her artistic repertoire, including filmmaking and font design.

Along with recent “Art Restart” guest Gregg Mozgala, Ayo received a 2022 Artpreneur Alumni of the Year Award from UNCSA. The award recognizes not only Ayo’s artistic experimentations but also a new skin-care business she has created that is inspired by her artistic research and .

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Ayo describes why and how she set out to broaden her artistic horizons and explains the historic and artistic ethic behind her new business venture.

https://www.ayojackson.com/

https://vimeo.com/498440544/5ea55cbbf3

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Actor and artistic director Gregg Mozgala uses theater to put the disabled body on display with unassailable authenticity.

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 10:30:00 +0000

UNCSA alumnus Gregg Mozgala, after years of performing on some of Off-Broadway’s finest stages, is enjoying a well-earned banner year. He recently completed a national tour playing the title character in “Teenage Dick,” a modern take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III” centered on the experience of a high school student with cerebral palsy, and this summer he appeared in “Richard III” itself, alongside film and theater star Danai Gurira, in the Public Theater’s revered Shakespeare in the Park season. This fall he will cap off the year with his Broadway debut in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Cost of Living,” reprising the leading role he performed in the play’s premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018.

Gregg can credit that success not only to his acting but also his producing skills. In 2012, determined to make disability and people with disabilities more visible on the nation’s stages, he founded The Apothetae, a New York-based theater company dedicated to the production of works that explore and illuminate the disabled experience. The Apothetae has developed several new plays and adaptations from and with both established and up-and-coming artists — disabled and non-disabled, Deaf and hearing — and it is through The Apothetae’s commissioning program that playwright Mike Lew completed “Teenage Dick.”

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Gregg describes how an understanding of his cultural lineage as a disabled performer led him to create a company that celebrates displaying disabled bodies and their stories with unassailable authenticity.

http://www.greggmozgala.com/

http://www.theapothetae.org/

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Multidisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya on how she protects her explorer's spirit and invites strangers to join her in her disc...

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 10:30:00 +0000

A neuroscientist-turned-artist, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, has long known how to “make the invisible visible,” as her artist statement declares. Her ability to make intricate scientific concepts accessible through art and design earned her a TED residency as well as the opportunity to speak on two TED mainstages. Her numerous works — including an AR installation immersing viewers in the world of microbes and “Beyond Curie,” a project that harnessed both technology and design to celebrate the most badass women in STEM history — have been featured in spaces all over the world, from a highway tunnel in the Netherlands to New York’s Cooper Union.

In the last couple of years, Amanda has focused her talents on engaging with and revealing often-hidden parts of the human psyche, from the bigotry and racist violence that have reared their heads throughout the country to the cumulative trauma and grief of the COVID crisis. As an artist-in-residence with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, she created a citywide mural project titled “I Still Believe in Our City” to counter anti-Asian violence and center the lives and experiences of Asian Americans and people of color as crucial threads in the American fabric. Soon after the shootings at a spa in Atlanta in 2021, Time magazine featured images from the series on its cover.

Pier Carlo Talenti spoke to Amanda while she was taking a brief break from troubleshooting one in a series of installations on Lincoln Center plaza in New York City. In this interview she describes the challenges and joys of expanding her artistic practice to invite even more collaborators — from institutions to the public at large — into her creations.

https://www.alonglastname.com/

https://www.istillbelieve.nyc/about

https://www.lincolncenter.org/series/summer-for-the-city/s/GATHER:%20A%20series%20of%20monuments%20and%20rituals

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Lear deBessonet and Clyde Valentín galvanize community artmaking to achieve local and national healing

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 10:30:00 +0000

It’s a good thing that director Lear deBessonet and producer Clyde Valentín have extensive experience in community-engaged participatory art — nine years ago she founded the acclaimed Public Works program at the Public Theater in New York City; he was the inaugural director of Ignite/Arts, a renowned community-arts incubator in Dallas since 2015 — because the scope of their newest project, One Nation/One Project, would overwhelm most artists and administrators.

One Nation/One Project, a partnership with the National League of Cities, is a truly national multi-year health-and-wellness initiative. Over the next two years, 18 communities scattered throughout the country will create hyper-local participatory and collaborative art works that in July of 2024 will be shared with a national audience. It’s a hugely ambitious project, a reimagining of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project, that looks to capitalize on a well-documented fact, namely that participating in the arts makes individuals and communities healthier.

Among the first cohort of nine sites that One Nation/One Project recently announced is the Kenan Institute’s very own community of Winston-Salem and surrounding Forsythe County. The Institute is working with several local partners — including the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County, Forsyth County Department of Public Health, United Health Centers and the City of Winston-Salem Department of Community Development — to support the program.

The other eight communities chosen are Gainesville, FL; Chicago, IL; Utica, MS; Providence, RI; Rhinelander, WI; Harlan County, KY; Edinburg, TX; and Phillips County, AR, focusing on the cities of Elaine and Helena.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Lear and Clyde describe how they conceived and designed their ambitious project and share their hopes for the national healing the 18 local creations might engender.

https://www.onenationoneproject.com/

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Nimble in Boise: Lauren Edson and Andrew Stensaas on founding multimedia company LED.

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Partners in life, love and art, dancer/choreographer Lauren Edson and musician/composer Andrew Stensaas founded the remarkable performance company LED in Boise, ID in 2015 and remain its co-leaders

Lauren, the company’s artistic director, trained at UNCSA and Juilliard before dancing with the renowned dance company Trey McIntyre Projects for many years. Andrew, LED’s creative director, is a self-taught musician and composer who played with two critically acclaimed bands — one in Portland, OR; the other in Boise, ID — before establishing himself as a teacher and composer/songwriter at Boise Rock School.

Just five years after LED’s founding, Dance Magazine included the company in its influential “25 to Watch” list, but it wouldn’t be accurate to call LED a dance company. Instead, what Lauren and Andrew have created is a creative laboratory that accommodates each their artistic backgrounds and interests and challenges them to keep exploring, whether through live performance, film or community happenings and always with movement and music at the core.

LED has performed in venues all over the Western US, and their most recent short film, “Waters into Wilderness,” screened at festivals all over the world including the prestigious San Francisco Dance Film Festival.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Lauren and Edson discuss how their distinct artistic personalities combined with their dedicated partnership to create the special sauce that keeps their young company nimble, inventive and exciting to the creative team and their audiences alike.

https://www.ledboise.com/

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Composer Brittany J. Green cultivates community and a deep listening practice

Mon, 23 May 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Composer Brittany J. Green is already making waves in the world of new classical music. However, given the variety of inspirations that pervades her work – from computer-coding languages to Black feminist theory – and her growing passion for electronica and for DJing her own sets, she is very much beating an artistic path that disregards the boundaries of genre.

Her work has been performed at concerts and festivals throughout the United States, including the Boulanger Initiative’s WoCo Fest and New York City Electronic Music Festival, and last year she recorded a new piece with the Atlanta Symphony that was released online in January 2022 as part of the Symphony’s “Concerts for Young People” series.

A recent recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Scholarship and the ASCAP Foundation’s Morton Gould Award, Brittany is currently in residence at Duke University in Durham, NC, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition as a Deans Graduate Fellow.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Brittany discusses the two qualities that guide the evolution of her compositional practice: her ability to learn through deep listening and her commitment to cross-disciplinary collaborations.

https://www.brittanyjgreen.com/

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ChristinaMaria Patiño Xochitlzihuatl Houle decolonizes the interview itself!

Mon, 09 May 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Artist, activist and visionary ChristinaMaria Xochitlzihuatl Patiño Houle is the co-founder and lead visionary of Las Imaginistas, a socially engaged art collective working to liberate the public imagination.

Several of Las Imaginistas’ projects have centered on Brownsville, TX, including “Taller de Permiso,” an arts and economic-justice campaign. Through hands-on art-making workshops and events, “Taller de Permiso” harnessed the community’s collective imagination to parse and reimagine the municipal permitting process, particularly as it affects small businesses operating in communities of color.

Another Las Imaginistas project is “Borders Like Water,” an ongoing international cross-cultural collaboration between healers, visionaries and thought leaders. “Borders Like Water” centers ancestral wisdoms and environmental understanding to answer the question, “If borders have been like ice, how can they move like water?”

ChristinaMaria is also the Weaver for Voces Unidas, a network focused on immigration and community development issues serving the multi-state Rio Grande Valley.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, ChristinaMaria, who is passionate about decolonizing longstanding historical and cultural practices, shares her deep unease with the traditional interview process and its fraught history and power dynamics. She then describes how she herself has honed her own listening practice when she visits and learns from Indigenous communities throughout the Americas.

https://www.christinapatinohoule.com/

https://www.lasimaginistas.com/

https://www.giarts.org/blog/christinamaria-patino-xochitlzihuatl-houle/art-money-and-apocalypse-lots-questions-few

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For Artistic Director Jacob Padrón, a radical change at his theater is an opportunity for collective reimagining

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:30:00 +0000

In February of 2022, Long Wharf Theatre, one of the country’s most respected regional theaters, released a bold statement. Starting with its 2022/23 season, the theater will not renew the lease on the space it has occupied for 57 years on the outskirts of New Haven, CT. Rather, under the leadership of artistic director Jacob Padrón, who joined Long Wharf in late 2018, the theater will commit at least for a few years to an itinerant production model that “will prioritize equity, accessibility and transparency, guided by three core pillars: revolutionary partnerships, artistic innovation, and radical inclusion.”

Coming at a time when, especially in the wake of the pandemic, theaters all over the country are grappling with ways to reinvigorate and diversify their production models as well as their audience base, Long Wharf’s announcement made waves. Did this mark the beginning of the end of the traditional regional-theater model?

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Jacob — who is also the founder and artistic director of The Sol Project and whose career includes innovative producing stints at such august institutions as Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and New York’s Public Theater — explains the impetus for this sea change in the theater’s production model. He also imagines a new path forward not only for his own theater but for the field as a whole.

https://longwharf.org/

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Landscape architect Daniel Woodroffe tells stories of joy and ingenuity through his urban landscapes.

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 10:30:00 +0000

In the twelve years since Austin-based landscape architect Daniel Woodroffe founded his firm, dwg, it has become a leader in sustainable design and low-impact development.

The firm has worked on projects all over the world but has made a particularly deep impression on the landscape of its home city. One of dwg’s most remarkable years-long project finally came to fruition when in August of 2021 Waterloo Park, at 11 acres downtown Austin’s biggest greenspace, opened to the public. Daniel’s company served as the local landscape architect team for world-renowned landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh.

Waterloo Park is a gorgeous urban oasis that features a 1.5-mile hike-and-bike trail, sinuous bridges, expansive lawns and a 5,000-seat amphitheater that has quickly become a premier music venue. The park is also universally accessible with barrier-free design. What a casual visitor might not necessarily know or notice is that the park was created to reclaim an urban overflow creek that over the years had not only often flooded but become a dumping ground. Now, thanks to dwg’s work, the creek’s water has been harnessed with engineering finesse to allow a wide array of plants native to Austin’s ecology to flourish as well as benefit local birds and pollinators.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Daniel explains how making urban spaces more sustainable and equitable is a recipe not only for economic dynamism but perhaps more importantly for good old-fashioned joy, an emotion he likes to cultivate in his offices as well.

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Fashion designer Nyla Hasan on code-flexing and playing the long game

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 10:30:00 +0000

A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology with 15 years of experience working for some of the country’s top designers, Nyla Hasan in 2019 decided to create her own fashion line. A few complications — not the least of which was a pandemic — delayed the planned debut of the line, but in the fall of 2021 her dream became a reality when fashion brand the øther launched its first collection.

The øther quickly made waves for its graceful blending of South Asian and Western influences and its use of both inventive as well as traditional South Asian techniques and handiwork. The line was profiled in The New York Times and Vogue, and — given that the clothes are all made to order — Nyla is currently preparing a third production cycle since the launch to meet demand.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Nyla describes how her own experience coming of age in two cultures informed the style and ethos of her line, making it truly distinctive, a candid reflection of its creator’s values.

https://theother-collection.com/

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Violinist and composer Earl Maneein brings Paganini chops to heavy metal and punk, slaying all the way

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 10:30:00 +0000

Earl Maneein is a violinist and composer who loves nothing more than to lend his considerable chops as a classically trained musician to the sounds and venues of heavy metal and hardcore punk. None other than Robert Trujillo, bassist for Metallica, has called him “a kick-ass artist who pushes the creative boundaries.”

Earl received a Bachelor of Music from Queens College and a Master of Music from the Mannes College of Music, where he studied with Daniel Phillips of the Orion String Quartet. He is the founder of and main composer for the string quartet SEVEN)SUNS, which plays both extant and new metal and hardcore work, and he is also a member of the Vitamin String Quartet, whose recent music was featured in the Netflix show “Bridgerton.”

As a composer Earl has received commissions from a broad array of individuals and institutions, from internationally renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine and pioneering hardcore band The Dillinger Escape to Plan to Dance Theater of Harlem and The Phoenix Symphony, helmed by past “Art Restart” guest Tito Muñoz.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Earl describes how, knowing that he was never going to want to play in a traditional orchestra, he nevertheless challenged himself to get a classical-violin education so that he could craft his singular artistic identity with absolute confidence.

http://www.earlmaneeinmusic.com/

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Amelia Winger-Bearskin on why AI needs artists as a guiding force

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Amelia Winger-Bearskin in an artist, technologist and researcher who specializes in working in and with artificial intelligence. She lives in Jacksonville, FL, where she is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida.

Her work, though incredibly varied, always focuses on finding ways to use AI to benefit communities and the environment. In 2017 she founded a nonprofit, IDEA New Rochelle, that created a VR/AR Citizen toolkit to engage the community as co-designers of their future city. The project, in partnership with the New Rochelle mayor’s office, won a highly competitive $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant.

Amelia is Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, and through much of her work she interrogates the supposed neutrality of technology and AI and strives to imbue new technology with the values of her Native culture. In 2019 she created Wampum.Codes, which is both an ethical framework for software development based on Indigenous values of co-creation and an award-winning podcast of the same name. In the podcast, Amelia interviews Indigenous artists and technologists about how they manifest their Native cultures’ values in their work.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Amelia draws a line between her youthful activities — providing music for her mother’s storytelling sessions and experimenting with her engineer father’s discarded prototypes — and her current mission to transform us all from mere consumers of technology to engaged participants creating a better world with new tools.

https://www.studioamelia.com/

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Muralist Troy Summerell on taking an artistic leap of faith and joy, haters be damned

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Troy Summerell has become well-known in his hometown of Virginia Beach, VA for his vibrant and joyful murals of flowers and ocean creatures that can be seen throughout the region, from the sides of large buildings to basketball backboards.

He loves bringing joy to those who need it and has therefore often worked in hospitals that serve children. He recently completed his largest commission to date, a 100-foot-long mural enlivening an entire hallway in Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, VA. Even the hospital’s ambulances are now wrapped in Troy’s unmistakable designs. His work also brightens the pediatric emergency room and the pediatric ICU at University of Florida Health Jacksonville, and in 2019 he traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico to paint a mural for the international nonprofit, Smile Train.

Troy is also a small-business owner, having launched OnieTonie Designs™ in 2014 to support his at-the-time nascent career as an artist. OnieTonie has now become a recognizable brand that sells an ever-expanding list of merchandise, from socks and beach towels to coffee mugs and T-shirts, all sporting Troy’s signature aquatic creatures.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Troy describes how at a challenging crossroads in his life he, a self-taught artist, heeded his design and marketing instincts and risked a life-changing leap.

https://onietonie.com/

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Interlochen’s Director of Music, Enrique Márquez, shapes the next generation of leaders through music.

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 11:30:00 +0000

In June of 2021, Enrique Márquez arrived on the campus of the renowned Interlochen Center of the Arts in Interlochen, MI as its new Director of Music. Founded in 1928, Interlochen offers students from grades 3 through 12 a wealth of arts-education opportunities through several programs, including its boarding school, the Arts Academy, and its Summer Arts Camp.

Before becoming an admired arts administrator and educator, Enrique was a professional violist who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2005. He served as principal viola of The Orchestra of the Americas and the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra, performing in over 25 countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe with such conducting giants Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Gustavo Dudamel and Valery Gergiev.

In his native Mexico, Enrique went on to become the youngest Director General of the Veracruz Cultural Institute. He also founded the Orquesta Filarmónica de Boca del Río, which quickly became treasured not only for its performances but also for its impact in the community as a cultural and educational hub. He also earned a Master’s in Cultural Policy and Management from City University London and a master’s in education at Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Enrique describes how a fundamental belief in music’s power to draw out every young person’s most vibrant qualities has determined his career path.

https://www.interlochen.org/news/interlochen-center-for-arts-names-enrique-marquez-director-music?fbclid=IwAR2CKijIQEjWsce8Y_uo0432wBfIZpKYhDeVmB23vdB5nlygLL-xKY1j8X4

https://www.filarmonicadeboca.org.mx/

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Dancer Valencia James urges artists of all stripes to dream and scheme with techies.

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:30:00 +0000

Born and raised in Barbados, Valencia James studied modern dance in Budapest, Hungary and had the opportunity to perform work by some of the world’s most adventurous choreographers in international venues. However, it wasn’t until she started asking questions about what role artificial intelligence might play in shaping the future of the performing arts that she truly found her passion.

Today Valencia works with innovative technologists and scientists to create collaborative performance pieces that blur the boundary between artificial intelligence and the human performer and that hint at how different the experience of performance may be for future artists and audiences alike. She and her collaborators have presented their research and AI-infused work at conferences all over the world. Two days after this interview, dancing in front of a camera in her home in Redwood City, CA, she premiered a brand-new live immersive piece titled “Suga’: A Live Virtual Dance Performance” in the New Frontier exhibition of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, proving that the worlds of film and live performance are very much already blending.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Valencia explains how her work with technology has influenced her creativity and how an ethos of accessibility is proving useful in guiding her and her collaborators on their exploratory forays.

https://festival.sundance.org/program/#new-frontier-info/61ae1eff14aef7791a1c579b

https://valenciajames.com/

https://volumetricperformance.com/

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Composer Sahba Aminikia proves that a musical education is part of a spiritual education.

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Sahba Aminikia is an Iranian American composer, musician and educator based in San Francisco whose own musical training spanned three continents. He first studied composition in the city of his birth, Tehran, and then relocated to Russia to attend the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. After emigrating as a refugee to San Francisco in 2006, Sahba then earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

His passion for blending genres and cultural influences in his work — he is as well-versed in traditional music from Iran and classical music from Europe as he is in the oeuvres of Pink Floyd and Queen — quickly garnered attention from musicians and ensembles all over the world. Among the performing groups to have commissioned him are Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Symphony Parnassus, and his compositions have been performed all over the world.

Sahba is also the founder and artistic director of the annual Flying Carpet Children Festival that since 2018 has been bringing music — and world-class musicians — as well as circus arts to the Turkish border city of Mardin to delight and engage refugee children from Iraq and Syria.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Sahba explains how his own experience as refugee has informed his belief that music is a form of spiritual liberation with the unique ability to unite peoples and cultures across all borders.

https://www.sahbakia.com/

https://www.flyingcarpetfestival.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxDN8k63jJM

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José Ome Navarrete Mazatl

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 11:30:00 +0000

José Ome Navarrete Mazatl is the co-artistic director of NAKA Dance Theater in San Francisco, CA. Since he and fellow dancer Debby Kajiyama founded NAKA in 2001, the company has worked with a wide array of communities in the Bay Area as well as internationally to explore urgent social-justice issues.

Among the communities and organizations with whom NAKA has partnered to create performance projects over the years are the Eastside Arts Alliance, a cultural and empowerment space for Black youth in East Oakland; Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a social- and economic-justice organization of Latina immigrant women; and Skywatchers, a group that works with formerly unhoused residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district to center their urgent concerns.

NAKA has presented and discussed its work all over the world, including at the Hemisphere Institute’s 2007 Encuentro in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in 2008 and 2014 as the San Francisco representative in SCUBA’S multi-state tours. José was a 2018 U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow, a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and just this year, José was one of only six choreographers to receive a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, José describes how the always surprising and often unpredictable input of the community members with whom he works has made him a more nimble, inventive and impactful artist.

http://nakadancetheater.com/

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Evan Weissman

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 17:00:00 +0000

In 2012, theater-maker Evan Weissman founded Warm Cookies of the Revolution, a civic health club in Denver, CO. What exactly is a civic health club? Warm Cookies’ own description can’t be beat: “Well, you go to a gym to exercise your physical health, a religious institution to exercise your spiritual health, and a therapist to exercise your mental health. Warm Cookies of the Revolution is where you go to exercise your Civic Health.”

Since Warm Cookies’ founding, Evan and his team have found evermore inventive and entertaining ways to introduce citizens —particularly those who are not traditionally decision-makers, such as young people, recent immigrants and those with fewer resources — to the many ways in which they can participate in and contribute to the civic planning that shapes their communities. Through over 150 unique programs and a jam-packed schedule of ongoing activities, Warm Cookies of the Revolution has convinced thousands of Denver residents to raise their voice on civic issues from neighborhood development to the use of tax dollars and the needs of aging populations. All along the way, they have also lived up to their name by treating their community to mountains of cookies and oceans of milk.

Evan’s work has earned him national and statewide recognition. Evan was selected as a 2019 Roddenberry Fellow for innovative activism as well as a 2019 Livingston Fellow from Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. He was awarded the 2019 Colorado Governor’s Award for Creative Leadership and the 2018 Parr Widener Civic Leadership Award from the Denver Foundation. Evan was Denver Commissioner for Cultural Affairs in 2017 and Creative in Residence at the Denver Art Museum in 2015.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Evan reveals how the ethos that first guided him as a theater artist led him to become a community leader who has figured out how to make civic engagement as fun as it is essential.

https://www.warmcookiesoftherevolution.org/

https://buntport.com/

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Danielle Villasana

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist whose documentary work focuses on human rights, gender, displacement, and health with a focus on Latin America.

Her work has earned her widespread recognition. She is a National Geographic Explorer, Magnum Foundation awardee, Women Photograph grantee, and an International Women's Media Foundation fellow, and her photographs have been included in solo and group exhibits and have been published in National Geographic, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She is a member of Women Photograph and Ayün Fotógrafas, a collective of women photographers united by Latin America that is in partnership with NOOR, the global journalism collective.

Danielle is also an activist who strongly believes in the power photography can have when paired with education and community development. In 2017 she co-founded We, Women, an ongoing platform exploring crucial issues across the U.S. through photo-based community engagement projects by women and gender-nonconforming artists. In 2016 she joined The Everyday Project's Community Team, where she helps conceive and work on various initiatives and group photography projects. In 2018 she joined the Authority Collective as a board member. Most recently in 2020 she helped co-author the Photo Bill of Rights, which works to push for a more inclusive, diverse and equitable visual media industry.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Danielle explains the journalistic, ethical and artistic forethought her role as a visual storyteller of others’ stories requires and describes the impact of both her images and her activism on communities she has profiled and more recently on the worldwide community of lens-based workers.

https://www.daniellevillasana.com/

https://www.ayunfotografas.com/

https://www.wewomenphoto.com/wwhome

https://www.photobillofrights.com/

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Noelle Scaggs

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 10:30:00 +0000

As the co-lead vocalist of the alt-pop band Fitz and the Tantrums since 2008, Noelle Scaggs was used to seeing huge crowds through her years of live performance and touring. Their songs “Out of My League” and “The Walker,” both of which Noelle co-wrote, were certified Platinum and hit the number one spot on the Alternative Airplay chart, and in 2016 their song “HandClap” became a bona fide sensation, a triple-platinum international hit that the casual listener could hear anywhere from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to FOX’s Superbowl preshow. What Noelle wasn’t used to seeing while on tour, however, were Black women like her in any of the myriad behind-the-scenes positions that make tours possible.

When the pandemic hit and tours were canceled, Noelle gathered her thoughts and then decided to speak up. She wrote an open letter to the music industry that Billboard published in September 2020. In the letter, she states, “As an artist and a Black woman of color, I can and will no longer accept being the only person like me in any room or any stage,” and then goes on to announce the creation of Diversify the Stage. Diversify the Stage is a two-prong initiative to ensure that ethnic and sexual minorities as well as people with disabilities are not only trained for technical and production positions in the touring industry but also have access to job opportunities in those fields.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Noelle describes what she’s discovered about her industry and herself as she’s developed Diversify the Stage and imagines a future when the organization’s mission has been accomplished.

https://www.diversifythestage.org/

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christopher oscar peña

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 10:30:00 +0000

christopher oscar peña is an accomplished playwright with a resume that includes productions, commissions and residencies at some of the country’s most forward-thinking theatrical institutions. Among his most recent productions are the world premieres of his plays “a cautionary tail” at the Flea Theater in New York and “The Strangers” at the Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, TN.

chris is also amassing impressive credits as a TV writer, having written for the Emmy-nominated first season of “Jane the Virgin” on the CW and HBO’s highly lauded “Insecure” as well as the Starz series “Sweetbitter.” He is currently on the writing staff for “Promised Land,” a new series that will air this season on ABC.

Early in the pandemic, chris was approached by director James Darragh to join him and composer Ellen Reid, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for her opera “p r i s m,” on a new project: a brand-new operatic work to be created specifically for and presented in the digital space. Never an opera aficionado, chris nonetheless jumped at the novel opportunity, and with the addition of “p r i s m” librettist Roxie Perkins, the creators hired a team of writers and composers and then filmed and recorded “Desert In.” All eight episodes are available for viewing on the streaming platform, OperaBox.tv. “Desert In” was described by The Wall Street Journal as “lush and expansive … a highly original marriage of opera and series television,” and The New York Observer wrote that “this stylish film-opera hybrid … is a sun-drenched melodrama.”

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, chris describes how his enduring passion for breaking form and pushing artistic envelopes has allowed him to craft an eclectic career that amplifies his voice and core beliefs.

https://www.operabox.tv/desert-in

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Frank Horvat

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 10:30:00 +0000

Frank Horvat is a celebrated Toronto-based composer and pianist who for decades has written and performed music across genres, from contemporary classical to musical theater and electronica. In 2017 he was the inaugural recipient of the Kathleen McMorrow Music Award which recognizes outstanding work by Ontario composers.

Frank is devoted to using his creative platform to support and bring awareness to causes about which he is passionate: the environment, human rights and mental health. Examples of his artivism include his album “For Those Who Died Trying” that memorializes the lives of murdered environmental activists and the “Piano Therapy” concert, a performance he developed and continues to tour in order to share his own mental health journey and to end the stigma around mental illness, particularly in the world of classical music.

His upcoming projects include “Fractures,” a song cycle of 13 pieces commissioned by acclaimed soprano Meredith Hall on the subject of the environmental impact of fracking, and a brand-new commission from pianist Kara Huber, a suite of solo piano pieces about the hiking paths in and around the beautiful mountain town of Banff, Alberta. In fact, shortly after this interview was completed, Frank traveled to Banff for a month-long residency during which he hiked the area’s most spectacular trails and started composing pieces inspired by his mountain peregrinations.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Frank describes why and how he went about creating “Music for Self-Isolation,” his response to the pandemic lockdown that threatened the careers of so many of his musician colleagues. “Music for Self-Isolation” became an international phenomenon, has since been recorded as an album and is the focus of a documentary film. He also explains why being candid about his own mental illness — to himself, his loved ones and his audience — allowed his creativity to flourish in ways he couldn’t have foreseen.

https://frankhorvat.com/

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Martine Kei Green-Rogers

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 10:30:00 +0000

Martine Kei Green-Rogers is an author, educator and dramaturg with decades of experience, having worked as production and new-play dramaturg at theaters all over the country, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Houston’s Classical Theatre Company and Chicago’s Court Theatre.

This past summer she took a leave from her position as associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the State University of New York-New Paltz to become the interim dean of the Division of Liberal Arts (DLA) at UNCSA.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Martine explains how the key to ensuring a healthy future for the American theater is to cultivate questioning and adventurous minds in artists and audience alike, essentially encouraging all of us to approach art with a dramaturg’s curiosity.

https://www.martinekeigreenrogers.com/

https://whoslouis.com/

https://www.signaturetheatre.org/About/Playwrights---Residencies/Branden-Jacobs-Jenkins.aspx

https://www.jamesijames.com/

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