Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Eric Aho is an American artist whose paintings are equally concerned with the physical immensity and intimacy of the natural world as much as with an ever-evolving process of extract-ing spiritual experiences discovered within it. His energetic, gestural painting process uses lively marks and swaths of color to create richly applied paint that morphs between abstract expanses and the contours of nature. Aho’s work develops primarily from his own experience and memories of the landscape. He references broadly and freely from the history of art—responding to a wide range of works from Poussin to Constable, and from Winslow Homer to Ellsworth Kelly to inform his compositions. Aho lives and works in Saxtons River, Vermont. Ice Out (Allagash), Oil on linen, 90x80, Photography © Rachel Portesi. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Ice Cut (Violet, Kennebec), Oil on linen, 80x90, Photography © Rachel Portesi. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York

Angela Westwater at 257 Bowery, 2020, photo by Alexei Hay Angela Westwater co-founded Sperone Westwater Fischer in 1975 with Italian art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone and German gallerist Konrad Fischer, opening a space at 142 Greene Street in SoHo, New York. (The gallery's name was changed to Sperone Westwater in 1982.) An additional space was later established at 121 Greene Street. The founders' original program showcased a European avant-garde alongside a core group of American artists to whom its founders were committed. Notable early exhibitions include a 1977 show of minimalist works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Sol Lewitt; seven of Bruce Nauman's seminal early shows; six early Gerhard Richter shows; two Cy Twombly exhibitions in 1982 and 1989; eleven Richard Long exhibitions; and the installation of one of Mario Merz's celebrated glass and neon igloos in 1979 -- part of the gallery's ongoing dedication to Arte Povera artists, including Alighiero Boetti. Other early historical exhibitions at

Untitled Collage 2 John J. O'Connor was born in Westfield, MA and received an MFA in painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000. He attended The MacDowell Colony, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, was a recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Grants in Painting and Drawing, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency. John has been in numerous exhibitions abroad, including The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), the Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), TW Fine Art (Australia); and in the US at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Weatherspoon Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, the Queens Museum, and the Tang Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, Ar

Brandi Twilley was born in 1982 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA in 2011 from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited at: Josh Lilley in London, UK; Zero Gallery in Milan, Italy; the Museum of Sex in New York City; and Kate Werble Gallery in New York City; among others. Three solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at Sargent’s Daughters in New York City. Her work has been reviewed in: The New York Times; ARTFORUM; ARTnews; The New Yorker; Artnet News; Time Out; The Observer; and Hyperallergic; among others. Manhattan Skyline, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 inches. "Washing my Hair, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 26 by 14 inches

Stylist/Creative director: Rebekka Fellah Photographer: Enrique Leyva © Hugo McCloud Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York Born in Palo Alto California in 1980, Hugo McCloud is one of the most prolific young artists working today. In a career that has now spanned fifteen years, Hugo McCloud's work has quickly evolved through a process of restless experimentation, bringing inventiveness and fearlessness to the act of making. The artist is engaged in an ongoing quest to elevate and master diverse methodologies and the array of subjects his work addresses. An abiding, unifying theme is Hugo's preoccupation with finding beauty in the everyday. Self-taught with a background in industrial design, McCloud’s practice is unrestricted by classical, academic tenets. He has gravitated toward materials that could be considered abject – roofing materials, solder, and presently, single-use plastic bags. Drawing inspiration from the rawness of the urban landscape, McCloud creates rich, large-scale abstract paintings and by fusing

When m was seven, they had a pet snake named Herman. Kept him in a bubble bath container shaped like a train, and when they opened the lid, they could see him peering back. Everyone else in their family was afraid of snakes. Them favorite was the gentle black king snake. Herman was tiny and green. A rubbery toy they had to hide from their mother, who had a way of making things disappear. Like their sixth finger, which they wore between thumb and index, from which they shot little projectiles that contained messages. Like the satanic bible, which they read to investigate the opposition, since their father was a born again man of the cloth. Being a gender fluid person was likely going too far, but eventually, it wasn’t something they could put a lid on. Around the same time as Herman, they started rink roller skating, dressing in wide cords with an alligator belt, a white cotton shirt, and beneath it, a striped cravat they called a dickey. One day, m peered at Herman peering back at them and felt a sudden fear,

Cynthia Daignault received a BA in Art and Art History from Stanford University. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Kasmin Gallery and White Columns. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and editor of numerous publications. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019, and a new paperback edition will be released in early 2022. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2016 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Award, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Gettysb

Paco Barragán (Oviedo, Spain) is a curator and culture theorist that believes that the so-called “white cube” is dead. Since 2016 he doesn’t do “white cubes.” Between 2015 and 2017 he oversaw the visual arts section of Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile. As a curator he is interested both in the history of museology and exhibition design and the history of the making of the art market. Why? Because you can´t have a good command of curatorial practices without a profound knowledge of the art market, which had a profound impact on museological and curatorial practices. Most of the known museological displays, from the Period Room to the Impressionist or Expressionist hang respond after all to profound commercial goals. For this reason, Barragán wrote a book about the history of art fairs and biennials since ancient Greece and Rome until today as he understands that we need a longue durée perspective. At this very moment he’s finishing a book about the history of collecting since Assyria until today. Museums are

Molly Hassler is an interdisciplinary artist, often embracing collaboration and primarily using drawing and fibers techniques to mine the complex relation between representation and identity as a queer person in the Midwest. Through printing, drawing, weaving and quilting, she is actively sewing up the past, literally and metaphorically mending. Her fine art practice rests most comfortably between peculiar three dimensional objecthood and semi-narrative works containing drawings and text that speak to the sweetness and trauma of queer and trans coming of age. Hassler is a 2022 recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and 2021-2023 Springboard for the Arts: Rural Regenerator Fellowship. She has shown her work in exhibitions including Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York, The Jackson Dinsdale Art Center in Hastings, Nebraska as well as Portrait Society Gallery and Real Tinsel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Currently working as a teaching Artist in Residence with Lynden Sculpture Garden and Woodland Pattern

Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice, and she is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships from the Laundromat Project, A Blade of Grass, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Skidmore's Documentary Storytellers' Institute, KODA Lab, Asian American Arts Alliance, En Foco, China Residencies, Flux Factory and Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Artists Space, SPACE Gallery, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Tribeca Film Festival's Interactive Showcase, 2019 BRIC Biennial; Old Stone House, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. In 2018 she had a solo exhibition at

Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer whose practice is at the intersections of art, activism, and creative resistance to consumer culture. Her web-based artworks critique brand messaging. Re Made Co. (remadeco.org) takes the form of an online "company" to parody actual company Best Made Co.'s appropriation of working class identities and revitalization of traditional male roles. RETHINK SHINOLA (rethinkshinola.com) analyzes and exposes a complex and patronizing agenda of marketing the White savior myth, Detroit, and authenticity. Modrak is a co-curator of #exstrange, a curatorial project featuring site-specific works by artists using eBay as a site for the exchange of ideas. She is co-editor of the recently published Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts (Belt 2021) in which twenty writers consider humility as a state of being, with the power to impact institutions, families, and individuals. She is the lead author of Reframing Photography (Routledge 2011), a book critically exploring photographic repre

A painter and arts writer, Sharon Butler is widely known as the founder of Two Coats of Paint, a project which includes an influential art blogazine about painting, an artists’ residency, online conversations, a small press, and other initiatives. Her geometric abstractions, which explore the tension between digital and handmade, and are based on drawings that she makes in a phone app. Solo painting exhibitions in 2016, 2018, and 2021 at Theodore Gallery were written about in Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, The James Kalm Report, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine. In a review of her 2021 solo, artist-critic Laurie Fendrich called her work “beautiful and grittily compelling” and suggested that “the future of abstraction will be owned by those who accept a post-compositional approach to their paintings. Right now, Sharon Butler has the best of both worlds.”  She has received awards and residencies from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Connecticut Comission on the Arts, Connectic

Enemy Combatant, David Winner's third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher's Weekly/Booklife Editor's Pick. He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times briefly-noted Anthology. His Kirkus- recommended, second novel, Tyler's Last came out in 2005 while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions and The Kenyon Review. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, and a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. The subject of part of the interview, Dorle, with Mick Jagger

Esther Kläs employs hands-on dexterity with her process-oriented sculptures and works on paper which challenge contemporary sculptural norms and discourses. With links to Postminimalism, she utilizes malleable materials including clay, oil stick, or resin while maintaining an intimate physical relationship with her work. The artist’s distinctive visual language relates to her body in a surrounding environment while simultaneously referencing her inner experience. Appearing at once as mysterious presences and projections of a poetic imagination, her sculptures and works on paper emphasize the intuitive gestures that shape her work. Questioning the essence of objects and herself within a space, the work suggests relationships of both being and seeing. Esther Kläs, Start, The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 21 – November 30, 2019 Esther Kläs, The subtle interplay between the I and the me, Kolumba, Cologne, Germany, June 2 – August 16, 2021 Esther Klas, Maybe it can be different, Fonda

In this interview we discuss Poetic Song Verse, a new book by Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez. Mike Mattison is a singer, songwriter, and founding member of Scrapomatic and the Tedeschi Trucks Band with whom he has won two Grammy Awards, eight Blues Music Awards from the Blues Music Foundation, and four Canadian Maple Blues Awards. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1991. He tours over 150 days annually and frequently publishes essays and music journalism. Ernest Suarez is the David M. O’Connell Professor of English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and executive director of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. He was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Spain and China and was named the Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia. He has published widely on southern literature, poetry, and music.

Caterina Verde is an American and French artist whose work is most often presented in a cross-plat- form of media that includes video, installation, performance, drawing, photography, and editions. Much of what she has considered in her practice has centered around identity construction + constriction through referencing historical, psychological, perceptual content as well as language and its use for limitation and containing culture. Verde is a 2021 recipient of a New York City Artist Corps grant sponsored by NYFA and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs for her three-channel video (in-progress and most recent) project, Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle. In the nineties, she was the Hybrid and Performance Curator for The Kitchen in NYC (under a pseudonym), and later spearheaded a few early online performance projects, including, Strange Positioning Systems and most recently Peat and Repeat, an art edition house based in NYC. In September 2021, Verde curated the exhibition: “a micro-biol

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce Jimmy Raskin’s STATIONS OF THE LAST ECCENTRIC, the artist’s fourth one-person exhibition at the gallery. The exhibit is open Jan. 4th - Feb. 5, 2022. STATIONS OF THE LAST ECCENTRIC features nine layered works, each holding at its center The Cone of Expression. This diagrammatic overlay includes a prominent vertical line that imposes a primordial fold, creating a mirror-image wherein a chosen picture of the cosmos faces itself. This event, in turn, conjures a myriad of faces staring back at the viewer. The phenomenon, known as facial pareidolia, instills an emotional charge in an otherwise non-sentient image or form. A point of connective stillness emerges, which may be considered sacrificial: we bypass the layers, critical-distance, dynamic conversations therein, and reach an almost humorous reduction point; an anthropomorphic flattening in the name of stillness. Within the gaze of the gaze, a space for mesmerization or resonance is generated. An artist book accompa

Chris Sharp is the founder and director of Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles. Formerly an independent curator and writer, Sharp also co-founded the project space Lulu, Mexico City, in 2013.   Aaron Gilbert, The door to the other world is always open,December 11- January 22 Tyler Vlahovich, Pulling Up Roots  01/29 – 03/12

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God:  An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale U.P., 2013), Discoveries:  New Writing from The Iowa Review (Iowa Review, 2012), and The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016). A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Black has also received fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, the MacDowell Colony, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Bla

Carole Silverstein is a Los Angeles based artist who has exhibited in galleries and alternative venues throughout the US, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco. In 2015 she showed at the 56th Venice Biennale in an exhibit entitled “We Must Risk Delight: 20 Artists from Los Angeles” at the Magazzino del Sale, Venice Italy. Additionally, her work was featured in an exhibit which traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Manila, Capetown, and Johannesburg. She received her MFA from Queens College, CUNY and her BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, with additional study at the International School of Art in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. In 2000, a book collaboration of her collages and the poetry of Jim Henderson was published entitled “Clearly These Clouds”. Her artworks are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Citibank, Art in US Embassies (US Embassy Djibouti), Art for Healing, The Salser Collection, and numerous private collection