Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Monia Ben Hamouda, photo: Michele Gabriele Monia Ben Hamouda (b. 1991, Milan) lives and works between al-Qayrawan and Milan. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan. Previous positions include a visiting professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden and a Master of Curating at Istituto Marangoni, Florence, and a seat in the jury at the Filmmaker Festival, Milan.  Her work has been presented in various venues including ChertLüdde, Berlin; ASHES/ASHES, New York; Ar/Ge kunst Kunstverein, Bozen; Jevouspropose, Zurich; Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence; Et.Al, San Francisco; Ada, Rome; Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris; Universitätssammlungen Kunst, Dresden; Alios 16me Biennale d’Art Contemporain, La Teste de Buch; Marselleria Permanent Exhibition, Milan. Awards include: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (winner); VI Club Gamec Prize (finalist); TSI Art Award x Artissima (winner); Art Business Accelerator Grant, Artwork Archive and Redline Contemporary Art

Portrait by Gabriella Marks Paula Wilson received an MFA from Columbia and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Alongside her current exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery, she is currently exhibiting within a group exhibition Plein Air at MOCA Tucson and has an upcoming solo exhibition Toward the Sky’s Back Door at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs in 2023. She has also recently had an acquisition placed at Colby College Museum of Art. In addition, her upcoming Albuquerque Museum show: Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land opens October 8th, 2022 and is part of a larger umbrella of shows titled: Historic and Contemporary Landscapes including work by Thomas Cole and Kiki Smith. Wilson’s has held other recent solo exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2020-2021), 516 ARTS Contemporary Museum, Albuquerque, NM (2019), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2018), and Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY (2018). She has been included in four exh

In Takuji Hamanaka’s mosaic-inspired works on paper, multiple sections of monochrome color interlock within dimensional, polychrome compositions. Adapting the ‘Bokashi’ technique of woodblock printing to a contemporary practice, Hamanaka prints multiple papers in color gradients and arranges them onto paper in organic designs that call to mind lattices, prisms, and slopes. Color and its absence draw attention to the paper’s opacity, as well as more theoretical ideas of windows and grids, and the tension between nature and pure abstraction. Takuji Hamanaka was born in 1968 in Hokkaido, Japan and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. From 1986-89 he trained at the Adachi Institute of Woodblock printmaking in Tokyo, Japan. Hamanaka is the 2022 recipient of a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the recipient numerous other grants and awards including The Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant (2021), the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant (2020), and the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Printmaking

Anthony Akinbola Photo by Fredrick Nwosu Anthony Akinbola is an interdisciplinary Nigerian- American, Brooklyn-based artist. Born in Columbia, Missouri, Anthony Akinbola, is a first-generation American raised by Nigerian parents in the United States and Nigeria. His layered, richly colored compositions celebrate and signify the distinct cultures that shape his identity. The artist’s signature Camouflage paintings, consisting of single and multi-panel works, utilize the ubiquitous du-rag as their primary material. Universally available and possessed of significant cultural context, the du-rag represents for Akinbola a readymade object that engages the conceptual strategies of Marcel Duchamp and other significant artistic predecessors. Throughout his work Akinbola unpacks the rituals and histories connecting Africa and America, addressing the power of fetishization around cultural objects. Anthony Akinbola was selected for the Anderson Ranch Art Center Residency in 2017 and created a monumental wall collage f

Kyle Thurman (b. 1986, West Chester, PA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2016 he received an MFA in painting from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. From 2011 to 2012, Thurman studied with Christopher Williams and Peter Doig as a guest student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. In 2009 he received his BA in Film Studies and Visual Arts from Columbia University. Most recently, Thurman was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta; his work is now included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other recent solo and group exhibitions include Central Fine, Miami Beach, FL; The Meeting, New York, NY; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, Austria; 1301PE, Los Angeles, CA; Off Vendome, New York, NY; The Cleveland Triennial, Cleveland, OH; Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis, MO; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Cookie Butcher, Antwerp, Belgium; Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium; Kostyal, London, England; Benevento, New York

Andrea Kantrowitz, an artist and educator, has lectured and led workshops on art and cognition internationally, and has twice served as a Singapore Ministry of Education Outstanding Educator in Residence. She was a teaching artist in the New York City public schools for many years, involved in multiple local and national research projects that demonstrated the positive academic impact of an integrated art curriculum for students growing up in poverty. As a director of the Thinking through Drawing Project, she co-organized 10 years of international drawing and cognition research symposia and workshops, in collaboration with colleagues from around the world. She holds a doctorate in Art Education and Cognitive Studies from Columbia University Teachers College, an MFA in Painting from Yale, a BA in Art and Cognition from Harvard and is an Associate Professor and Director of the Art Education Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz.  Her paintings have been exhibited nationally and are in many pr

Noah Jemisin, 2022 Noah Jemisin was born in Birmingham, AL and obtained an MFA degree from University of Iowa, in 1974. His extensive travels in Africa, Europe and  Asia over the years have helped him to develop an approach to life and art that enables him to synthesize into a distinct and dynamic whole the various components of his identity and create work that strives to make meaning of his personal history as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary culture. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and admiration of art historical precedents in his work as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism’s formal concern’s with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. He is included in the highly anticipated exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA), New York, October 9 , 2022 – February 18, 2023. JAM was an art gallery that welcomed artists and visitors of many generations and races in New York City from

Perrotin New York is pleased to present the first survey exhibition in the United States of the late Norwegian-born painter Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987), entitled Revelation. A central figure in the development of European modernism, Bergman abstracted the landscapes of Norway into spiritually transcendent compositions. Despite Bergman’s colorful life and strikingly original creative output, there has yet to be such a spotlight on her talent — a situation that is soon to change, given a major pair of retrospectives set to open at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the National Museum of Oslo in 2023. This interview is with Thomas Schlesser, the director of the Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman foundation. N°63-1961 Big universe with small squares, 1961. Oil and metal sheet on canvas Framed: 198.2 × 208 × 6 cm. Photographer: Claire Dorn. ©Anna-Eva Bergman /ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York 2022. Courtesy Fondation Hartung -Bergman & Perrotin Anna-Eva Bergman N°59-1962 Small golden fire on black, 1962 Tempera a

Sarah Dwyer (b. 1974, Ireland) is a painter who lives and works in London. Drawing is at the heart of her process, often combined with painting, printmaking, and sculpture, resulting in reimaginings of the familiar through exuberant color palettes and lively approaches to mark-making. Incorporating both figurative and abstract imagery, her dynamic compositions are the result of processing her own surroundings and the human day-to-day experience, in addition to an indulgence in our desire for play. Surfaces, in turn, retain traces of process and development within their own archive and present the viewer with a navigable visual history. Dwyer earned a Master’s in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2004 after an MFA from Staffordshire University in 2001. Her work has most recently been exhibited at Fabian Lang Gallery, Zurich; PiArtworks, London; Pigeon Park, Manor Place, London; in three solo shows at Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK; Hair & Nails Gallery, M

Sydney Licht draws inspiration from the common, disposable detritus of everyday life and creates still lives centered around takeout containers, department store boxes, sugar packets and other disposables.  Licht tells the domestic experience of society’s materialism via modern takes on the still life. “For centuries, still life paintings have portrayed items from the realm of the domestic....food, utensils, dishes, flowers and other elements that celebrate the table and the communal dining experience,” Licht says. “Today, as technology impacts our lives more and more, few of us have the means or the desire to spend hours preparing and presenting a meal served on china dishes with silver place settings.  Instead, we order online and our food arrives ready to be microwaved.  During the Covid era, communal dining experiences were more likely to occur on a computer via Zoom than in person sitting around a table together.  All of this begs the question, has the shelf life of the still life as we’ve known it reac

Rhys Ziemba is an artist and musician in New York City As part of his practice, Ziemba collects various objects, such as medical skeleton models, traffic cones, paint buckets, inflatable flamingos, or kettlebells, and assembles them in his basement studio. The basement serves as a stage for his paintings which in turn become documentation of the arranged eclectic elements. His works are carefully rendered with consideration to the objects and the space which surrounds them. Balancing between Ziemba’s close observation and saturated imagination, his paintings record time. On view at Art Cake is a selection of intimately scaled oil paintings made by Ziemba. Many of the paintings illustrate urban environments or landscapes in Florida created from direct observation, en plein air, or photographs taken by the artist. Other paintings were developed from drawings the artist made during a recent trip to Crete, Greece. Each of the paintings, measuring eight by ten inches, illustrates scenes within nature and contains

Portrait of Gaby Sahhar Page presents Gaby Sahhar, the New York debut of the London-based artist. Released explores alternative forms of knowledge-making through queer shapeshifting. Soaked in a kaleidoscopic palette of India and alcohol ink, Sahhar’s new works draw on processes of articulation within LGBTQI+ communities that resist academic domination. Such tools of thought migrate across borders, slipping into the pores of the public sphere, shifting into a collective body. Gaby Sahhar (b. 1992, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Sahhar received a BA from Goldsmiths, London in 2015. Solo exhibitions include MAC VAL, Paris / The Kooples Art Prize (2023); PAGE (NYC), New York (2022); and Sweetwater, Berlin (2019). Group exhibitions include Fragment Gallery, New York (2022); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); and Museum of Moscow, Russia (2020). Installation view, Gaby Sahhar, Released, PAGE (NYC), 2022. Gaby Sahhar, Released, 2022, India and alcohol ink on synthetic paper, 80 x 156 inches. Gaby Sahha

Ryan Sarah Murphy is a New York City-based artist, represented by C24 Gallery. Her body of work, which includes sculptures, videos and drawings, provides a multi-dimensional deconstruction of the intuitive, creative process, as expressed through different mediums and technologies. Murphy’s sculptures are generated from the random discovery of discarded pieces of cardboard that she finds throughout the streets of New York City. Initially drawn to these materials because of their color, she strips them of any identifiable markings such as logos or lettering, then cuts and layers the torn pieces into raw, elegant constructions that allude to cross sections of buildings or overhead maps. The works act as visual meditations on geographical location, placemaking and spatial awareness, fueled by the pure, energetic power of color combinations and their visceral impact. Her solo exhibition, Structural Integrity, is on view at C24 Gallery through September 23rd. Her work will also be on view in the Gallery's booth at

"In his approach to painting, [Thomas Trum tries] to find out everything there is to know about a certain paint or piece of equipment before using it in his work. The way he works on a smaller piece of paper is basically similar to when he makes a large mural: by zooming in and out on his own methods he can work on many different surfaces and sizes. Paint is his muse, whether it is in small-scale research or expanding public spaces with his colourful large-scale work."  - by Rianne Groen Thomas Trum (1989) lives and works in s’-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. He graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2014.  His works have been shown at a variety of galleries and museums like Het Nieuw Instituut, Rotterdam, Art Rotterdam and Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch. 

Naomi Safran-Hon creates work that makes gripping statements about the fragility of human experience, the complicated nature of one's home, and the vicissitudes of collective identities. The artist is seeking the narrative that is hidden and buried in the landscape. The spirit is inherent in Safran-Hon's intellectual construction, and, as the journey described in sefer hechaloth, the inner odyssey within oneself (Anselm Kiefer) permeates her entire body of work.  Safran-Hon's process lingers at the intersection of drawing, photography, sculpture, and painting, focusing on the internal energy of the material, continuously emboldening the viewer to look beyond the surface. Her work is anchored in undeniable reality, yet she unceasingly builds by extracting the essence from the soul of the materials she uses, thus transforming preexisting contexts.  Safran-Hon uses a unique process to transform her photographs into evocative paintings with strong impressionist undertones. Cutting through the photograph and canva

Erick Antonio Benitez (b. 1988, Bronx, NY) is a first generation Salvadoran-American multidisciplinary artist, musician, organizer and curator based between Baltimore, MD and Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has exhibited work at Selenas Mountain (NY), REGULARNORMAL at Dinner Gallery (NY), Greenpoint Gallery (NY),  Connor Smith Gallery (DC), The Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Gaddis Geeslin Gallery (TX), Strange Fire Collective (CO), Galerie B-312 (Montreal, QC), Metafora Studio Arts (Barcelona, ES) and Simultan Festival (Timișoara, RO). His work has been reviewed by The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, BmoreArt, The American Scholar, Terremoto (MX) and Le Devoir (QC) and a few publications including the sixth issue of BmoreArt Magazine, Let’s Talk Live (WJLA), and Hyrsteria Zine Vol. 2. Benitez is also a recipient of the Ruby Artist Project grant, The Contemporary: Grit Fund 2, MASB Travel Artist Award, Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Award an

Photo portrait by Kicca Tommasi Jorge Macchi is a  visual artist. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1963. Lives and works in Buenos Aires. In 2001 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He had three major retrospectives of his work: Perspectiva at MALBA Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, in 2016, Music Stand Still at S.M.A.K the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium in 2011, and The anatomy of melancholy at Santander Cultural, 2007, Blanton Museum, 2007 and CGAC, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, 2008, He represented Argentina at the Venice Biennial in 2005. He took part in the Biennials of Liverpool 2012, Lyon 2011, Yokohama 2008, Porto Alegre 2007, Venezia 2005, San Pablo 2004, Estambul 2003, Porto Alegre 2003. Parallel lives, Jorge Macchi. Courtesy the artist. All the words of the world, Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Galeria Luisa Srina, Sao Paulo. Bone exposed, Joerg Lohse. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery, NY

Sung Hwa Kim (b. 1985 in Seoul, South Korea) received his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA from The Art Institute of Boston. Kim has held solo exhibition at Hesse Flatow (New York, NY). Recent group exhibitions include Gone Was the Glow at 1969 Gallery (New York, NY); At the Table, The AAPI Awareness Charity Exhibition at Christie’s (New York, NY); You Had Me At Hello: New American Paintings 2022 Review at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA); The Views at Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles, CA); Shifted Horizon at HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY); 36 Paintings at Harper’s Books (East Hampton, NY); NOCTURNE on Galleryplatform.LA, M+B (Los Angeles, CA); The Edge Effect curated by Akili Tommasino at The Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY). Sung Hwa Kim lives and works in New York City.  Sung Hwa Kim, Nocturne: My love, hope, and sweet dreams. I'm still here and that is all that matter. acrylic, flashe, and gouache on canvas, 60 x 48 in, 2021 Sung Hwa Kim, Nocturne: On the day when your long night

Rob Ober (b. 1968, Wiesbaden, West Germany) lives and works in Kent, CT. Having grown up as the son of a US diplomat, Rob spent his youth in Moscow, Dehli, Athens and Bethesda, MD. After college, Rob began collecting Russian nonconformist art. In 2006, Rob opened a gallery in Kent, CT and showed the works of many of his artist friends including Brian Belott, Katherine Bradford, Lance De Los Reyes, and Rob Nava. Rob began painting seriously seven years ago. Art Miami  2021 was the first exhibition of his work. Rob is having his first solo exhibition at SHRINE gallery. Fruit Loops, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 in  (182.9 x 152.4 cm) Napoleon, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 96 x 72 in  (243.8 x 182.9 cm) Yes, No, Probably, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 in  (152.4 x 121.9 cm)

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019. She taught art history, the in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000. Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.