Shockoe Artspeak

If you are a practicing maker long enough, you will likely have a place where all the things you have started and never finished live. Some of these objects might be simple notes about ideas, and some of these objects might just need the final bits of spit and polish. Regardless of how many there ...

Spend a few minutes thinking of all the terrible stereotypes of artists and see how angry or sad you get. While you certainly may know a person or two who fits into those spaces, the stereotype is definitely not where you want to spend your time. Now think of all the terrible stereotypes of entrepreneurs; ...

You’ve seen his work almost everywhere during your entire life, but you have likely never heard his name. Saul Bass’s career started when he was young and only came more prolific as he worked on some of history’s most iconic logos, film title sequences and eventually became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after visual stylists. From ...

In any given day, we are likely to come across more information and more content than our ancestors may have experienced in a year or several years or maybe even their lives. We are constantly being handed things to discover, ideas to interpret and news to accept without a second thought. We are saturated by ...

In any given day, we are likely to come across more information and more content than our ancestors may have experienced in a year or several years or maybe even their lives. We are constantly being handed things to discover, ideas to interpret and news to accept without a second thought. We are saturated by ...

In any given day, we are likely to come across more information and more content than our ancestors may have experienced in a year or several years or maybe even their lives. We are constantly being handed things to discover, ideas to interpret and news to accept without a second thought. We are saturated by ...

You’ve heard us say it at least a few times on this podcast: art and design. These two fields are so closely aligned, but can seem miles apart from one another. Historically, we see the separation of design from the larger body of art around the middle of the nineteenth century, but the fracturing in ...

During art school, having someone come into your studio and talk about your work seems like a normal thing: your friends come in, your studiomates come in, and your professors come in. But after graduation, when the studio is in your home, or in your backyard, those visits are fewer and farther between. Outside of ...

Milton Glaser is easily one of the three best known graphic designers in the United States, and his storied career has been marked by a constant pursuit of art and craft. He has had the distinction of one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center. He was selected for the lifetime ...

We see every episode as a chance to open up a conversation and provide a few handles so you can dig deeper into the ideas or thoughts we present. We never expect to be comprehensive in how we approach a topic. We are just a few folks with experiences and knowledge that we want to ...

As with everything else we talk about, a deep dive into freewill implicates a number of assumptions and ideas that we have about how and why the world works. Something simple has many moving parts, so it follows that something more complex (like the concept of freewill) has so many more including choice, responsibility, hiding, ...

For most of the world, it is assumed that everyday when we wake up we retain all the agency and choice for our lives. We choose our future, we choose our jobs, we choose our friends, and we choose where we live. We believe–as the poet William Ernest Henley wrote and Winston Churchill mused–that we are ...

We’ve all come across someone in life who we thought was just a bit too serious. And we’ve all come across other folks who were never serious enough. We know these folks, and what each leaning is missing is a nice mixture of humor and seriousness. It is actually possible (and some might argue preferable) ...

What’s a job anyway? Some folks are brought up thinking it’s just a thing we do in between sleeping. We always get asked what we’re going to do when we grow up, but did anyone ever really talk about how that choice happens? Or if it is even a choice at all? Whatever the case ...

The thing about Twitter is that, just like Dave Chappelle said, it’s not a real place. Sure, you can grab a headline or string together a few sentences into a thread, but at the end of the day it’s just another virtual space with disembodied experiences. Twitter may live on as the internet’s comment section, ...

Here we are in 2022, and we are pumped to be throwing more great conversation and topics your way. After a few weeks off and Garreth losing his voice, it is time to get back into the studio and focus on what it is we are doing as creative professionals and why it matters so ...

Like most of y’all, we spend the end of our year thinking back and dreaming forward. New Year’s Resolutions, or whatever you may call them, are fun ways to think about what the next twelve months may have in store. They are also good ways to plan for the work you hope to do. This ...

Here we are folks: we’ve finally made it to Christmas, and everyone deserves a break. We thought 2021 would be a rebound from 2020, but it was just as hard. Just like you, we will be taking a break, but we have a bit more in store before that happens. This week, Ryan and Garreth ...

We’ve always handed out our fair share of satellite brain debris, and this episode is no different, except that we have someone else who can roll with it just as easily. The thing about this debris is that it isn’t useless. The influences, thoughts, memories and connections we call brain debris are really just the ...

There is a great deal of mythology and mysticism that surrounds the arts, especially when it comes to suffering and death. For centuries artists have been seen as tortured individuals who have a special sense about life or unique view into death. Art works from around the globe show depictions of the most normal and ...