Shockoe Artspeak

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 ...

Remember when everything was better? Remember when grandma sent that sweater that one time and it was your favorite? Remember when…? Nostalgia can be a great thing as you reminisce or think back on good times. But does nostalgia play nicely with the art and design world? It’s hard to really nail down because memory ...

It’s coming up on that time of year when schedules get full of even more great things to do. From holiday plans with family and friends to shopping and travel, the holidays can get loaded and make us all feel a little torn from our studio practice. The juggle is always real, and sometimes it ...

It’s an ironic thing that, after two conversations focused on suffering and death, Garreth and Ryan would both lose most of the last month to those very same topics. New episodes have been noticeably absent because extreme sickness and palpable death knocked Garreth and Ryan both out of commission. Garreth got a certain virus, and ...

As we are all recovering from the excitement and late night surrounding Halloween, we thought it would be good to revisit a solid conversation with multidisciplinary artist and Shockoe Artspace resident artist Chino Amobi. While 2020 was not the year any of us planned to have, we have finally found ourselves in a 2021 with ...

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 ...

Here we are: 100 episodes, and we couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you listening to our conversations and interviews. When we started this over two years ago, we didn’t actually know how far this would go or even if anyone would even listen. To our surprise, we are still here ...

During art school we are constantly inundated with artists and their work, and during this time we are most focused on how we can stand out, be different or position ourselves as an original. For most of us, that marked difference between us and our mentors and influences never really happens. We kind of look ...

Last week folks all across the country got hit with some intense rain. Here in Richmond, it rained so hard that an entire side of the Interstate flooded! Schools were closed, businesses were damaged, and people were swimming in the streets. For us, that meant a small bit of roof damage in our recording studio ...

With Ryan away with work obligations, Garreth sits down this week to talk with painter and friend of the show, Ken Gilbertson. Ken’s gallery, The Hatchback Gallery, was stolen earlier this year, leaving him without a job and without a studio. We catch up with Ken to hear about how his practice has had to ...

This week Ryan and Garreth sit down with Detroit-based artist Richard Haley to discuss personal history, graduate school, and tacos. Richard’s solo survey show can be viewed from September 3 – November 27, 2021 at Shockoe Artspace. Richard Haley is an artist, curator and writer living in Detroit. His work has been exhibited nationally, including ...

Have you ever been focusing on a project in an intense way only to have a random idea, bit of pop culture or snippet of a song jack knife its way into your brain? Sometimes it’s hard to shake it, and other times, it just makes you have to hum a few bars before you ...

Sometimes you just can’t help but be angry about some things. It seems that 2020 and 2021 was a free pass to take it to a new level. Anger isn’t so bad, but the way we process it and respond to it is a different story. Some people have even made a career out of ...

We were all there at one time or another: sitting in our bedroom floor drawing comic book characters or staring at paintings and trying to make ours look exactly the same. It seems the beginning of anyone’s journey into art and design always starts by looking at what is out there and trying to make ...

If you’ve ever been on a road trip, there are two things you have learned. The first is that there is never a restaurant where you want to eat near you when you are actually hungry, and the second is that your mind has plenty of time to think up things, spend a ton of ...

There are a lot of tough subjects in the art world, and one of them is how we deal with poverty. While there are organizations in various sectors that are doing fantastic work to fight poverty, the art world has had a difficult relationship with how it approaches the economically disadvantaged. Often times, the work ...

“Hey did you hear about the new person in accounting?” It’s no big deal, right? We’ve all done it. Gossip seems like the most common and most benign thing you could do. After all, the world has real problems that need to be dealt with, so something as small as widespread lying, behind-the-scenes manipulation, and ...

For most of us, the idea of vacation stirs up images of elaborate European hotels or luxurious stays at inclusive resorts. While there aren’t many folks who would turn down trips like this if they were given to us, there also aren’t many of us who could ever afford such things. Vacation seems far away ...

There are a lot of tough subjects in the art world, and one of them is how we deal with poverty. While there are organizations in various sectors that are doing fantastic work to fight poverty, the art world has had a difficult relationship with how it approaches the economically disadvantaged. Often times, the work ...

This week Ryan and Garreth sit down with Marisa Stratton to discuss painting, her relationship to social media, and her recent solo show, My Screen Time, on view at Shockoe Artspace from June 2021-August 2021. Marisa Stratton is a Richmond, Virginia based painter whose work explores the collective digital experience and its relationship to painting as documentation. ...