Art Practical Audio

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, visual artist Sydney Cain and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio meditate on the vision and process that inspire Cain’s upcoming show "Refutations" at Museum of African Diaspora. Cain, a third-generation San Franciscan, talks about living and making art in the city, reclaiming its Black past, present, and future. "Refutations" is an ongoing body of work exploring ancestral memory and the power of Black myth. The project includes various multimedia series of artwork, publications, and exhibitions emerging from personal genealogy research alongside process documentation through photography and drawing. Through play between ephemerality and figurative representation, Cain teases resistance against erasure while also celebrating metamorphoses that occur in the voids of invisibility. The work is an exploration in the perimeters of both existing and not existing through imaginative landscapes. Due to the current world health crisis, the Museum of the African Diaspora is currently closed. They are closely monitoring the changing status of COVID-19 and taking the necessary steps to reduce the spread of the coronavirus disease. All exhibitions have been postponed until further notice including "Sydney Cain: Refutations." For all updates on openings, please visit www.moadsf.org or follow MoAD on social media @moadsf.

For episode 8 of the Notes from MoAD series, visual artist DeShawn Dumas and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss the fragility and resilience of glass, the terrifying and meditative properties of art and shooting guns, and the qualities and limits of the art institution as community space. In conversation about the creation of his works, Dumas describes how the “performance” of creating the works embodied the navigation required to survive in this landscape. By creating abstract works, the artist shifts from the narrative of race in America to the visceral experiences of those most affected by the oppressive systems and violent tools of Colonialism. DeShawn Dumas’s solo exhibition, "Against the End of History," presented painting, video, and the artist’s self-described ballistic monochromes in a multimedia installation that situates the sacred within the political. Dumas counters the assertion of liberal democracy as the final form of human government and defender of human dignity as established by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay “The End of History?”. Dumas deploys the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to explore the psychic and historical afterlives of slavery, the increasing cultural predominance of militarized policing and the ecological catastrophe of climate change. Inhabiting the terrors of a past, not yet past, "Against the End of History" offered a space to contemplate the struggle for future(s) worth living. "DeShawn Dumas: Against the End of History" was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program September 4 through November 15, 2019.

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, photographer and visual artist Chanell Stone and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio revisit "Natura Negra (Black Nature)," Stone’s exhibition at Museum of African Diaspora. Stone walks us through the various parts of the show and gives us the behind-the-image process for her compelling black-and-white self-portraits that anchor the exhibition. Additionally, Stone reflects on her family’s ties to the American South, their eventual move to Los Angeles, and how these intertwined landscapes and narratives influence her image-making. Through the use of black-and-white analog photography, "Natura Negra" aims to expand the canon of traditional photography. Specificity is placed on urbanized African Americans living in dense cities and the disconnection from nature that often inherently follows this lifestyle. Stone analyzes the Black body’s presence within urban “forests” as an effort to reclaim and reconnect to nature itself, even within the confines of the man-made environment. Through a compilation of environmental portraits, Stone explores the notion of “holding space” within one’s environment and the nuances of compartmentalized nature. "Natura Negra" was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program, from December 4 through March 1, 2020.

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, visual artist Rodney Ewing and curator/organizer Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen talk about institutions, what the word “emerging” means when you’ve been an artist for fifteen years, and the things we learn about our work when we listen openly. As discussion about fact and truth leads to a deep-dive, head first, into the murky waters of the art market’s influence over what cultures get to have a brief and specific moment in the sun, the erasure of 200,000 years of Black art, and the long path to institutional diversity, they come up for air to affirm the power of creating our own spaces and communal opportunities. Re-examining complex and marginalized social histories, Longitude + Latitude presented an installation of mixed media works on paper created during Ewing’s residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Exploring social and historical narratives of forced migration or displacement, the exhibition considered mnemonic geography and the intersections of body, place, and memory within the African diaspora. Longitude + Latitude was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program from May 8 through June 23, 2019.

Welcome to Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. For our sixth episode of this series, multidisciplinary artist Indira Allegra and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss an expanding of world and experience, the interplay of consent and complicity, exhaustion of identity-based inquiry, and the temperature of colonialism. Indira’s faceted explorations of weaving through performance, textile, video/new media, and performance have documented and deconstructed physical, psychological, historical, social, and practical tensions. In conversation, Allegra and MacFadyen deliberate on these vectors of power and the reality that nothing is neutral. BODYWARP was a solo exhibition by Indira Allegra exploring weaving as performance requiring a unique receptivity to tensions extant in political and emotional spaces. BODYWARP explores looms as frames through which the weaver becomes the warp and is held under tension, performing a series of site-specific interventions using her body. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, looms and other tools of the weaver’s craft become organs of memory, pulling the artist’s body into an intimate choreography between maker, tool, and the narrative of a place. BODYWARP was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program, from September 19 through November 4, 2018.

Constance Hockaday on what it means to take risks in public art practice and how our desires can dictate the world's infrastructure.

A Conversation with Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada of Public Matters about expanding the notions and boundaries of expectations for public practice.

How does one survive and thrive as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area? The art world is inundated with stories from the community and media about artists being displaced in the face of great wealth disparity, a crushing housing crisis, the lack of sustainable employment in the arts, and a threatening decrease in exhibition and funding sources. Living and Working consists of a multi-author column, a video series, and live events where artists and cultural workers answer the question “How do you live and work in the Bay Area?” For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Jakeya Caruthers and Xandra Ibarra in the Growlery’s kitchen to commemorate the many conversations had in each other's kitchens.

For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Mik Gaspay and Kija Lucas in an intimate conversation about their experiences growing up in Palo Alto, and the paths that led them to becoming Bay Area-based artists. Learn how they continue to survive and thrive in the ever-changing ecosystem of the Bay. Gaspay's work can be seen at a permanent public art installation in Chinatown, San Francisco's Portsmouth Square bridge, he's a graduate of California College of the Arts. Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the Bay Area and nationally.

For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Brontez Purnell and Sophia Wang for a late-night conversation at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, where the two of them met and later co-founded the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. We’ll hear about the communities have shaped their practices, and how the two work together through dance and movement.

On April 11, 2018, legendary artist, activist, and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense Emory Douglas sat down with the California College of the Arts (CCA) Students of Color Coalition in a roundtable conversation. Douglas talked about his work in creating iconic images of Black liberation as a director, designer, and illustrator for the Panther newspaper, and heard from students …. This conversation was organized by Sita Bhaumik, Scholar in Residence at CCA's Center for Art + Public Life, as part of the Art + Survival program, supported by the CCA Center for Art and Public Life, the President's Diversity Steering Group, in collaboration with Diversity Studies, CCA Students of Color Coalition, and Art Practical

We close out the third season of the podcast with a conversation with Maya Stovall, a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose work deploys choreography, long term site research, experimental ethnography, and moving and still images to unpack the complexities of community survival, institutional disinvestment, and urban planning. Her layered approach comes through in the multimodal ways she speaks about her work, shifting between dense theory as almost poetic language, to a direct revelation of the pain and frustration in seeing how her family’s neighborhood has been rendered as a food desert with only liquor stores to serve them. Stovall is perhaps best known for her ongoing project, Liquor Store Theatre, an ongoing and long term exploration of her Detroit community. In video documentation of her artistic and anthropological dialogues with residents, we see her both performing in front of the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores and interviewing patrons and passersby, a juxtaposition of footage that manages to be revelatory while still withholding some things only for the people in the city who happen to be there to witness the live events. In her process, Stovall simultaneously interrogates ethnographic traditions and the expectations of artists in public practice. In our conversation, we talk about the roots of her practice, vulnerability, and resisting having her work being pinned down to any one reading of it. Stovall’s Under New Ownership, a solo exhibition jointly presented by Fort Mason Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, is on view through May 5, 2019. She will be enacting Theorem, no.1 a public performance winding through the streets of San Francisco on May 3rd. Click here for more information. Maya Stovall is a conceptual artist and an anthropologist, and she has exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2017–18 F-Series. Her book, Liquor Store Theatre, arrives from Duke University Press in spring 2020. Her second book on the imprint, Writing Through Walls, co-authored with her brother Josef Cadwell, is forthcoming. She has published peer-reviewed academic articles on her anthropological field research and her contemporary art practices in Transforming Anthropology and Journal of the Anthropology of North America, as well as in publications including Detroit Research Journal and The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Anthropology News. She lives and works in Detroit where she grew up, as well as in Los Angeles County, where she is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona. ________ Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

In an age where we are inundated by a seemingly endless scroll of images and living within an economy that demands an inordinate amount of our attention, it feels necessary to ask what is the value of doing nothing? It is much more evident now than ever before that social media platforms are another tool for advertisers and corporations to learn our desires through likes and clicks encouraging us to stay glued to our screens and monitors. In 2017, Bay Area-based artist Jenny Odell gave a talk at the annual EYEO festival titled “How to do Nothing,” which resulted in a book of the same name. I have been following Odell’s artistic practice and writing since she was in graduate student pursuing her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. With a background in literature and having taught Internet Art at Stanford University for several years, her wealth of knowledge related to networked culture to free things advertised on Instagram that aren’t actually free, she has an uncanny ability to craft a stories emblematic of our digital age. In this episode, The Value of Doing Nothing, I spoke with Odell about exercises in attention, space for refusal, bonding over our experience of an Ellsworth Kelly painting at the SF MOMA, and much more. The irony of Odell’s call to action, being that of doing nothing, leads us to the multitude of ways that stepping back from time to time enables and affords us the opportunity to learn how to observe the world around us, actively listen, and fastidiously mind the details we might normally overlook. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

In this episode, I talk with Honolulu-based artist, activist, and cultural organizer Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt. Rebecca’s winding path to her current practice reflects the complex layers of intercultural analysis and research she brings to her engagements with people and materials: growing up in Chicago’s Jewish community, her study of languages and photography, creative entrepreneurship, working as an educator facilitating Las Fotos Project with youth in Tijuana, and seeking out Hawaiʻi’s Filipino community to take part in Ilokano language and cultural reclamation within the diaspora. In one of her most recent projects, Nabanglo a lamisaan, she created a tasting table of sukang ilocos, sugar cane vinegar, to enable conversations about labor history, cultural practice, and imperialism. The project emerged from a collaborative exploration with botanists at the University of Hawaiʻi--where she attempted to make her own vinegar from local sugar cane--as well as research into anti-colonial resistance in the Philippines, such as the Basi Revolt. Over the course of our conversation, we talk about the trajectory of her practice and how she approaches Ilocano cultural recovery work while on the 'āina, Native Hawaiian lands. Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt is an artist, activist, feminist, and diasporic person engaging in place-based art-making and learning. Her current work reflects on studies and reclamation of the Ilokano language and her attempts to reconstruct connections with the land and cosmology of her ancestors which has been lost through displacement, colonization, and miseducation. Utilizing photographs, natural materials, handwritten words, as well as found images, she combines disparate information from various sites, sources, and time periods to explore how relationships to land/daga/'āina manifest in diasporic communities. Crossing into the realm of social practice, she often works in collaboration to facilitate the exchange of knowledge intergenerationally and interculturally. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu. ________ Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

Virtual reality is not a new phenomenon. From dioramas to panoramas, the allure of being enveloped in a place or tableau outside of one’s reality has mass appeal considering the popularity of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Through 360 filmmaking and photography, the creation of space within the virtual realm has become commonplace. From journalism to entertainment purposes, while virtual worlds enable a new way of seeing fantastical worlds, artists and designers must consider format and aesthetics. In the second part of a two-part series, Not Your Average Playtest, I look at how artist Veronica Graham translates her drawings and paintings into digital architectures within the virtual world. She also touches upon how she must reconcile physical and digital perception to create immersive experiences. Veronica Graham is an Oakland based visual artist primarily working in print and digital mediums. Inspired by today’s rapidly changing environment, she sees her art practice as a form of world building. Each work is the creation of place or artifact, calling attention to how fiction is weaved into our reality. In 2012 she founded Most Ancient, a design studio focused on small press and digital production. Her books have been collected by SFMoMA, MoMA, The New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, Stanford University, Yale University, and other public and private collections. Graham has received grants from Kala Art Institute and Women’s Studio Workshop. She is now designing virtual worlds and her first VR project called “The Muybridge Mausoleum” was completed in 2017 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift platforms. In addition to her own practice, Graham is an active member on SFMoMA’s Games Advisory Board and an arts educator who has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, Southern Exposure, and Creativity Explored. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

(un)making | Ep. 38: Leland Miyano by Art Practical

I collect treasures. To some people, I collect junk. But one object I own that has never lost its luster is the View-Master. Even as an adult, the sensation of looking at reels ranging from visuals showing vintage Disney cartoons to 1960s New York cityscapes, the View-Master has served up a type of visual immersive space since the late 1930s. From dioramas to panoramas, the allure of being enveloped in a place or tableau outside of one’s reality has mass appeal considering the popularity of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Through 360 filmmaking and photography, the creation of space within the virtual realm has become commonplace. From journalism to entertainment purposes, while virtual worlds enable a new way of seeing fantastical worlds, artists and designers must consider format and aesthetics. In the first part of a two-part series, Not Your Average Playtest, I scratch the surface of the history of virtuality from analog to digital formats and examine how contemporary artists are using virtual reality as a medium. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

In this episode, I talk with Los Angeles artist Carolina Caycedo. Caycedo’s multilayered projects weave together archival, site, and community research, long term support of grassroots social movements, drawings, performance, documentary video, educational engagements, and the work of many collaborators. Through this array of tactics, she investigates the impact of extractive economies and hyper development on communities, local systems of knowledge, and the environment. While the art objects generated through her practice are not necessarily the endpoint of her work, they have a presence and depth that unfolds across a variety of contexts. For instance, her Serpent River Book--an expansive accordion fold artist book that explores the stories of communities in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico grappling with the impact of privatization and industrialization of their rivers--is as much at home as a museum installation piece, pedagogical tool for village organizers, or performance prompt for a company of dancers. In our conversation we talk about the embodied knowledge of what she calls “geochoreographies,” navigating--and sometimes haunting--institutions, and working with ethical rigor. Carolina Caycedo has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogota, Quezon City, Toronto, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, San Juan, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Mexico DF, Tijuana, and London. Her work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows at Vienna Secession, Intermediae-Matadero Madrid, Agnes B Gallery Paris, Alianza Francesa Bogotá, Hordaland Kunstsenter Bergen, 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and DAAD Gallery in Berlin. She has participated in international biennials including Sao Paulo (2016), Berlin (2014), Paris Triennial (2013), New Museum (2011), Havana (2009), Whitney (2006), Venice (2003) and Istanbul (2001). In 2012, Caycedo was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin resident. She has received funding from Creative Capital, California Community Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Harpo Foundation, Art Matters, Colombian Culture Ministry, Arts Council UK, and Prince Claus Fund. Artist’s site: http://Carolinacaycedo.com Exhibition at the Huntington: https://www.huntington.org/rituals-of-labor Palm Springs Art Museum project: https://www.psmuseum.org/events/pop-up/carolina-caycedo Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram at @un_making

Tuesday, October 2, 2018, Art Practical hosted an evening of conversation between Ana Teresa Fernández and Julio César Morales, who spoke about how their respective practices are influenced by each other’s work and processes. This conversation was recorded live at the San Francisco Art Institute. Between You & Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible yet play a significant role in the generative space of artmaking. This program is organized as part of an editorial column published online by Art Practical with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing quality of life by championing and sustaining the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease. Ana Teresa Fernández, born in 1981 in Tampico, Mexico, lives and works in San Francisco. Her work explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures, translated into masterful oil paintings, installations and videos. Within her work, performance becomes a tool for investigation as strong feminist undercurrents flow together with post-colonial rhetoric. Through her work, the artist illuminates the psychological and physical barriers that define gender, race, and class in Western society and the global south. Fernández has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Humboldt State University, Eureka, CA; the Tijuana Biennial, Tijuana, Mexico; Snite Museum at Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA and The Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA. Her work has been collected by institutions such the Denver Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and Kadist Art Foundation. Julio César Morales By deploying a range of media and visual strategies, Julio César Morales investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’ practice employs multifarious mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, reenacted a famous meal, all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch more episodes! Check us out on Instagram at @artpracticalsf. #APaudio

Thursday, Nov 8, 2018, Art Practical hosted an evening of conversation between Constance Hockaday and Laurel Braitman, who will be speaking about how their respective practices are influenced by each other’s work and processes. This conversation was recorded live at the Curatorial Research Bureau. Between You & Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible yet play a significant role in the generative space of artmaking. This program is organized as part of an editorial column published online by Art Practical with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing quality of life by championing and sustaining the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease. Constance Hockaday’s work is about creating portals that get people closer to the water and nature, and closer to that feeling of belonging in a place (preferably the place where they live). Hockaday has most often looked to water as a place for hosting social sculptures and immersive experiences. She believes the shoreline is a place where many human and non-human interests collide. Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Medicine & the Muse Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine where she's busy helping physicians tell better stories--for themselves and their patients. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT, is a Senior TED Fellow and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine, a live magazine the New York Times has called a “Sensation.” Her work and collaborations with musicians and artists have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch more episodes! Check us out on Instagram at @artpracticalsf. #APaudio

As a little girl, I once dreamed of becoming a research scientist. It never happened, but I did spend a considerable amount of time in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry learning the intricacies of clinical research. While I never became the doctor my mother wished me to be, the desire to understand science, where we come from, and the internal workings of our various systems never cease to amaze me. In this episode, @_emotionalbaggage liked your post, I explore the artistic practice of artist Ani Liu and how she re-imagines portraiture and explores the translation between virtual to physical. In Liu’s most recent work, Real Virtual Feelings (2018), she examines how the digital realm affects our cognition and body chemistry. In essence, Liu shows the direct relationship of what happens inside our bodies directly affects our behaviors, intentions, and expectations. Yet Lui’s work is a part of a larger body of work of artists working at the intersections of art, science, and technology. The SubRosa collective has engaged in speculative and imaginative practices of how biomaterial can be used as artistic mediums for quite some time. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

It’s sad but true: all good things must come to an end. In their final episode of what are you looking at?, hosts Jay and Elena reflect on all the highs this past year has brought, revisit their all-time favorite segments, and interview their ultimate art crush Tschabalala Self. Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch our podcasts as soon as they publish! Check us out on instagram at @artpracticalsf. #APaudio

On this episode of the podcast, I talk with Oakland-based artist Katie Dorame. Dorame primarily works in painting and drawing to weave together elements from classic and camp Hollywood movies, genre fiction, and archival research to create narratives that explore colonialism and Native American pop-culture representations, leavened with moments of humor. Her work complicates this season’s theme of “movement,” challenging us to remember that movement is defined by the places moved through or into; that the power to enter in to a space is not the same as being welcomed in; and that the narratives that shape our knowledge of those journeys are a potential site to reclaim agency. In one of her signature series, Alien Apostles, Franciscan priests are depicted as invading outer space entities, terrorizing California’s Native peoples and facing staunch resistance. In Pirates & Sea Ghouls, she populates scenes from swashbuckling pirate cinema with Native American actors including Irene Bedard, Wes Studi, and Tantoo Cardinal, reimagining those oceanic Western fictions as a site for indigenous centered adventure. In our conversation we discuss the sources of her work; the compression of past, present, and future; and how painting suits her need for a reclusive practice. Katie Dorame is a visual artist, primarily working in painting, born in Los Angeles, currently living and working in Oakland. Dorame’s work has been exhibited at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles, Southern Exposure, Galería de la Raza, Incline Gallery, and the Thacher Gallery in San Francisco as well as the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College in New York. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Indigenous artist of mixed descent, and member of the Gabrielino/Tongva tribe of California. --- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! Check us out on Instagram at @un_making. #APaudio

One of the most memorable 2018 Super Bowl television commercials speculated on the loss of Alexa’s voice. At first, the viewer watches a woman at home, commanding the Amazon artificial-intelligence device to provide information. But the woman is surprised when the automaton belts out a cough and goes silent. Back at Amazon headquarters, the Alexa team reassures CEO Jeff Bezos of the backup plan, which entails the use of celebrities such as Gordon Ramsey and Cardi B to fill in for Alexa. Consumers requesting Alexa’s assistance are met with a slew of comical responses. The commercial aims to show the inadequacy and unpredictably of the human as a machine. In this episode, “Not So Artificial Intelligence,” I examine the ways in which assistive technology has become a new terrain for artists like Trisha Baga, Stephanie Dinkins, and Cara deFabio. Each artist has incorporated the use of assistive technology to explore human emotional labor as well as the slippery nature of language. For instance, in deFabio’s performance, Virtual Girlfriend (2017), the artist conducted extensive research on the crowdsourced labor of providing digital companionship to strangers around the world. Baga, meanwhile, examines what might happen when we develop an intimate relationship with a virtual assistant, in her work Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor (2018). The essay titled Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions, by the scholar Katherine Stubb, is a point of departure for the episode. Stubb’s work centered on phone operators, who were often women, as the providers of both connectivity and emotional support to the listener. --- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio

In this episode, Elena and Jay reflect on the decades-long careers of Black artists, often overlooked or undervalued, and consider what their re-emergence in the contemporary art conversation says about our current moment and what it means for the future. And in the most cyclical of fashions, they provide tips for surviving your Saturn return but choose artwork that they’d willingly die for. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch what are you looking at? as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram at @wayla_pod. #APaudio

In this episode of the podcast, I talk with artist, curator, and cultural organizer Nancy Hom. For decades, Nancy has served as an anchor and mentor in the Asian American artistic community, creating platforms to support artists, bring together people, and advance social justice work. From her early artistic and activist work in New York as a co-founder of the Asian American Media Collective and as part of Asian Women United, to her work with San Francisco’s Kearny Street Workshop, Nancy has dedicated her life to building institutional resources for the Asian American community and movements. We talk about her recent installations that take the form of collectively shaped, ephemeral mandala sculptures and the ways that practice reflects the worldview and spirituality that she built through decades of work in Asian American arts movements. Nancy Hom is an artist, writer, and cultural organizer. Based in San Francisco, she has served as an Executive Director for Kearny Street Workshop and was co-founder of the Asian American Media Collective in New York City. Nancy received her BFA in Illustration and Visual Communication from Pratt Institute. She is an internationally exhibited artist and has worked with many Bay Area community arts groups, including Galeria de la Raza and Japan Art and Media Workshop. Her archive and papers are collected in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio. Check us out on Instagram at @un_making.

With the popularity of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos on YouTube and social-media platforms, sound has become an integral part of understanding and exploring embodiment. Yet the fascination with sound has a long history beyond the digital realm. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art new-media curator, Rudolf Frieling, aptly described The 40 Part Motet by the artist Janet Cardiff as “sound as sculpture.” In a similar vein, this episode seeks to explore the history and convergence of analog and digital technologies in the production of experimental sound. The show’s topic is also inspired by Jonathan Sterne’s research and scholarship on the MP3 format, which reveals not only the evolution of the MP3 but also how this sonic commodity produced a science of sound connected to telephony and music and drew distinctions between public and private sound. In this episode, sound as a medium for creative practice and inquiry is examined through a conversation with the artist and scholar, Anna Friz. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

PRNT SCRN is a podcast hosted by Dorothy R. Santos about bridging the gaps between analog, new media, and digital art practices. The first official episode launches on artpractical.com on October 24th! Follow on: IG: @prnt_scrn_ap Twitter: @PRNTSCRN1 Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer and curator whose research interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH (in partnership with Eyebeam) and works as the Program Manager for the Processing Foundation.

On this episode, Jay and Elena visit Bay Area Now 8, the YBCA triennial exhibition, and talk about faves and feelings. From work that complicates the relationship between past and present to work that’s just plain complicated. The hosts look at the fine line between art crushes and art conundrums. Let’s just say there are a lot of feelings in this episode, a lot to unpack, and a lot of talk about...crime? -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch what are you looking at? as soon as it publishes! Check us out on instagram at @wayla_pod. #APaudio

In this (un)making episode, we talk with Ho Chi Minh City-based artist, curator, and cultural organizer Dinh Q. Lê. Lê is probably best known for his photo weavings that interlace Western representations of the American war in Vietnam, from Hollywood films to photojournalists’ documentation. His use of a traditional mat weaving technique, taught to him by his aunt, breaks apart and reassesses those fragmentary depictions through a Vietnamese lens. Along with those iconic pieces, Lê has explored issues of migration, trauma, collective memory, and global conflict through videos and photographs. We spoke briefly about one of the pieces, The Colony, which mixes drone footage of guano mining on the Chincha islands, video of Chinese vessels harassing Vietnamese boats in the South China Sea, and standoffs between the US and Chinese planes in international airspace to explore the human and ecological impact of global capital against the backdrop of the continuing neo-imperial struggles for territory and control. Our discussion of his current solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, True Journey is Return, serves as a jumping off point for a conversation about the forced departure of Vietnamese refugees in the wake of the American War in Vietnam and the return of many in the community to the home of their births, including Lê himself. We talk about how these journeys have impacted his work and expanded his worldview, the visual strategies he uses to contend with images, and the rebuilding of collective cultural memories. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! Check us out on Instagram at @un_making. #APaudio

Jay and Elena are back and getting down to business. In this episode, our hosts catch us up on how they spent the summer: seeing shows (or not) and watching ridiculous amounts of television. And since the art world and the academic world operate on roughly the same calendar, Elena and Jay unpack the meaning of “back-to-school” by thinking about the benefit and necessity of alternative schooling models, like LeBron James’ I Promise school, Joseph Cullier and Shani Peters’ The Black School, and the Pilipinx American Library (PAL) at the Asian Art Museum. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch what are you looking at? as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram at @wayla_pod. #APaudio

We kick off (un)making’s third season with an investigation into the theme of “movement,” with a conversation with artist and educator, Jesus Barraza. Through his many collaborations and community projects, particularly with his partner Melanie Cervantes and their work together under the banner Dignidad Rebelde, Jesus has helped to produce many of the political graphics and prints that continue to shape the visual identity for movements that are radical, feminist, and centered on people of color, in the San Francisco Bay Area and globally. Jesus roots this practice in struggles for social justice and in generations of creative knowledge, stories, and production. As he notes in the course of the interview, this work draws on a long and complex history of print, mural, and socially engaged practices within Indigenous and Xicanx communities—a constantly growing tradition that he now passes along to his students. We talk about Indigenous spiritualities, the community workshop as a cultural practice, and the ways Dignidad Rebelde’s political analysis has been shaped by Xicanisma and the Zapatistas. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! Check us out on Instagram at @un_making. #APaudio

In this episode, writers and members The Black Aesthetic, Jamal Batts and Malika Ra Imhotep, sit down with LA-born filmmaker summer fucking mason, to discuss their immersive installation and short essay film Gemini. summer discloses how this work is deeply tied to familial rupture, the discovery of themselves and their brothers within the structures of black masculinity, and understanding their queerness. Notes from the Field: MoAD’s Emerging Artists and Critic Series, in partnership with Art Practical, is a podcast dedicated to MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program. This series of interviews gives the exhibiting artists an opportunity to discuss their featured exhibition at MoAD and how their art practice is in dialogue with contemporary art as it considers themes of the African Diaspora.

Notes From MoAD: Episode 4 with Tamara Porras, Emily Kuhlmann, & Soleil Summer by Art Practical

All great things must come to an end...luckily for you, this ‘thing’ will be back in a few short months. This episode is the season finale of “what are you looking at,” and our hosts reflect on all different sorts of endings: the ending of the season, the ending of artists’ careers, and the art we would (hypothetically) end our lives over. It’s not all doom and gloom though, Elena and Jay also bask in their summer-break plans, brand new art crushes, and consider whether we’re in the beginning of a new black avant-garde. Music: What’s Good by Son! Follow: Lachelle Workman Jen Everett (@jeneverettart)

episode 32: Barnali Ghosh & Anirvan Chatterjee This episode we talk with community activists, storytellers, and researchers Barnali Ghosh & Anirvan Chatterjee, the founders and facilitators of the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Through the tour, the two guide people across downtown Berkeley as they share stories that explore the multigenerational and intersectional work of South Asian Americans in the region: from Queer community building, feminist mobilization against human trafficking and labor exploitation, international freedom movements, and student organizing. The two have also carried this investment in bringing together storytelling and cultural history in curatorial projects--including exhibitions and programs at Kearny Street Workshop and the Asian Art Museum--and ongoing writings that continue to uncover new archival resources that connect us to the long legacies of resistance in the South Asian community.

episode 31: Erick Arguello (Calle 24), Rachel Lastimosa (SOMA Pilipinas), & Tommy Wong (Oakland Chinatown) We’ve got a supersized discussion this episode as we talk with three Bay Area cultural organizers who are helping to build resilient local neighborhoods that are grounded in communities of color: Erick Arguello from Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, Rachel Lastimosa of SOMA Pilipinas - the Filipino Cultural Heritage District, and Tommy Wong of the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Initiative. This panel, Keeping Our Space: Organizing Cultural Districts in the Bay Area, was recorded live at the Bayanihan Community Center in the heart of SOMA Pilipinas in early April as the final event in Art Practical’s Process + Practice + Progress series. In the course of our conversation, we talk about the history and context for the organizing happening in each neighborhood—what this means legislatively and culturally; the stakes of this work; and how communities are evolving and what it means to hold space to welcome in other people.

It’s MFA season and Jay and Elena reflect on their post-grad experiences and give some tricks and tips that have helped them survive it (so far). They muse on what their alternate reality majors would have been and address institutional bias in the exhibition jurying process. Elena and Jay also give a BIG shoutout to all the recent fine arts grads in the Bay. Music: Rewind Bello x knowsthetime https://soundcloud.com/knowsthetime/rewind Tags: @sfaiofficial @cacollegeofarts @millscollege @ucberkeleyofficial @stanforduniversity @knowsthetime @bellofromthebay

Artist Andrew Wilson sits down with Curator and Educator Angel Rafael Concepcion Vazquez to discuss his affinity for fashion and honoring the ephemeral objects that acknowledge the histories of of Black bodies in America. Notes from the Field: MoAD’s Emerging Artists and Critic Series is dedicated to MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program, giving the exhibiting artists an opportunity to discuss their featured exhibition at MoAD and how their art practice is in dialogue with contemporary art as it considers themes of the African Diaspora.

episode 30: Edgar Arceneaux In this episode I talk with Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux about his recent projects Until, Until, Until and Library of Black Lies; Milli Vanilli and the Roots Christmas special; understanding black masculinity growing up as a geeky kid; and learning from moments of failure. Follow Edgar's work at studioedgararceneaux.com and on Instagram at @edgar_three.

How do you incentivize art institutions to shift away from latent, public, or systemic white supremacy and inequitable power dynamics? As Black arts leaders, how are the programs and publics of institutions, both locally and globally, considered under current political conditions? Join Art Practical and some of California’s leading Black voices in arts leadership for a panel discussion on how they influence and challenge the pre-existing structures within art institutions. Panelists: Jamillah James of ICA LA, Maria Jenson of SOMArts, and Linda Harrison of Museum of the African Diaspora, moderated by independent curator Essence Harden.

episode 29: In this episode, I talk with New Orleans-based artist, writer, and cultural organizer Imani Jacqueline Brown. Imani manifests her work in many forms: as a core member of Occupy Museums, co-founder of Blights Out in New Orleans, Director of Programs with Antenna, co-producer of Fossil Free Fest, and as a board member of the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a community land trust that built New Orleans's first permanently affordable housing. Throughout her work she consistently interrogates the underlying mechanisms of exploitation and inequity in capitalism while organizing intentional communities of resistance and mutual aid. In our conversation, Imani explains the themes that link her many projects. She also challenges our communities to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate and resist extractive industries, whether real estate speculation or oil. We also discuss her ambivalence toward identifying as an artist and whether that identification is useful in the work that she does.

Taking their lead from patron saint Nicki Minaj, Jay and Elena are demanding equal respect in the capital-a Art world. Taking a hard look at arts institutions, our hosts discuss the recent dismissals of women in the art world as well as highlight the space(s) being carved out by women of color, subverting white male dominance within these same institutions. Jay and Elena also chat it up with Bay Area-bae Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle about her solo exhibition “The Retrieval” at SFAC Galleries and ask how she fights against her own erasure and finds solace in humor, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, memes, and her son the Alphabet King. Follow: @achinkle05 @sfac_galleries @jamillahjames @moad_sf @somarts @essenceh @spikeleila @artpracticalsf @nickiminaj

episode 28: Chinatown Art Brigade This episode features a conversation with Tomie Arai, ManSee Kong, and Betty Yu from the New York-based cultural organizing and activist collective, Chinatown Art Brigade. The three co-founded the group with the help of social justice movement building organization, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, who wanted to develop a culturally rooted complement to their tenant organizing work in Manhattan’s Chinatown. We talk about the genesis of their work, future projects, and the cultural context of organizing in Chinatown. Follow them at chinatownartbrigade.com, @chinatownartbrigade on Instagram, and @ctownartbrigade on Twitter.

In this episode, artist and educator, Angela Hennessy sits down with Cheryl Dericotte, MoAD’s inaugural artist from the Emerging Artist Program. Derricotte's exhibition, Ghosts/Ships, was exhibited on January 27, 2016 and closed on April 03, 2016. They discuss how Dericotte’s interdisciplinary practice is influenced by the texts she encounters in her daily life and the importance of titling work. Dericotte also generously shares songs from her playlist for creating new work, as music plays a key role in the development of her projects. Notes from the Field: MoAD’s Emerging Artists and Critic Series is dedicated to MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program, giving the exhibiting artists an opportunity to discuss their featured exhibition at MoAD and how their art practice is in dialogue with contemporary art as it considers themes of the African Diaspora.

In this episode, we talk with multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator Sarah Biscarra Dilley. Sarah works expansively in collage, print, archival materials, handwork, and language; she’s a writer and academic investigating resilience, displacement, geography, and history, currently pursuing a PhD in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. In our conversation, Sarah discusses maps as myth and legislation as literature to be interrogated, her research into the stories embedded in her yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash familial lands, and role of intuitive image making in her practice. She also expands on the international relationships and projects she’s been developing between indigenous peoples across the Pacific that echo and continue ancestral legacies of navigation and cultural exchange, particularly through an upcoming exhibition that she is co-curating with Leuli Luna’i Eshraghi, Freja Carmichael, Tarah Hogue, and Lana Lopesi at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Through that project, opening in September 2018, she is presenting the work of artist Natalie Ball. Follow Sarah's work at sarahbiscarradilley.com and @sarahbiscarradilley on Instagram.

This month’s episode is all about sports...kind of. In the spirit of March Madness, Elena and Jay tackle the relationship between art and sports culture. Using ambivalence about the upcoming relocation of the Golden State Warriors franchise as a jumping off point, our hosts discuss contemporary artists like Pamela Council, Mark Bradford, and Hank Willis Thomas who use sports as a lens for considering race, gender, nationality, and politics. **Special shoutout to the arts podcast Bad at Sports who inspired this month’s episode title. Music: BroadwayMuse https://soundcloud.com/taniesha-broadway/make-me-rich Follow: @hankwillisthomas @pamelacouncil @tabithasoren @broadway_muse This episode is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.

Decolonial Strategies with Anuradha Vikram, Michelle Dizon, and Việt Lê was the first of three talks in Art Practical’s new programming series called Process Practice Progress, which is funded, in part, by the California Arts Council, a state agency. The series strives to create generative dialogue to reshape art institutions through actionable solutions and sustainable practices.

episode 26: Tyese Wortham In this episode, I talk with cultural equity advocate, arts administrator, and dancer, Tyese Wortham. In our conversation, Tyese explains the work that she does with CAST--the Community Arts Stabilization Trust--and in particular, Keeping Space - Oakland, a technical and financial assistance initiative she runs within the organization. Tyese breaks down how CAST approaches their work and the nuances of Oakland’s cultural ecology--including hopeful examples of people self-organizing resources to hold onto their spaces. We also talk about cultural equity and creating room for yourself as an artist and creative being within institutions. For more information visit www.cast-sf.org

Notes from the Field: MoAD’s Emerging Artists and Critic Series is dedicated to MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program, giving the exhibiting artists an opportunity to discuss their featured exhibition at MoAD and how their art practice is in dialogue with contemporary art as it considers themes of the African Diaspora. In the first episode of this mini series, Art Historian, Jacqueline Francis sits down with sculptor and designer Ebitenyefa Baralaye to discuss his history and identity as its spans from his birthplace in Nigeria, through Antigua, and currently the U.S. For more information about MoAD visit: www.moadsf.org For more information about Ebitenyefa Baralaye visit: www.baralaye.com

episode 25: Vero Majano In this episode I talk with filmmaker, storyteller, and community archivist, Vero Majano. Vero’s work explores the cultural history of San Francisco’s Mission District, creating spaces to assert and remember the queer and Latinx communities that shape one of the city’s most iconic but highly contested neighborhoods. In our conversation, Vero breaks down why nostalgia is such a critical tool for her community in this time of change, her work as love letters to those who will hear them, and Queer longing and imaginary as a lifelong creative project. Follow Vero on Instagram at @gordofacesf.