Being An Artist With Tom Judd

Nigerian born but living in America since the age of one, Odili Donald Odita's work explores color on the grand scale and his hard-edge large paintings and mural installations have redefined abstract painting in the context of sociopolitical concerns. Most of Odita's work is inspired by the vibrant textiles of his home country, Nigeria, mixed with patterns from Western modernity. He has exhibited his work prolifically in important museums and galleries around the world including a recent large installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also been an important critic, writer, and lecturer at major institutions including Yale University and his present position as Professor of Painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University in Philadelphia.

A Chicago painter with an endless amount of surprises that unfold inside her landscapes of the Rococo and fantastical. Her work represents a continuation of the Chicago Imagists of the 60's with an interest in combining eccentric figuration with abstraction. “Bramson incorporates the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas, and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons” said critic Miranda McClintic She has shown her work prolifically in prestigious galleries and Museums internationally and her work is included in over 100 major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago ,The national museum of American Art in Washington DC and many more. She also was a professor of art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago …. totaling over 40 years of being a teaching Artist.

My guest today is Henry Burmudez. He became a major artist in his home country of Venezuela in the 70's through the early 2000's. He made a good living and prospered as a creative force in his home town of Caracas. Among his other accomplishments, he represented Venezuela at the 1986 Venice Biennale. In 1998 , with the election of Cesar Chavez, his world began to fall apart. With the collapse of the economy, his  collector base evaporated and left the artist with no way of making a living and support his family. With the help of artist Frank Hyder, he was invited to show in Miami Florida.  He eventually made his way to Philadelphia where he forged a new life as an artist and in 2024 had a 20 year retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit  was a survey of his extraordinary reinvention of himself and his artwork in his new chosen home. With the results of the recent election in the US, he is now reminded of the challenges he faced in Venezuela.We will be talking about all of that and what it means to be an artist in the world today.  

Chip is a photographer, an international public street artist and activist who worked as a physician on the Navajo nation between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon in Arizona for 36 years retiring in 2023. In 2012 he formed the Painted Desert Project – a community project which resulted in a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by reservation artists and artists from  all over the world. As an artist, a doctor and community activist he has committed himself to the vital health of the Navajo nation and the planet earth in general.  Thomas was a 2018 recipient of a Kindle Project gift and in 2020 was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN's founding.  

The independent filmmaker based in Salt Lake City, Utah has created his own very distinct and unique style of filmmaking. In 2013, Indiewire proclaimed Harris "The Best Underground Filmmaker You Don't Know — But Should."[5] Harris' films have been featured at various festivals and museums worldwide, including renowned venues like Sundance, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the British Film Institute in London, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna Austria, Les Laboratories in Aubervilliers France, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.[6] Harris taught film and screenwriting classes at the University of Utah and worked as a documentarian and television journalist. He wrote and directed six feature films, many experimental movies, and more than one-hundred documentaries for PBS, National Geographic, NBC, and others.[6] In 1991, he wrote and directed the comedy Rubin and Ed, in which Crispin Glover and Howard Hesseman wander the desert looking for a suitable place to bury a frozen cat.  In 2001 he released The Beaver Trilogy,  The Movie he has received the most critical acclaim and world wide attention. Harris has  also written three books: The Wild Goose Chronicles, Fate Is A Hairy Rodent, and Mondo Utah.[10]

“I appreciate the Rococo for its extravagance and theatricality, as it appeals to my love of kitsch.”- STUART NETSKY      Netsky is a conceptual artist making paintings, mixed media sculptures, prints and other objects. An original voice and artist whose work jumps off the canvas and confronts us with the eclectic absurdity of our image inundated culture. A lover of the theatrical, mixed with his unique version of pop and Romantic master painting.  His work is made in distinct series, creating a pictorial eclecticism that obscures our ability to make sense of the image, acting as a metaphor for the confusion and shifting dichotomies in social interactions.Digital images speak to our technologically driven world and reflect the temporal paradox in pop culture whereby the past is brought to the present, the present to the past. He digitally appropriates art and historical images with those from film and popular culture, juxtaposed with psychedelic and floral patterns and mixes them all together. His influences include Francois Boucher and Gerhard Richter, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, Nicholas Krushenick and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others - the rococo and abstraction, op art and pop art, anime and realism, and the psychedelic all come together, layered, spliced and distorted, materials that evoke the psychosexual. He views his practice as a drag display operating within the  time he has lived in while embracing nostalgia and romanticism for their tender and universal  sensibilities. He received a Master of Art in Art Education from Philadelphia College of Art in 1986 and went on to receive a Master of Fine Art in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA in 1990. Netsky was an Adjunct Professor at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Jefferson University. He has had solo exhibitions of his work at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Richard Anderson, NYC, Locks Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and a retrospective at the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts. He has also shown in innumerable group shows nationally and internationally. In 1995, he received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His work is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, as well as the Johnson and Johnson Collection and many private collections.   

Donald Camp is a renowned Philadelphia artist and photographer known for his large scale images that explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in the human face. Camp's unique printing methods are based on early 19th Century non-silver photographic processes. In 1990 Camp began his most acclaimed series, Dust Shaped Hearts. These large photographic monoprints are created with raw earth pigment and casein, and transmit haunting and intimate images of the human face. He is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim and Pew Grants. His work is included in many important collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art , and the Simon Guggenheim Collection.  

Dan Rizzie is an artist of the heart, whose work is playful yet sophisticated and combines a rich variety of medium and textures. His images and subject matter conjure a world of memory and symbols.   Born in Poughkeepsie, NY  in 1951,  he grew up in India, Egypt, Jordan and Jamaica. Rizzie lives in Sag Harbor, New York.[1] Dan  is a painter, printmaker, and collage artist. He attended Hendrix Collegein Conway, Arkansas under the mentorship of Don Marr and Bill Hawes.[2] At Hendrix he received his BFA in 1973.[2] In 2005, Rizzie was awarded Hendrix College's Distinguished Alumnus Award.Rizzie earned a MFA from Southern Methodist University's Meadow's School of Art in Dallas, Texas in 1975.[1][4] Dan Rizzie is an artist of paradoxical qualities.  His independence is in contrast to his aesthetic conservatism.  And perhaps because of his unwillingness to be either revolutionary in his artistic approach, or as flamboyant in technique as he is patently capable of, his work hasn't been as accurately understood as it deserves to be.  Rizzie's extraordinary knowledge of art history informs his art deeply, but in off-beat, even eccentric ways. One is tempted to suggest that at times absorption in the art of others, subsumes his own passion to express a uniquely individual set of feelings. Rizzie's art is represented by major galleries across the country and is included in many important collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and  the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,[4] the Dallas Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and collections at AT&T Corporate Center, Chicago, Illinois, Delta Air Lines, Parrish Art Museum, and the Mayo Clinic.  

Sarah McEneaney's art is singular and unique in its focus on the everyday existence of the artist. Living in the middle of the very busy and complicated city of Philadelphia, she has created a lifestyle of almost monastic discipline as an artist. McEneaney is also an activist and community leader including the formation of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association in 2001, and the co-founding of the Reading Viaduct Project in 2003. She works mostly in egg tempera, and her work is raw and direct, a slow moving autobiographic investigation of the nature of her life, and our life. In that way her paintings are very universal and profound.  She has shown her work in major galleries and museums for the last 40 years, including an extensive retrospective in 2004 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the university of Pennsylvania. She is included in major collections including Philadelphia Museum of Art,[2] Mills College Art Museum,[3] the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,[4] Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Woodmere Art Museum  in Philadelphia.

Judith Schaechter:  Stain glass artist that has redefined the scope of contemporary art in both materials and subject matter. She has created a startling body of work, using hi-tech and low tech, if not centuries-old techniques. She has chosen for her subject matter an equally archaic focus that seems to bring the suffering and story telling of ancient religious iconography into the 21st century. Her work can be seen all over the world in major museums and galleries including:  Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Schaechter's Bigtop Flophouse Bedspins appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. She has artwork in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

Gail Ann Dorsey, most famous for being David Bowie's bass player and collaborator, has, with her voice and stage presence, made an art of being a session player with other top bands and artists, bringing her unique sound to a long list of important bands and recordings, including Tears for Fears, The National, Lenny Kravitz, Bryan Ferry, Ani Difranco, to name a few. She has written, recorded, and performed her own material as well, creating the 2004 lyrical masterwork, “I Used to Be.” Originally from West Philadelphia, Dorsey, at the age of 22, moved to London to pursue her musical career, where she was in a musical collaboration with many bands, including her first high-profile job as a guest vocalist in the original lineup of The Charlie Watts Big Band and its 1985 premiere at London's famous West End jazz club. Dorsey went on to become a world-renowned session player, singer, and writer.

Stuart Rome, a world-renowned photographer, has produced one of the most eclectic and compelling bodies of work imaginable. He also established the photography department at Drexel University, exhibited his work in top galleries, and is featured in the collections of many major museums. Moreover, he has published books of his work and has been featured in numerous art publications. In 2015, he received the Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award for his current project, Oculus.

Mahogany L. Browne, poet, writer, and artist, is currently the executive director at Bowery Poetry Club and the artistic director at Urban Word NYC. She is also the author of several books, including children's books, stage plays, articles, and audio recordings. As the founder of Penmanship Books, Browne holds the distinction of being the first-ever poet-in-residence at New York City's Lincoln Center.

Terry Tempest Williams is a towering cultural figure as a writer, educator, and conservationist and activist. Her writing is rooted in the American West, and she is an unstoppable stand for this vulnerable and fragile landscape.  

Richard Watson is a fixture and legend in the city of Philadelphia. His idea of being an artist includes the way he dresses with great care and style. He's an activist and committed to the breaking down of racial exclusion in the arts and elsewhere.

On today's episode I'll be talking to Rosanne Cash; singer, songwriter and author.  Daughter of Johnny Cash, she has taken that legacy and created her own very original voice and expansive body of work.

Derrick Velasquez is an artist and exhibition organizer who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. His most recent exhibitions include solo shows at The Herron School of Art and Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Robischon Gallery, Pentimenti, and The Black Cube Nomadic Museum. He has had recent group exhibitions at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Carvalho Park and Transmitter in New York, and was a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors and a 2019 MacDowell Fellow. Derrick also runs Yes Ma'am Projects, an artist-run gallery in the basement of his Athmar Park home and Friend of a Friend, a project space in the Evans School in the Golden Triangle.

A legend in his own time, Peter Paone is a fixture in the Philadelphia art world. He has exhibited his artwork internationally including New York, London, Vienna and Germany... and in major cities across the US.   His work is in many prestigious collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Yale University Art Gallery, to name a few. He is a prolific painter, printmaker, archivist, and teacher. 

Mikel  presently makes his home in Germantown Philadelphia, but has travelled the world on his way to being the established and formidable artist he is today.    He  has been featured in international publications and media,  including commercial television, and feature films. He earned a  BFA degree in painting from U Arts in 1986 and also studied at The School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1987 he took on a life changing job of being a personal assistant to the great jazz icon Miles Davis and was with him until his death in 1991. This profoundly impacted his life both as an artist and a human being. His art reflects the rich and varied life he has led.  He collages materials and imagery together to create a rich tapestry of meaning and experience.  

Brooke Larsen has had a remarkable career that includes single handedly starting an art program at the Richard Stockton University in Pomona, New Jersey in the early seventies. He was the only teacher! Then, after moving to New York City, he became an integral part of the early eighties art scene in New York. Along with his artwork, he became one of the most important frame designers and makers of this generation of contemporary artists' work.   In 1991 he reluctantly took an offer to teach a Saturday afternoon class at the School of Visual Arts. This turned out to be a revelation for Brooke in rediscovering his passion for teaching.    Thirty years later he is still teaching at SVA and has become a legend for his engaging projects that challenge and inspire students to go beyond their limitations. In 2018 he taught a semester at the School of Creative Arts in Shanghai Tech University and had a show of his work.    He has kept up a vigorous art career throughout exhibiting in galleries and museums. Wherever Brooke Larsen shows up, or whatever he does, he brings his passion, commitment and sense of humor with him.

Jane Irish has created an expansive career that has included ambitious projects and collaborations with others. She has used her great talents as a painter and inclusive visionary to take on big subjects and has brought everyone along for the ride. Her most famous and ongoing project being exposing the fraud and consequences of the Viet Nam War.  To this end she has given voice to veterans  and other committed activists in curating extensive ground breaking exhibitions.   In her own practice she interacts with history, place and politics and social norms to comment on the state of our human drama. She is both a painter, ceramicist and a would-be theatrical stage designer. She transforms spaces into large environments, and she invites us into her world of wonder. Along with all of that, her paintings by themselves, are astoundingly beautiful and engaging.

Host Tom Judd speaks with Eileen Neff about how literature has influenced her work, including the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Neff, a Philadelphia based artist, began as a painter until she discovered photography was the pathway to her expression as an artist in the early 80s. Known also as a sought after art critic and writer, she went on to develop an astounding body of work over a 40 year period. You can learn more about her on her website eileenneff.com

Born in Brownsville Texas and raised in Mexico City, Ray Smith emerged as an important voice in the 1980’S post modern reinvention of painting in New York city,  along with his friend Julian Schanbel.   Ray is best known for his large segmented paintings, his elements of cubism and surrealism, and his work with Mexican muralists, with the use of  anthropomorphic animals akin to his hero Pablo Piccaso.   Ray refers to his subject matter this way... “They are Beasts, but they are directly attached to a blueprint of our own existence.”   His works reflects upon the complexities and absurdities of society, family, culture, the human condition between birth and death.    You can learn more about Ray Smith on his website raysmithstudio.com

Two powerful artists by themselves , the married couple love to mix it up including collaborating on paintings and sharing ideas about art and artmaking. Established contemporary artists, they are both published writers and love to play music together. The interview reveals an expansive studio practice between their two homes, New York City and a country house in rural Pennsylvania.  The COVID outbreak impacted them immediately when Jennifer came down with the virus and was bed ridden for a month back in March. She talks of how she drew her way out of it with drawings from bed which later led to a whole series of large paintings.  David produced an astounding body of work for his show at Fredericks and Freiser in the fall with a Title surprisingly appropriate "Arms of the Law." He also completed an extensive monograph of his long career, "David Humphrey" edited by Davy Lauterbach. You can learn more about them on their websites davidhumphreynyc.com and jenniferlcoates.com

Host Tom Judd sits down with painter Tim McFarlane to discuss the importance of putting in the work, and showing up. Tim also talks about the daily challenges with a painting, even when it's not going well, and how to listen to the painting instead of your busy mind. Your can learn more about Tim on his website timmcfarlane.com

On this episode of Being an Artist, host Tom Judd talks to sculptor Darla Jackson about her love for clay and sculpting, quitting her full time job to pursue art while pregnant, getting endorsed by Courtney Love and more! Darla ran Philadelphia Sculpting Gym. It was a coworking space for sculpting that ran for four years. She is currently working on her show Enter the 36 Chambers, a series of 36 bird sculptures that tells a blend of Kung Fu, Wu-Tang and fairytales through the lens of her brain. Check Darla Jackson out at DarlaJacksonSculpture.com