Beware the Artist

Iranian, b. 1986 Lives and works in Baltimore, MD Taha Heydari's striking, large-scale canvases examine the power of images—and the role of the spectator—in politics, propaganda, and the shaping of culture and identity. Particularly of interest to Heydari are the ways in which the seductive power of media imagery is being used to shape perceptions and outcomes in the the United States and the Middle East. Heydari begins each new painting by culling from his growing archive of source material, news and media artefacts gleaned from research in libraries and on the Internet. His paintings are painstakingly executed with minutely detailed brushwork, but appear pixelated and fragmented, approximating the digital image in the moment of a glitch, when an error occurs in transmission. The beauty of Heydari's paintings invites closer inspection, which yields an array of ominous associations. In his most recent series of works, Heydari draws from covers of the Iranian women's magazine Zan-e Rooz (Woman of Today) published just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, examining the ways in which cultural ruptures produce shifts in ideology and identity. Heydari received his BFA from the Art University of Tehran and an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute of College of Art in Baltimore. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Iran, New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore, including Taha Heydari: Subliminal, his first institutional solo at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC in 2017. He has additionally been included in group exhibitions in Baltimore, Amsterdam, Dubai, London, Antwerp and Berlin, most recently Make Good Trouble: Marching for Change at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, Baltimore, MD (2020-2021) and Performance Anxiety at the Allegheny College Art Galleries in Meadville, PA (2021). He has been nominated for the prestigious Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize (2017), and the Bethesda Painting Awards (2019). (Courtesy of Haines Gallery) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Ryan Syrell is a painter whose work focuses on the interrelationship between haptics, perception, and the recollection of sensory information. Ryan Syrell at the time of our interview was living in Baltimore, he has since relocated to New York. The New York based painter who also teaches and writes about art. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase in Painting and Drawing, 2006, and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2017. Solo exhibitions include numerous shows at Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA), the Bromo Seltzer Tower (Baltimore), and Guest Spot at the ReInstitute (Baltimore). Group exhibitions include but are not limited to: To Find Home, curated by Zach Wampler, HappyluckyNo.1 (Brooklyn), Sondheim Semi-finalist exhibition (Baltimore), Whateverbeing, curated by Owen Duffy, Present Co. (Brooklyn) and the Sondheim Finalist exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Lou Ros has long approached his artistic journey with a unique hunger for experimentation and fundamental self discovery. Each of his compositions begin with images of films, both his own and those taken from a variety of social media platforms that he appropriates, exploring, transforming into his narrative; stories of his own from borrowed parts, people and places. The faces and their bodies are among his key subjects of predilection. Thus, the current series of portraits represent characters, personalities, taken or captured on the spot, in action, in poses, frozen in time. The faces and their bodies, often cut up, changed, edited, fragmented; exist across many layers of various matter, as if to better reach and unveil the individual. The painted subjects found in his paintings offer a wink to the viewer as if to inform the onlooker they are apart of the story too. A witness to his own time, Lou Ros represents the world as he perceives it in the now, with borrowed images of the past and present. Through bright colors, flashes of light his paintings are poetic and emotionally rich. The finished work, is a sensitive and keenly human representation, delivered in often soft and hazy compositions, like that of ones remembered dreams. Born in 1984, Lou Ros lives and works in Paris. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Lee Nowell-Wilson (b. Easton, MD 1989) is an American figurative artist who builds autobiographical drawings that investigate the emotional and ambivalent undertones within birth, domestic labor and human relationship. Through using the female body and maternal subject, Nowell-Wilson illuminates a detail of life that is extremely personal, yet universal. She predominantly executes this in an ironic way by using mundane objects (blankets, dishes, pillows, toys) to express complex human tendencies and emotions. Those ordinary household items create forms that become a secondary subject in-and-of themselves and interact with Nowell-Wilson's figures on an interpersonal level. A tight turtleneck becomes a close partner in conversation. The womb of blankets upon one's head becomes the hand that steals identity, while simultaneously creating a self-birthing place and points to a labor worth crowning. Nowell-Wilson's work investigates that tipping point — the line where the maternalistic state of being tips from something sensitive to aggressive, from a tearing tension to close connection — and she invites her viewer into that vulnerable walk. While also combining high realism, abstract marks and empty contours, Nowell-Wilson speaks metaphorically to elements of weight, physicality, mental health and veneration. Nowell-Wilson earned her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011. She has participated in artist residencies with Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN, Creative Paradox in Annapolis, MD and the Street Art School in Lyon, France. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably New York City and Scotland, and she has also completed urban art pieces in Norway, France, Northern Ireland and Chile. In 2019, she founded MILKED, a new arts publication featuring visual art, photography and the written word by female artists investigating the maternal figure and form. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Caleb Paul Kortokrax (b. 1987) is an American painter working in Baltimore, MD. A 2014 Maryland Institute College of Art; LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting MFA Grad and 2011 BSFA Valparaiso University majoring in Fine Art and Education. In the artists words: "My paintings are an exercise in unlearning and relearning how to see. My current work is an investigation into human perception and context, and my studio practice is rooted in the interdisciplinary spirit. The recent work builds bridges between disparate painting traditions and time periods. In the process of making a painting, I resample quality material traditions of the past into the current omnidimensional state of imagery. Through combining past and present visual signals in my studio process, I reanimate the painted image––similar to a DJ giving renewed vigor to an old sound sample by placing it in a fresh context. I use the image and the physical surface of the paintings to navigate a way that offers more possibilities and more cross-pollination, not particularly favoring any one style or dogma." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Dominic Chambers Born 1993, St. Louis, MO Lives and works in New Haven, CT Chambers received BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016 and is a 2019 MFA graduate from the Yale University School of Art. Dominic's work is founded upon the relationship between reality and fantasy. At this illusory boundary, Dominic Chambers negotiates ideas of magical realism by presenting black figures as they delve into literature and contemplation within imagined landscapes. These subtle, leisurely moments not only celebrate each subject's visionary power but further negate pervasive and toxic clichés, instead focusing on black talent, creativity and mysticism. The artist has exhibited his work in exhibitions in the US and Europe including a solo show at August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, PA as well as group shows Abstraction of Black Citizenship: Art from St. Louis curated by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud at Seattle University; Black Voices / Black Microcosm curated by Destinee Ross at CFHILL Stockholm, Sweden; Painting Is Its Own Country curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC. He has participated in a number of residencies, including the Yale Norfolk summer residency and the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Katherine is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto, Ontario. Her fine art education began in high school where she attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts for Visual Arts. She completed her BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University in 2014 and received a Certificate of Advanced Visual Studies at OCAD's Self-Directed Studio Program in Florence, Italy. In 2017, she furthered her creative education at CMU where she studied Special Effects Makeup Art and Design for TV and Film. Katherine's current body of work focuses on charcoal drawings, premiered in This Land., at the start of the pandemic. Working from photographs, Curci has completed some 75 seascapes and landscapes. Each scene is fully realized and highly nuanced—rendered in such expert detail that her works can often be perceived as photographs. Featured imagery includes specific places throughout her home country of Canada, as well as in regions of South America and Europe. Carefully manipulating the pressure of the charcoal, Curci achieves all tones—from the deepest, velvety black to pure white highlights, while encompassing all tonalities in between. She captures sfumato cloud covers and misty seas, as well as highly detailed and densely populated tree stands. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Adam Amram (b. 1994 Haifa, Israel) earned a B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. He has shown most recently with Mother Gallery (Beacon, New York), Harpy (Rutherford, New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York), Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman Gallery (Portland, Oregon) and Resort (Baltimore). Amram attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Fellowship in 2015, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson Vermont, in 2018. Amram currently lives and works in the California Bay Area, and was recently named the 2020 YoungArts Daniel Arsham Fellow. His work has recently been published in Art Maze Magazine. He is currently exhibiting a painting at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as part of The de Young Open, a juried exhibition celebrating the Museum's 125th anniversary, and commemorating local Bay Area artists. Rendered with vivid color and graphic symmetry, Amram’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures are best characterized by fantastical narratives which both contemplate the challenges of life and relish in the remarkability of existence. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.(ocula.com) Justin Mortimer graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1992 and lives and works in London. He has won several prestigious awards including the EAST Award (2004), NatWest Art Prize (1996) and the BP National Portrait Award (1991).Recent solo exhibitions include BREED, Parafin Gallery, London (2019), HOAX, The Armory Show, New York, NY (2018), "It is Here" Parafin, London(2017), "while the worst" The Factory, London(2017), Haunch of Venison, London (2012), Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011) and Master Piper, London (2010). Recent group exhibitions include How to Tell The Future from the Past, Haunch of Venison, New York (2013), Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary (2012), MAC Birmingham (2011) and the 2011 Prague Biennial. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Portrait Gallery, Canada, Royal Society for the Arts, Bank of America, NatWest Bank and the Flash Art Museum of Contemporary Art in Trevi, Italy. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Kyle J. Bauer’s mixed media sculptures lay bare devotion to seamless craftsmanship and the desire to create new meaning out of materials with humble origins. He takes cues from the silence, anticipation, and mounting tension that accompany the act of hunting, forcing the viewer to physically navigate around his sculptures. Bauer moved to Baltimore in 2011 after earning his MFA from Louisiana State University. 2011-2020, he has worked as the conservation technician of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. As of February 2020 Kyle is now a Matting/Framing Specialist in the Department of Paper conservation at the NGA. He is a 2016 Hamiltonian Fellowship recipient and was an Artist in Residence at Baltimore Clayworks from 2011-2014. Bauer has been honored as a 2014 Sondheim Artscape Prize finalist, a 2015 and 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant recipient, and was awarded third place in the 2015 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition and a 2018 Award of Excellence for the Exhibition 280 at Huntington Museum of Art. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at Huntington Museum of Art, Hamiltonian Gallery, Delaware Contemporary, the Walters Art Museum, The Wassaic Project, Vox Populi, Flashpoint Gallery, Loyola University, McDaniel College, Arlington Art Center, and School 33 Art Center. He has been invited to present at MAP Gallery's THIRTY speaker series, The Luce Center at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Loyola University, York College, Marymount University, and Dickinson College. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Cindy Cheng is an artist working in Baltimore, MD. Rooted in the practice of drawing, she explores the relationship between drawings and objects through complex constructions and explorations into ceramics. Cindy likes thinking about how built structures and artifacts may act as an incubator for history, memory and reflections on the physical and abstract self. She enjoys puzzles. Most recently she has been exploring ideas surrounding conspiracy theories. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and at the Anderson Ranch Artist Residency and in 2017 she was awarded the Sondheim Artscape Prize. She was a finalist for the 2016 and 2017 Trawick Prize, winning second place in 2017. She has participated in group and solo shows at St Charles Projects (Baltimore, MD), ‘Sindikit Project (a collaboration with Cheeny-Celebrado Royer) (Baltimore, MD), Present Junction (Toronto, Canada), Mount Saint Mary’s University (Emmitsburg, MD), Flashpoint (DC), E-merge Art Fair. She is thrilled that her first solo show on the West Coast is in cooperation with the lovely people of Ditch Projects!Cindy received her BA from Mount Holyoke College. She received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from MICA in 2008 and then earned an MFA from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2011. She is currently teaching at MICA in the Drawing Department. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Rebecca Ness creates richly layered and colorful paintings that capture mundane moments of contemplation or nuanced movements frozen in time. Ness is known for her atypical viewpoints and bodies rarely shown in full, but rather figures fragmented or obscured by books, newspapers or clothing. Elements of everyday life fill each canvas in their entirety, creating a tapestry of experience, memory, imagination, pattern and body language. While many of her paintings are imagined scenes, Ness admits that her work is usually triggered by something in reality, especially as it relates to her gender or politics. Rebecca Ness (b. 1992, Salem, MA; lives and works in New Haven, CT) received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University in New Haven, CT. She has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions at 1969 Gallery, New York; Monya Rowe Gallery, New York; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; Danese/Corey Gallery, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia and Copeland Gallery, London, among others. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Our Guest this week is Shawn Harris. Singer, Songwriter, Illustrator and adventurer, Shawn is most notably known for his band The Matches. His other musical endeavors include St. Ranger, Maniac and Fortress Social Club. He most recently has created and illustrated a children's book entitled “A Polar Bear in the Snow” with his long time friend Mac Barnett. We talk about music, art, living in an airstream, and the creative process! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Taj Stansberry (born in Oakland, California, United States) is an American director and photographer, known for his music videos with artists such as Rihanna, J Lo, Usher, Ne-Yo, John Legend, Young Jeezy, Ludacris, Keyshia Cole, Swizz Beatz, Eve, Wale and Big Sean.His video for J Lo's "On the Floor" is the most watched female video of all time on YouTube with over 800,000,000 views. He is currently developing a few feature projects as well. Now residing in Los Angeles, His unique style and ability to capture an artists' personality has made him one of the most sought after directors in the business. Taj is a self-taught photographer turned director. He started out photographing local rappers and models in Oakland, where he grew up. He then went on to work as a production assistant for renowned music video director, Anthony Mandler, who motivated Taj to start directing himself.Soon after he signed to his first production company, Boxfresh Pictures. Today he is with Happy Place Productions under the umbrella of his TPK (The Popular Kid) brand. Taj is represented by LARK CREATIVE for music videos and Verve Talent and Literary Agency for feature films. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Humphrey received a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1977 and a MA from New York University in 1980. He has shown nationally and internationally and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. Mr. Humphrey is is represented by the Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York. Though his paintings, works on paper, and sculptures defy categorization, David Humphrey emerged as an artist in the late 1970s along with Postmodernism, an approach that continues to inform his heterogeneous compositions, visual pastiches that, in his words, “erase the breaks” between divergent styles. As he explains: “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship—the psychology of bonding, lovemaking, attachment, and so on—has kept me interested for a long time. I come back to it as a way to thicken the grammar of picture making.” In his paintings, this grammar includes gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, pop art, surrealism, and Expressionism. His vibrant compositions feature human figures, narrative vignettes, animals, and objects interwoven into abstract passages. They read as sexually and psychologically charged dreamscapes, through which Humphrey breaks down boundaries to explore our relationships with each other and the world. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Originally from rural Southwestern Virginia, Sable moved to Washington, DC in 2007 to attend American University, where she received an MFA in 2009. Sable also holds a BFA from Virginia Tech, with a concentration in Painting and a minor in Art History. Kate's paintings of curvilinear and gridded abstract forms in oil and gouache are studies in color, line, and depth of field, in an ongoing investigation of her own studio process. The work directly engages personal metaphor and inquiry, navigating the tension between the unpredictable and the analytical, while remaining strongly grounded in the painting process. #art #studio #interview #studiopractice #artpodcast #artinamerica #installation #artistinterview #katesable #painting #contemporaryart #conteporarypainting #soloshow #dcart #virginia #bmoreart #hyperallergic #brooklynrail #bewaretheartist #virginiatech #virginiatechalumni #americanuniversity #americanuniversitymfa #americanuniversityalumni --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Bill Schmidt was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1947. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (BFA, 1969) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine before moving to Baltimore in 1969. He received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger School of Painting in 1971. He has received numerous grants and awards including the Semmes G. Walsh Award (Baker Artist Awards, 2016) and the Bethesda Painting Award (2015). He has exhibited his paintings, drawings, and sculpture extensively in the Mid-Atlantic region. Recent shows include “Baker Artist Awards 2016” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, “Squared” at the Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA; ”Variations in Paint” at the Painting Center, NY, NY; and “Interior Space – Small Scale Abstract Painting”, Salena Gallery, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY. He recently retired after 18 years as the director of the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Fine Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. In addition to his involvement with art, he is a musician who has been playing traditional American music on fiddle, banjo and guitar for over 40 years. He has recorded numerous times, and has performed in Canada, Europe and the United States. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

This weeks we interview Katie Pumphrey! ( @katiepumphreyart ) Katie Pumphrey is an American painter exploring the tension between calm and chaos. Crisp edges and quiet shapes are at a constant tug-o-war with playful movement and vibrating color. Her work dives into the familiar struggle we all face, again and again, to find control, ease the tension, and harness the commotion. We feel steady, level-headed, comfortable — and then something shifts, and we scramble to find our footing. We ping-pong between these moments time and time again. With turbulent brushstrokes and the suggestion of imagery, her work examines these experiences with a hint of humor, play, and lightheartedness. Katie has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has participated in artist residencies at the Studios of Key West, Vermont Studio Center, Gallery Four, and the Creative Alliance in Baltimore. Katie is also a long distance, open water swimmer — who swam the English Channel in 2015, around the island of Manhattan in 2017, and the Catalina Channel in 2018. Those three swims make up the Triple Crown of open water swimming, adding Katie to an elite group of open water swimmers from around the world. This aspect of her life often influences and drives her work. Katie currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

This week we have the pleasure of speaking with the infamous Ken Tisa! ( @ken_tisa ) Born in Philadelphia in 1945, he received his BFA from Pratt in 1968 and MFA from Yale in 1971. Ken identifys himself as a painter but has multitude of media to his name with works that range from painting to sculpture to fibers to ceramics but all approached through a painters eye. Tune in Sunday November 1st to listen to our conversation as we cover topics such as his current Quarantine project, collecting, art history, teaching, and finding truth in the act of making! I hope you enjoy or conversation as much as I did! Tisa has held solo exhibitions at Gordon Robicheaux, (2017) New York, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2013); Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2006); Centre d’Art et de Culture, Aix-en-Provence, FR (2004); Stellweg-Seguy Gallery, New York, NY (1988); Alexander Wood Gallery, New York, NY (1986); and Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY (1972). His work has been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Artist’s Space, New York, NY; and Art in General, New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York, NY, and is a recently retired professor in the painting department at Maryland Institute College of Art. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Beware the Artist Episode 002: In this episode we talk with the pumpkin queen Jessi Hardesty and cover topics about her studio practice, Halloween, the occult, her curatorial practice and experiences as a professor --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support

Welcome to our first ever episode of "Beware the Artist". EPISODE 001: We have the great honor of having Akil Godsey as the first interviewee on our show. Akil is the frontman of Baltimore hardcore power house END IT (@enditbaltimore ) and runs a podcast @thehardtimesnews called Up The Blunx. "A podcast where two black punks from two different walks of life come together to voice their opinion on a wide variety of topics from bands to condiments to the police" Very stoked to have him on the show and I hope you're just as interested to see where our conversation takes us! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeremy-jirsa/support