Peachy Keen

Peachy Keen and guest co-host Stephanie Raines, artist advocate and arts administrator, visited Nashville-based artist Chalet Comellas-Baker in her artist-run exhibition space (Unrequited Leisure) just as all of us pandemic mole people were beginning to peep our little heads out of our burrows. Fittingly, after a year of not being with other humans, we talked about wildlife— particularly bird sounds as they relate to Comellas-Baker’s most recent artworks—and Nashville life among the honky-tonks (honky geese included!).Chalet shared the process behind her collaborative work with Clint Sleeper that’s currently on view at MOCAN, gave us really cute mini-zine maps that guided us through her current projects, and dropped some insider knowledge on the nuts and bolts of showing and getting paid for video work without using NFTs.

Peachy Keen masked-up and joined artist Alice Stone-Collins in her home studio in Atlanta, GA, for our first (and so far, only) pandemic interview. She contemplates the lasting impact that her rural Madison County upbringing has had on her work, which utilizes a combination of painting and collage techniques to depict a slightly askew, surreal version of the everyday mundane.We commiserate about pandemic life and motherhood as two working artist parents and get the low down on how the COVID-19 pandemic has and hasn’t affected the content of some of her most recent works. Stone-Collins explains how seemingly random or disjointed scenes such as carousel horses in a roundabout or a beach overrun with Amazon vans relate to her everyday experiences. She also talks about how My Little Pony “blank flanks” and “cutie marks” can sadly be seen as a metaphor for our society at large.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Jessica R. Smith at her home studio in Savannah, where she is a professor of fibers at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Smith is the is the co-author with Susan Falls of the recently released book Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond.We talked about her childhood spent between Alaska and Pennsylvania, her family’s history in the Florida panhandle, and how a formative backpacking trip around the world with a friend led her to a deeper appreciation of the use of textiles to create narratives.She explains how her artistic practice and research have evolved from an initial interest in painting and printmaking to a focus on performance and installations—starting with wallpaper and moving into fabrics. By playing as a designer and creating subtly subversive wallpapers that referenced historical designs (think 80s suburban angst meets Waverly prints) she became a designer—starting her own business and then licensing her designs to Studio Printworks.We discuss how her 12-year-relationship with SCAD colleague and professor of anthropology Susan Falls has led to multiple collaborations, culminating in their current book project, Overshot. Smith gives us the lowdown on their research process as a team, and some of the surprising finds they made as they explored the history, presentation, context and materiality of woven “overshot” coverlets.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Sonya Yong James on the occasion of her massive installation “Phantom Threads” as part of the PROJECT exhibition curated by Scott Ingram at the Temporary Art Center in Atlanta. (Thanks to our podcasting friends from Brainfuzz Podcast for lending us the use of their swank dedicated podcasting room on site!)We talked about our shared position as women/artists growing up in the 1970s/80s (shoulder pads did come up), her formative years in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and how she’s navigated labels as they pertain both to her art and her identity.She explains how the Gwisin of Korean folklore are related to her PROJECT piece, her path to working with such diverse materials as bedsheets and horsehair after having been initially trained as a printmaker and gives us the lowdown on managing a thriving studio practice that involves everything from supervising assistants to fear-free scissor lift operation.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Colleen Merrill on day three of SECAC 2019 and got into the nitty gritty of the psychology behind her conference presentation titled Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic—discussing both Rozsika Parker and Donald Winnicott’s theories. We note the lack of men at parenting-related SECAC sessions and the importance of having men in the room when discussing parenting and career roles.But first, we talk about how she got sucked into the college town vortex of Lexington, Kentucky post grad school, seduced by its many charms—including the rich local craft community and cheap, easy access to an inspiring selection of found textiles. She paints a picture of how the local customs (like painted gourds for bird houses) have influenced her practice.She describes how her time at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn made her realize how immense and popular textiles have become in the contemporary art scene, and we debate the extent of fiber-based mediums’ integration into the sometimes off-putting world of fine art. We also discuss parenthood and its relationship to her practice as an artist and her career as an academic. As a professor at a community college, Merrill explains how her initial naivety of her school’s policies on student parents worked in her favor as she works to build a more inclusive and supportive learning environment for her students with young children.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Naomi Falk in a boardroom at the Chattanoogan Hotel during the recent SECAC conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After briefly discussing some of the points that Falk made in her conference session on limits in the studio art classroom, we continued to talk about some of the challenges and joys of pushing students in our own classrooms, the long slog to a permanent teaching position in the arts, working collaboratively, and her experiences at artist residencies throughout the US and abroad.Originally from Michigan, Falk currently lives and works in South Carolina. We discussed how geography has affected her art practice—from a heightened awareness of climate change living in an area affected by hurricanes and frequent flooding, to her use of indigo, an important crop in the state during the eighteenth century.

Peachy Keen visited the home studio of Nashville artist Virginia Griswold on a Sunday morning to chat about her life and work. Starting with the shocking revelation that Griswold was once sent away to an all-girls Catholic school for disciplinary issues and a little family history focusing on women artists, we quickly get into tackling her broad-based postsecondary education.We discuss Griswold’s early focus on a variety of craft-related media and the related feminist overtones, her five years as a studio technician and instructor at Urban Glass in Brooklyn and her eventual choice to take a more conceptual direction in her work by attending graduate school at Alfred University’s Sculpture/Dimensional Studies program before getting into her current body of work.Sitting in her studio at a table of works in progress, we explore a variety of topics related to her materials, techniques and themes including combining fiber and ceramics, dyeing using native plants, and postpartem anxiety and the body. If you’re looking to get schooled on a wide variety of three-dimensional materials and techniques, this is your episode.

Brittainy Lauback on vacation cruises:We're always trying to vacation from ourselves and we never can. You know? What I think is so kind of disturbing about the cruise in general is that you have this—you know, you're really stuck with all these people. You really do kind of start to have like a little bit of an existential crisis. Like, you know, like hell is other peopleand you're stuck on the ship with them. And I really felt that, but at the same time I have to say I also felt this overwhelming tenderness. And like I also really loved all these people, and everyone was genuinelyopen and trying to connect. You know, it's like kind of those stereotypes about the…you know,open, loudmouth American. There's something really lovely about that.

Peachy Keen spent the morning at home talking art over coffee and pound cake with visiting curator, Rachel Reese. The kind of person that graduates from college ahead of schedule (3 ½ years, y’all!), Reese amassed an impressive resume of arts-related positions before landing in her current gig as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums in Savannah.An Atlanta native, she shares some insights from her time at BURNAWAY and the Atlanta Contemporary. (Why would a digital art magazine want to do a print edition? Where did Sliver Space come from? This is your chance to find out.)We break down how Reese’s remarkable experiences working for big-name galleries like Deitch Projects in New York and Fleisher/Ollman in Philadelphia have translated (or not) into her career down South, share a few laughs at the expense of our well-meaning thrift store art shopping moms, and get the low down on the ins and outs of being a curator for the oldest public art museum in the South.

Peachy Keen met with artist and writer Donna Mintz in the back room of her exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta during the recent blackberry winter to talk about her current body of work. We discussed her use of materials to express ideas on memory and place: kaolin gathered from Georgia’s fall line recalls an ancient sea, elementary school milk cartons become a practical casting container for gold reliquaries, samples of water taken from North Georgia rivers and streams mark childhood haunts, and found large format negatives capture the gravitas of memory—even if those memories are unknown to us. She gives us a detailed account of her 24 hours at a 1920s homesteaders’ cabin observing Walter De Maria’s masterwork, The Lightening Field, and explains how the concept of the sublime expressed in this work relates to her own art. This is a good episode for you visual folks to bulk up on your literary to-do list because in addition to James Agee (who is featured with De Maria in Mintz’ current book in progress) Mintz references the works of many literary giants including Vladimir Nabakov, Ezra Pound, James Dickey, Lillian Smith, and Joel Chandler Harris. Also discussed: lost-cause mythology, the impermanence of human life, and generational gender roles. Not all serious, we get a little silly with some chat about ASMR and maybe give you something to think about before you go whispering to the person next to you while an author is reading an emotional passage.

Peachy Keen met up with Christina Renfer Vogel in her Chattanooga studio to talk shop about her painting, teaching and curatorial projects. Originally from Pennsylvania, Vogel has been in Chattanooga for the past 6 years. We discussed her interim time in Nebraska working at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, how she turned her office into an alternative exhibition space and the lingering benefits of going unplugged for a two-week summer residency at the Hambidge center. Although working from life is a very traditional form of painting, Vogel explains how it remains new— energizing and surprising in its ability to slow us down. We talk about her artistic influences, her embrace of the heavy relationship painting has to art history and get some technical insights into her process as she prepares for two upcoming exhibitions. In the spirit of the podcast, we blow up some hierarchies associated with painting beautiful, colorful still lifes. Painting flowers can be its own kind of bomb.

Katie Hargrave is an artist and educator in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Meredith Lynn is an artist and curator based in Tallahassee, Florida. Peachy Keen caught up with them in Chattanooga, where they were meeting up for the weekend to collaborate on a body of work for an upcoming exhibition at the Wiregrass Museum of Art that they first began exploring while at a Signal Fire residency in Oregon.

Artist Corrina Sephora moved to Atlanta in the mid 90s after receiving her BFA in Sculpture and Metalsmithing from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and has stayed on to become an integral player in the Atlanta arts community, establishing a prosperous artistic practice in metal and other media.  She tells Peachy Keen how she created her own apprenticeship program (looking up blacksmiths in the White Pages and refusing to take no for an answer), how local teachers and benefactors helped set her on the path to manage her own studio, and paints a picture of the gritty but thriving creative scene that was Atlanta in the 90s—when her neighbors included both artists (such as Radcliff Bailey and Danielle Roney) and guys that refurbished mac trucks.  We got into some discussion of how gender has and has not affected her trajectory in a career where women have been historically underrepresented, learned the ins and outs of moving a 3000 pound sculpture over a three story house, and covered some of the family backstory and artistic and cultural influences that play into her current exhibition: Between the Deep Blue Sea and the Universe.

Haylee Anne and Angela Bortone took a Twitter friendship to the next level, eventually joining forces with Jessica Caldas, Angela Davis Johnson, and Danielle Deadwyler to become the Living Melody Collective. This group of Atlanta-based, female-identifying artists is all about participating in and uplifting their community through creative projects.Peachy Keen chatted with Haylee Anne and Angela Bortone on a Saturday morning amongst Haylee Ann’s cat babies—who added a few sound effects for this episode. We discussed the group’s commitment to provide support to each other (especially as artist parents) and some of their individual backgrounds before getting into the nitty-gritty:How did they come up with the design for their mural at the Center for Civil and Human Rights? What’s the deal with the school bus that they painted and are using to promote voter engagement? Check out this episode to find out.

Artist Tommye Scanlin sat down with Peachy Keen at her loom in her Dahlonega, Georgia, studio to discuss teaching, learning, and tapestry on the eve of her second retirement from teaching. We got deep into the history of the University of North Georgia art department, where she taught for 28 years and was appointed Professor Emerita in 2002. Raised by a single mother, Scanlin attended college on scholarships and learned early on to balance her teaching career with her artistic practice. She described the role that her teacher, mentor, and then-colleague Bob Owens played in shaping her career, and she passed on some serious teaching wisdom centered on the desire to learn and the willingness to make mistakes.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Jenny Fine in the upstairs classroom of the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama on a hot Friday afternoon in early October. We discussed the influence that many strong creative women have had on her career—most notably that of her grandmothers (who both play an important role in her work) and of Ann Hamilton (a world-renowned installation artist who Fine studied under and then later apprenticed). Fine elaborates on how her interest in the wet-collodion process and post-mortem photography is related to her “Flat Granny” series—which references the “Flat Daddy” photographic cutouts used by military families to help maintain a presence at home for deployed loved ones. We also get the lowdown on her performances and current stop motion film (link below) as they relate to her family history and her still photography. In our talk, Fine explains how her personal narratives have allowed her to enter a larger discussion about white identity in the rural South, and we tiptoe into the minefield of racially charged regional iconography and customs depicted in her work that include the boll weevil, peanuts, and the pageantry of local parades and clogging.

Courtney Sanborn on medieval art and the iconography in her work: Sanborn: Like I said, I love Medieval art. And I love the iconography. I love that in that period of art …there’s no words to describe evil. How do you describe something that’s evil or negative? There’s no words, but there are pictures. And so, the artists of that time made their demons out of—like there are these weird conglomerations—of like pigs, bats and like weird creatures that they had like deemed evil. Right? And so that’s how they portrayed the dark side of things. There’s always happy. There’s always sad. There’s evil. There’s good. There’s temptation. There’s like peace and like wholeness… and I love that they showed that. Cause I’ve found that no matter what narrative or whatever situation I’ve found myself in there’s always good.  There’s always bad. And they exist together…  So, the demons in this embroidery are acting out the wedding rituals. She’s getting her nails done. She’s getting her hair done. And down here, this is the demon wedding. So this is the culmination of their day…which is happening at the same time as my day.  Liddell: So there’s the flip—it’s like the yin-yang of weddings. Sanborn: Yeah, yeah. So here’s this happy wedding that was happening… here’s the garden party. These are my friends. And then here’s the demon wedding that’s happening.  Liddell: Do the demons have their friends here? Sanborn: They don’t have friends. It’s just them.. 

Peachy Keen began the school year with a visit to downtown Atlanta and the campus of Georgia State University to talk with artist Shanequa Gay in her studio.We discussed vulnerability and the importance of sharing the highs and the lows of life to pave the way for fledgling creatives. She accuses the women in her family of lying (not owning up to the fact that they were artists!), and admits to having her own kind of crazy, which has prompted her to steer clear of drugs and alcohol.She explains how her work as a spoken word poet is related to her performance art, and we specifically discuss her performance for Kathryn Johnston— a 92-year-old woman who was shot by police while inside her Atlanta home in 2006. She also gave us some background on the thought process behind her latest body of work, a photo series of African-American women.

Peachy Keen met up with Atlanta artist Hannah Tarr on a sunny Saturday morning in July to talk shop. After RISD and stints in Oakland, Chicago and Ox-Bow, she explains how the film industry lured her back to her hometown with its tempting day jobs—where else can you be a “stand by” painter on set and go to Def Leppard shows with Dave Bautista? We talk about why men should wear yoga pants, the zen of skateboarding, fashion, and how hard it is to resist clicking on butts on Instagram. All of this, is of course related to art. How do you stay focused on the process when there are so many images out there? How do you participate in internet culture without letting it dictate your path? Why are we still talking about John Berger’s writing from 1972? Find out—if not the answers—then at least our opinions on these topics and more in this week’s episode.

For this episode, Peachy Keen stayed close to home to talk to Athens, Georgia artist, Yvonne Studevan. Having gained some local fame for painting the proprietor of Vic’s Vintage shop downtown as “Black Jesus”, Yvonne explains how deeply that portrait— commissioned by St. Philip Monumental AME Church in Savannah—is related to her own history and desires to increase the representation of black people with black features in portraiture. A seventh generation descendent of Richard Allen, the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Studevan recounts how she only became interested in history after she began to uncover a historical record that she could relate to. We talk about how she’s come from making paper dolls with darker skin tones as a child to plein air painting local sites of black historical significance, her technical growth as a painter, and her astute observations of color and changing light.

Peachy Keen headed down to Orlando, Florida for Spring Break and met up with local artist and educator Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. Bronx-born to Puerto Rican parents, Raimundi-Ortiz talks us through her teenage years attending the fabled “Fame” school (LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and creating her Wepa Woman superheroine. She explains how she got schooled at Skowhegan and Rutgers (hanging around with such highfalutin art-world characters as Robert Storr) where she learned to use her own body to tell her own story on her own terms as a performance artist. She breaks down how her hilarious "Ask Chuleta" character ended up on YouTube and we talk at length about teaching with what she calls "cultural spackle" to fill in the gaps that may be missing in students' education. Ever wonder what to say when your Uber driver finds out you’re an artist and asks “what’s the big deal with Mondrian?” Raimundi-Ortiz knows how to walk the lines and switch the codes and she’s got your answer.

Peachy Keen spent a rainy, coffee-fueled morning talking with Atlanta artist Karen Tauches about her fine art practice in her East Point studio. This is the perfect episode to listen to on your Spring Break road trip. Look out your window at what Tauches refers to as "the greatest hits" of our landscape (the Florida beaches and the Georgia mountains, for example)—how do they compare to the billboards, architecture and graphic design that have infiltrated them?Tauches explains how she arrived as an astute observer of the American landscape, her desire for a mobile office (like she had as a child!), and prompts us to question our role as colonizers as we prepare to take over outer space. We look at her work's relationship to graphic design and the environment; she breaks down her process and the invented language she uses to describe it (What is a jumble? A power spot? A disappeared house?). Ultimately, it all comes down to the big thinking she requires of her audience, who most likely won't even realize they're looking at contemporary art when they start to consider their "SOUL PURPOSE" while driving by her most famous repurposed sign— a guerrilla work which has become an Atlanta landmark since it's installation on Moreland Avenue in 2012.

Peachy Keen met up with Atlanta visual artist and sculptor Zipporah Camille Thompson on the week of the rare super blue blood moon eclipse—notable in the context of Zipporah's work, which often deals with lunar activity as a subject. What would happen if the moon decided to up and leave us?  We chat about this and other pressing questions amongst looms, a kiln, shelves of thread and various containers of materials in her Stone Mountain home/studio as she prepares to move everything to The Goat Farm Arts Center to begin her two year studio residency with The Creatives Project. We discuss process, starting with source imagery and materials, and moving into working methods. She gets technical with some loom talk, and we ponder the guilt associated with the refusal to "commit" to one medium, as well negotiating labels when crossing between high and low materials and techniques.  We find out that the artist blood runs deep in her large, supportive family from North Carolina, and we talk about how her education took a turn from psychology to the visual arts.

Peachy Keen spent the evening talking art (and drinking a little wine) in the Nashville studio of artist Amelia Briggs. We discuss the gendered psychology of the found imagery she uses from vintage comics and children's coloring books and how she subverts narrative in her formal process, which is split between object making and painting. She talks about the subtler role that feminist content plays in her work since she's moved away from the figure as a subject, and the relationship between her materials and her viewers. While the work can be seductive on the surface, we get "deep" into some childhood memories that may inform a more sinister reading of her "Inflatables" series.

Peachy Keen visited Kelly Kristin Jones in her studio at the Atlanta Contemporary just before the opening of her solo exhibit Cotton is Still King at the Sandler Hudson Gallery (November 2 - December 8, 2017). Jones explains how her Midwestern background informs her current practice, including her years teaching film photography to digital natives, and how her MFA program at the Art Institute of Chicago challenged her to confront her own position on the supposed “truth-telling” nature of photography as a medium. She gives us the lowdown on using her own work as a bridge to understanding both familiar and unfamiliar locations, her interest in “flipping the script” on urban landscapes, and how she adjusted to the "Mars" that is Rush Week in Athens, GA, after a lifetime in Chicago. Jones explains the process of collecting and producing images at Civil War historical marker sites that culminated in her current series of photographic “counter-memorials,” and why documenting seemingly small or personal events is worth the effort.

Flora Rosefsky on teaching: I think education is key. And I love teaching. It’s coming up with the right lesson. Once you come up with the right art lesson, the teacher should not be interfering with that student. In fact, I usually work on my own piece. I don’t look at their work until the end. The worse thing a teacher can do is put their hand on that person’s hand and say "Oh no no no no, put it that way..." Hummm. And they’re all different... Or "Oh no, this is the way you have to draw the circle." Oh, really? Or "No, the face has to be a certain color." Really? No.

Veronica Kessenich, Executive Director of the Atlanta Contemporary, took a break from preparing for Art Party 2017 to take Peachy Keen on a behind the scenes tour of the capital improvements currently underway. We talked about her thwarted childhood dreams to become a dancer, her experiences as a student then professor at women's colleges, and her secret writing habits.  She explains how she landed at the Contemporary, showing some love for her mentor, Fay Gold, along the way. And of course, she gives us the scoop on what to expect at Art Party.

Chakura Kineard invites Peachy Keen into her spacious, glitter-filled studio at the Atlanta Contemporary to talk shop. She reflects on her experiences as a woman of color navigating public education in the South, her rebellious tendencies as they relate to art-making, and the job prospects for millennials in a baby-boomer's world.  We geek out discussing her use of found objects in an art historical context, but keep it real by using the all-knowing eye of Instagram as a touchstone. She shares some hilarious insights on some not-so-hilarious situations—like how to win the racists vs. non-racists "competition"—and educates us on the difference between a "loc" and a "townie" in the Athens scene.

Atlanta artist Tori Tinsley takes a break from her busy studio practice to talk with Peachy Keen about returning to her own art after working for years as an art therapist, how her mother's intrepid personality inspired her to push her own career, and how her work has developed alongside the loss of her relationship with her mother due to Frontotemporal Degeneration. She explains to the 90% of us who don't know what the other meaning of the phrase "bread and butter" is (hint: it's not what makes you the money), shares some of the best feedback she got in grad school, and breaks down the logistics of making her first large scale mural for the Zuckerman Museum of Art.

Candice Greathouse talks about her mostly photography-based studio practice as it relates to her roles as a curator and educator. With a background that includes performance and feminist art, we get into the bodily and how Greathouse's work has evolved to focus on a more subtle documentation of her personal experiences. She shares her insights (and some history) on working collaboratively with a partner in a family context, and tells us why Atlanta people should spend more time in Athens. Oh, and also: unicorns.

Saturday, April 1, Durham NC Betsy Greer (author of Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism and Knitting for Good!) talks to Peachy Keen about the power of positive affirmations, the lingering division between art and craft, and her life as a maker & permission giver. We discuss those pussy hats and what you can do with them, professors that are jerks, gatekeepers vs. permission givers, and growing up Southern with the bad craft of the 70s.

Peachy Keen joins up with Nedra Deadwyler of Civil Bikes for her Women's History Month bike tour of Atlanta. We stop by Parlor, Katie Troisi's DIY gallery run out of her midtown home, to talk with artist, Felicia Garcia about her one-night exhibition: "The Black Women's Happiness Project."

Artist and arts advocate, Melissa Lee, talks with Peachy Keen in her Athens, Georgia studio about her childhood in South Georgia, why mamas shouldn't let their babies grow up to be existentialists and libertarians, and the struggle to find work in an arts-related field.

Tatiana Veneruso talks about her life as an artist, curator, and the experiences leading up to the opening of her new gallery, Trio, in Athens, Georgia.