Podcast appearances and mentions of Houston Center

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. This week on 'Art is Awesome,' host Emily Wilson chats with Stephanie Robison, a sculptor living in Oakland and the chair of City College of San Francisco's Art Department. The episode delves into Stephanie's background, from growing up in Oregon and being encouraged by a high school counselor to attend college, to falling in love with sculpture, particularly stone. Stephanie discusses her creative process, the resistance she enjoys from materials like marble, and how her grandmother inspired her love for making things. She also shares her experiences with exhibitions and her thoughts on teaching. About Artist Stephanie Robison:Originally from Oregon, Stephanie currently resides in California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. Robison holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marylhurst University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited at Marrow Gallery, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California, Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Joseph A Cain Memorial Art Gallery and Greater Denton Arts Council in Texas, Yeiser Art Center in Kentucky, Site:Brooklyn Gallery in New York, Foster/White Gallery, Whatcom Museum and Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, and Peter Robertson Gallery in Alberta Canada.Stephanie is represented by Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, California and Foster/White Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Her work can also be found at Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado.The sculptures of Stephanie Robison plays with multiple oppositional relationships. Working with industrial fabrics and wood, she creates large-scale installations that examine relationships between culture, nature and the built environment. Her latest series of work combines traditional stone carving and the process of needle felting wool. By merging incongruous materials such as wool and marble, she works to synthesize and fuse: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial. Focusing on materiality and color with this new work, Robison creates charming, often humorous or awkward forms referencing aspects of the body, relationships and the environment. Visit Stephanie's Website:  StephanieRobison.comFollow Stephanie on Instagram:  @SquishyStoneFor more about Stephanie's Exhibit, "Incantations for the Average Person" CLICK HERE. --About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

On Tuesday's show: The Texas Medical Board has adopted new guidance for doctors regarding what qualifies as a "life-threatening" circumstance when it comes to abortions in the state, which are only legal in order to preserve a pregnant person's life or a major bodily function. We learn what the guidance says and discuss the legal implications of it.Also this hour: We learn what it's like to experience a hurricane from the air as we meet NOAA's Hurricane Hunters.Then, Houston writer Katherine Center talks about what makes a good romantic comedy, something she knows very well -- and is the subject of her latest novel, The Rom-Commers.And we continue our summer series visiting area museums and attractions with a visit to the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

Project Apollo was a feat of human achievement akin to, and arguably greater than, the discovery of the New World. From 1962 to 1972, NASA conducted 17 crewed missions, six of which placed men on the surface of the moon. Since the Nixon administration put an end to Project Apollo, our extraterrestrial ambitions seem to have stalled along with our sense of national optimism. But is the American spirit of adventure, heroism, and willingness to take extraordinary risk a thing of the pastToday on the podcast, I talk with Charles Murray about what made Apollo extraordinary and whether we in the 21st century have the will to do extraordinary things. Murray is the co-author with Catherine Bly Cox of Apollo: The Race to the Moon, first published in 1989 and republished in 2004. He is also my colleague here at AEI.In This Episode* Going to the moon (1:35)* Support for the program (7:40)* Gene Kranz (9:31)* An Apollo 12 story (12:06)* An Apollo 11 story (17:58)* Apollo in the media (21:36)* Perspectives on space flight (24:50)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationGoing to the moon (1:35)Pethokoukis: When I look at the delays with the new NASA go-to-the-moon rocket, and even if you look at the history of SpaceX and their current Starship project, these are not easy machines for mankind to build. And it seems to me that, going back to the 1960s, Apollo must have been at absolutely the far frontier of what humanity was capable of back then, and sometimes I cannot almost believe it worked. Were the Apollo people—the engineers—were they surprised it worked?Murray: There were a lot of people who, they first heard the Kennedy speech saying, “We want to go to the moon and bring a man safely back by the end of the decade,” they were aghast. I mean, come on! In 1961, when Kennedy made that speech, we had a grand total of 15 minutes of manned space flight under our belt with a red stone rocket with 78,000 pounds of thrust. Eight years and eight weeks later, about the same amount of time since Donald Trump was elected to now, we had landed on the moon with a rocket that had 7.6 million pounds of thrust, compared to the 78,000, and using technology that had had to be invented essentially from scratch, all in eight years. All of Cape Canaveral, those huge buildings down there, all that goes up during that time.Well, I'm not going to go through the whole list of things, but if you want to realize how incredibly hard to believe it is now that we did it, consider the computer system that we used to go to the moon. Jerry Bostick, who was one of the flight dynamics officers, was telling me a few months ago about how excited they were just before the first landing when they got an upgrade to their computer system for the whole Houston Center. It had one megabyte of memory, and this was, to them, all the memory they could ever possibly want. One megabyte.We'll never use it all! We'll never use all this, it's a luxury!So Jim, I guess I'm saying a couple of things. One is, to the young'ins out there today, you have no idea what we used to be able to do. We used to be able to work miracles, and it was those guys who did it.Was the Kennedy speech, was it at Rice University?No, “go to the moon” was before Congress.He gave another speech at Rice where he was started to list all the things that they needed to do to get to the moon. And it wasn't just, “We have these rockets and we need to make a bigger one,” but there was so many technologies that needed to be developed over the course of the decade, I can't help but think a president today saying, “We're going to do this and we have a laundry list of things we don't know how to do, but we're going to figure them out…” It would've been called pie-in-the-sky, or something like that.By the way, in order to do this, we did things which today would be unthinkable. You would have contracts for important equipment; the whole cycle for the contract acquisition process would be a matter of weeks. The request for proposals would go out; six weeks later, they would've gotten the proposals in, they would've made a decision, and they'd be spending the money on what they were going to do. That kind of thing doesn't get done.But I'll tell you though, the ballsiest thing that happened in the program, among the people on the ground — I mean the ballsiest thing of all was getting on top of that rocket and being blasted into space — but on the ground it was called the “all up” decision. “All up” refers to the testing of the Saturn V, the launch vehicle, this monstrous thing, which basically is standing a Navy destroyer on end and blasting it into space. And usually, historically, when you test those things, you test Stage One, and if that works, then you add the second stage and then you add the third stage. And the man who was running the Apollo program at that time, a guy named Miller, made the decision they were going to do All Up on the first test. They were going to have all three stages, and they were going to go with it, and it worked, which nobody believed was possible. And then after only a few more launches, they put a man on that thing and it went. Decisions were made during that program that were like wartime decisions in terms of the risk that people were willing to take.One thing that surprises me is just how much that Kennedy timeline seemed to drive things. Apollo seven, I think it was October '68, and that was the first manned flight? And then like two months later, Apollo 8, we are whipping those guys around the moon! That seems like a rather accelerated timeline to me!The decision to go to the moon on Apollo 8 was very scary to the people who first heard about it. And, by the way, if they'd had the same problem on Apollo 8 that they'd had on Apollo 13, the astronauts would've died, because on Apollo 8 you did not have the lunar module with them, which is how they got back. So they pulled it off, but it was genuinely, authentically risky. But, on the other hand, if they wanted to get to the moon by the end of 1969, that's the kind of chance you had to take.Support for the Program (7:40)How enthusiastic was the public that the program could have withstood another accident? Another accident before 11 that would've cost lives, or even been as scary as Apollo 13 — would we have said, let's not do it, or we're rushing this too much? I think about that a lot now because we talk about this new space age, I'm wondering how people today would react.In January, 1967, three astronauts were killed on the pad at Cape Canaveral when the spacecraft burned up on the ground. And the support for the program continued. But what's astonishing there is that they were flying again with manned vehicles in September 1967. . . No, it was a year and 10 months, basically, between this fire, this devastating fire, a complete redesign of the spacecraft, and they got up again.I think that it's fair to say that, through Apollo 11, the public was enthusiastic about the program. It's amazingly how quickly the interest fell off after the successful landing; so that by the time Apollo 13 was launched, the news programs were no longer covering it very carefully, until the accident occurred. And by the time of Apollo 16, 17, everybody was bored with the program.Speaking of Apollo 13, to what extent did that play a role in Nixon's decision to basically end the Apollo program, to cut its budget, to treat it like it was another program, ultimately, which led to its end? Did that affect Nixon's decision making, that close call, do you think?No. The public support for the program had waned, political support had waned. The Apollo 13 story energized people for a while in terms of interest, but it didn't play a role. Gene Kranz (9:31)500 years after Columbus discovering the New World, we talk about Columbus. And I would think that 500 years from now, we'll talk about Neil Armstrong. But will we also talk about Gene Kranz? Who is Gene Kranz and why should we talk about him 500 years from now?Gene Kranz, also known as General Savage within NASA, was a flight director and he was the man who was on the flight director's console when the accident on 13 occurred, by the way. But his main claim to fame is that he was one of — well, he was also on the flight director's desk when we landed. And what you have to understand, Jim, is the astronauts did not run these missions. I'm not dissing the astronauts, but all of the decisions . . . they couldn't make those decisions because they didn't have the information to make the decisions. These life-and-death decisions had to be made on the ground, and the flight director was the autocrat of the mission control, and not just the autocrat in terms of his power, he was also the guy who was going to get stuck with all the responsibility if there was a mistake. If they made a mistake that killed the astronauts, that flight director could count on testifying before Congressional committees and going down in history as an idiot.Somebody like Gene Kranz, and the other flight director, Glynn Lunney during that era, who was also on the controls during the Apollo 13 problems, they were in their mid-thirties, and they were running the show for one of the historic events in human civilization. They deserve to be remembered, and they have a chance to be, because I have written one thing in my life that people will still be reading 500 years from now — not very many people, but some will — and that's the book about Apollo that Catherine, my wife, and I wrote. And the reason I'm absolutely confident that they're going to be reading about it is because — historians, anyway, historians will — because of what you just said. There are wars that get forgotten, there are all sorts of events that get forgotten, but we remember the Trojan War, we remember Hastings, we remember Columbus discovering America. . . We will remember for a thousand years to come, let alone 500, the century in which we first left Earth. An Apollo 12 story (12:06)If you just give me a story or two that you'd like to tell about Apollo that maybe the average person may have never heard of, but you find . . . I'm sure there's a hundred of these. Is there one or two that you think the audience might find interesting?The only thing is it gets a little bit nerdy, but a lot about Apollo gets nerdy. On Apollo 12, the second mission, the launch vehicle lifts off and into the launch phase, about a minute in, it gets hit by lightning — twice. Huge bolts of lightning run through the entire spacecraft. This is not something it was designed for. And so they get up to orbit. All of the alarms are going off at once inside the cabin of the spacecraft. Nobody has the least idea what's happened because they don't know that they got hit by lightning, all they know is nothing is working.A man named John Aaron is sitting in the control room at the EECOM's desk, which is the acronym for the systems guide who monitored all the systems, including electrical systems, and he's looking at his console and he's seeing a weird pattern of numbers that makes no sense at all, and then he remembers 15 months earlier, he'd just been watching the monitor during a test at Cape Canaveral, he wasn't even supposed to be following this launch test, he was just doing it to keep his hand in, and so forth, and something happened whereby there was a strange pattern of numbers that appeared on John Aaron's screen then. And so he called Cape Canaveral and said, what happened? Because I've never seen that before. And finally the Cape admitted that somebody had accidentally turned a switch called the SCE switch off.Okay, so here is John Aaron. Apollo 12 has gone completely haywire. The spacecraft is not under the control of the astronauts, they don't know what's happened. Everybody's trying to figure out what to do.John Aaron remembers . . . I'm starting to get choked up just because that he could do that at a moment of such incredible stress. And he just says to the flight director, “Try turning SCE to auxiliary.” And the flight director had never even heard of SCE, but he just . . . Trust made that whole system run. He passes that on to the crew. The crew turns that switch, and, all at once, they get interpretable data back again.That's the first part of the story. That was an absolutely heroic call of extraordinary ability for him to do that. The second thing that happens at that point is they have completely lost their guidance platform, so they have to get that backup from scratch, and they've also had this gigantic volts of electricity that's run through every system in the spacecraft and they have three orbits of the earth before they have to have what was called trans lunar injection: go onto the moon. That's a couple of hours' worth.Well, what is the safe thing to do? The safe thing to do is: “This is not the right time to go to the moon with a spacecraft that's been damaged this way.” These guys at mission control run through a whole series of checks that they're sort of making up on the fly because they've never encountered this situation before, and everything seems to check out. And so, at the end of a couple of orbits, they just say, “We're going to go to the moon.” And the flight director can make that decision. Catherine and I spent a lot of time trying to track down the anguished calls going back and forth from Washington to Houston, and by the higher ups, “Should we do this?” There were none. The flight director said, “We're going,” and they went. To me, that is an example of a kind of spirit of adventure, for lack of a better word, that was extraordinary. Decisions made by guys in their thirties that were just accepted as, “This is what we're going to do.”By the way, Gene Kranz, I was interviewing him for the book, and I was raising this story with him. (This will conclude my monologue.) I was raising this story with him and I was saying, “Just extraordinary that you could make that decision.” And he said, “No, not really. We checked it out. The spacecraft looked like it was good.” This was only a year or two after the Challenger disaster that I was conducting this interview. And I said to Gene, “Gene, if we had a similar kind of thing happen today, would NASA ever permit that decision to be made?” And Gene glared at me. And believe me, when Gene Kranz glares at you, you quail at your seat. And then he broke into laughter because there was not a chance in hell that the NASA of 1988 would do what the NASA of 1969 did.An Apollo 11 story (17:58)If all you know about Apollo 11 is what you learned in high school, or maybe you saw a documentary somewhere, and — just because I've heard you speak before, and I've heard Gene Kranz speak—what don't people know about Apollo 11? There were — I imagine with all these flights — a lot of decisions that needed to be made probably with not a lot of time, encountering new situations — after all, no one had done this before. Whereas, I think if you just watch a news report, you think that once the rocket's up in the air, the next thing that happens is Neil Armstrong lands it on the moon and everyone's just kind of on cruise control for the next couple of days, and boy, it certainly doesn't seem like that.For those of us who were listening to the landing, and I'm old enough to have done that, there was a little thing called—because you could listen to the last few minutes, you could listen to what was going on between the spacecraft and mission control, and you hear Buzz Aldrin say, “Program Alarm 1301 . . .  Program Alarm 1301 . . .” and you can't…   well, you can reconstruct it later, and there's about a seven-second delay between him saying that and a voice saying, “We're a go on that.” That seven seconds, you had a person in the back room that was supporting, who then informed this 26-year-old flight controller that they had looked at that possibility and they could still land despite it. The 26-year-old had to trust the guy in the back room because the 26-year-old didn't know, himself, that that was the case. He trusts him, he tells the flight director Gene Kranz, and they say, “Go.” Again: Decision made in seven seconds. Life and death. Taking a risk instead of taking the safe way out.Sometimes I think that that risk-taking ethos didn't end with Apollo, but maybe, in some ways, it hasn't been as strong since. Is there a scenario where we fly those canceled Apollo flights that we never flew, and then, I know there were other plans of what to do after Apollo, which we didn't do. Is there a scenario where the space race doesn't end, we keep racing? Even if we're only really racing against ourselves.I mean we've got . . . it's Artemis, right? That's the new launch vehicle that we're going to go back to the moon in, and there are these plans that somehow seem to never get done at the time they're supposed to get done, but I imagine we will have some similar kind of flights going on. It's very hard to see a sustained effort at this point. It's very hard to see grandiose effort at this point. The argument of, “Why are we spending all this money on manned space flight?” in one sense, I sympathize with because it is true that most of the things we do could be done by instruments, could be done by drones, we don't actually have to be there. On the other hand, unless we're willing to spread our wings and raise our aspirations again, we're just going to be stuck for a long time without making much more progress. So I guess what I'm edging around to is, in this era, in this ethos, I don't see much happening done by the government. The Elon Musks of the world may get us to places that the government wouldn't ever go. That's my most realistic hope.Apollo in the Media (21:36)If I could just give you a couple of films about the space program and you just… thought you liked it, you thought it captured something, or you thought it was way off, just let just shoot a couple at you. The obvious one is The Right Stuff—based on the Tom Wolfe book, of course.The Right Stuff was very accurate about the astronauts' mentality. It was very inaccurate about the relationship between the engineers and the astronauts. It presents the engineers as constantly getting the astronauts way, and being kind of doofuses. That was unfair. But if you want to understand how the astronauts worked, great movieApollo 13, perhaps the most well-known.Extremely accurate. Extremely accurate portrayal of the events. There are certain things I wish they could include, but it's just a movie, so they couldn't include everything. The only real inaccuracy that bothered me was it showed the consoles of the flight controllers with colored graphics on them. They didn't have colored graphics during Apollo! They had columns of white numbers on a black background that were just kind of scrolling through and changing all the time, and that's all. But apparently, when their technical advisor pointed that out to Ron Howard, Ron said, “There are some things that an audience just won't accept, but they would not accept.”That was the leap! First Man with Ryan Gosling portraying Neil Armstrong.I'll tell you: First place, good movie—Excellent, I think.Yeah, and the people who knew Armstrong say to me, it's pretty good at capturing Armstrong, who himself was a very impressive guy. This conceit in the movie that he has this little trinket he drops on the moon, that was completely made up and it's not true to life. But I'll tell you what they tell me was true to life that surprised me was how violently they were shaken up during the launch phase. And I said, “Is that the way it was, routinely?” And they said, yeah, it was a very rough ride that those guys had. And the movie does an excellent job of conveying something that somebody who'd spent a lot of time studying the Apollo program didn't know.I don't know if you've seen the Apple series For All Mankind by Ronald D. Moore, which is based on the premise I raised earlier that Apollo didn't end, we just kept up the Space Race and we kept advancing off to building moon colonies and off to Mars. Have you seen that? And what do you think about it if you have? I don't know that you have.I did not watch it. I have a problem with a lot of these things because I have my own image of the Apollo Program, and it drives me nuts if somebody does something that is egregiously wrong. I went to see Apollo 13 and I'm glad I did it because it was so accurate, but I probably should look at For All Mankind.Very reverential. A very pro-space show, to be sure. Have you seen the Apollo 11 documentary that's come out in the past five years? It was on the big screen, it was at theaters, it was a lot of footage they had people had not seen before, they found some old canisters somewhere of film. I don't know if you've seen this. I think it's just called Apollo 11.No, I haven't seen that. That sounds like something that I ought to look at.Perspectives on space flight (24:50)My listeners love when I read . . . Because you mentioned the idea of: Why do we go to space? If it's merely about exploration, I suppose we could just send robots and maybe eventually the robots will get better. So I want to just briefly read two different views of why we go to space.Why should human beings explore space? Because space offers transcendence from which only human beings can benefit. The James Webb Space Telescope cannot articulate awe. A robot cannot go into the deep and come back with soulful renewal. To fully appreciate space, we need people to go there and embrace it for what it fully is. Space is not merely for humans, nor is space merely for space. Space is for divine communion.That's one view.The second one is from Ayn Rand, who attended the Apollo 11 moon launch. This is what Ayn Rand wrote in 1969:The next four days were torn out of the world's usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind's lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of man, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilization; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone a failure, like the sound of the Oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as a man. Those four days conveyed the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art—a play dramatizing a single theme: the efficacy of man's mind.Is the answer for why we go to space, can it be found in either of those readings?They're going to be found in both. I am a sucker for heroism, whether it's in war or in any other arena, and space offers a kind of celebration of the human spirit that is only found in endeavors that involve both great effort and also great risk. And the other aspect of transcendence, I'm also a sucker for saying the world is not only more complicated than we know, but more complicated than we can imagine. The universe is more complicated than we can imagine. And I resonate to the sentiment in the first quote.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

In episode 293 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on listening to experts, and learning from those with experience. He also notes the passing of Ross McDonnell, Larry Fink, Elliott Erwitt and Shane McGowan. Plus this week, photographer Arthur Meyerson takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' Since 1974, native Texan Arthur Meyerson has travelled throughout the world, creating award winning advertising, corporate and editorial photographs, as well as an extensive body of art based imagery. A three-time winner of Adweek's Southwest Photographer of the Year award, Meyerson is on Communication World's list of top 10 corporate photographers and was named one of the 30 best advertising photographers by American Photo. His awards are numerous including gold medals from the New York Art Directors Club, the Art Directors Club of Houston, the Dallas Society of Visual Communications and the Stephen Kelly Award for his work on the Nike advertising campaign. Meyerson was selected by Nikon to their illustrious Legends Behind the Lens list and honoured by the Houston Advertising Federation as the inaugural recipient of the Only In Houston award for individuals. In 2008, the Houston Decorative Center named him as the first photographic recipient of their annual Stars Of Design celebration. Besides his commercial work, Myerson's fascination with light, colour and the moment culminated in his 2012 book, The Color of Light. His second book, The Journey, was published in 2017. Meyerson's photographs are in the public collections of several major institutions and have been exhibited internationally. Today, he teaches workshops, undertakes individual mentoring and participates in speaking engagements throughout the U.S. and abroad. Meyerson is a former member of the Advisory Council for the Santa Fe Center for Photography and the Houston Center for Photography as well as continuing to serve on the Board of Advisors for the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. www.arthurmeyerson.com Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Under-Graduate and Post-Graduate Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of At Home With the Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006), Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019) and What Does Photography Mean to You? (Bluecoat 2020). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com and he is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts. Scott's next book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, (Orphans Publishing), is on pre-sale now. © Grant Scott 2023

From the creators of Top Golf - Puttshack is coming soon to Houston Center....and there's a free 'Taylor Swift' themed workout class this Thursday at Eleanor Tinsley Park

People Enjoyed an afternoon of free art, music, poetry, and family activities in celebration of our vibrant neighborhood. Participating organizations include: DACAMERA, Houston Center for Photography, Inprint, The Menil Collection, Pride Chorus Houston, Rothko Chapel, Writers in the Schools (WITS), and Watercolor Art Society. Ars Lyrica presented an interactive, family-friendly musical story time featuring Maria's Magical Music Adventure focused on mindfulness, with narrators reading the book in English and Spanish with live string quartet accompaniment. The performance included excerpts from Vivaldi's Four Seasons and was followed by a book signing by author Emma Kent Wine and translator Verónica Roméro at the Suzanne Deal Booth Welcome House between performances. Presenters for this event included Emma Kent Wine, author and English narrator; Verónica Roméro, translator and Spanish narrator; Joanna Becker, violin; Maria Lin, violin; Matthew Weathers, viola; and Fran Koiner, cello.

In Episode 33 of The Energy Question Podcast, David Blackmon interviews Chuck McConnell, Energy Center Officer for the University of Houston Center for Carbon Management.David and McConnell conduct a wide-ranging discussion related to Chuck's work at the University of Houston, the potential for carbon capture and storage along the Gulf Coasts of Texas and Louisiana, and Chuck's involvement in and leadership efforts with the Carbon Neutral Coalition.Run of Show:01:30 - Chuck's role at the UH Center for Carbon Management, and the importance of the work there05:30 - How CCS helps improve the sustainability of the oil and gas industry through synergies in staffing and other factors10:00 - How the business community is increasingly recognizing CCS as not just an environmental opportunity, but a business opportunity11:10 - Chuck's work at the Carbon Neutral Coalition - Workforce of the Future14:30 - The magnitude of the CCS opportunity for Texas18:40 - Why acceptance and adoption of CCU by the business community is so important20:00 - What Texas has done and is continuing to from a policy standpoint23:30 - The potential for the "U" part of CCUS - Utilization26:40 - Is knee-jerk opposition to CCS diminishing over time?29:30 - How 45Q tax credit enables commercialization of CCS projects31:00 - Why the energy transition is not going to be cheaper in any way33:00 - CloseLink to the UH Center for Carbon Management: https://uh.edu/uh-energy/wpc/mcconnell.phpSponsorships are available or get your own corporate brand produced by Sandstone Media. David Blackmon LinkedInDB Energy Questions Energy Transition Absurdities SubstackThe Crude Truth with Rey TrevinoRey Trevino LinkedInEnergy Transition Weekly ConversationIrina Slav LinkedInArmando Cavanha LinkedIn ENB Top NewsENBEnergy DashboardENB PodcastENB Substack

Why Make Podcast, Wendy Maruyama Episode Part II TranscriptTime Code00:00 Robb HelmkampHello and welcome to Why Make, where we talk to makers from different disciplines about what inspires them to make.With your hosts Robb Helmkamp and. Erik Wolken Erik Wolken. If you would like to learn more about the makers we interview on Why Make please go our website why-make.comRobb HelmkampAnd please help support the Why Make podcast and Why Make productions by making a tax refundable donation to us on Fractured Atlas.Erik WolkenFractured Atlas is our new non profit fiscal sponsor which allows us to access a wide range of funding possibilities including funding available only for non-profits Robb HelmkampVisit https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/the-why-make-project or go to the donate to Why Make page on Why-Make.com 01:03 Robb HelmkampWelcome to our first podcast of the 2023 season of Why Make. This episode is part two of our in depth conversation with the artist Wendy Maruyama.Erik Wolken Wendy Maruyama is a furniture maker, sculptor and retired educator who resides in San Diego California. Wendy's work has tackled a wide scope topics from traditional furniture forms to exploring her Japanese heritage and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WW2 to the issue of endangered speciesRobb HelmkampAs we discuss later in the podcast Wendy was born with significant hearing loss and cerebral palsy and at her request, to aid our listeners, we have included a full transcript of our conversation on our web page for this episode which can be found on the podcast page of why-make.com It can also be found in the episode notes on Apple podcastsErik WolkenPlease join us and take a listen to our wide ranging discussion with one of the more amazing artists in the woodworking field, Wendy Maruyama.02:06 Erik Wolken Moving along Wendy, let's talk about the next phase of your work. Because the next phase of your work use do start to tackle some of your identities in your bodies of work in Turning Japanese, Simple Pleasures and Indulgences & Men in Kimonos you do start to sort of not only address your heritage, but really start to use narrative in your work. What was what was behind all of that? I mean, what do you think was the inspiration behind that? The whole thing that started with Turning Japanese and Men in Kimonos exploring your cultural identity.02:42 Wendy MaruyamaI think the Turning Japanese series the Men in Kimono riff came from my first trip to Japan could be in '92 maybe I can't remember but I'd never been to Japan until the early 90's and like anybody else I was just amazed by what I was seeing over there especially the craft scene. There is such a strong craft heritage in Japan not only with woodworking, ceramics of different styles at the same time some of the fields like textiles really evolved into the modern times to use the unusual fibers and metal in weaving. And then of course, going to downtown Tokyo in the Shibuya District dominated with all this neon stuff, it was very much like Blade Runner if you've seen the movie Blade Runner? It was clearly based on Tokyo. And so there are these two very different aspects of Japan, the old and the very, very, very new high tech side of it. There is a little bit of conflict to you know, I'd be riding on the subway and you can see these Japanese business men reading these pornographic cartoons it was called Manga. I think it was it all these lady with big boobs, it's all cartoons. It was such a flurry of images and so I think some of that was mostly my personal response to what I saw in Japan and I realized that I didn't fit even though I was Japanese American. Japanese descent. I did not fit into that whole culture, I mean, even if I tried. I mean, I'm kind of proud of it from a distance but I realized I don't think like that. So, maybe that was kind of a mixture of sadness and relief in a way. It is a very patriarchal society so there was that and it was kinda just a response to my experiences going to Japan.05:44 Erik WolkenAnd the other interesting thing about that body of work is you begin to introduce using video and still images into it too. And you're really starting to truly experiment with your craft and and I thought that was absolutely wonderful. You know, you reached outside the box, which I think is what we all aim to do as artists. When you first started using video and still images? And where did that come from?06:11 Wendy MaruyamaI'm trying to think. Trying to remember if the Tasmanian Tiger piece was first, I think it was. But anyway, in the Turning Japanese series I started using photo's because I went to a flea market in Kyoto. It's one best thing about Japan! It's amazing what you can find at the flea market. Some love it. If you ever go to Japan, make sure that you go into a big flea market either in Kyoto or Tokyo. The stuff that you find is amazing, but anyway, I came across a box of old black and white photographs of Kabuki actors. And I found out later that in Kabuki theater, women were not allowed to perform. I don't know if that is the case now? But women were not allowed to perform in Kabuki and so the female characters in a Kabuki play were always played by men who were expert at mimicking the feminine movement of women in the story. So all these men I mean all these women in kimono were actually men and they were quite beautiful and alluring and I was just kind of fascinated by that, how these beautiful, these men were. And they were prettier than I was and I thought it be kinda fun to use some of these images. At the same time, I'm a big Japanese sci-fi fan I think that was because that was the first time I saw Japanese people in a movie. It was in a Godzilla movie where you see all these Japanese people running from Godzilla. In one of the Godzilla movies there's these twin fairies (the Shobijin). I don't know if you remember they were sidekicks to Mothra, who was another monster. So I wanted to create this sort of these twin geisha women in the image of this. Oh I don't know, it's amazing about Photoshop, I was taking Photoshop class, and it's amazing how you can make fantastical images using Photoshop. So that was an opportunity to experiment with different media. I tend to jump around from, you know, from subject to subject cause that's the way my life goes. I'm not one to stay with one idea for 40 years, I think I would be bored to death. So it's important for me to just kind of reflect my life through my work. And so hopefully you get an idea what I've been going through by seeing my work in a linear pattern.09:41 Erik Wolken Yes, you definitely see a progression of your work, because then the next body of work you move on to is Executive Order 9066. And the Tag Project. And of course this is referring to, and I'm going to use the correct terminology. This is referring to the incarceration and or imprisonment of the Japanese people on the West Coast of America during World War Two. Just to give you an idea of the scope of this project, and Wendy you can go on to talk about it more, but there were 120,000 Japanese, people of Japanese heritage, imprisoned during EO 9066. And the Tag Project, you printed out a replica of the original tags, these people wore as they were sent to their prison camps. 120,000 tags, that is a mind boggling number.10:38 Wendy MaruyamaThat's a lot of tags. I started this the body of work when I was an artist in residency at SUNY New York, SUNY Purchase that is State University of New York Purchase. I knew that I needed to do this work, but I wasn't really ready until then. I mean it's a really hard topic because my mother's side of the family was deeply impacted by Executive Order 9066 because they were in Los Angeles at the time when Pearl Harbor was bombed and all that happen. But what struck me and kind of made me sort of angry was I was really surprised at how many people didn't even know about this episode in American history, especially on the East Coast and in the south and even now sometimes you run into people who don't even know about it. I think people know, more people know about it now. But even 15 years ago, when I started this project I was running across a lot of people who didn't know, they kind of knew but they didn't really know. And when you tell them how many people were sent away to these prison camps but it's daunting to think about. And so I also thought a lot about the Holocaust too. It doesn't hold a candle to what happened here, but still the fact that Executive Order 9066 happened in this country, this country of freedom and all that. I just really wanted to bring that to the forefront with my work. And I also wanted to get to know more of the Japanese American community. And so one of the first things I did was that I reached out to the local San Diego Japanese American historical society to learn more about Executive Order 9066. And I started talking to a lot of other people who were sent to prison in Poston, which was in Arizona. Most people from San Diego were sent to prison camp in Arizona. And that's when I started to make it into a community project and I would host these tag writing parties we would have different chores people would stamp tags, they would write the names, they would tie, tie them together, there were a lot of processes in for each tag and the only way I was going to be able to do 120,000 tags was to make it a community project. But hopefully make it an educational project, but also social advocacy project. So that people can learn about what happened. And I would show a slide show before we would start working on the tags. I was going to temples and churches and high school classrooms, and college classes, and galleries and museums. So it was kind of a broad outreach and it took 4 years but we did manage to finish all the tags in time for the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066.Erik WolkenThat was a massive undertaking, what led you I mean, what led you at the beginning to first think of producing these 120,000 tags?14:54 Wendy Maruyama I must have been crazy, you know. I started out by making just a few tags of people that my family knew. And I was incorporating them into cabinet pieces and for instance this one cabinet had the image of a young Japanese American girl in the back. And the tags were all showed they were under the age of 10 and were sent to camp in 1942. But then a friend of mine, Christine Lee came to visit me in NY and she said, you know, it would be amazing if you could do all 120,000 tags. Now, Christine, kind of, she does this kind of work, you know that that very labor intensive. And at first I thought she was crazy. but then, you know, I thought about it and the impact it would have would be so much more powerful than just seeing a couple of tags here and there. And um I like the idea of art reaching in... You know, I am kind of a shy person and so it is really hard for me to like reach out to strangers and just interact. I think it has a lot to do with my hearing disability,, it kind of forced me to do that. 16:44 Erik Wolken Right. And, and I mean, we'll have pictures of all this up on our website. But um just to paint a picture. So there's two pieces to the Tag Project in EO 9066. So there is the Tag Project, which represents all 120,000 people that were imprisoned, and then... Robb HelmkampIn 10 camps I correct?17:03 Erik WolkenRight. Memorializes, the 10 camps that were mostly over the Southwest, and just amazing images of these places where people were housed for three, four years, and it's an equally intense part of the piece. You know, I would I would encourage people to look into it further. And also there is a great website called www.densho.org, which will help better inform you about the incarceration and imprisonment of people of Japanese, Japanese Americans remember these were Americans, Japanese Americans during World War Two.Robb HelmkampAnd then there's also you've kept quite a blog about the process of the project on your website.17:50 Wendy MaruyamaI did and I feel bad that I haven't really kept it up to date, but it was really to follow the whole process of the tag project. At the same time I wanted to share relevant news articles that were not only about the Executive Order 9066, but just discrimination. I remember working on the tags and this whole outcry with a woman at the UCLA library posted a video of herself complaining about Asian students in the library and she was making fun of the way they talked, shing shong chi chong. But video went viral, and it kind of backfired on her. Discrimination on that level is still alive and well, most people know now. Erik Wolken So moving on to your next advocacy project, because this really is a phase of your life where you're taking on a very much the role of an advocate is the Wildlife Project. Do you want to describe the Wildlife Project a little bit?19:07 Wendy MaruyamaLike I have said before, and I think you know this, I love animals more than people, who are just awful. I started reading too many articles about the demise of the elephant in particular. Poaching for the ivory and it's not only just the elephants, but rhinoceros and tigers, all for the sake of being able to show off someone's wealth. The elephant population was really precariously dropping to the point the danger of becoming extinct. So I wanted to do a whole series of work, kind of highlight this issue. And at the same time, I meet somebody, Elizabeth Kozlowski, who was an independent curator and she wanted me to do an exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, which is where she was working at the time. And so that was the incentive to make a whole body of work about wildlife. Again, you know elephants are big and I wanted to be able make these huge pieces and I had to figure out a way to make them big without making them heavy and difficult to manage. At the time, I was working in a very small studio. And so I came up with the idea of making them out of very thin pieces of wood and sewing them together. When I was in high school, I loved to sew and the fabrication of making a dress or an article of clothing, is very three dimensional and it could be applied very easily to other materials like cardboard and wood and paper. I guess it's like a form of origami, creating volume with these very flat surfaces. So that was how that work came about and then it was accompanied with a bunch of other pieces.Erik WolkenThe other thing that fascinated me about that show is that the other pieces were in different mediums. You did a huge rhinoceros in plaster and then you did a pangolin which I'm not really familiar with what a pangolin is, in rattan It was you still continue to experiment and I just find that wonderful.22:06 Wendy Maruyama It's fun, you know like I said I think wood working just doing woodworking would really bore me to death. Just some materials they have a different capacity to express a different idea. The thing about glass is that I was able to, I was offered a residency at Pilchuck so it is kind of funny how these opportunities come together and make it possible to integrate projects and so I was able to spend I think it was two weeks or three weeks at Pilchuck and I was given two amazing glass blowers to help me make these tusks and I mean obviously glass was the perfect medium. And it was kind of tricky because you know William Morris, William Morris was a hot glass blower, he's still blowing glass he became known for the very large blown primitive forms. But he also did elephant tusks but it was a different context. He presented them a just large sculptures of beautiful tusks and I wanted to portray the tusks as being bloody and taken from a living animal. So the glassblowers and I had a conversation about that you know I said I don't want to do it if you feel like it treads too closely to other glass blowers work. But my message is completely different and they agreed that it would work with kind of presentation that I was using. The tusks were created through the help of Dan Friday and Nancy Callan who are amazing glass blowers in the Seattle area.Erik Wolken Right and then of course there's the life size and burlap rhinoceros!Wendy MaruyamaWhat was I thinking, right um.24:38 Robb Helmkamp You were thinking about that old desk that you made a long long time ago with chicken wire and Paper Mache?Wendy MaruyamaI learned a lot from that Paper Mache piece, you know I thought about that Paper Mache piece when I was doing the plaster rhino. It's kind of funny how that comes around again. The rhino was necessary to make because I wanted to have I wanted to have that scale and I wanted it be made out of plaster because it was white and fragile and it was like a ghost. But now I need to find someone who needs a plaster rhino, so if you know anybody that wants it, and if you can pay for shipping you're welcome to have it.Erik Wolken I would take the plaster Rhino. But Robb will have to pay for the shipping!25:31 Robb HelmkampWe might be able to work something out. I mean, I could put it behind me here in my office but...Wendy MaruyamaIt's the size of the small Volkswagen bug that's how big it is. Robb HelmkampAll right, we're coming out to San Diego to get that.25:41 Erik Wolken Well speaking of the Wildlife Project one of the pictures will post on the website is a wonderful picture of Robb and I and Tommy Simpson in front of one of the elephant masks when we were filming the Tommy Simpson documentary and we didn't end up using it in the documentary but it's it was it was just a wonderfully sweet moment of talking about, about your piece Wendy with Tommy Simpson. As we were as we were filming for the Tommy Simpson documentary.Wendy MaruyamaTommy Simpson, like I said, you know he was a huge inspiration back in 1970-71. I still have the very first book that he did that got torn up from years of flipping through it and sharing with my students.Robb HelmkampIts well loved and well used.Wendy MaruyamaThat really makes me happyErik Wolken The was the book was published I think...Wendy MaruyamaI would never have known that I would cross paths with Tommy Simpson back then. I mean he was like a movie star back then in the 70's and then we he came to visit San Diego one year. Oh ahhhh He stayed at my house!27:06 Erik WolkenSo let's talk about your most recent bodies of work the Color Field pieces and Memory because you're sort of leaving advocacy and going back to your roots in color. I love the Color Field pieces there, you know you're just really exploring the basics of color which is I just find incredibly appealing and almost a 2D sense as opposed to a three dimensional sense although there's texture.27:34 Wendy MaruyamaI um, you know, after doing Executive Order 9066 and the Elephant Project I was kind of beat up emotionally. It was really tough working on those pieces and it was even tougher for me to talk about those pieces after being asked to give talks during shows, it was kind of difficult to hold myself together. but anyway I'm getting better at it now. I can start talking about these things without breaking out in tears, but I needed to do something that was not heavy I needed to go back to using color again in a very pleasant way. It was an invitation to show that got me started on the Color Field pieces. Somebody in Colorado was having an exhibition of Bauhaus inspired furniture. because I think it was like 100th anniversary of Bauhaus and there is a Bauhaus Institute in Aspen so they wanted to do an exhibition of furniture but the problem was I hated Bauhaus furniture it wasn't really my thing. all that metal tubing and whatever. But I loved Annie Albers, who was a weaver with the Bauhaus movement, and she had a wonderful use of color and so I modeled my work after Annie Albers. It was kind of down my alley in terms of exploring color again. That's why they became two dimensional because of the weavings they were inspired by.29:41 Robb Helmkamp Were the pieces that you created where they kind of modeled after tambours? Like on a piece of furniture...Wendy MaruyamaYeah that's true I forgot that... I'm glad you mentioned that because tambour pieces were one of my favorite things to make actually. I've made a lot of carcass pieces that have tambours and I love the textural qualities of tambours. Yeah, for sure that was an inspiration.Robb Helmkamp Your use of more muted colors. From the Bauhaus movement I guess Annie's kind of take on it is really nice. It's nice to see that side of Bauhaus.30:26 Wendy MaruyamaI usually like punch colors but I wanted to experiment with a different tone of colors.Robb HelmkampVery beautiful. So let's talk about a little bit about Memory, one of the last bodies of work that you've, you've completed. 30:43 Wendy MaruyamaLets see in 2018 my uncle died... I have an aunt and uncle I am very close to they were kind of like second mom and dad and my uncle had severe dementia and he finally passed. I think it was 2018. I'm trying to remember but so my aunt was living alone and turned out that she had dementia as well. She was such a brilliant women and was such a role model for me it was really tough to see her decline. So we made the decision at the end of 2019 put her into a memory care facility, and so... and then of course Covid hit so right after we put her there we weren't even able to visit her for about 6 months. There was a lot of guilt and concern and so that was kind of tough. Like I said your getting older and you go through these phases and then go through things with your parents. Some of your friends may die. You know some of this stuff that you're going through at my age anyway. So the memory series was first about her loosing her memory but it's also about memories that people keep and I think it's a very powerful thing. Memories kind of get reused in a way there kind of special after a while, you start thinking about dreams that you've had and they're very similar to many different things that are kind of not intangible things that you think about. In short the work of trying to make these intangible things tangible, relatable in a very tactile way. So the memory piece I did about my aunt has a black lacquered mirror that goes from completely reflective to becomes very distorted at the very end to where you don't recognize yourself anymore, and the case that it is in has a kind of Asian aesthetic to it, being Japanese American. But there is a dysfunctional door on the left side it moves but it really doesn't function to any degree. That was referencing lack of memory, her inability to solve problems. I think that black mirrors have a lot of meaning, you know the iPhone is a black mirror, a black mirror to technology. And in Japan, this is interesting because I think I need a black mirror, the geisha woman in Japan as they aged began to use black lacquer as a mirror because the black lacquer kind of made your wrinkles go away. So you couldn't see your wrinkles so the process of aging is sort of disguised in a black mirror. Yeah, anyway, so the whole black mirror series is about conveying depth. So deep looking into that black lacquer. It looks like you're looking into a deep dark hole. Well you're looking at a reflection. It's been a lot of fun working with you with the black lacquer and I've been really lucky, because um... I don't know if you know Greg Johnson? He's a finisher in upstate New York he has been doing the black lacquer mirrors for me and he does such a beautiful job.35:11Erik Wolken The Black Mirror is just an incredible metaphor. That's just incredibly powerful.35:16 Wendy MaruyamaIt's so rich you know it's interesting how the many things you think about when you look at it. Plus I love the TV series I've seen the Black Mirror. I love that TV show.Robb Helmkamp Isn't it great? I've watched it through and through. It makes you think!Erik Wolken So and starting to wrap this up, Wendy. What are you working on now? What's your what's your what's your next body of work or what are you what are you moving forward with now?35:48 Wendy MaruyamaI am still finishing up the Black Mirror (Memory) series and wrapping up that little chair (Matador) I was telling you about earlier. But I don't really know now what I am going to be making next but hopefully I have been talking to Tom Loeser about doing something together. We were talking about maybe showing together again? No, we haven't looked at the details yet. But it is always kind of fun to show with a good old friend.Erik Wolken Well, Wendy, I just want to wrap this up because this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation with you.Wendy MaruyamaOh, good. I'm glad I hope you can get at least 10 minutes out of it.Robb HelmkampOh, I think we can at least do 15. No Wendy it's been an absolute pleasure talking with youErik Wolken Right and we always end… by saying Why MakeRobb HelmkampWhy Make36:47 Wendy MaruyamaThank you very much. Why Make

Amy and Ryan Marquez of the University of Houston Center for Consumer Law cover a lot of ground as they tackle topics important to renters in Houston and across Texas.

Meghann Riepenhoff © Geoffrey Berliner Meghann Riepenhoff's (b. 1979; Atlanta, GA) work has been presented internationally in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; C/O Berlin, Germany; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; and Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX. Her work is held in permanent collections across the United States, including those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, among others. In 2018, the artist was selected as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Riepenhoff earned her BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist divides her time between Bainbridge Island, WA, and San Francisco, CA. Her book, mentioned in the interview is Ice. Meghann Riepenhoff , Waters of the Americas: Eastman Kodak's Emissions A (Confluence of the Genesee River and Lake Ontario, Rochester, NY, 03.14.2022), 2022 Three Dynamic Cyanotypes, Approximately 59 1/2" x 42" (151 x 106.5 cm) each element. © Meghann Riepenhoff, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York  Meghann Riepenhoff, Waters of the Americas: Eastman Kodak's Emissions C (Confluence of the Genesee River and Lake Ontario, Rochester, NY, 03.13.2022), 2022. Dynamic Cyanotype, Approximately 59" x 59" (150 x 150 cm) © Meghann Riepenhoff, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York 

Town Square with Ernie Manouse airs at 3 p.m. CT. Tune in on 88.7FM, listen online or subscribe to the podcast. Join the discussion at 888-486-9677, questions@townsquaretalk.org or @townsquaretalk. Earlier today, President Biden landed in Rzeszów, a small city in Poland near the Ukraine border. This town is the first stop for many people trying to flee the war, and has become the epicenter of the refugee crisis. According to NPR, it's where more than 2 million Ukrainians have fled since the war began. While in Poland, the President will get a briefing on the humanitarian crisis and meet with refugees. Today, we unpack these latest developments – from yesterday's NATO press conference to humanitarian aid being offered to the White House's recent announcement that the US will welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. As we all struggle to better understand this ongoing crisis, we welcome Houstonians' questions and concerns. Guests: Michael Pelletier Executive Director of the University of Houston's Institute for Global Engagement Former US Ambassador to the Republic of Madagascar and the Union of the Comoros Zachary Zwald Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston Director of the University of Houston Center for International and Comparative Studies Town Square with Ernie Manouse is a gathering space for the community to come together and discuss the day's most important and pressing issues. Audio from today's show will be available after 5 p.m. CT. We also offer a free podcast here, on iTunes, and other apps.

Town Square with Ernie Manouse airs at 3 p.m. CT. Tune in on 88.7FM, listen online or subscribe to the podcast. Join the discussion at 888-486-9677, questions@townsquaretalk.org or @townsquaretalk. As Ukraine and Russia are expected to have further conversations and President Biden is headed to Europe next week for NATO to discuss ongoing defense efforts, what will China's involvement be? With more sanctions and weapons deployment, there is much more to discuss within the latest Russia-Ukraine headlines.  But first, we are joined by Ukrainian married couple Dmitriy and Yuliya Kozhushanova, co-owners of  Dance Life Houston who are working to raise money to help get Ukrainian orphans to safety. Dance Life Houston will host free group dance lessons on Thursdays at 8 pm and Fridays at 7 pm. Lessons are free with a donation of at least $1, and all of the money from sales on those days will be donated to help refugees. The Kozhushanova's also share their personal story of Yuliya's grandmother in Mariupol and how they haven't been able to get in contact with her since the attacks began.   Guests: Zachary Zwald Faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston Director of the University of Houston Center for International and Comparative Studies Dmitriy and Yuliya Kozhushanova Co-Owners of Dance Life Houston Town Square with Ernie Manouse is a gathering space for the community to come together and discuss the day's most important and pressing issues. Audio from today's show will be available after 5 p.m. CT. We also offer a free podcast here, on iTunes, and other apps.

Joy, laughter, and the unexpected are at the heart of Annie Evelyn's work. Employing a range of materials (handmade paper flowers to Swarovski Crystals) and processes (tessellating metal pieces to create soft upholstered seating or embedding fresh cut flowers to add aroma), Evelyn uses furniture's inherent interactive qualities and relationships to the human body to create new and surprising experiences. From 2014-2017 Evelyn was resident artist at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and in 2016 was awarded The John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship. She received both her BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Evelyn has taught at RISD, California College of the Arts, Parsons - The New School, Haystack Mountain School, Penland School of Craft, and others. Her work has been featured on the cover of American Craft Magazine and published in Agata Toromanoff's book, Impossible Design.  She has been awarded Windgate Furniture residencies at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2011), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2018), and San Diego State University (2020). Evelyn had a solo show at the Houston Center for Craft and in 2018 was a finalist for the Burke Prize for contemporary craft and her work was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD). In 2019, Evelyn co-founded Crafting the Future, a collective of artists working together to provide equitable opportunities in the arts. You may follow along with Annie's work on her Website and Instagram.

What you'll learn in this episode: How Cindi helped the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston secure one of the country's most important art jewelry collections  Why jewelry is a hybrid of craft and art that doesn't fit just in one category Why the art world began to question the value of craft in the 80s, and why that perspective is changing now Why museum and gallery visitors shouldn't ask themselves, “Would I wear this?” when looking at art jewelry About Cindi Strauss Cindi Strauss is the Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design and Assistant Director, Programming at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). She received her BA with honors in art history from Hamilton College and her MA in the history of decorative arts from the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design. At the MFAH, Cindi is responsible for the acquisition, research, publication, and exhibition of post-1900 decorative arts, design, and craft. Jewelry is a mainstay of Cindi's curatorial practice. In addition to regularly curating permanent collection installations that include contemporary jewelry from the museum's collection, she has organized several exhibitions that are either devoted solely to jewelry or include jewelry in them. These include: Beyond Ornament: Contemporary Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2003–2004); Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2007); Liquid Lines: Exploring the Language of Contemporary Metal (2011); and Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection (2014). Cindi has authored or contributed to catalogs and journals on jewelry, craft, and design topics, and has been a frequent lecturer at museums nationwide. She also serves on the editorial advisory committee for Metalsmith magazine. Additional Resources: Museum of Fine Arts Houston Transcript: For the uninitiated, jewelry, art and craft may seem like three distinct (and perhaps, unfortunately, hierarchical) entities. But Cindi Strauss, Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, wants us to break down these barriers and appreciate the value of jewelry as an art in its own right. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how she helped MFA Houston establish one of the largest art jewelry collections at an American museum; why jewelry artists should be proud of their studio craft roots; and why wearability shouldn't be the first consideration when looking at art jewelry. Read the episode transcript here.      Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week.    Today, our guest is Cindi Strauss, the Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, where she's been responsible for a number of exhibits and has written extensively. She coauthored the recent book “Influx: American Jewelry and the Counterculture.” In addition, she's on the Board of Directors of Art Jewelry Forum. We'll hear more about her jewelry journey today. Cindi, welcome to the program.   Cindi: Thank you, Sharon. I'm delighted to be here.   Sharon: So glad to have you. Tell us about your jewelry journey. Did you like jewelry, or did you come to it through decorative arts? How did that work?   Cindi: Well, the story has been heard. I have told it before, about how I was introduced to art jewelry through Helen Drutt through a serendipitous meeting with her. Prior to that, we only had one piece of art jewelry in the museum's collection, a terrific Art Smith necklace from 1948. Personally, I come from a family who loves jewelry, but I have not been as much of a lover of it. I have always worn very minimal jewelry myself, so it's sort of ironic that I am the curator of this phenomenal jewelry collection, the foundation of which is the acquisition in 2002 of Helen Drutt's private collection. At that time, we acquired a little over 800 pieces, including sketchbooks and some drawings of international art jewelry dating from about 1963 to, at that point, the early 2000s. Helen continued to add to that collection up through 2006, when we were in the final preparation for the Ornamentist art exhibition and catalogue. That opened in 2007 in Houston and traveled to Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then to Tacoma, Washington. That is, from a publications point, a great point of demarcation in terms of art jewelry collections. Since then, not only has Helen continued to add pieces to the museum, but we have worked with a lot of national and local collectors, and our jewelry collection continues to grow through acquisitions and gifts.    I would say that in graduate school, I had the barest introduction to jewelry, and it was really historical jewelry as part of a larger decorative arts education, in terms of looking at styles and how they reflected themselves in historical jewelry. At the time I was in graduate school at the Cooper Hewitt, there was not a seminar on contemporary art jewelry or art jewelry in general, so my knowledge of it has really been built and continues to be built based on our collection, our commitment to it going forward, and trying to keep up with the bare minimum of what's been happening in the field. I have to say Art Jewelry Forum is an amazing way for me to do that through their website, through the articles, through the artist awards, through the artist maker pages. It's a very easy snapshot of what's happening in the field, and then I can take that research and interest into other directions.   Sharon: I can't imagine being an aficionado, whether it's to study or just being a jewelry lover, and not being involved in Art Jewelry Forum. There's no other place like it.    Cindi: There isn't. Honestly, nine times out of 10, if I am interested in learning more about an artist and I plug in the artist's name in Google, the first search that comes up is always Art Jewelry Forum. It's either an interview or an article or something. For me, it has always been a one-stop initial research location.   Sharon: How did you come to study decorative arts? How did you become a professional in the area? Was that something you had always wanted to do? What was your training?   Cindi: It really happened, I would say, serendipitously. I grew up in a family where my father was in the design field, particularly in textiles. My parents' preferred style was that of Scandinavia and Italian modern. I grew up in a contemporary house, so there was a certain amount of osmosis with this field. I grew up in Connecticut, which is more oriented towards colonial architecture and traditional interiors, and I knew our house was different and it kind of stuck out. I remember asking my parents when I was young why our house didn't look like everybody else's, and their answer was very simple: because this is what we like, and this is why we like it.   I went off to college and thought I was going to be an English major. I took an intro to art history survey and found I loved it, but it wasn't until my senior year in college that a survey of the history of decorative arts was offered, and that completely ignited my fire. As much as I loved art history, I wanted to be able to touch paintings, which I can't do. I was interested in the tactile qualities of art and texture and being able to feel and understand value. This introduction to the history of decorative arts was my gateway. That ignited a passion not only for the decorative arts, but when I was going to the museums and such during that time, I started to pay attention to decorative arts galleries more than I had in my museum billing previously. I thought, “This is what I want to do; this is where I want to be. I want to be in a museum and I want to be doing decorative arts.”   My first year out of college, I had an academic year fellowship at the Met. It was in a subset of the registrar's office called the cataloguing department, and that gave me a bird's eye, in-depth view of what was happening at the Met. At that time, I knew I was going to have go to graduate school, and I learned about Cooper Hewitt's program in the history of decorative arts. At that point, I chose Cooper Hewitt. There was no graduate center yet, and I knew I didn't want to do early American decorative arts. I wanted to have a broader art education, so I went to Cooper Hewitt. Interestingly, my thesis and a large chunk of my classes were on 18th-century European art, particularly porcelain, and I thought I would spend my career there because that's where all the research was happening. With the exception of design museums or modern art museums like MOMA, a lot of the big, encyclopedic institutions were not really paying attention to decorative arts beyond the Arts and Crafts movement. But I took as many classes as I could in 20th-century design and took decorative arts because that was what my personal passion was.   I got lucky, because my first position after graduate school was curatorial assistant here in Houston. I was split between two departments, the decorative arts department and our not-yet-opened house museum, Rienzi. It was the perfect job for me because Rienzi was all about the 18th century, whereas the decorative arts department was just starting to move past the Arts and Crafts movement into modern and contemporary. Ultimately, I was able to determine the pathway for that and create a separate department, and I made my way out of the 18th century to focus completely on the 20th and 21st centuries. So, it was a pathway of following my heart and my curiosity within this larger field.   Sharon: What were your thoughts when you were presented with this 800+ piece collection by Helen Drutt and they said, “O.K., put this exhibit together”?   Cindi: First of all, it was completely daunting. Anyone who knows Helen knows her knowledge is so vast, and she is so generous with it, but at the beginning, it's all brand new. So, it's rather intimidating, and you're doing so much looking and listening. In my initial conversations with Helen about the possibility of this acquisition, it was focused on the “Jewelry of Our Time” catalogue that she had cowritten, which featured a lot of the collection. There was a lot of study of that, trying to get myself up to speed to even make the presentations for the acquisition to not only my director, but our trustees.    It's funny; I have my initial notebooks from my first visit to Philadelphia with Helen, where I spent a number of days just sitting next to her as she held up different pieces, talked about different people, gave insight. Because I didn't know anything about the field—all the artists' names are spelled phonetically—there are a lot of notes to myself saying, “What does this really mean?” or a question mark with “follow up” or something like that, and I was drawing. I think I had a cell phone, but there was no cell phone camera. I didn't have an iPhone or iPad. I don't even know if they existed in 2002, but I would draw little pictures next to something she was talking about. Anyone who knows me knows I am quite possibly the world's worst draftsperson, so the pictures are hilarious. But I go back to those notebooks periodically, and you can see how I am intent on wrapping my head around this and trying to understand which countries, who were the major players, where things had gone.   We built a library at the museum with Helen's help. She seeded our library intending to send books. We were ordering catalogues nonstop, and I spent the better part of four years immersing myself in art jewelry and talking to artists. At that point, it was all done through these forms we would mail to artists. I tried to meet artists, and Helen's archives with all the correspondence were an incredible resource. There were interviews with artists and things like that. I would travel to the American Craft Council to see their incredible library and artist archive. I would do all of this plus travel to meet artists. I did a number of trips to Europe and across the U.S., trying to get my head around this field as seen through Helen's collection. The collection represents not only her eye and experiences and viewpoint, but truly the birth and development of the field over decades, not just in America, but globally as well.   Sharon: What's her connection to Houston? How is it she came to your museum?   Cindi: She didn't have any real connection to Houston. At the time, her son, Matthew, was the Chief Curator of the Manil Collection, which is a terrific, incredible museum here in Houston. She also had a very close and longstanding friendship with our then-photography curator, Anne Tucker. They met in a cute way over a slide table at Moore College of Art in the 70s, when they were both teaching there.    We have a festival every other year in Houston called FotoFest. It's one of the U.S.'s largest photography festivals, and all the institutions do exhibitions for FotoFest and their popup shows and galleries. The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft was only a year old at that point, but through connections, they met Helen. She curated a small show of photo-based, image-based jewelry for FotoFest, so of course she came down, and that's where I met her.    I met her at the opening. We had coffee separately during her visit. I was really ramping up our craft collection in terms of acquisitions and representation. As I said, we only had this one piece of art jewelry. I knew enough about what I didn't know to say to Helen at the time, “This is a field I'm interested in starting to acquire works from. Would you guide me?” She pointed me towards the “Jewelry of Our Time” catalogue and said, “Well, you know I have a collection.” I, of course, said, “Well, yes, it's famous, and it's in Philadelphia. It's so lucky they're going to get it.” She said, “Not necessarily. Nothing's been done. There's nothing in writing.” I seized on that and said, “Well, will you provide me with more information, and may I speak to my director about this?” She said, “Sure.”    It was, at the time, sort of a lark. I thought, “I don't know whether this will happen,” because it was not a field we were familiar with and certainly my director, Peter Marzio, was not familiar with it. I showed him the book. I talked to him with my little knowledge. He was intrigued, because he saw in it what he referred to as a “visual index” of modern and contemporary art in small scale. He saw all the connections and the creativity, and he said, “I'd like to learn more.” I arranged for him to go to Philadelphia, where he spent half a day with Helen and they talked and looked at pieces. He came back and said to me, “I want to figure this out. I want to do this,” and the rest is history.   Sharon: Wow! It's funny; when you were saying you were spelling things phonetically, I thought of Gijs Bakker. That's the name that came to mind. For people listening, it's G-i-l-s-b—   Cindi: G-i-j-s B-a-k-k-er. Gijs is one of the most important Dutch jewelry artists. He, along with his late wife, Emmy van Leersum, completely turned the idea of art jewelry on its head in the 60s. He and a number of other Dutch artists in the 60s and 70s revolutionized the field. Helen was such a great supporter, and he's one of her dearest friends. We have something like 34 or 35 of his pieces in the collection, not just from Helen, but from a couple of others that we've added along the way. I think outside of the Netherlands, we have the largest collection of Gijs' work.   Sharon: Wow! My first Art Jewelry Forum trip was to Amsterdam. I had just come to art jewelry myself, and his studio and his house were the first stop. When I think about it now, I think, “Oh, my god!” I had no idea. At the time, I didn't know which way was up when it came to art jewelry.   Cindi: I think that is a lot of people's first experience. It's visually compelling, and then you start to learn more. Quite often, you realize after the fact you met one of these super-important people, or you were in their studio or what have you.    Sharon: Yeah, it really is. I'm backing up a little. When you were studying, were there museums studies? Did you expect to be working in a museum or to be a curator? Was that part of your career field?    Cindi: Yeah, I always wanted to work in a museum, and I wanted to work in a curatorial capacity. The Cooper Hewitt's program at that time was geared towards museum curatorial careers. Also, a lot of people went into education. It was not geared towards working in the commercial sector. There were a handful of people who might have gone to an auction house or to a gallery, but it was focused on developing museum curators. That was something I knew I wanted and was really important to me in terms of being at the Cooper Hewitt. The program is embedded in the museum physically and has a lot of faculty from the museum and also, during my time, a lot of faculty from the Met, from the Brooklyn Museum. We had people teaching from MFA Boston, from Winterthur.    It was very much a program equally based on not only research and history and study, but on connoisseurship. Connoisseurship is essential to being a museum curator. You need to be able to delineate and understand the differences between different objects made by the same designer as well as within any larger aspect of the field. Cooper Hewitt was very much geared towards that, which was perfect for me. Because we were in the museum and we had faculty from other New York area museums, it was also possible to have internships with prominent curators from the various museums, again, moving you through this curatorial path.    The trick is always getting a job, and for me that was a lot of luck, I think. When I was in my second year, my last year of graduate school, I was working as an intern for one of the premier curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, particularly in late 19th-century ceramics and glass but also furniture. Her co-curator on an upcoming exhibition was my future boss at Houston. There was a job opening. Katherine Howe sent a fax, at that time, of the job description, and she handed it to me and said, “I know you still have a semester to go, but here, take a look at it.” I thought, “Well, I need to get a résumé in order. I need to start thinking about this.” I applied not thinking anything other than this is good exercise, and it obviously worked out for me.    I think in my graduating class from Cooper Hewitt—I think there were about 15 of us—there were only three of us who actually got museum jobs. A lot of it is timing because positions come open so rarely. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one from my graduating class left in a museum. It's not for everybody, and there aren't always jobs, but it was all I ever wanted to do. I also only wanted to work in a big institution, so Houston fit the bill for me. I love doing what I do within an encyclopedic institution, being able to contextualize, in this case, art jewelry, whether it's historical works of art, the idea of adornment, showing it within a particular geographical context. We exhibit the jewelry not only on its own and with other contemporary craft and design, but we exhibit it next to painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper. We embed it, and that is something my colleagues are very much used to and see it as being a vital art form.   Sharon: This is a two-part Jewelry Journey podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week.

After Dinner Mints - Episode 28 - 21.12.01Interview with Perry PriceArt Blocks home website: www.artblocks.ioJoin us on discord: discord.gg/artblocksSubscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://artblocksinc.eo.page/subscribePerry Price is the Executive Director of Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. To learn more about the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, visit https://crafthouston.org/or on Social Media at @crafthouston

What you'll learn in this episode: The characteristics that define contemporary American jewelry What narrative art jewelry is, and why it was so prevalent in the 1960s and 70s What defines American counterculture, and why so many 60s and 70s jewelers were a part of it Who the most notable American jewelry artists are and why we need to capture their stories How Susan and Cindi developed their book, and why they hope other people will build on their research About Susan Cummins Susan Cummins has been involved in numerous ways in the visual arts world over the last 35 years, from working in a pottery studio, doing street fairs, running a retail shop called the Firework in Mill Valley and developing the Susan Cummins Gallery into a nationally recognized venue for regional art and contemporary art jewelry. Now she spends most of her time working with a private family foundation called Rotasa and as a board member of both Art Jewelry Forum and California College of the Arts. About Cindi Strauss Cindi Strauss is the Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design and Assistant Director, Programming at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). She received her BA with honors in art history from Hamilton College and her MA in the history of decorative arts from the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design. At the MFAH, Cindi is responsible for the acquisition, research, publication, and exhibition of post-1900 decorative arts, design, and craft. Jewelry is a mainstay of Cindi's curatorial practice. In addition to regularly curating permanent collection installations that include contemporary jewelry from the museum's collection, she has organized several exhibitions that are either devoted solely to jewelry or include jewelry in them. These include: Beyond Ornament: Contemporary Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2003–2004); Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2007); Liquid Lines: Exploring the Language of Contemporary Metal (2011); and Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection (2014). Cindi has authored or contributed to catalogs and journals on jewelry, craft, and design topics, and has been a frequent lecturer at museums nationwide. She also serves on the editorial advisory committee for Metalsmith magazine. Additional Resources:  Museum of Fine Arts Houston Art Jewelry Forum  Photos: Police State Badge 1969/ 2007 sterling silver, 14k gold 2 7/8 x 2 15/16 x 3 15/16 inches Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, 2012.20 Diane Kuhn, 2012 PHOTO: John Bigelow Taylor, 2008 Portrait of William Clark in a bubble_2 1971                        photographer: Unknown Necklace for the American Taxpayer 1971 Brass with silver chain  17 " long (for the chain)  and 6.25 x 1.25 " wide for the hanging brass pendant. Collection unknown Dad's Payday 1968 sterling, photograph, fabric, found object 4 ½ x 4 x ¼ inches Merrily Tompkins Estate, Ellensburg Photo: Lynn Thompson Title: "Slow Boat" Pendant (Portrait of Ken Cory) Date: 1976 Medium: Enamel, sterling silver, wood, copper, brass, painted stone, pencil, ballpoint pen spring, waxed lacing, Tiger Balm tin, domino Dimensions: 16 3/4 × 4 1/8 × 1 in. (42.5 × 10.4 × 2.5 cm) Helen Williams Drutt Family Collection, USA Snatch Purse 1975 Copper, Enamel, Leather, Beaver Fur, Ermine Tails, Coin Purse 4 ½ x 4 x 3/8” Merrily Tompkins Estate, Ellensburg The Good Guys 1966 Walnut, steel, copper, plastic, sterling silver, found objects 101.6 mm diameter Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, 1977.2.102'                        PHOTO: John Bigelow Taylor, 2008 Fetish Pendant 1966 wood, brass, copper, glass, steel, paper, silver 3 ½ x 3 ½ x 5/8 inches Detroit Institute of Art, Founders Society Purchase with funds from the Modern Decorative Arts Group, Andrew L. and Gayle Shaw Camden Contemporary and Decorative Arts Fund, Jean Sosin, Dr. and Mrs. Roger S. Robinson, Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Danto, Dorothy and Byron Gerson, and Dr. and Mrs. Robert J. Miller / Bridgeman Images November 22, 1963 12:30 p.m. 1967 copper, silver, brass, gold leaf, newspaper photo, walnut, velvet, glass 6 ¼ x 5 x 7/8 inches Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Rose Mary Wadman, 1991.57.1 Front and back covers Pages from the book Transcript: What makes American jewelry American? As Susan Cummins and Cindi Strauss discovered while researching their book, In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture, contemporary American jewelry isn't defined by style or materials, but by an attitude of independence and rebellion. Susan, who founded Art Jewelry Forum, and Cindi, who is Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about what it was like to interview some of the most influential American artists; why they hope their book will inspire additional research in this field; and why narrative jewelry artists were part of the counterculture, even if they didn't consider themselves to be. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guests are Susan Cummins and Cindi Strauss, who, along with Damian Skinner, are the co-authors of In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture. Susan is the founder of Art Jewelry Forum and for several decades drove the organization. Cindi Strauss is the Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Susan and Cindi, welcome to the program. Susan: Thank you. Cindi: Thank you for having us, Sharon. Sharon: So glad to have you. Can you each give us a brief outline of your jewelry journey? Susan, do you want to start? Susan: Sure. My journey started in the 80s. I had a gallery in Mill Valley, California. I was showing various crafts, ceramics mostly, and a bit of glass, fiber, a whole grouping, and then I decided I should show jewelry. I don't really know why, because I didn't wear jewelry, but it sounded like a good idea. I started showing it, and I was very impressed with how smart and incredibly skilled the artists were. I continued to show that, and the gallery became known for showing jewelry. In 1997, I still had the gallery, and I decided along with numerous other craft groups that we should start an organization that represented the collectors of jewelry. I started Art Jewelry Forum with the help of several other people, of course. That has continued onto today, surprisingly enough, and it now includes not only collectors, curators and gallerists, but also artists and everybody who's interested in contemporary art jewelry. Sharon: It's an international organization. Susan: Yes, it's an international organization. It has a website with a lot of articles. We plan all kinds of things like trips to encourage people to get to know more about the field. I also was part of a funding organization, shall we say, a small private fund called Rotasa, and years ago we funded exhibitions and catalogues. That switched into funding specific things that I was working on instead of accepting things from other people. I've been very interested in publishing and doing research about this field because I feel that will give it more value and legitimacy. It needs to be researched. So, that's one of the reasons why this book came into being as well as Flocks' book. It really talks about the beginnings of American contemporary jewelry in the 60s and 70s. That's my beginning to current interest in jewelry. Sharon: I just wanted to say that people can find a lot more if they visit the Art Jewelry Forum website. We'll have links to everything we talk about on the show. Cindi? Cindi: Sure. My jewelry journey was surprising and happened all at once. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had no contemporary jewelry in its collection until 2000, when we acquired an Art Smith necklace from 1948. That was my first real knowledge of post-Arts and Crafts jewelry and post-Mid-Century, people like Harry Bertoia. That led me to Toni Greenbaum's Messengers of Modernism catalogue, a fantastic resource for American jewelry from the 30s through the 50s. It opened a whole new field for me, and I started to think about how we should focus on some modern jewelry from that period to expand on the Art Smith necklace, because that Mid-Century design was a specialty of the institution.  Truly, I would say my life changed in respect to jewelry for the better in every way I could explain. When the museum acquired, in 2002, Helen Williams Drutt's private collection of artist-made contemporary jewelry, dating from 1963 to 2002 at the time of the acquisition, in one fell swoop, we acquired 804 pieces of international jewelry as well as sketchbooks and drawings and research materials. We began to build an extensive library. Helen opened her archives and we had recordings of artist interviews. It was just going from zero to sixty in three seconds and it was extraordinary. It was a field I knew really nothing about, so I was on a very steep learning curve. So many people in the field, from the artists to other curators to collectors—this is how I met Susan—were so generous to me in terms of being resources. The story about how the acquisition happened is familiar to probably many of your audience, so I'll keep it brief, which is to say that there was an exhibition of Gijs Bakker's jewelry that Helen organized for the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Sharon: Cindi, I'm going to interrupt you for a minute because a lot of people listening will not have heard of Gijs Bakker. Cindi: Sure. Gijs Bakker, one of the most prominent Dutch artists, began his career in the 1960s, along with wife, Emmy van Leersum, and was part of the group of Dutch jewelry artists who revolutionized the concept of contemporary jewelry using alter-native materials. They created a lot of photo-based work challenging the value system of jewelry and also challenging wearability. It was his photo-based work that was shown in a small exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in March 2002 as part of a citywide festival called Photofest, which is all photography-based work. It was through that exhibition, at the opening weekend—that's how I met Helen. I said to her, “This is something I don't know anything about. I'm interested in exploring it. I'm starting to build a collection for the museum. Could we meet and have coffee and talk?” So we met, and I peppered her with a lot of questions and said, “Could I call on you for advice in terms of building a collection?” Of course, at this time she had the gallery, and she said, “Well, you know, I have a collection,” and I said, “Yes, I know, and I understand it's going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” her hometown museum. She said, “Not necessarily. We haven't had any formal talks about that.” So, one thing led to another, and six months later, we signed papers to acquire the collection. That set me off on my initial five-year journey, which resulted in the exhibition and catalogue “Ornament as Art: Contemporary Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection” that opened in Houston and traveled to Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina, and to Tacoma, Washington. After that point, I felt that I was really steeped in the field. I have, since that point, been adding works to the collection. It was always going to be a long-term commitment and journey for the museum. We have works installed all over the museum in relationship to other contemporary art, whether it's photography, prints and drawings, sculpture, painting. We also have a robust presentation of jewelry in our departments' galleries. It is an ongoing journey, just like with Susan. It's a journey that never ends, happily. There are always new artists to discover and new ideas. Part of that is our meeting of the mind, if you will, and then with Damian, is what resulted in this book. Sharon: How did you come to write the book? Susan, you started to mention it. The research in this is jaw-dropping. How did you decide to write the book? Why this particular period, the two of you? Susan: We decided to write the book because I was wondering what's American about American jewelry. Europeans have done a lot of research and writing about their beginnings, but I didn't see a document or a book that really talked about the American origins. As Cindi mentioned, Gijs Bakker started in the 60s. So did American contemporary jewelry, but it's a very different story than the European one. We wanted to talk to the people who are still alive now, so we did tons of interviews for the book. We specifically concentrated on the pioneers who were responding to the political and social events of the time. In other words, we were investigating those artists who were considered narrative artists, because that was the defining feature of American art to those out of the country. We wanted to discover who was making this work and what were they saying in their narrative, so really answering “What was American about American jewelry?” We did tons of research through old documents of the American Crafts Library. We went all over the country and interviewed, and it was about a five-year-long process to get this point. The book is incredibly condensed. You can feel that there's a lot there, but it took a lot to condense it down to that.  Really, what we hope is that it's an easy-to-read story about the stories that jewelers were telling at the time, which was the origin of all that's come down to us now. It was the beginning of the development of university programs in the country. They just were in the process of expanding them, and people were learning how to make things. Nobody had a lot of skills in this country, so everybody had to learn how to make things. There were a lot of alternative ways of passing around information. The counterculture, we regarded that not as hippies per se, although hippies were part of it, but also a lot about the political and social issues of the time and how people responded to them. The ethos of the time, the values that people developed really became part of the craft counterculture itself. The craft field is based on a lot of those ways of working in the world, a sort of hope and trying to create a new society that had more values than the 50s had aspired to for each individual. People were trying to find ways to have valuable lives, and doing something like making something yourself and selling it at a craft fair became a wonderful alternative for many people who had the skill to do that. That was a very different way of having a life, shall we say, and that's how American jewelry developed: with those values and skills. I still see remnants of it in the current field. That's my focus. Cindi, do you have some things you want to add to that? Cindi: Yeah, the larger public's ideas and thoughts about American jewelry from that period were rooted in a history and an aesthetic that emerged largely on the East Coast, but certainly spread, as Susan said, with the development of university programs. That was an aesthetic that was largely rooted in the organic modernism of Scandinavian influence, as well as what had come before in America in terms of modernist studio jewelry. There's a history there in the narrative, and that narrative played out in early exhibitions. It played out in the first SNAG exhibition in 1970 in St. Paul, which is considered one of those milestones of the early American studio jewelry movement.  Now, we knew that there were artists like Fred Woell, Don Tompkins, Ken Cory, Merrily Tompkins, who were on the West Coast and working in a different vein, as Susan said, a narrative vein, and who were often working with assemblage techniques and found materials and were making commentary on issues of the day. Within the accepted history of that period, they were a minority, with the exception of Fred Woell and really Ken Cory. Their work was not as widely known, as widely collected, as widely understood. Damian and Susan and I started after we thought, as Susan said, “What is American about American jewelry?”  Fred Woell was an artist who immediately came to mind as embodying a certain type of Americanness. We had an extraordinary trip to visit with Fred's widow, Pat Wheeler, and to the see the studio and go through some of his papers. When we went, we thought we would be doing a monograph on Fred Woell. It was on that trip that we understood that it was a much larger project, and it was one that would encompass many more artists. As part of our research, there were certain artists who were known to us, and our hope was that we would rediscover artists who were working intently during that period who had been lost to history for whatever reason. There were also artists whose work we were able to reframe for the reasons that Susan mentioned: because of their lifestyle, their belief system, the way they addressed or responded to major issues during the day. So, we started developing these list of artists. I think what readers will find in the book is looking at some of the well-known artists, perhaps more in depth and in a new frame of analysis, but also learning about a plethora of other artists. For us, it was five years of intense work. There's a tremendous amount of research that has gone into this book, and from what we've been hearing, it has enlightened people about a period. It's not an alternative history, but it is an additional history. We hope it will inspire people to pick up the mantle and go forth because, of course, one has constraints in terms of word counts for publishing. At a certain point, you have to get down to the business of writing and stop the research, but there are so many threads that we hope other scholars, curators, students, interested parties will pick up and carry forth. In some ways we were able to go in depth, and in other ways we were able to just scratch the surface of what has been a fascinating topic for all of us. Sharon: I have a lot of questions, but first, I just wanted to mention that SNAG is the Society of North American Goldsmiths, in case people don't know. Can you explain, Susan or Cindi, what narrative jewelry is? Cindi: There's no one definition. Everybody would describe it a little bit differently, but I think a basic definition is jewelry that tells a story, that uses pictorial elements to tell a story. Whatever that story is can range from the personal to the public, to, in our case, responding to things like the Vietnam War, politics, etc. Susan, do you want to add to that? Susan: It's a very difficult thing to do when you think about. Narratives usually have a storyline from this point to that point to the next point. Here's a jeweler trying to put a storyline into one object, one piece. It is tricky to bring enough imagery that's accessible to the viewer together into one piece to allow the viewer to make up the story that this is about or the comment it's trying to make. You have to be very skilled and smart to make really good narrative jewelry. Sharon: It sounds like it would be, yes. When you realized what this book was going to entail—it sounds like you didn't start out thinking this was going to be such a deep dive—were you excited, or were you more like, “I think I'd probably rather run in the other direction and say, ‘Forget it; I can't do it'”? Susan: I don't think at any point did we stop and think, “Oh, this is a gigantic project.” We just thought, “Let's see. This person's interesting; O.K., let's talk to this person. Oh, gosh, they said these about this other person. Let's talk to them.” You just go step by step. I don't think, at any point, did any of us realize how vast a project this was until the end, probably. Cindi: Yeah, I would say because it happened incrementally, deep dive led to another and another. We would have regular meetings not only over Skype, but we would get together in person, the three of us, for these intense days in which we would talk about—we each had different areas we were focusing on. We'd bring our research together and that would lead to questions: “Should we explore this avenue?” Then someone would go and explore this avenue and come back, and we would think, “Maybe that wasn't as interesting as we thought it was going to be,” or maybe it was far more interesting than we thought, so it spun out a number of different avenues of research.  At a certain point, we started looking at the most important threads that were coming out and we were able to organize them as umbrellas, and then look at subthemes and think about the artists. It became like a puzzle. We had pockets of deep research, whether it was the in-person artist interviews or whether it was the archival research that was done, whether it was the general research. Damian and I were not alive during this time. Susan was, which was fantastic because I learned a lot about this in history class and school. Damian is a New Zealander, so he was coming at it from an international perspective. There was a lot of reading he did about American history, but Susan was the one gave us all the first-person accounts in addition to the artists. She participated in the American Craft Council Craft Fairs and was able to balance the sometimes emotionless history books with the first-person experiences that made it come alive. I think that's what you see throughout the book. It was important to us that the book would be readable, but it was also important to us that it would have a flavor of the times. When you do oral history interviews, there are many different kinds of questions that can be asked. We set out to talk not only about the jewelry that artists were making, but their lives, what was important to them, how they felt. The richness of experiences and emotions that came out in those interviews really inflected the book with feeling like you were there and a part of what these artists were thinking. This is a 2 part episode please subscribe so you can get part 2 as soon as its released later this week. 

I sat down with Leah DeVun to discuss her book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. We talk about how widespread thinking and writing about non-binary individuals was during the first centuries of the CE and again in the C12th-14th, and the way non-binary bodies actually shaped the way a host of categories and boundaries (not just gender) were demarcated. We talk in detail about the shift in the C12th/13th and the way non-binary sex shaped the project of establishing a non-human other, justifying violence towards Jews and Muslims, and determining who could live in a Christian territory. We also talk about the figures of "Adam androgyne" and the "Jesus hermaphrodite", and how they function as "anchors of eschatological time." Finally, Leah discusses how this study can inform our present, not only by showing that the consideration of non-binary, trans*, and intersex bodies are not novel to our period, but how this consideration cuts through claims of 'natural and immutable' in our own day. Buy the book.Leah DeVun is Associate Professor of History and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe, as well as on contemporary queer and transgender studies. DeVun's new book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press (in spring 2021). DeVun is also the author of Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, winner of the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize, and co-editor (with Zeb Tortorici) of Trans*historicities, a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2018) devoted to transgender history before the advent of current categories and terminologies of gender. DeVun has also written articles for GLQ, WSQ, Osiris, Journal of the History of Ideas, postmedieval, and Radical History Review, among other publications. DeVun is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Huntington Library, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, American Philosophical Society, and Stanford Humanities Center. DeVun is also a multi-media artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. DeVun's artwork has been featured in Artforum, People, Huffington Post, Slate, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, and Modern Painters, and at venues including the ONE Archives Gallery and Museum at the University of Southern California, Houston Center for Photography, Blanton Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. DeVun has curated exhibitions and programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections, and other venues. Find More episodes: www.loverinserepeat.com/podcast Follow the show on Twitter: @RinseRepeatPod // Follow me: @liammiller87 Love Rinse Repeat is supported by Uniting Mission and Education, part of the Uniting Church in Australia Synod of NSW/ACT

Joyce Lin is an artist and designer passionate about making furniture and sculptural objects that deconstruct material, form, and the ever-shifting relationship between humans and their environment. Joyce currently lives and works in Houston, TX and was a 2019 artist in residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. You can follow along with Joyce's work on Instagram and her Website.

Norwood Viviano: Understanding Our Place in Time Using tools of mapping and materials of industry Norwood Viviano makes installations and sculptures that consider various social and environmental factors leading to population changes in American cities. His most recent series, Re-Cast Cities, continues his exploration of the cross-sections of geography, cartography and history, merging urban landscapes with the symbols of industry that have fueled their booms, busts and builds.  Heller Gallery's March 2021 Re-Cast Cities exhibition documented the first eight pieces made in this series focusing on Detroit, Houston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, (OR), Toledo and White Mills, (PA). Curator and writer Sarah Darro called the project “a radical reconsideration of cartography that inflects Viviano's ongoing analysis of the rise and fall of American manufacturing with an experimental energy geared towards the future.”   Viviano received a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work is represented in the collections of major museums in the US, Europe and Asia. His work has been shown at the Venice Architectural Biennale (2014), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2013); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015), Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park (2016), Bellevue Art Museum (2016), Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2016), MOCA Jacksonville (2017), Boise Art Museum (2018) as well as at Stanze de Vetro in Venice, Italy (2020). Recent solo exhibitions include Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, MI (2015); Heller Gallery, New York, NY (2011, 2014, 2018 and 2021); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk VA (2016) and Corning Museum of Glass (CMOG), Corning, NY (2017-18). Viviano is an associate professor and sculpture program coordinator at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Awards and residencies include the 2019 Corning Museum of Glass, David Whitehouse Research Residency for Artists; visiting artist residencies in 2017 and 2010 at Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; inclusion in CMOG's New Glass Review #16, #22, #33, #36, and #38; a 2016 fellowship at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center – Creative Glass Center of America, Millville, NJ; the 2014 Pilchuck Glass School John H. Hauberg Fellowship; the Venice Biennale, Best Exhibition Award, from Global Art Affairs Foundation; and the Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, GVSU, Catalyst Grant for Research and Creativity. The result of Viviano's 2017 Visiting Artist Residency at the Museum of Glass, Cities Underwater focused attention from population and cartographic shifts of the past to the future. The artist conceived the project to visualize the dramatic loss of land predicted to occur in the next 500 years in areas that some 127 million Americans call home. The adaptation needed to mitigate the impending changes that will affect our lives, history and culture is massive. The Cities Underwater work is aimed at keeping this conversation alive and not forgoing it for short-term convenience or gain. The installation was comprised of 16 sets of nesting glass cylinders, which represent 16 coastal cities in the United States. Using existing LiDAR data and scientific projections, Viviano showed the projected loss of land mass due to sea level rise in Boston, Galveston, Miami Beach, Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, Newark, New York, Norfolk, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco, Savannah, Seattle, St. Petersburg and Tacoma. Each set was accompanied by vinyl cut drawings and animation, which provided additional data. For Mining Industries, Viviano utilized digital 3D computer modeling and printing technology in tandem with glass blowing and casting processes to create work depicting population shifts tied to the dynamic between industry and community. By showing how landscapes and populations move and are modified as a result of industry, his work creates a 3D lens to view that which is invisible or forgotten. His use of blown glass forms and vinyl cut drawings are micro-models of macro changes at the regional, national, and international level.  Viviano says: “I find myself looking at the world as a surveyor – telling stories through objects. Stepping back and researching how pieces fit together gives me the opportunity to consider the impact of the component parts. Conversations with specialists in a range of disciplines — historians, urban planners, demographers, climate scientists and statisticians — deepen my engagement with the subject matter and the complexity of my work. My artistic intention is to better understand our place in time by focusing on land use through pictorial imagery and on industrial growth and decline through population studies that also ask questions about the present and future of communities. My installations and objects encourage individuals to make connections and ask questions about the interconnectivity between their and other communities.  He continues: “My material choice of glass is meant to demonstrate the fragility of populations. I hope my work asks people to examine their own histories of migration, from personal and communal standpoints, just as it continues to help me navigate and explore my own.”   Viviano will teach a one-week 3D printing and mold making workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, CO, July 19-23, 2021. For more information andersonranch.org  

These two! A powerhouse duo of talent, passion and all-around art do-goodness. They are pooling their wide ranging skills to deliver a new model to help artists become creatively and financially successful. Learn all about Assembly in this episode!Ashlyn Davis Burns has worked to support lens-based artists for the past decade through curatorial, editorial, and fundraising initiatives, including most recently as the Executive Director & Curator of Houston Center for Photography (2015-2020). She has written for numerous publications, consulted with artists and publishers on photobooks, and curated exhibitions internationally for a variety of institutions including libraries, universities, and galleries.Shane Lavalette has worked as the Director of Light Work (2011-2021), a non-profit dedicated to supporting emerging and under-represented artists working in photography, as well as a publisher, editor, writer, and consultant to collectors, institutions, photo editors, and artists. Lavalette has a broad range of professional experience in curating, publishing, design, creative direction, art buying, fundraising, and advocating to make the field more equitable for artists.

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance.

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance.

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah's second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people's politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

On this episode of Between Two Wings we talk with Houston Center Air Traffic Controller, Jenn Pierce! Tune in to hear about her experience controlling the skies and a few things she wishes all pilots knew. https://youtu.be/aIu5RckeGyU

For the penultimate episode of How To Be An Artist, Kate Bryan is joined by Genevieve Gaignard. Based in Los Angeles, she enlists the use of photographic self-portraiture, sculpture and installation to explore race, femininity, class, and their various intersections. In this episode, Gaignard chats to Bryan about her recent residency at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, how she draws inspiration from her mother's aesthetic, and shares advice to aspiring artists. Gaignard's work has been exhibited throughout the United States, with shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the Houston Center for Photography. Her installationNever Too Much can also be found at Soho Warehouse in Downtown LA.

We're joined by Trish Gilbert, Executive VP of the American National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) and heavily advocates for aviation safety. Before being elected as NATCA EVP, Gilbert worked 21 years as an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) at Houston Center, and served in many activist roles within the union including Facility Representative, Southwest Region Chair of NATCA's National Legislative Committee and Chair of the National Legislative Committee. She also chaired NATCA's National Organizing Committee served as NATCA Charitable Foundation Vice President and then, the Foundation's President. Join us to hear about Trish's path from Air Traffic Controller (ATC) to a leader in the Aviation industry.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha talks with Ashlyn Davis Burns, co-founder of the new agency and creative studio, Assembly. They discuss how events and opportunities lead her from an American Studies degree to her 5 year post as the Executive Director of the Houston Center for Photography. Ashlyn talks about co-founding Assembly with Shane Lavalette (former Director of Light Work) as a platform committed to representing diverse artists in both the fine-art and the commercial world. http://www.ashlyndavis.com Ashlyn Davis Burns is a writer, editor, and curator and the Co-founder of Assembly, a gallery, agency, creative studio, and art advisory focusing on lens-based artists that launched in early 2021. From 2015 - 2020, she worked at Houston Center for Photography as the Executive Director & Curator as well as the chief editor of spot magazine. She earned her BA in Art History from Pratt Institute and her Master's Degree in American Studies at the University of Texas with a focus on American photography and culture.  Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Pittman McGehee was asked to give a 15 minute talk on Play in Houston at the University of Houston Center for Humanities called Visions for Houston. So the beginning of this talk is about someone happening in the news at the time (Ginsberg) who was denied the ability to serve his country because of smoking marijuana and what a miserable theology it was to not forgive misdeeds and experimentation. Then he described play for 15 minutes which wasn't long enough so this Sunday School class taught on 11/8/87 gave him an opportunity to elaborate on it and he begins by saying we are all conceived in play in order for creation to continue. What is play for human beings is the question. He says the opposite of play is not work and only you know what that looks like for yourself. Then in his usual humorous style of story telling he speaks of going to Bennihana’s for his son’s birthday and I will let you all hear how he tells it. Enjoy!

Gem chats to Farah Al Qasimi. While her primary line of inquiry examines postcolonial structures of power, gender and taste in the Gulf Arab states, what galvanises the work is her unique ability to embed meaning into visual aesthetics. Farah describes her aesthetic approach as 'so muchness'. Her frames overflow with a heady mix of print, objects and domestic interiors amplified by the tension between harsh lighting and an acidic colour palette. Together they transport us into her psyche, an intimate imagining of her world.In this conversation, we talk about her journey, her process and what photography means to her. We talk about her recent exhibition Funhouse at Helena Anrather in New York, it’s genesis and how it speaks to key themes within her practice. We talk about performativity, paying attention to your own sensitivity’s and how they can be guiding principles in making work. We discuss how she uses the world as raw material, rather than a direct subject. In doing this she builds worlds in which geography does not matter in order to access a psychic space that defies language.Farah Al Qasimi (b.1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; lives and works in Brooklyn and Dubai) works in photography, video, and performance. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco; the CCS Bard Galleries at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Helena Anrather, New York; The Third Line, Dubai; The List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and the Houston Center for Photography, Houston.Follow Farah on Instagram @frequentlyaskedquestion on Instagram and visit https://farahalqasimi.com/ to see her work. Follow Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth, we will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Representation uniquely manifests in different creative fields: curators, agents, gallery owners, editors, producers, etc. With audiences, collectors, and revenue more accessible than ever with the internet, creatives’ reliance on representation for success has diminished. However, representation can still prove to be an important element in an artist’s career through contacts, space, funds, and advocacy. We will have two guests to offer their experiences on navigating their successful careers in an ever-expanding arts landscape, one represented in some form by a professional and another who is not.Janavi Mahimtura Folmsbee wants to live in a world where everyone can experience the beauty of our oceans. She was born and raised in Mumbai, India in a home overlooking the Indian Ocean. She is a 2009 graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (S.A.I.C). She currently lives and works in Houston. Folmsbee has shown her work in Mumbai, Beijing, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dubai, and the United States. Her works have been featured in international fairs, including Kunst Rai, Art Rotterdam, The Indian Contemporary Art Fair, Texas Contemporary Art Fair, Arte Dubai; in print media, including Harper’s Bazaar (Malaysia edition), The Times of India, the Houston Chronicle, Houston Modern Luxury, and Verve (India); and in television interviews on ABC News and KRPC Houston. Folmsbee has created large fine art murals throughout Houston, which can be found on Google Earth. Her public works also include an important commission from the Red Cross Society in Mumbai, India.Folmsbee collaborates and works with marine organizations like the G.B.F, Correa Lab, Maar Alliance, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A), and the Coral Restoration Foundation to help preserve our oceans. Find out more about her work by visiting Janavi Mahimtura Folmsbee’s website at http://www.janavimfolmsbee.com.Francis Almendárez is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator that traverses the intersections of history, (auto)ethnography, and the arts. Using them as tools to address memory and trauma, he attempts to unpack and reconstruct identity, specifically of im/migrant, queer, working-class bodies of Central America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Almendárez has participated in exhibitions, screenings, and performances in the US and abroad. Recent shows including rhythm and (p)leisure, Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Potential Wanderer, The Reading Room, Dallas, TX; Sisyphus, Ver.20.18, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan; and Voices of Our Mothers: Transcending Time and Distance, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX. Almendárez is the recipient of various awards including a Houston Artadia Award, the Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship from Houston Center for Photography, and artist grants, in collaboration with his brother Anthony Almendárez, from Y.ES Contemporary and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. He has been a participant of the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence program, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Moscow Summer School. Almendárez was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and is currently living and working in Houston, TX where he is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Houston School of Art. He received his MFA in Fine Art (with Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BFA in Sculpture/New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design.​Music: "Ike is Gone" by Nick GaitanSupport the show (https://fresharts.org/about-fresh-arts/friends-of-fresh-arts/)

According to a study by M-AAA, artists are one of the most educated populations amongst working sectors. However, degrees and/or institutional support has never been, nor should be, the deciding factor on whether or not someone is a legitimate/good/worthy artist. MFAs, ideally, should be programs that help an artist improve their craft, but others have interpreted the MFA as a necessity to be ‘taken seriously’ as an artist. Not to mention, the ‘institution’ can be a stifling & uniforming experience for artists. We will have two guests to offer their experiences as successful creatives who have or don’t have MFAs and can speak to the pros and cons of either decision.Grace Zuñiga is an artist, curator, and arts administrator originally form Sandia, Texas. In 2007, she received her BFA from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, with a focus in photography and in 2012 received her MFA in studio art, with a focus in printmaking, from the University of Georgia, Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens,Georgia. In May of 2014, Zuñiga completed a nine-month residency at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and currently holds the position of Creative Director at Sawyer Yards. In her role, Zuñiga strives to build bridges within Houston’s arts community by creating opportunities for local, national, and international artists and arts organizations.Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally known writer, educator, activist, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Poet in the World, Her work has appeared in Houston Noir by Akashic Press (2019), Black Girl Magic by Haymarket Books (2019), Fjords Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and on such platforms as NPR, BBC, ABC, Apple News, Blavity, Upworthy, and across the TedX circuit. She serves as a contributing writer to Texas Monthly and Glamour. Her most recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, won honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. A German translation, under the title "Berichtenswert," is set to be released in Fall 2021 by Elif Verlag.Music: "Ike is Gone" by Nick Gaitan.Support the show (https://fresharts.org/about-fresh-arts/friends-of-fresh-arts/)

Twenty Summers was thrilled to welcome author & journalist Jenna Wortham in residence at the Hawthorne Barn this past September, and to host a virtual conversation with photographer Naima Green. Naima Green’s exhibit Brief & Drenching is on view at Fotografiksa until February 2021, and Jenna Wortham’s Black Futures, co-edited by Kimberly Drew, will be published by Penguin Random House in December 2020.For more virtual arts programming please visit https://www.20summers.org Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and host of the culture podcast "Still Processing." A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked at Wired before joining the Times in 2008 and more recently, the New York Times Magazine. Wortham is an important voice on digital culture and new technologies, and is a co-author of “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew, coming out via One World 2020.Jenna Wortham on her current project:  I am working on a collection of linked essays that treat finding the body as a neo-noir thriller as an entry point, and then broadens out into a larger concentric series of inquiries and investigations about how the modern black female queer body functions in space and time. The body is a container for the self, and a vessel for experiences. My book seeks answers to the questions: What does it mean to participate in a body? To unmake and make one while inside one? My book is an investigation on the formation of identity, a blueprint for how to keep it, especially in our newly digitized lives. It’s about discovering the thrill of architecting desire outside of patriarchy, living in blackness and the freedom of exploring life beyond any earth-bound paradigm. I think about this work as a ritual, an unlearning, an unbecoming as a means to unfold. An exorcism in reverse. A repossession. It is a story about identity, and body consciousness, the liminal space between our masculine and feminine sides, digital homogeneity, intimacy and lust.Naima Green is an artist and educator currently living between Brooklyn, NY and Mexico City, Mexico. She holds an MFA in Photography from ICP–Bard, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA from Barnard College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, International Center of Photography, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, ltd los angeles, Gallery 102, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Shoot the Lobster, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Arsenal Gallery. Green has been an artist-in-residence at Recess, Mass MoCA, Pocoapoco, Bronx Museum, Vermont Studio Center, and is a recipient of the Myers Art Prize at Columbia University.Her works are in the collections of MoMA Library, the International Center of Photography Library, Decker Library at MICA, National Gallery of Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Barnard College Library.Share 

Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. Krajnak was orphaned as an infant and adopted into a transracial family from the American coal country. This early experience of racial difference continues to drive her interest in identity, belonging, and inherited histories. Krajnak is an Associate Professor of Art at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Honor Fraser Gallery, as-is.la gallery, Houston Center for Photography, SUR Biennial Los Angeles, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, SF Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Photo Madrid, Photo London, Belfast Photography Festival, and Unseen Amsterdam. Her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Nueva Luz, Strange Fire Collective, and Camerawork. She received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Texas Photographic Society, and most recently from the Harpo Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Glasstire, Artforum, and Contemporary Review Los Angeles. Krajnak is a 2020 Lightwork AIR Recipient. She will open a solo exhibition in October 2020 at Filter Photo in Chicago, and is currently working with DAIS books on a forthcoming publication of her poems and photographs. Instagram: tarrahkrajnak_studio Alexander Keefe writes about art, media and aesthetics. His work has appeared in magazines including Bidoun, Art Asia Pacific, Artforum.com and Tank. He did graduate work in Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian at Harvard University, and has divided his time between the United States and India since 1995. Recently he has been investigating the history of the dancer Shanta Rao and working on the exhibit A Slightly Curving Place, at HKW in Berlin. Centered around a multi-authored audio play and a video installation, the exhibition, curated by Nida Ghouse, responds to propositions opened up by Umashankar Manthravadi in his practice as a self-taught acoustic archaeologist. Instagram: aakeef

In this episode, I interviewed Smitha Mallaiah, yoga therapist and Program Director at SVYASA-USA, Houston Center. We spoke about Smitha's work as Senior Mind-Body Intervention Specialist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Integrative Medicine Program. She also shared how yoga therapy in India differs from yoga therapy in the US and how she has been utilizing Telehealth to continue her services at MD Anderson during the coronavirus crisis.Support the show (https://innerpeaceyogatherapy.com)

Today's episode is from Carol Manley, M.Ed., LPC-S, LMFT. Carol works at the Houston Center for Christian Counseling, and her clinical areas of focus include anxiety / depression, blended families, boundaries, communication, coping skills, marital issues, parenting, relationship issues, trauma / abuse / PTSD​​.We are delighted to have her on Anchor Point today, talking about relational maintenance in the light of current circumstances.

This episode is part of a new podcast series call "Lead Well". Steve Kyles, host of the Loan Officer Leadership Podcast, interviews Tim Mavergeorge, the Director of Houston Center for Christian Counseling. In this episode, they discuss Dealing With...

This episode is part of a new podcast series call “Lead Well”. Steve Kyles, host of the Loan Officer Leadership Podcast, interviews Tim Mavergeorge, the Director of Houston Center for Christian Counseling. In this episode, they discuss Dealing With…

This episode is part of a new podcast series call “Lead Well”. Steve Kyles, host of the Loan Officer Leadership Podcast, interviews Tim Mavergeorge, the Director of Houston Center for Christian Counseling. In this episode, they discuss Dealing With…

This episode is part of a new podcast series call "Lead Well". Steve Kyles, host of the Loan Officer Leadership Podcast, interviews Tim Mavergeorge, the Director of Houston Center for Christian Counseling. In this episode, they discuss Dealing With Stress, Anxiety, and Fear. Join our Facebook group, Loan officer Leadership Group and Make sure to SHARE and SUBSCRIBE to the weekly podcast.

Jaydan was born into a family of fourth generation tombstone makers in California. Most of his childhood was largely spent at the family business, which doubled as a rental storage space; where he would rummage through other peoples objects, and listen to families making arrangements for their loved ones. It is these experiences that made him value the heirlooms and objects we choose to use as markers for significant moments.His career began as an undergraduate student at California College of the Arts, in Oakland and received his MFA and MA from University of Wisconsin-Madison.Jaydan has furthered his career through generous opportunities as an artist in residence at Penland School of Crafts, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and a Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth Universities Craft/Material Studies Program. He has received grants through the American Craft Councils Emerging Voices Program, North Carolina Arts Fellowship, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. He has shown in recent exhibitions at Design/Miami (FL), Basel (SWI), Cheongju Craft Biennale (South Korea), Museum of Craft and Design (CA), Racine Art Museum (WI), Fuller Craft Museum (MA), and the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design (NC). He has also held teaching appointments at Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University in the Craft Materials Studies Program, California College of the Arts, and Penland School of Crafts.Jaydan is represented by Ornamentum Gallery (NY).Got questions? Email Jaydan: jaydantmoore@gmail.com Instagram: @jaydan.mooreWebsite: jaydanmoore.com•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••APPLY TO IN SCHOOL SUSPENSION an open call brought to you by JV Collective. Visit jv-collective.com for the details of the call. Don't forget to Rate AND Review us on iTunes!SUPPORT PERCEIVED VALUE!www.patreon.com/perceivedvaluewww.perceivedvaluepodcast.com/how-to-support-donate/Want a chance on the mic? Visit our events page at www.perceivevaluepodcast.com/events to find out when Perceive Value Podcast will be in your area!Instagram + Facebook: @perceivedvalueFind your Host:sarahrachelbrown.comInstagram: @sarahrachelbrown≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠≠The music you hear on Perceived Value is by the Seattle group Song Sparrow Research.All You Need to Know off of their album Sympathetic Buzz.Find them on Spotify!

In this episode, the guys are joined by Harold Boggs. He is a licensed therapist at the Houston Center for Christian Counseling and also Jason's Sponsor. He comes on the show and gives expert advice on addiction, mental health and suicide prevention. He also shares some stories of his and Jason's friendship. Support Our Podcast Here: https://anchor.fm/jason-hollen5/support --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jason-hollen5/support

Jane Szabo is a Los Angeles based fine art photographer, with an MFA from Art Center College of
Design in Pasadena, CA. Her work investigates issues of self and identity. Using self-portraiture and
still life as a vehicle to share stories from her life, her work merges her love for fabrication and
materials, with conceptual photography. Szabo brings many facets of visual art into her photographic
projects, incorporating sculptural, performance and installation elements into her work. Her imagery is often infused with humor and wonder, ingredients that draw the viewer in, inviting them to linger and to have a dialogue with the work, and themselves. Her background in the film industry, creating prop and miniatures for theme parks, and overseeing set construction for film and television, undoubtedly informs her creative process. Szabo’s photography has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster, CA, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Yuma Fine Art Center in Arizona, and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Oceanside Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Houston Center of Photography, Tilt Gallery, Davis Orton Gallery, The Colorado Center for Photographic Arts, San Diego Art Institute, Los Angeles Center for Photography, Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, the Kaohsiung International Photographer Exhibition in Taiwan, and Foto Fever in Paris, France. Her photographs have been featured in many publications and blogs including: The Huffington Post,
Lenscratch, Mono Chroma Magazine, Silvershotz, Bokeh Bokeh, L’Oeil de la Photographie, F-Stop
Magazine, Foto Relevance, Fraction, Your Daily Photo, A Photo Editor, Don’t Take Pictures, Art &
Cake, Diversions LA, ArtsMeme, and others. Jane Szabo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA), the
Lancaster Museum of Art & History (MOAH), and in private collections throughout the US and Europe. Upcoming Shows include: “All Women Are Dangerous,” Building Bridges Art Exchange, Santa Monica, CA, opens December 14   https://www.buildingbridgesartexchange.org/ "Somewhere Else", solo show: Foto Relevance Gallery,  Houston, TX - opens January 24    https://fotorelevance.com/ Houston Center of Photography, Houston, TX, auction preview exhibit opens January 17 Houston Center of Photography, Houston, TX, print auction / gala, February 13.   https://hcponline.org/print-auction/ Photo LA, Susan Spiritus Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, January 30-Feb 2. https://www.photola.com/ All images courtesy of the artist 00:00 - Introduction 00:39 - Jane Szaba 02:30 - Hana Vu - Actress 05:59 - Switch to Photography 11:08 - dis.place.ment 16:31 - Reconstructing Self 23:59 - Family Matters 30:06 - Current Work 35:42 - The Static - Dead Soft 39:46 - Outro 40:07 - Finish

Lori Hepner is a Pittsburgh based new media artist working primarily in performative light painting, fine art photography, and community centered public art projects. She has spent considerable time over the last five years in artist residencies in the Arctic through artist residencies in Finland, Iceland, Canada, and Norway. A collaboration with singer Kendra Ross has manifested itself into live performance as Hepner & Ross in Intersection*ology. A feminist exploration into the power of women, technology, and individual voices, she developed the real-time, light painting system that is used to draw with light using the body during these performances in South Africa, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Lori's photographic work has been featured in Time, Wired, and Next Level Magazine and has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and in photo festivals in the Netherlands, China, & Spain. One of her Twitter portraits from Status Symbols will be sent to live on the moon in the MoonArk in 2019. She holds degrees in Digital Media and photography from RISD and RIT. She was just promoted to Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State University and just finished a residency in Norway as a Fulbright scholar. All images courtesy of the artist Kendra Ross in INTERSECTION*OLOGY @ Alloy Studios, March 3, 2013. INTERSECTION*OLOGY @ Alloy Studios: March 3, 2017 Facade Murals installed at the Beechview Healthy Active Living Center. 9' x 20' T Car Mural, installed October 2018 - February 2019. PAT Transit, Pittsburgh, PA. Sun Print Workshop at the Hazelwood branch of Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh. 00:00 - Introduction 00:40 - Lori Hepner 02:05 - Hope - (Sandy) Alex G 04:40 - Drawing With Light 16:54 - The Work / Life Balance 19:04 - Community Engagement 27:21 - Worry Doll - Jeremy Ivey 31:22 - Outro 31:43 - Finish

In this fascinating 45-minute interview, you'll learn among other things how to use mentors to help you succeed.  Whether you are just starting out or you are a seasoned entrepreneur, mentors can help you get to the next level by avoiding common mistakes and taking advantage of proven strategies that have worked for them.  Dan has personally mentored THOUSANDS of people over the years (including Jon LaClare!), and he believes that one of the key reasons for his success is that he still uses mentors himself.  He's very personable and knowledgeable.  Dan also shares the two biggest mistakes that almost all inventors and entrepreneurs make, so be sure to listen and make sure you avoid this possible missteps.  You're sure to love this interview.Dan Valdez, President of GUI Global Products, has an incredible track record of successfully launching and running entrepreneurial businesses.  He first learned from his father that was an entrepreneur in Austin, TX and has since benefitted from the advice of dozens of other mentors.  In 1985, he launched Stationery and Furnishings, Inc., and sold the company to Corporate Express (now Staples) in 1996.  Dan is also a founding stakeholder of the University of Houston Center for Entrepreneurship, which is voted the #1 school for undergraduate entrepreneurial studies in the U.S.A.  Dan is also an active advisor to the University of Houston Small Business Development Center.  Most recently, and for the past several years, Dan has been running GUI Global Products, Inc., makers of the GWEE GYM, GWEE Cleaning Products and the Dry See medical device.  Jon LaClare and Harvest Growth have been working with Dan for several years to help with their marketing efforts on national TV, digital media and HSN.Learn more about their products at these websites:GWEE.comGWEEGym.comDrySee.com

In order to boost the economy of Houston, Houston Center for Literacy strengthens providers of adult education who, in turn, provide necessary skills for underemployed citizens to fulfill their potential and become economically self-sufficient.  Houston Money Week (HMW) is a community wide initiative to empower families and individuals with financial education.  Through the collaboration and coordinated effort of organizations across Houston and surrounding areas, including businesses, financial institutions, schools, libraries, non-profits, government agencies and the media, individuals of all ages will have access to financial resources and ongoing opportunities.  Jackie Aguilera has over 20 years experience in adult education and curriculum development. She has taught literacy, ESL, college success courses, and workforce readiness skills development at UH Downtown, University of Houston, Houston Community College, and the Houston Center for Literacy.  Jackie serves on advisory boards for the Houston Center for Literacy and the PVAM Cooperative Extension Program for Family & Consumer Sciences. She is a member of the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation Partner Network and a member of the adult education committees for Houston Money Week and the Alliance for Economic Inclusion.  To learn more about Jackie, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-aguilera-10362477/ To learn more about Houston Money Week visit: www.Houstonmoneyweek.org Financial Advisor Magazine Articles: http://www.fa-mag.com/news/advisors-stay-the-course-amid-monday-s-market-drop-22864.html?section=3  http://www.fa-mag.com/news/on-it-s-80th-anniversaryadvisors-consider-social-security-s-impactfuture-22784.html?section=3 You can listen live by going to www.kpft.org and clicking on the HD3 tab. You can also listen to this episode and others by podcast at: http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/moneymatters or www.moneymatterspodcast.com #KPFTHOUSTON #HoustonMoneyWK #Jackieaguilera

Ep10 Houston Center Member Dustin Newell: Helping Others With His Love of Aviation by NATCA National Office

In order to boost the economy of Houston, Houston Center for Literacy strengthens providers of adult education who, in turn, provide necessary skills for underemployed citizens to fulfill their potential and become economically self-sufficient.  Houston Money Week (HMW) is a community wide initiative to empower families and individuals with financial education.  Through the collaboration and coordinated effort of organizations across Houston and surrounding areas – including businesses, financial institutions, schools, libraries, non-profits, government agencies and the media – individuals of all ages will have access to financial resources and ongoing opportunities.  Jackie Aguilera has over 20 years experience in adult education and curriculum development. She has taught literacy, ESL, college success courses, and workforce readiness skills development at UH Downtown, University of Houston, Houston Community College, and the Houston Center for Literacy.  Jackie serves on advisory boards for the Houston Center for Literacy and the PVAM Cooperative Extension Program for Family & Consumer Sciences. She is a member of the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation Partner Network and a member of the adult education committees for Houston Money Week and the Alliance for Economic Inclusion.  To find out more about the Houston Center for Literacy, visit: http://www.houliteracy.org/ To learn more about Houston Money Week visit: www.Houstonmoneyweek.org   http://www.cheatsheet.com/personal-finance/how-schools-can-improve-their-personal-finance-education.html/ Financial Advisor Magazine Articles: http://www.fa-mag.com/news/advisors-stay-the-course-amid-monday-s-market-drop-22864.html?section=3  http://www.fa-mag.com/news/on-it-s-80th-anniversaryadvisors-consider-social-security-s-impactfuture-22784.html?section=3 You can listen live by going to www.kpft.org and clicking on the HD3 tab. You can also listen to this episode and others by podcast at: http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/moneymatters or www.moneymatterspodcast.com #KPFTHOUSTON #HoustonMoneyWK #Jackieaguilera

Betty Boop delivered the next All-Star challenge right from the runway. It was really, seriously, truly her. Betty Boop's actual presence clearly threw off the designers this week. Before we discuss the real struggle our old friends had in the workroom, we respond to a wonderful listener question. Join in on the conversation! Hope y'all enjoy :-) LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheat Sheet and Bracket Battle Update: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/cheatsheet46 www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/pras6bracketupdate3 Our Dream Runway Judge Suggestions: Stella Jean www.stellajean.com Rachel Roy www.rachelroy.com Edward Enninful www.edwardenninful.com Doru Olowu www.duroolowu.com Ellie Tahari www.elietahari.com Samilia's Course at Memphis College of Art: mca.edu/community/community-education/fashion-design/ Samilia's Sewing Classes and Online Store: www.TexstyleShop.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstyleshop on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease's Works up for Auction for Houston Center for Photography: https://paddle8.com/work/hernease-davis/153272-untitled/ And for the Penumbra Foundation: https://paddle8.com/work/hernease-davis/153782-untitled-from-the-a-womb-of-my-own-mistakes-were-made-in-development-series/ Hernease's Cyanotype Bag Shop on Etsy:https://www.etsy.com/shop/HowIndigo?ref=search_shop_redirect HowIndigo on Instagram: @HowIndigo Hernease's website: www.herneasedavis.com Hernease on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Nayland's Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art: http://icaphila.org/exhibitions/8899/tag-proposals-on-queer-play-and-the-ways-forward and at the African American Museum in Philadelphia: http://www.aampmuseum.org/current-exhibitions.html Find Us On The Interwebs: www.facebook.com/theworkroom www.instagram.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-workroom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom

The leader of Team Nayland is back on The Workroom Podcast! Yes, Nayland Blake is here for a chat to discuss the EPIC weekend our beloved Philly just had, his theory as to why there are NO plus-sized models on All Stars, and what's up with Anne Fulenwider stomping on the designer's hopes and dreams with those pair of heels her assistant pulled for her from the Marie Claire closet. There were so many things to cover that we didn't get into Nayland's fallen bracket picks, Ari or Candice, this time around. We'll get to them next time! Join us! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheat Sheet and Bracket Battle Update: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/cheatsheet45 www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/pras6bracketupdate2 Nayland's Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art: http://icaphila.org/exhibitions/8899/tag-proposals-on-queer-play-and-the-ways-forward and at the African American Museum in Philadelphia: http://www.aampmuseum.org/current-exhibitions.html Samilia's Course at Memphis College of Art: mca.edu/community/community-education/fashion-design/ Samilia's Sewing Classes and Online Store: www.TexstyleShop.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstyleshop on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease's Works up for Auction to support the Houston Center for Photography: https://paddle8.com/work/hernease-davis/153272-untitled/ And for the Penumbra Foundation: https://paddle8.com/work/hernease-davis/153782-untitled-from-the-a-womb-of-my-own-mistakes-were-made-in-development-series/ Hernease's New Etsy Shop:https://www.etsy.com/shop/HowIndigo?ref=search_shop_redirect HowIndigo on Instagram: @HowIndigo Hernease's website: www.herneasedavis.com Hernease on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Find Us On The Interwebs: www.facebook.com/theworkroom www.instagram.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-workroom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom

Nick DeFord is an artist, educator, and arts administrator who resides in Knoxville, TN. He received his MFA from Arizona State University, and a MS and BFA from the University of Tennessee. He exhibits nationally, with recent exhibitions at the Coastal Carolina University, The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, University of Mississippi, Lindenwood University and this spring in 2018 at East Tennessee State University. He has had artwork or writing published in Surface Design Journal, Elephant Magazine, Hayden Ferry Review, and Willow Springs. Currently, Nick is the Program Director at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, and works on his fiber art practice from his home studio.Nick's website: www.nickdeford.comInstagram @nick_defordMore about the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts: arrowmont.orgInstagram: @arrowmont_schoolMore about Pentaculum:https://www.arrowmont.org/events/arrowmont-pentaculum/Don't forget to Rate AND Review us on iTunes!Find Perceived Value:perceivedvaluepodcast.comInstagram + Facebook: @perceivedvalueFind your Host:sarahrachelbrown.comInstagram: @sarahrachelbrownThe music you hear on Perceived Value is by the Seattle group Song Sparrow Research. All You Need to Know off of their album Sympathetic Buzz.Find them on Spotify!

Arthur Meyerson is recognized as one of America’s finest photographers. Since 1974, this native Texan has traveled throughout the world, creating award-winning advertising, corporate and editorial photographs, as well as an extensive body of fine art imagery. A three-time winner of Adweek’s “Southwest Photographer of the Year” award, he is on Communication World’s list of top 10 corporate photographers and was named one of the 30 best advertising photographers by American Photo. His awards are numerous including gold medals from the New York Art Directors Club, the Art Directors Club of Houston, the Dallas Society of Visual Communications and the prestigious Stephen Kelly Award for his work on the Nike advertising campaign. He was selected by Nikon to their illustrious Legends Behind the Lens list and was honored by the Houston Advertising Federation as the inaugural recipient of the Only In Houston award for individuals “whose creativity and passion for his art have brought recognition to the city of Houston”. In 2008, the Houston Decorative Center named him as the first recipient of photography in their annual Stars Of Design celebration. A photographer with a strong commitment to his profession, Arthur teaches photography workshops, does individual mentoring and participates in speaking engagements throughout the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Santa Fe Center for Photography as well as serving on the Board of Advisors for the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and the Houston Center for Photography.   Resources: Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for . Click here to download Click here to download for Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort.  You can do this by visiting or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button. You can also provide a one-time donation via . You can follow Ibarionex on and .  

Interview with Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Curator Kathryn Hall. We talk about the current exhibit “For Hire: Contemporary Sign Painting in America”

Born and raised in Hangzhou, China, Shiyuan Xu received her BA from China Academy of Art in 2012, and MFA from Arizona State University in 2016. Completed a summer residency at Archie Bray Foundation last year, currently Shiyuan is the resident at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston. Shiyuan is the recipient of 2017 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist.

Joseph diGenova on interviewing President George H.W. Bush during Clinton passport file investigation ~ ". . .at the end of the meeting he said "Come on, let's have a drink." So I went into his office and we started talking about our families and my daughter at that time was having very serious medical problems, and he said bring her down here, I'll get her into the Houston Center, we'll have her taken care of, it won't cost you a dime, let me know, give me the phone, I'll call her, I'll talk to her. I said, Mr. President that's very nice of you, but we've got everything taken care of." Joseph diGenova, Legal Analyst and Former US Attorney for the District of Columbia A Ockershausen: This is Our Town, this is Andy Ockershausen. And I'm so pleased to have a special guest who's really a WMAL personality, but he's part of what we are here and that is a major, major market radio station. And people listen to this man. We'll spend the next half hour or so talking to him about his life in Our Town, which we consider so important, his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Scalia, his law partner and lovely wife Victoria. I got that right, Joe, I didn't say "Vicky". And the passion he has for the law. He's my friend, a local treasure, and a special guest, Joe diGenova, welcome to Our Town. Joseph diGenova: Great to be here with you, Andy. A Ockershausen: Back on WMAL, which you never left. I did, but you stayed. Joseph diGenova: That's right. Every Monday morning, 7:05. A Ockershausen: My wife just lives for that Monday morning. I thought she lived for me, but she lives for the radio show. Joseph diGenova: It's all right. A Ockershausen: But Joe, you've had a spectacular career in Our Town and yet you are not from Our Town, you're a Wilmington boy. Wilmington, Delaware Joseph diGenova: I'm from Wilmington, Delaware, the hotbed of eastern radicalism, home of the DuPonts. Where nothing ever happens except people sit around and make money and go to private clubs. It's a lovely little town. Went to a nice little Catholic boys' school. A Ockershausen: Fabulous. Christina River? Joseph diGenova: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful. A Ockershausen: I went through basic training up there in Delaware for the Air Force. And one of the highlights of my life was having my first submarine. Well, they called it a hoagie. The best bread I ever had was Wilmington, Delaware. Joseph diGenova: Absolutely. I remember- A Ockershausen: That's what I remember the most. Joseph diGenova: Yeah, I remember being drafted and then going to the US Post Office in Wilmington, getting on a bus and going to Philadelphia for my physical. A Ockershausen: The hospital? Joseph diGenova: Yeah. A Ockershausen: The naval hospital? Joseph diGenova: Oh my God, it just ... Awful experience. That was in the middle of the Vietnam War, baby. A Ockershausen: Well, I was in the middle of the Korean War, and thank God I was at the end of it. Because I was reminding, we saw something of a tool company called Thule and I was one time on order to go to Thule, Greenland, and I quickly used all my friends to get out of that, I'm not going to Greenland. But Joe, and then you went to high school in Wilmington? Joseph diGenova: Salesianum School for Boys, Oblates of St. Francis de Sales. Great school. I had a great time there and then went to- A Ockershausen: Great, great school. Joseph diGenova: Yeah. Great. A Ockershausen: We're involved with his Don Bosco effort, Christo Rey, Janice and I are and- Joseph diGenova: I'm a great believer in Catholic schools for boys and girls. I think it's a great thing to have kids separated, educated separately. A Ockershausen: Great education for our kids. Joseph diGenova: I think it's a wonderful thing. The boys and girls all grow up differently and it's very exciting. It's really fun. A Ockershausen: Ain't that a wonderful thing? Joseph diGenova: Yeah, we didn't have to worry about transgender bathrooms back in ...

The Menil Collection and surrounding nonprofit organizations presented their annual Menilfest community arts festival, a free afternoon of exhibitions, performances, and readings that extends across the Menil neighborhood. In collaboration with Menilfest, the Rothko Chapel activated the Chapel and the plaza between the hours of 11am-6pm with a music performance, interactive labyrinth dance, on-site tours, and refreshments by SweetCup Gelato. 3-4:30pm Anecdote of the Spirit Music created by Misha Penton, soprano, and Thomas Helton, double bass Misha Penton, soprano and experimental vocal composer, and Thomas Helton, composer and double bassist, created music through spontaneous and improvised compositional techniques, yielding quiet, spacious, beautiful and intense sounds, in keeping with the sacred environment of the Chapel. The audience was invited to wander in and out of the Chapel for a quiet, introspective, and contemplative experience. “Anecdote of the Spirit” is a direct quote from Mark Rothko, and in full reads: “Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.” Rothko’s quote speaks to the inarticulable in art and music: the essential and transformational experience of the work not communicable with descriptive words. About the performers Misha Penton is a contemporary opera singer, experimental vocal composer, and writer. Her work explores the intersection of new music performance; new opera theater; soundscape composition; and classical and extended vocal techniques. She is the founder, artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater, a Houston-based opera, new music and multi-performing arts ensemble. Misha's performance work has appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, Menil Collection, University of Houston Center for Creative Work, and DiverseWorks Arts Space Houston; organizations and ensembles she has sung with include Houston Grand Opera, Mercury, and Foundation for Modern Music. Misha's recordings include Selkie (2013, composer Elliot Cole), ravens & radishes (2014, composer George Heathco), and The Captured Goddess (2015, composer Dominick DiOrio). www.mishapenton.com Thomas Helton is a composer and bassist who writes and performs music in both solo and ensemble settings. As a composer Mr. Helton was awarded a Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Fellowship Grant in 2007. He was awarded an artist residency for the commission and premiere of Pride from DiverseWorks ArtSpace in Houston in October 2004 in collaboration with video artist Maria del CarmenMontoya. Other new music commissions include 5 works for the Michele Brangwen Dance Ensemble. His work, Black Rain (2005) was chosen to be performed as part of FotoFest’s 2006 Biennial dedicated to the themes of The Earth and Artists Responding to Violence. As a bassist, Thomas Helton performs with his own ensemble, The Core Trio, as well as with many celebrated jazz and free improv artists. www.thomashelton.org

English @ Work is a mobile language provider that customizes English classes to your business' needs and delivers them on site to your employees. 75% of E@W businesses promote or cross-train employees after they have graduated. 70% of participants are better able to help their children with school. 50% of participants plan to pursue continued education after finishing the program   Ms. Sheri Suarez Foreman (President/CEO Houston Center for Literacy) began her career with Houston Center for Literacy (formerly Houston READ Commission) in 2007 as Chief Operating Officer and was named President/CEO in September 2009. Ms. Foreman is an advocate for adult education, literacy and skills development, nationally and in Houston. Ms. Foreman has been honored by Former First Lady, Barbara Bush, for her efforts to improve Adult Education and Literacy in Houston. Ms. Foreman currently serves on the Texas Workforce Commission Adult Education Advisory Board, the Houston Community College Adult Education Steering Committee and Advisory Board, the City of Houston Task Force for Welcoming Houston: Department of Immigration and Refugee Services and is a proud fellow of the American Leadership Forum.  Jackie Aguilera has over 20 years experience in adult education and curriculum development. She has taught literacy, ESL, college success courses, and workforce readiness skills development at UH Downtown, University of Houston, Houston Community College, and the Houston Center for Literacy.  Jackie serves on advisory boards for the Houston Center for Literacy and the PVAM Cooperative Extension Program for Family & Consumer Sciences. She is a member of the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation Partner Network and a member of the adult education committees for Houston Money Week and the Alliance for Economic Inclusion. To learn more about Houston Center for Literacy - Mayor's Commission for Adult Literacy visit: www.houliteracy.org  Personal Finance Cheat Sheet Article: http://www.cheatsheet.com/personal-finance/how-schools-can-improve-their-personal-finance-education.html/ Financial Advisor Magazine Articles: http://www.fa-mag.com/news/advisors-stay-the-course-amid-monday-s-market-drop-22864.html?section=3  http://www.fa-mag.com/news/on-it-s-80th-anniversaryadvisors-consider-social-security-s-impactfuture-22784.html?section=3 You can listen live by going to www.kpft.org and clicking on the HD3 tab. You can also listen to this episode and others by podcast at: http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/moneymatters or www.moneymatterspodcast.com #KPFTHOUSTON #HouLit

To celebrate the Houston Museum District Association's Museum Experience, the Rothko Chapel hosted a day full of events in conjunction with The Menil Collection and Houston Center for Photography. The Da Camera Young Artists - a group of emerging professional vocalists, instrumentalists, and composers - descended on the Museum Experience in Zone 1 to present nine concerts in the span of two hours. Visitors traveled between the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, and the Houston Center for Photography to hear each program. The concerts began simultaneously in each venue at 2:00, 2:45, and 3:30 and the music reflected the unique character of each space. Da Camera Young Artists (Callie Denbigh, voice; Stephanie Gustafson, harp; Amelia Love, voice; Sonya Matoussova, cello; and William Shaub, violin) Johann Sebastian Bach Sonata in G Minor, I. Adagio William Shaub, violin John Cage In a Landscape Stephanie Gustafson, harp Morton Feldman Voices and Cello (1973) Amelia Love, voice Callie Denbigh, voice Sonya Matoussova, cello Johann Sebastian Bach Sonata in G Minor, III. Siciliano William Shaub, violin

Fashion Week is here! What more can we even say besides...cohesion. Cohesion, that classic collection conundrum is back and everyone should be worried about how cohesive their garments are. Are those pants cohesive? Why doesn't that smokey eye and those shiny mules have cohesion written all over them? Is that too much? Cohesion? You get it so join Hernease, Samilia (she's back!) and our bringer of snark, Nayland for this epic Finale episode. Shaniece Aurielle will round out our Foursome with her own reaction segment so stay tuned! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet and Brackets: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet151314 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Nayland's cartoons on Hyperallergic.com: http://hyperallergic.com/author/nayland-blake/ Nayland's new book of cartoons @naylandwblake on Instagram or on Twitter @naylandblake Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things On her website: www.herneasedavis.com And on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

It is the last challenge of Project Runway Season 15, so time for an episode full of twists, turns and...Best Western Ads. Beyond that, the greater goal is to survive this last challenge and move forward to FASHION WEEK! While Samilia is adventuring away, Shaniece Aurielle is back with Hernease in The Workroom to mine through this week's episode of Project Runway Season 15. Join us! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet and Brackets: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet1511 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Shaniece on her new amazing website www.shanieceaurielle.com Or on Social Mediums @Sha_Baam on Instagram Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things On her website: www.herneasedavis.com And on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Intro music, Animaux, by Gabriel Viglienson here: www.freemusicarchive.org Outro-Intro music Keepsake by THA BOOGIE here: www.reverbnation.com/thaboogie/songs

We are back for one of our FAVORITE challenges. The Avant Garde (but is it really?) Challenge! This week, there is a twist, and it's Shaniece Aurielle. While Samilia is adventuring away, Shaniece Aurielle is back with Hernease in The Workroom to mine through this week's episode of Project Runway Season 15. Join us! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet1512 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Shaniece on her new amazing website www.shanieceaurielle.com Or on Social Mediums @ShanieceAurielle on Instagram Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things And on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Intro music, Animaux, by Gabriel Viglienson here: www.freemusicarchive.org Outro-Intro music Keepsake by THA BOOGIE here: www.reverbnation.com/thaboogie/songs

Hernease was in Houston for her show opening and Samilia was in pre epic travel mode. There is a lot going on, and that also includes this latest episode of Project Runway. We had a nice Pow-Her-Ful chat about this surprisingly dramatic episode of… just kidding, this show is always dramatic. But, seriously, this season keeps getting better and better. Join us as we dig right on in together from the same time zone:-) LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet1510 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things ...and on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Intro and Outro: Heidi with Pastor Shirley Caesar remixed by @RemixGodSuite and @iComplexity

When The Workroom meets These Streets it's gotta mean it's time to take it back to Project Runway. This is Episode 20 and we are down to the top 10 designers. From here on out, the ride gets rough… get it? Watch the SHOW! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet156 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things ...and on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Intro: “In These Streets” - The fabulous Jenifer Lewis, The Amazing Roz Ryan and The Only Brandy Outro: “In These Streets” with The Impeccable Laurence Basse

We are back in The Workroom for another epic podcast to recover from last week with some cocktail...dresses. Samilia has her Mai Tai sandals and Hernease has her Army Navy clutch - It is fancy drink time on Project Runway! LINKS - - - Get This Week's Cheatsheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet156 www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Subscribe To Our Podcast: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/theworkroom Find Us On The Interwebs: Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things ...her Photogram Workshop: http://www.penumbrafoundation.org/workshops/photograms-with-hernease-davis-november-6-2016 ...and on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Intro music, Animaux, by Gabriel Viglienson here: www.freemusicarchive.org Outro-Intro music Keepsake by THA BOOGIE here: www.reverbnation.com/thaboogie/songs

We are back in The Workroom for another epic podcast in honor of a truly epic episode of our favorite show - Project Runway. Season 15 is turning out to be pure GOLD y'all. GOLD! Come on in with us, Hernease and Samilia, as we try to wrap our tastefully made print handkerchiefs around this tear jerker of an episode and attempt to answer the question, “What the HELL just happened?!?!” Join us. Links Below! Get The Cheatsheet 15.5 Cheat Sheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet155 OR ON Facebook: www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Our Internets! Samilia and her new bag selections: www.TexstyleBags.com Samilia on Social Mediums: @texstylebags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Hernease at The Houston Center for Photography: https://www.hcponline.org/exhibits/exhibitions/view/117/the-surface-of-things And her Photogram Workshop: http://www.penumbrafoundation.org/workshops/photograms-with-hernease-davis-november-6-2016 And Hernease on Social Mediums: @hernease on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook Subscribe! iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: @theworkroom Intro music, Animaux, by Gabriel Viglienson here: www.freemusicarchive.org Outro-Intro music Keepsake by THA BOOGIE here: www.reverbnation.com/thaboogie/songs

Come on back with us into The Workroom Podcast. Samilia (!!) returns this week to talk about the real-ity struggle of being forced to design for Heidi Klum. The prize is huge, but the road is rough in the wake of Hurricane Heidi. So join us! Links! 15.4 Cheat Sheet: www.herneasedavis.com/theworkroom/prcheatsheet154 OR Facebook: www.facebook.com/theworkroompodcast Our Internets! Samilia has launched two new bags. Check them out!: www.TexstyleBags.com - And follow her on Instagram and Twitter @texstylebags Hernease will be exhibiting at The Houston Center of Photography in November. Check it out: www.hcponline.org and follow her on Instagram and Twitter @hernease and at www.herneasedavis.com Subscribe! iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-w…oom/id1085984001 Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=83661&refid=stpr SoundCloud: @theworkroom Intro music, Animaux, by Gabriel Viglienson here: www.freemusicarchive.org Outro-Intro music Keepsake by THA BOOGIE here: www.reverbnation.com/thaboogie/songs

Episode 7. Tim Mavergeorge is a Christian counselor that manages the branches of the Houston Center for Christian Counseling, and he has extensive experience dealing with addictions and sexual compulsive behaviors. He is personal in his approach with each client, and he looks to find the root cause that is driving the medication. In this […] The post Castimonia Purity Podcast Episode 7: The Addiction Cycle Explained – How Can Anyone Act Like That? Can’t They Just Stop? appeared first on CASTIMONIA.

Arthur Meyerson is recognized as one of America's finest photographers. Since 1974, this native Texan has traveled throughout the world, creating award winning advertising, corporate and editorial photographs, as well as an extensive body of fine art imagery. A three-time winner of Adweek's "Southwest Photographer of the Year" award, he is on Communication World's list of top 10 corporate photographers and was named one of the 30 best advertising photographers by American Photo. His awards are numerous including gold medals from the New York Art Directors Club, the Art Directors Club of Houston, the Dallas Society of Visual Communications and the prestigious Stephen Kelly Award for his work on the Nike advertising campaign. He was selected by Nikon to their illustrious Legends Behind the Lens list and was honored by the Houston Advertising Federation as the inaugural recipient of the Only In Houston award for individuals “whose creativity and passion for his art have brought recognition to the city of Houston”. In 2008, the Houston Decorative Center named him as the first recipient of photography in their annual Stars Of Design celebration. Besides his commercial work, Arthur’s fascination with light, color and the moment continues and has culminated into an impressive body of personal work as well and in 2012 culminated in his highly acclaimed book, The Color of Light. His photographs are in the public collections of several major institutions and have been exhibited internationally. He and his work have been profiled in many publications including Communication Arts, Rangefinder, Camera Arts, Graphis, Digital Photo Pro, Zoom (France), Portfolio, Idea (Japan), Novum (Germany), Photo World (China), and Fotodigital (Portugal). A photographer with a strong commitment to his profession, Arthur teaches photography workshops, does individual mentoring and participates in speaking engagements throughout the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Santa Fe Center for Photography as well as serving on the Board of Advisors for the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and the Houston Center for Photography.   Resources: Arthur Meyerson   Ernst Haas   Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for . Click here to download Click here to download for Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort.  You can do this by visiting or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button.

On this episode, Robert chats with Ben Lowy about his acclaimed career covering international conflict, natural disaster, as well as commercial work for various brands. They also talk about his his early adoption of mobile photography and social media to tell stories in a new way. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of The Photo Brigade Podcast!Benjamin Lowy is award winning photographer based in New York City. He received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and began his career covering the Iraq War in 2003. Since then he has covered major stories worldwide. In 2004 Lowy attended the World Press Joop Swart Masterclass, he was named in Photo District News 30 and his images of Iraq were chosen by PDN as some of the most iconic of the 21st century. Lowy has received awards from World Press Photo, POYi, PDN, Communication Arts, American Photography, and the Society for Publication Design. Lowy has been a finalist for the Oskar Barnak Award, a finalist in Critical Mass, included in Magenta Flash Forward 2007, as well as the OSI Moving Walls 16 exhibit. His work from Iraq, Darfur, and Afghanistan have been collected into several gallery and museum shows, and shown at the Tate Modern, SF MOMA, Houston Center for Photography, Invalides, and Arles. His work from Darfur appeared in the SAVE DARFUR media campaign. In 2011 Lowy's Iraq | Perspectives work was selected by William Eggleston to win the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The book is currently available and in stores now. In 2012, Lowy was awarded the Magnum Foundation Emergency fund to continue his work in Libya. In the same year, he received the International Center of Photography (ICP) Infinity Award for Photojournalism. In 2014, at the age of 35, Lowy received a Distiguished Alumni Award from Washington University in St Louis. Lowy is based in New York City. He is currently represented by Reportage by Getty Images. BenLowy.com

How good are you at hanging on to an ATC clearance that is long and complicated? Houston Center says, “Commanche 448 Juliette Mike, reduce speed to 160, then descend and maintain 9,000 thousand. The Galveston altimeter is 29.86.” In this week’s edition of IFR Flight Radio, I’ll give you tips and techniques for recording and […]

Leah Hamilton French was born and raised in Cambridge, MA. The daughter of a museum professional and a craftsman, she had a lot of exposure to the arts as a child. In and out of school she immersed herself in various art forms – piano, signing, ceramics, drawing, and theater. Following her senior year of high school, French combined her love of acting with her interest in making things, competing in the PBS engineering reality show Design Squad: Season 2. In each episode, contestants designed and built solutions to engineering tasks. The best part, according to French, was learning how to use all the tools in the shop. “Before we started filming, they gave us a crash course in the design process, from drafting to test models, to final product. It was really empowering to realize, hey, if I can dream it, I can draw it, and if I can draw it, I can build it.” French attended Wellesley College, where she majored in Anthropology and French Cultural studies, and joined Teach for America shortly after commencement.  As a pre-kindergarten teacher, French found that a curriculum infused with art, math, and science was the best way to engage her young students. Painting and drawing strengthened her students’ early literacy and fine motor skills. Playing with clay and making collage developed their early math skills, like spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and naming, rotating, and tessellating shapes. Upon moving to Houston, TX, French decided to explore a different approach to education. She worked for Writers in the Schools (WITS), teaching creative writing to young students in the Houston public schools, and loved how easy it was to bring art into those lessons. Currently, she works as a museum educator at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She loves that her job combines several of her passions – art, specifically craft, and education. At the moment, French’s pet project is creating downloadable lesson plans that integrate craft into core subjects. “For me, because I have that experience with art, and math, and engineering, I see how they all fit together. I also have experience as a teacher, and know there are only so many hours in the day. I wanted to create a resource to help teachers easily connect art to the math, science, and language arts concepts they are already teaching. When you can find a way to tie it all together, you produce well rounded students, who then become more creative and innovative citizens.”  For more information visit www.cstem.org. 

Jamie Robertson is a native of Houston, Texas. She received a B.A. in Art from the University of Houston in 2012 and a M.S. in Art Therapy from Florida State University in 2014. She currently works at Houston Center for Photography as Outreach Coordinator. She is a member of the American Art Therapy (AATA) and serves on the Multicultural Committee. In addition she is a former recipient of AATA's Pearlie Roberson Award for her joint Frenchtown Mural project. Her personal art explores African American history and her personal genealogy and mythology. Jamie’s other interests include the implementation of art and art therapy for social change and cultural community development. Jamie hopes to use the healing and transformative properties of art to improve her community in Houston. Success is being in a place feeling very comfortable with myself in my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m excited about it.

Gary studied at the University of Wisconsin and obtained a Masters of Fine Arts from University of Illinois Champaign.   One of Gary’s biggest challenged was learning the administrative aspects to the art world; “you’re trained for the technical aspects of art, not the admin part.   The joy of life creeps into your art making. Gary provides good advice on experiencing life and bringing that into your art. Art can be a way for you to process what happened in life. It can be therapeutic.   One’s quality life can be based on happiness. Think about if you are doing something happy. As a culture, are you doing something to improve the quality of life. I don’t take it lightly that I work with metals. As a maker of objects, I hope they do not end up in the landfills. I try to use objects that do not hurt the Earth.   The objects around us have a story. You can have the community around you to collect and engage. Finding ways to repurpose items instead of throwing them away. Objects have something beyond what you see to the eye.   Success is a work in progress. I feel that I am relatively successful because I’m still doing what I setup to do and I still love it.   Gary is a Resident Artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and his currently designing a limited edition piece inspired by his kids.

When your child has picked a school and decided they want to go to college the next step is paying for it. After we get over the sticker shock that is the current cost of college tuition we most figure out where the funds to pay for school actually come from. Today we answer the question how do we pay for college. Jackie Aguilera has over 20 years experience in adult education and curriculum development. She has taught literacy, college success courses, and workforce readiness skills development at UH Downtown, University of Houston, Houston Community College, and the Houston Center for Literacy. Currently, Jackie is the Literacy Coordinator at East Side University, a community based learning center in Third Ward, and serves on the Houston Center for Literacy Advisory Board and on the adult education committees of Houston Money Week and the Alliance for Economic Inclusion. You can find out more about Jackie Aguilera and East Side University by visiting the website at: www.esuvclc.org   You can listen live by going to www.kpft.org and clicking on the HD3 tab. You can also listen to this episode and others by podcast at: http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/moneymatters or www.moneymatterspodcast.com ‪@kpft @houstonmoneywk  

Photo by Marissa Boone ‘14. MFA AC+D Lecture: Mary Smull The MFA in Applied Craft and Design welcomes Mary Smull as part of the 2013-2014 Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series. MARY SMULL is an artist, writer, and curator living in Philadelphia, PA. She merges object and action in a practice centered around textile processes to expose the diversity of attitudes toward labor and the complex relationships surrounding art and craft, amateur and professional, producers and consumers. Recently, Smull’s work has been exhibited at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia International Airport, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Temple Contemporary, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, and at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Public Fiction Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 2013 and 2014, Smull will be featured in exhibitions at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, WI, and the Craft Alliance, in St. Louis, MO. Smull holds a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and currently teaches in the Fiber Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Download

Benjamin Lowy is an award-winning photographer based in New York City. He received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and began his career covering the Iraq War in 2003. Since then he has covered major stories worldwide. In 2004 Lowy attended the World Press Joop Swart Masterclass, he was named in Photo District News 30 and his images of Iraq were chosen by PDN as some of the most iconic of the 21st century. Lowy has received awards from World Press Photo, POYi, PDN, Communication Arts, American Photography, and the Society for Publication Design. Lowy has been a finalist for the Oskar Barnak Award, a finalist in Critical Mass, included in Magenta Flash Forward 2007, as well as the OSI Moving Walls 16 exhibit. His work from Iraq, Darfur, and Afghanistan have been collected into several gallery and museum shows, and shown at the Tate Modern, SF MOMA, Houston Center for Photography, Invalides, and Arles. His work from Darfur appeared in the SAVE DARFUR media campaign. In 2011 Lowy's Iraq | Perspecitves work was selected by William Eggleston to win the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The book is currently available in stores now. In 2012, Lowy was awarded the Magnum Foundation Emergency fund to continue his work in Libya. In the same year, he received the International Center of Photography (ICP) Infinity Award for Photojournalism. Lowy is based in New York City. He is currently editorially represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

Here are some of the reviewers mentioned in this podcast: Brooks Jensen - publisher and editor of Lenswork Magazine Darius Himes - editor of PhotoEye Booklist Tim Anderson - publisher and editor of CameraArts Magazine  Mary Virginia Swanson - consultant, educator Other Great Reviewers Laura Addison, Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of New Mexico Pilar Graves - Owner and Director, Pilar Graves Fine Art Marita Holdaway - Director, Benham Gallery Julianne Newton - Editor, Visual Communication Quarterly Larry Padgett, Executive Director, The Center for Fine Art Photography Ann Pallesen - Gallery Director, Photographic Center Northwest Alan Rapp - Photography and Design Editor, Chronicle Books Madeline Yale, Program Director, Houston Center for Photography