Cathy Byrd channels conversations about creativity in the Fresh Art International Podcast. Since 2011, we’ve amplified the voices of contemporary artists, curators, architects, writers and filmmakers from the center and fringe of creative communities across six continents.
Episodes
Thursday Mar 02, 2023
Thursday Mar 02, 2023
In February 2023, we travel to the Arab Emirates for the first time. We’re here to witness and celebrate Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Four years in the making, the exhibition is ambitious and expansive. More than 100 artists from 70 countries are presenting projects in 19 venues across the emirate. Seventy of those projects are new commissions.
The memory and influence of Nigerian born art historian, author, educator, and curator Okwui Enwezor is deeply felt, despite his physical absence. The Sharjah Art Foundation had invited Enwezor to curate this iteration of the biennial. He envisioned the exhibition title before his death in 2019.
Sharjah Art Foundation Director Hoor Al Qasimi was 22 years old when she met Okwui Enwezor and experienced his non-western curatorial model at documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany. Enwezor’s impactful perspective on postnational hybridity and global modern identity inspired Al Qasimi to lead the Foundation and the Biennial in new directions.
On the 30th anniversary of the Biennial, we sit down with Al Qasimi to talk about the inclusive ethos that we find in the art experience of Thinking Historically in the Present.
Story: Cathy Byrd | Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio
Special Audio: Hassan Hajjaj with Mestre Pastel, Open Capoeira Session, Arts Square, Sharjah
Related Episode: New Point of View at Venice Biennale
Related Links: Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah Art Foundation, documenta 11, 2nd Johannesburg Biennial
Tuesday Nov 05, 2019
Tuesday Nov 05, 2019
We shadow CYJO, a Miami-based Korean American visual artist, as she navigates the complex maze of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018. Her goal is to discover and document exceptional work in the photographic medium for the “Art Basel Miami Week Diary” that she contributes to the bilingual online publication L’Œil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography).
Inside the fair, Gian Paolo Paci, of Paci Contemporary, in Bresi, Italy, introduces us to his gallery’s featured artist: American photographer Nancy Burson. Burson created some of the earliest photographic portraits using computer-morphing technology.
Jared Quintan, Associate Director of Rhona Hoffman, in Chicago, deconstructs the symbolism in a photographic wall installation by Lorna Simpson, an African-American photographer and multimedia artist known for her singular approach to portraiture. Quintan also talks about intimate portraits by African American artist Deana Lawson, whose photographs reveal the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories.
A few weeks later, we meet CYJO in her studio, a light-filled loft that looks out over Biscayne Bay in Miami. We’re here to learn more about how the artist explores the complexities of identity, beauty and belonging through her own photography, video and text.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related Episodes: Modern Portrait of Black Florida, Jillian Mayer on the Nude Selfie Project, Adam Schreiber on the Spatial Dynamics of Photography
Related Links: CYJO, Art Basel Miami Beach, L’Œil de la Photographie, Paci Contemporary, Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Monday Jun 17, 2019
Monday Jun 17, 2019
What does "creative resilience" mean for curators in the year 2019?
One evening, we decide to find out. Setting up a temporary recording studio in a poolside cabana, at a Miami Beach hotel, we sit down with a dozen curators and cultural producers to document their stories. In this marathon recording session, you’ll hear curatorial strategies for engaging new communities, increasing the visibility of underrepresented artists, and addressing some of today's most pressing social, political and environmental challenges.
We recorded this special program when the annual Congress of the Association of International Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) took place in the United States for the first time. Curators from the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean gathered in Miami, Florida, to explore the contemporary art scene and participate in a symposium about art and resilience in the climate crisis.
Voices in the episode: (alpha order) Eva Asp, Bayardo Blandino, Aldeide Delgado, Yucef Merhi, Thale Fastvold and Tanja Torjussen, Michele Fiedler, O'Neil Lawrence, Lorie Mertes, Najja Moon, Marina Reyes Franco, Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: (in order of appearance) Spectres in Change: FoAM / Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney; The Quilt Performing Arts Group for Beyond Fashion exhibition, National Gallery of Jamaica; Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Hacked!) 2000-2004; The BLCK Family Dinner
Related Episodes: Art and the Climate Crisis with IKT Miami, Art and the Rising Sea, Curating in a Time of Global Change: IKT Norway, Sounds of Contemporary Art in Norway with IKT
Related Links: International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, FoAM Spectres in Change, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Hacked!) 2000-2004, National Gallery of Jamaica, Resisting Paradise, Locust Projects, The BLCK Family, Gävle Konstcentrum, International Cities of Refuge Network, SALA MAC / Contemporary Visual Arts Center of Women in the Arts in Honduras, Women Photographers International Archive, Locus Art
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space.
Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own exhibition sites (Agnes Denes brought a Wheatfield to a New York City landfill). Some flaunted the rules of museum installation with live interventions (Joseph Beuys lived in a Soho gallery with a live coyote).
Our series of episodes on site sensitivity brings a broader range of cultural production into the conversation, exposing new ways of seeing place, space, and site in contemporary art.
Art with a Sense of Place, Part II, highlights conversations featured in the second issue of the Fresh Art International Smart Guide. We produce the guide as a series of downloadable pdfs. Each issue delves into a different theme—through select episodes, transcriptions and links to research that informs our podcast.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related episodes: Agustina Woodgate, Louis Grachos, Adam Schreiber, Tania Bruguera
Related link: Smart Guide, Issue 02 Art with a Sense of Place
Monday Jun 04, 2018
Monday Jun 04, 2018
Today, we take you to meet to artist Deborah Mitchell in her studio on Miami Beach, to talk about the ways that Florida’s southwest coast inspires her. The contested landscape, endangered by encroaching urban development and sea level rise, is where she engages as an artist and an advocate for North America’s only subtropical wilderness: The Everglades. Mitchell’s mindful practice expresses her affinity for this fragile ecology, and her desire to learn, share and preserve its science and history.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Deborah Mitchell | Photographs courtesy the artist and Fresh Art International
Related links: The Everglades, Big Cypress, Deborah Mitchell, Artists in Residence In Everglades (AIRIE)
Monday May 14, 2018
Monday May 14, 2018
Trinidad-born photographer Johanne Rahaman shares hope for a better world in her Black Florida project—a modern archive of images that tell the story of Blackness in America today. Follow our Sunday morning drive to Perrine where we visit Flavas, the town's favorite breakfast spot, and stop by the House of God, home of the sacred steel ensemble known as The Lee Boys. Find out why Rahaman is taking the time to dignify the character of rural and urban black communities across the state. Keep listening to discover how she will celebrate Black water rights on Miami's South Beach during Urban Weekend 2018.
Special Audio courtesy Johanne Rahaman
Related links: Johanne Rahaman, Flavas Miami, House of God, The Lee Boys, Zora Neale Hurston, Urban Beach Weekend Miami
Monday May 07, 2018
Monday May 07, 2018
Monday Apr 30, 2018
Monday Apr 30, 2018
We follow artist Joana Choumali from the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Bienniale to Dak'Art 2018, as she explores the shared experience of migration and violence in her birth country. Her embroidered photographs trace stories of loss and longing—depicting lone figures disappearing from home and reappearing in foreign environments, and giving shape to the emptiness left by the casualties of terrorism. Needle and thread express Choumali's empathy with the fraught human condition.
Sound Editing: Anamnesis Audio | Photography: Joanna Choumali and Fresh Art International
Thursday Jun 02, 2016
Thursday Jun 02, 2016
Finnish artist Ola Kolehmainen talks about his large-scale photographs of imperial Turkish architecture from the 16th century. Turkish collector Ahmet Kocabiyik–chairman of Borusan Holding company and owner of a significant contemporary art collection—made the project possible by commissioning the artist to photograph buildings designed by the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Prior to this commission, Kolehmainen’s work featured abstractions and reflections of contemporary and modern architecture. A six month residency in Turkey was a chance to explore the legendary architect's expansive design history.
Sound Editor: Guney Oszan | Sound performance audio courtesy Oliver Beer
Thursday Oct 23, 2014
Thursday Oct 23, 2014
Miami-based artist Jillian Mayer introduces 400 Nudes, a revealing found photo project to debut at the Montreal Biennial. Mayer's work examines the nude selfie phenom on the Internet to comment on information sharing, privacy, the manipulation of identity, and the body politics of revenge porn.