Writer/curator Cathy Byrd sparks conversations about today’s art, design, and film on the Fresh Art International podcast. Synthesizing interviews and field recordings with critical commentary since 2011, the podcast archives the voices, sounds, and stories of contemporary culture makers from around the world.
Episodes
Monday Sep 02, 2019
Monday Sep 02, 2019
New York-based artist Allison Zuckerman explains what drives her desire to distort conventions of female beauty and push art appropriation to a new high. In bright, bold collages, she mixes paint with pixels to create absurd and exaggerated hybrids—women claiming their presence and power in the world.
We meet during her 2018 exhibition at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection. The paintings on view are the wild fruit of a 2017 summer residency. When collectors Mera and Don Rubell offered Zuckerman the time and space to expand her artmaking, she seized the opportunity to go larger than life. In Fall 2019, curator Tami Katz-Freiman introduces Zuckerman’s wild pop-surrealist paintings to Israel, with a solo show at the Herzliya Museum of Art.
Sound Editor: Joseph DeMarco
Related Episodes: Patricia Cronin on Making Art History, Zoë Buckman on Fight Mode, Kathleen Morris and the Year of Yes, ORLAN on Art Tech
Related Links: Allison Zuckerman, Rubell Family Collection, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
Monday Aug 26, 2019
Monday Aug 26, 2019
In August 2019, we head to Nashville, Tennessee, where leaders of the seventh annual 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival invited us to stage a live podcast event. We’re here to talk about the Creative Economy. At the heart of our conversation is a startup that aims to have a big cultural impact in this state: the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art. The major art exhibition premieres in 2021, joining others across the United States. Every three years, Prospect New Orleans, Cleveland’s Front International, and Counterpublic in St. Louis, animate contemporary art experiences for their diverse communities.
New Orleans and Nashville are both southern destinations for music and festivals. To think about what an expansive art exhibition could mean for Nashville and the State of Tennessee, let’s go back in time, to the year 2017, when the fourth iteration of Prospect New Orleans came to the Crescent City. You’ll hear how The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp evokes the musical character of New Orleans and the surrounding urban and natural environment. Click below to hear more stories from Prospect.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sonia Boyce, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Music Box Village, Darryl Montana, The Kitchen Sisters
Voices, in order of appearance: Trevor Schoonmaker, Brooke Davis Anderson, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Boyce, Rusty Lazer, Darryl Montana, Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters
Related Episodes: Art and Community in Prospect 3 New Orleans, Tameka Norris on Channeling Personal History, Franklin Sirmans Introduces Prospect 3 New Orleans, William Pope.L Transforms the Black Factory into a Magic Lantern Show
Related Links: Prospect New Orleans, Tennessee Triennial, Front International, Counterpublic, 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival
Monday Aug 19, 2019
Monday Aug 19, 2019
Jamaican-born artist Nadine Hall introduces Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, a personally significant episode from her Fresh Art playlist. First published on July 26, 2017, this segment reveals the complex and diverse influence of the Caribbean on contemporary art.
Franklin Sirmans, director of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, talks about the pivotal role of art from the Global South in the triennial art exhibition known as Prospect New Orleans. Prospect returns to the Crescent City in November 2020.
Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator founder and curator Rosie Gordon Wallace and Miami-affiliated artists describe how the Caribbean is embedded in their work. In November 2019, DVCAI spotlights the region’s cultural impact in the collaborative exhibition Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City, at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, in Washington, DC.
Nadine Hall writes: The Diaspora Vibe episode from the Fresh Art archive is my favorite—a dream-come-true story to share. Cathy Byrd recorded a conversation with me in summer 2017, just before I traveled outside my homeland Jamaica for the first time. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator had invited me to Miami, to spend one month at Fountainhead Residency. Two years later, I’ve returned to South Florida. I’m here to pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Miami, with a three-year scholarship. In this episode, you’ll hear my voice, and the story behind the first step in my incredible journey.
Sound Editor: 2019 Anamnesis Audio, 2017 Guney Ozsan | Special Audio: Los Jaichackers, Jorge Martillo, Ashley Teamer
Related Episodes: Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, Live from Trinidad: Where Digital Culture Thrives, Live from Dominican Republic with Tilting Axis, Miami’s Caribbean Arts Remix, Art of the Everyday, Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots
Related Links: Franklin Sirmans, Perez Art Museum, Miami, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Asser Saint-Val, Gerard Caliste, Ashley Teamer, Nadine Hall, Los Jaichackers, Jorge Martillo
Monday Aug 12, 2019
Monday Aug 12, 2019
Today, we take you back to the month of April, in the year 2012. That’s when we set out on a road trip from Austin, Texas. We’re aiming to find out how remote wide open spaces of the American Southwest inform and inspire art and design, curating and filmmaking.
Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of musician songwriter Buddy Holly, is our first stop. In a warehouse at the edge of town, we meet architecture professor Chris Taylor. He introduces us to students from Texas Tech University who took his course in Land Arts of the American West. The course involves a 6,000-mile road trip that culminates each time in an exhibition such as the one on view during our visit.
We drive on to Roswell, New Mexico, home to the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Museum, to spend the night in one of the ranch-style houses that accommodate the Roswell Artists in Residence Program, known as RAIR. Established in 1967 by artist and art collector Don Anderson, the program is off the beaten path for residencies, offering visual artists the unique opportunity to spend an entire year concentrating on their work. The voices you’ll hear are five of the current residents at the time of our visit: Sarah Bostwick, Jon-Paul Villegas, Brian Villegas, Brian Kluge, and Sioban McBride.
A three hour drive from El Paso, Texas, Marfa has become a destination for art tourism. Home of the ghostly Marfa Lights (unexplained lights sometimes seen along the horizon in the night sky), the tiny town sits in the high desert, between the Davis Mountains and Big Bend National Park.
Renowned minimalist artist Donald Judd came here in the 1970s to escape New York City’s commercial art scene. With the help of the DIA Foundation, he acquired a former Army base. Before Judd died in 1994, he transformed the 400-acre expanse into a faceted art experience. The Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum designed to connect art to the surrounding landscape. Year round, visitors can explore Judd's signature boxes and installations by Dan Flavin, Rebecca Horn, Ilya Kabakov and more. We spend a few days to track down some of the artists, curators, designers and producers expanding on Judd’s singular vision.
Professional filmmakers Jennifer Lane and David Hollander moved to Marfa from Los Angeles. CineMarfa, the film festival they founded there, will celebrate its tenth year in 2020. We visit their home for a conversation about the genesis of CineMarfa and plans for the second annual event.
Ballroom Marfa is a key site of cultural production in this remote art mecca. Arts pioneers Fairfax Dorn and Virginia Leh-bermann founded the contemporary cultural arts space in 2003. Ballroom’s gallery is a converted dancehall that dates to 1927. We sit down with Ballroom’s creative team to learn more.
In 2019, we reach out to curator Laura Copelin to find out what happened next. Ballroom Marfa continues commissioning site specific artworks and installations—responding to the environmental, social and political ecology of the landscape that extends to the border of Mexico. One recent example is Haroon Mirza’s massive Stone Circle in the grasslands east of town. This is Ballroom’s most ambitious public commission since Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa was completed in 2005. The stone circle will remain in the landscape for the next several years.
Leaving the high desert, we drive northeast through the Texas hill country, passing endless fields of bluebonnets. In East Austin, we meet designer architect Jack Sanders in his studio. Sanders talks about how the legendary architect Sam Mockbee influenced the evolution of his own life’s work.
Sound Editing and Special Audio Credits:
Destination American Southwest Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Land Arts of the American West Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Special Audio: 45 rpm record found by Land Art 2011 participants
Program Director: Chris Taylor
Students: Alexander Bingham, Luis Bustamante III, Will Cotton, Winston Holloway, Richard Klaja, Celeste Martinez, Zachary Mitchell, Carl Spartz, Rachael Wilson, Bethany Wood. Program Assistant: Adrian Larriva
Roswell Artists in Residence Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | RAiR acoustics: Sarah Bostwick
CineMarfa Sound Editor: Jay Agoglia | Sound Track: Harmony Korine, TRASH HUMPERS, 2009
Ballroom Marfa Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Special Audio: Brian LeBarton, The Wind, 2010. New Year’s Film/Score Series. January 2, 2010. The Crowley Theater, Marfa
Jack Sanders Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Music: Ross Cashiola, “Trains in the Grass”
Related Episodes: Fresh Talk: Joan Jonas, Fresh VUE: Austin, Land Arts of the American West, Roswell Artists in Residence, CineMarfa 2012, Ballroom Marfa Imagines a Drive-In, Jack Sanders on Slow Architecture
Related Links: Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Sarah Bostwick, Jon-Paul Villegas, Brian Kluge, Corwin Levi, Sioban McBride, Chinati Foundation, CineMarfa, Jack Sanders, Sam Mockbee/Rural Studio
Tags: architecture, Austin,, Design Build Adventure, El Cosmico, Jack Sanders, Marfa, Rural Studio, Sam Mockbee, Texas, New Mexico, art podcast, Fairfax Dorn, Virginia Lebermann, Roswell, artists in residence, Chinati Foundation, Texas Tech University, Donald Judd
Monday Aug 05, 2019
Monday Aug 05, 2019
How do contemporary art and film illuminate the Black Imagination? This segment from our archive explores some of the issues and ideas behind creative practices that re-imagine the Black experience.
To begin, we share a conversation recorded with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver from 2013, while she was working at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Cassel Oliver is now Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she's expanding the representation of African American and African-diasporic artists in the Museum's collection.
On November 2, 2016, artists, filmmakers and curators joined us to consider this topic during the Fresh Art International show on Jolt Radio, Miami. Since then, curator Natalia Zuluaga continues to edit [NAME] publications and co-edits the bilingual online journal Dispatches. In summer 2019, Zuluaga curates Materia Abierta, a program on theory, art and technology in Mexico City. Artist Domingo Castillo has been working under the radar since visualizing the complexities of Miami’s future in his 2017 video Tropical Malaise. In 2019, among other recent projects, artist Jamilah Sabur presented a five channel video installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and showed a commissioned video at Hudson Yards, New York. Amir George, co-founder of the touring visual shorts program Black Radical Imagination, continues to engage in cinema culture. Mikhaile Solomon, founding director of the annual PRIZM art fair, is preparing for the Fair’s seventh year in Miami, scheduled for December 2019.
Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan 2016; Anamnesis Audio 2019 | Special Audio: courtesy Jamilah Sabur and Oolite Arts
Related Episodes: Valerie Cassel Oliver on Black Performance in Contemporary Art and Jean-Ulrick Désert and Trenton Doyle Hancock on Radical Presence, Black in America, Contemporary Black Portraiture
Related Links: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [NAME] Publications, Hammer Museum, Black Radical Imagination, PRIZM Art Fair, Oolite Arts
Monday Jul 29, 2019
Monday Jul 29, 2019
American artist Charles Gaines has been delving into philosophy, abstraction and mathematics to address politics and race since the 1970s. In August 2019, Gaines receives the 60th Annual Edward MacDowell Medal, an award celebrating his high achievements in visual art, musical composition and performance, and his influence as a teacher, writer and curator. An artist whose work is described as formulating the DNA of the conceptual movement, Gaines is a key figure in contemporary art history.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaines was the first African American accepted into the School of Art and Design MFA program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He now lives and works in Los Angeles. He’s been a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, for more than three decades.
As Charles Gaines prepares for high profile exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, through 2022, we reflect on what his art says to the world. Resolutely abstract in his practice, Charles Gaines refuses traditional representation—resisting both dominant racial stereotypes, and pressure from within the black community. His gridworks and manifestos deliberately counter deep-seated assumptions about the forms that nature and culture, art and music should take. Gaines shows us how art can embody conceptual, aesthetic, and personal freedom.
This episode features conversations recorded with Charles Gaines in 2015, 2017 and 2019.
About the MacDowell Medal: A Haven for Artists since 1907, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, was the first artist residency program established in the United States. Each year, the MacDowell Medal recognizes one individual for outstanding contributions to American arts and culture. Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Sonny Rollins, and Toni Morrison are among past honorees.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Charles Gaines, Manifestos performance, 56th Venice Art Biennale
Related Episodes: Mark Bradford Connects Art with the Real World, Contemporary Art and the Black Imagination
Related Links: Charles Gaines | MacDowell Honors Visual Artist, Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, Charles Gaines, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Charles Gaines, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Biennale Arte 2015, All the World's Futures
Monday Jul 22, 2019
Monday Jul 22, 2019
This July, NASA invites us to celebrate the historic 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission. Looking up to the sun, moon and stars, we revisit a radio show designed to revolve around the 2017 total solar eclipse. Listeners will learn that the weather threw our program slightly off course. That's because the first time we streamed The Art of the Eclipse on Jolt Radio was September 6, 2017, four days before Hurricane Irma hit Florida. The southern coast was in evacuation mode.
Our show begins with a flashback to 2013, in Berlin, when we recorded a conversation at the intersection of art and science in the control tower at the abandoned Tempelhof airport, in Berlin. German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis demonstrates one of her gravity experiments and explains how she raises moon geese.
We share our field recordings and interviews from August 21, 2017, when thousands of people came together to experience the solar event at Miami's Frost Museum of Science. Dr. Jorge Perez-Gallego, then curator of astronomy at the Museum, calls in to tell stories of his eclipse-viewing adventure outside Madras, Oregon. For the finale, we introduce a selection from the short films screened at the Frost's Science Art Cinema Film Festival in summer 2017.
Sound Editors: 2017 Guney Ozsan, 2019 Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Frost Science Museum, Delphino Huang, John Akre, Michael J. Ruiz-Unger
Related Episodes: Studio Drift Drones Send Up Swarming Ode to Apollo at 50, Art and Our Uncertain Future, Art of the Eclipse, Agnes Meyer Brandis on Science and Creativity
Related Links: NASA, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, Delphino Huang, John Akre, Michael J. Ruiz-Unger, Science Art Cinema Film Festival
Monday Jul 15, 2019
Monday Jul 15, 2019
To honor the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this July, we introduce you to Studio Drift, two artists whose poetic work points to the moon and stars. During NASA festivities, a special edition of their airborne art will lift off from the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center.
Amsterdam-based Lonneka Gordijn and Ralph Nauta work at the intersection of nature, art and technology. Their complex creative applications of new technology invite us to question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. In 2017, we meet the artists to talk about two of their curious experiments—an enormous concrete block hovering inside New York City’s Armory art fair, and 300 illuminated drones that swarmed in the night sky over Miami Beach during Art Week.
In 2018, after the South Florida premiere of Studio Drift: Franchise Freedom, the artists brought their drone starlings to sky watchers in Amsterdam, during their retrospective exhibition at the Stedlijk Museum, and to the Burning Man festival, in the northwest Nevada desert. This week, there’s a chance that millions of people watching the NASA celebration from afar will become virtual witnesses to the wonder of Studio Drift’s flying sculpture.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Apollo 11 sounds via NASA website, Franchise Freedom music composed and played by Joep Beving for Studio Drift, Franchise Freedom live performance, Miami Beach, Florida, 2017, courtesy Fresh Art
Related Episodes: Drone Starlings in the Night Sky: Studio Drift on Nature and Culture, Steve Brown and Jesse Deeter Capture Burning Man on Film
Related Links: Studio Drift, National Air and Space Agency, Stedelijk Museum, Burning Man, Miami Art Week
What Studio Drift says about their July 16, 2019, ode to the NASA moon landing:
Lonneke Gordijn: The moon landing made us think about our lives here on earth more than life on the moon. That’s what our work Franchise Freedom is about, human behaviour on earth.
Ralph Nauta: The Apollo 11 moon landing exemplifies how technology can have a positive effect on humanity. Let’s take this as an example of what amazing possibilities we have if we put our minds together. It is our responsibility to use technology to build a sustainable future.
Thursday Jul 11, 2019
Thursday Jul 11, 2019
Today, we take you to Miami Beach, Florida, for a conversation with British-born artist Ellen Harvey.
In 2002, the art fair known as Art Basel traveled here from Switzerland, to set up a winter home. While the South Florida metropolis has grown into an international contemporary art mecca, this coast has also become recognized as ground zero for sea level rise.
Despite increased flooding from high tides, the population keeps growing. Public and private investments continue to pour in. In 2015, the City of Miami Beach allocated 620 million dollars to renovate and expand the Convention Center where the Art Basel fair takes place every December. Seven million dollars of the budget were dedicated to public art. Six new site works are adding star power to the City’s permanent collection.
Selected for one of the high profile commissions, Brooklyn-based artist Ellen Harvey seized the moment, to create what she describes as “a hopelessly romantic call to action.” We sit down with her to talk about the endangered eco-system that informs Atlantis, her shimmering glass wall installation.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related Episodes: Art and the Climate Crisis with IKT Miami, Curating and Creative Resilience with IKT in Miami, Whithervanes: The Art of Anxiety, Where Art Meets Activism, Art and the Rising Sea
Related Links: Ellen Harvey, Art in Public Places
Ellen Harvey’s Atlantis joins other public art projects to be realized in and around the Convention Center. Accessible to visitors and locals, the full set will include a vivid painted mural by Franz Ackermann (Berlin), a bent swimming pool sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset (Berlin), a neon global positioning installation by Joseph Kosuth (London/New York), whimsical park seating by Joep van Lieshout (Rotterdam), and an expansive patterned tile wall by Sarah Morris (New York).
Cathy Byrd, Fresh Art International Founder and Artistic Director, participated in the review and selection process from 2015-2016 as a member of the City of Miami Art in Public Places Committee.
Monday Jul 01, 2019
Monday Jul 01, 2019
Where do you go to hear the voice of architecture?
At midnight, on the eve of the 14th Istanbul Biennial exhibition opening in 2015, we meet British sound artist Oliver Beer inside a 400-year old Turkish bath for an immersive acoustic experience. With microphone and recorder in hand, we follow him into the bath’s hot, steamy inner chamber, where young local opera singers are rehearsing for a one-night-only performance of his composition Call to Sound.
Revisiting our sonic encounter with the architecture of Istanbul is an opportunity to introduce the sound work that Oliver Beer brings to New York in 2019. Keep listening, to hear the site-specific project he created for The Met Breuer, home to the modern and contemporary art program of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met's first commission of a sound-based installation, Oliver Beer: Vessel Orchestra is a musical instrument, a series of live performances, and an installation composed of thirty-two sculptures, utilitarian vessels, and decorative objects from the Museum collection.
Call to Sound Composer: Oliver Beer | Musical Director: Eray Altınbuken (ITU/MIAM)
Singers: Seren Akyoldaş, Ufuk Atar, Başak Ceber, Nur Diker, Murat Güney, Recep Gül, Baruyr Kuyumcıyan, Deniz Özçelik, Alin Aylin Yağcıoğlu, Canan Tuğberk
Sound Editors: 2015 Kris McConnachie; 2019 Anamnesis Audio | Call to Sound performance audio courtesy Oliver Beer; Oliver Beer: Orchestral Vessel installation sound courtesy Oliver Beer and The Met Breuer
Related Episodes: Oliver Beer Explores the Sound Chamber of a Turkish Bath, Camille Norment on the Character of a Sonic Environment
Related Links: Oliver Beer: Vessel Orchestra, Oliver Beer: Call to Sound, Istanbul, Kiliç Ali Paşa Hamam, 14th Istanbul Biennial