Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Jarrett Key (b. 1990) lives and works in Providence, RI. Key is a recent MFA graduate from RISD Painting. Key is one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. Key’s practice embodies several modes of production in one frame. Through form, image, and material, the objects they make integrate a sculpture, painting, and performance practice. Excavating lost stories and the oral histories that define their upbringing in rural Alabama, Key’s work seeks to criticize those historical conditions that are the seeds of contemporary issues in their life, while creating spaces that celebrate beauty, joy and survival. Key has been featured in exhibitions and residencies at 1969 Gallery, Fierman Gallery, the RISD Museum, La MaMa Galleria, The Columbus Museum, Gallery 67, Swiss House/MGLC, Galerija Kresija, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Caelum Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Outlet Fine Art, Former Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Secret Dungeon, La Maison D’A

Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality—from the surface of the page to the surface of language. Her most recent projects are the chapbook W/\SH: Initial Contact (Above/Ground, 2021), a speculative ecopoetic collaboration with Terri Witek; The Book: 101 Definitions (Anteism, 2021), a collection of definitions of the book by artists, writers, scholars, librarians, and book artists; and Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona (QPL, 2020), a printable chapbook of computer-generated curtal sonnets. Borsuk is also the author of The Book (MIT Press, 2018), a brief introduction to the book as object, content, idea, and interface published in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Her books of poetry include Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016),  Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Poetry Prize; and Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), a chapbook-length erasure. Abra (1913 Press, 2016), a book of mutating poems created with Kate Durbin, received an NEA-sponsored Exp

Photo of Nicolás by Wadi Céspedes Raful / Courtesy of Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited or performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Call/Walks, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Nicolás has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and MacDowell. Nicolás holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelph

Ben Balcom (b. 1986, Massachusetts) is a filmmaker currently living and working in Milwaukee, WI. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and is the co-founder and co-programmer of Microlights Cinema. Since 2013, Microlights has hosted over 50 film and video artists from around the world. Combining elements of documentary, fictional narrative, and abstraction, Balcom’s films investigate the relationship between cinematic artifice and ordinary affects. He has explored melodrama, essay film, and, most recently, regional histories. His films have been exhibited at venues and festivals such as the European Media Festival, Media City Film Festival, Anti-Matter Media Arts, Alchemy Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Slamdance. Balcom received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his bachelor’s degree in Film-Video Production from Hampshire College. The books I mentioned in the interview are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy 

Eric Fleischauer is a Chicago-based artist whose projects engage the histories of media culture to examine technology’s nuanced influences and forgotten genealogies.  Working across various mediums, fleischauer utilizes conceptually-driven production strategies to make work that can be read as an aestheticized form of media theory and criticism. His work has been exhibited at the MCA Chicago, Interstate Projects (NYC), Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and discussed in Artforum, The Washington Post, Afterimage Journal, and rhizome.org. Currently he is an Associate Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.   Universal Paramount, 2010, digital image, dimensions variable homeland security, 2020, staples on paper, xerox print, 11" x 14" twohundredfiftysixcolors (preface) 2013 from eric fleischauer on Vimeo.  

Self-Portrait Ian Weaver is an Artist and Professor at Saint Mary's College, South Bend, IN. His M.F.A. is from Washington University in St Louis (2008). He has exhibited at the South Bend Museum of Art; The Chicago Cultural Center; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; and Saint Louis Art Museum. His residencies include Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts; Ox-Bow; the ISCP Residency, New York; and Yaddo and the Millay Colony, both in upstate NY. Awards include the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award; Artadia and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, both based in NY; and the Illinois Arts Council.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for The Believer Book Award in Poetry, as well as the book-length poem Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013).   His poetry and essays appear widely in such venues as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Believer, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest, and his work has been recognized with an Iowa Review Award (selected by Srikanth Reddy), The Paris-American Reading Series Prize, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the I-Park Foundation, the University of Denver, and Columbia University.   During the 2021 — 2022 academic year, he will be teaching creative writing at George Washington University, and will also be Wr

George working on "Tia Catrina" George Rodriguez addresses sensitive sociopolitical issues through his highly ornamented figurative ceramic sculptures. There is a tongue-in cheek-ease that is evident in the sense of warmth his works convey. Themes of culture and identity recur throughout his sculpture, celebrating the unique attributes of diverse cultures as well as the similarities that unite us all. Rodriguez’s ceramic sculptures eloquently communicate the emotions they embody, through figures spanning a wide range of forms and personalities. Aspects of certain forms echo elements of African, Italian, and South American ceramic traditions, yet the resulting pieces are dynamically modern. George received a BFA in ceramics from the University of Texas El Paso then went on to receive an MFA from the University of Washington.  His world curiosity grew as a recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship where he traveled the world through most of 2010. His work can be found in the permanent collection of the Nati

Susan Mastrangelo was born and raised in New York City and Washington D.C. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School, and received her MFA from Boston University under the tutelage of Philip Guston. Based in New York since graduate school, she has shown nationally and internationally, and is a recipient of a Mercedes Matter Award, a Rockwell Grant and two grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a guest at Civitella Raneri, and a resident at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Triangle Workshop (as a student of Anthony Caro), and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. For 27 years she taught and chaired the Art Department at the Buckley School in New York City, and now works as a full time multidisciplinary artist at the Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. High expectations, 2020, Knitting, cord filler, fabric, acrylic paint on wood panel, 60 x 48 inches. Not A Ghost Town, 2020,

Robert Schirmer’s novel Barrow’s Point won the Gival Press Novel Award and was a finalist for a Foreword INDIES Book Award. He’s also published a collection of short stories titled Living with Strangers (NYU Press), winner of the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. His stories have appeared in a wide range of literary journals such as Glimmer Train, The Sewanee Review, Epoch, New England Review, Fiction, Byliner, Confrontation, Joyland, and The Best of Witness. Over the years he’s won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Walter E. Dakin fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship from The Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project. His screenplays have been optioned by Amblin Entertainment and Warner Brothers. He’s also been a Visiting Writer at the Southwest Writers Series and at Stetson University as part of the Tim Sullivan Endowment for Writing.