Haptic Visions and Ambient Identity: DB Amorin Working in the Wake of the Glitch

Episode 3 (S2): #CareerGoals

Elena and Jay reflect on the decades-long careers of Black artists and consider what their re-emergence says about our current moment and for the future.

Haptic Visions and Ambient Identity: DB Amorin Working in the Wake of the Glitch

DB Amorin explores a queer Native "ambient identity" through video installations that include the geographic, the cognitive, and the historic. 

Sappho’s Body is Leaking: Sacred Enclosures of Queer Desire

From the performance-art practice of Hope Mohr Dance to the Sapphic brilliance of Juliana Huxtable’s poetry and soundscapes, sacred enclosures of queer desire abound.

Stranger Visions: Questioning Tech’s Ethics in a DNA Boom

For her work Stranger Visions, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected genetic traces left on New York streets. Like the shed DNA, internet data collection leaves a trail through which to trace our digital lives.

Episode 35: Nancy Hom

Weston talks with artist, curator, and cultural organizer Nancy Hom, who has served as an anchor and mentor in the Asian American artistic community, creating platforms to support artists, bring together people, and advance social justice work.

Cybele Lyle: Lured to the Local

Cybele Lyle renegotiates her relationship to the rapidly changing landscape of her childhood home: “I feel like I'm seeing a place I've known forever for the first time.”

Cliff Hengst & Scott Hewicker

"I keep thinking of Prue Leith from the Great British Baking Show (one of the few things these days that calms my rising anxiety) when she says knowingly to the contestants, 'It has got to be worth the calories.' I’m sure there’s a metaphor for art school in there somewhere."

Learning from Ad Minoliti’s Experimental Feminist Heterotopic Fantasy

The Feminist School of Painting is a solo exhibition by the Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti, but it is also an experiment and a “performance that begins with open questions.”

Xiaojing Yan and Wen-Li Chen: Between Worlds

Episode 1: Sound as Sculpture

In the first episode of PRNT SCRN, Dorothy explores the history and convergence of analog and digital technologies in the production of experimental sound.

Utopian Visions with Srijon Chowdhury

The Utopian Visions Art Fair in Portland, OR proposes an optimistic alternative to traditional models.

Fold, Staple, Embrace: The Body Alive in the Archive

Photographic objects and the subjects within them degrade over time, particularly when discarded through the sieve of archival practices. Do possibilities exist for the body to further live through the photograph? Can photographic objects invoke life over death?

Magnetic Fields

The Bay Area may be losing some of its soul, but there’s a tenacious spirit here that cannot be eradicated. Ultimately, things boil down to our sense of truth and empathy.

Episode 2, (S2): Deep In My Feelings

On this episode, Jay and Elena visit Bay Area Now 8, the YBCA triennial exhibition, and talk about faves and feelings.

Episode 34: Dinh Q. Lê

In this (un)making episode, Weston talks with Ho Chi Minh City-based artist, curator, and cultural organizer Dinh Q. Lê.

Between Ocean and Sky: Jerome Reyes’s Abeyance (Draves y Robles y Vargas)

Comprised of quotes from three notable Bay Area Filipino Americans, Jerome Reyes’s Abeyance compels viewers to think about immigration, history, mothers and mother tongues, and the city.

Medusa’s Last Laugh: An Interview with Bri Williams

Bri Williams often sources objects from antique malls, second-hand stores, or simply from the street: materials that were once possessed by someone or something else—and perhaps still are. 

Autumn Knight’s Sanity TV

Autumn Knight's Sanity TV is a performative talk show negotiating the complex socio-policital dynamics of its audience.

Going Outside at NanHai Art: The Solitary Landscapes of He Kunlin and Tong Yi Xin

Going Outside showcases the work of China-born, US-based artists He Kunlin and Tong Yi Xin. The exhibition addresses an ongoing negotiation of masculinity in the contemporary era.

Episode 1, (S2): Let’s Do A Check-In

Elena and Jay catch up from summer break and unpack the meaning of “back-to-school” by thinking about the benefit and necessity of alternative schooling models.

Episode 33: Jesus Barraza

In this episode, Weston Teruya is in conversation with artist and educator, Jesus Barraza, whose work draws on a long and complex history of print, mural, and socially engaged practices within Indigenous and Xicanx communities.

Apex at Portland Art Museum: The Gridded Architecture of Avantika Bawa

Apex at the Portland Art Museum takes the iconic Veterans Memorial Coliseum as its subject and explores the power of repetitive image making and observational variance in its production.

Support Structures

What does the migration of people in creative fields away from the Bay Area mean for those who stay? What is needed to survive here?

Chitra Ganesh & Sung Hwan Kim

"There are structural affinities between preservation of American race and American art."

Episode 5: summer fucking mason, Jamal Batts, and Malika Ra Imhotep

In this final episode, Jamal Batts and Malika Ra Imhotep, sit down with LA-born filmmaker summer fucking mason, to discuss their immersive installation and short essay film Gemini.

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 3 of 3)

"For law to positively affirm ownership to an individual or group, it must simultaneously negate and vacate the claims of others as we’ve discussed throughout our letters."

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 2 of 3)

"Place is irreparably altered by markings in time; through action, place becomes something new entirely."

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 1 of 3)

"How do we repair the rifts within the self, between culture and civics, between human and nature?"

Episode 4: Tamara Porras, Emily Kuhlmann, & Soleil Summer

In this episode, Tamara Suarez Porras sits down for an interview with Museum of the African Diaspora's curatorial team, Emily Kuhlmann and Soleil Summer. 

Episode 8: Bittersweet End Notes

This episode is the season finale of what are you looking at?, and our hosts Jay and Elena reflect on the bittersweet feelings of all different sorts of endings.

Episode 32: Barnali Ghosh & Anirvan Chatterjee

The Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour guides people across downtown Berkeley as they share stories that explore the multigenerational and intersectional work of South Asian Americans in the region.

Episode 31: Erick Arguello, Rachel Lastimosa, & Tommy Wong

Keeping Our Space: Organizing Cultural Districts in the Bay Area, was recorded live at the Bayanihan Community Center in the heart of SOMA Pilipinas in early April as the final event in Art Practical’s Process + Practice + Progress series.

Gagged: An Interview with Marcel Alcalá

To face the precarity of our present day and the psychic freight it offloads onto queer, POC, and undocumented people, Marcel Alcalá stages critiques that are in turn humorous and no-bullshit.

Secrets and Other Superheroes

In superhero films, the secret lives of the protagonists are self-protective, ensuring their security within the civilian world. While the secrecy of identities and societies can fortify resistance, it also suggests an absence, one that has parallels to the lack of representation produced by socioeconomic and racial inequality and political oppression.

Indira Allegra’s Grieving Technologies

Grief’s complexity is at the center of much of Indira Allegra’s work, which explores the intersections of loss, disability, and Black feminine physicality. 

Children of Children

In the exhibition Children of the Children of the Revolution at Stockholm’s Färgfabriken, five artists reckon with the legacies of their revolutionary upbringings.

Episode 7: MFA or Nah

Jay and Elena reflect on their post-grad experiences and give some tricks and tips that have helped them survive it (so far).

Episode 3: Andrew Wilson with Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción

Artist Andrew Wilson sits down with Curator and Educator Angel Rafael Concepcion Vazquez to discuss his affinity for fashion and honoring the ephemeral objects that acknowledge the histories of of Black bodies in America.

Episode 30: Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux explores concepts of absolution, redemption, and the participation of audiences and institutions in exploitative systems.

The Ghost of Geys: Art as Artifice at Yale Union

Jef Geys, the artist’s posthumous exhibition currently on view at Yale Union (YU), is a compilation of works that conceptually teeter between the liminal authorships of artist and curator, creative freedom and institutional limitations. 

Bree Lamb

Bree Lamb produces sweet and sugary photographs that complicate partnerships and familiar relations while also instigating a hint of nostalgia for anyone who was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s.

Mythmaking in and through Sublime Seas at SFMOMA

The polyphony quickly reveals itself to be a major source of the power of John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea. Specifically, it provides a conceptual frame for greater consideration of the relationships between bodies and voices, media and environment, representations and reality.

The Performative Drawings of Dorian Katz, aka Poppers the Pony

Dorian Katz exposes forces of nature in the animal world that help to deconstruct human-held views of normative sexuality and gender. Katz’s metamorphic animals exist in the liminal spaces between species and genders, illustrating and leveraging other ways of embodiment and being.

Black Prominence: The Vision & Re-vision of Art and Leadership

Black Prominence: The Vision & Re-vision of Art and Leadership joins Jamillah James of ICA LA, Maria Jenson of SOMArts, and Linda Harrison of Museum of the African Diaspora, moderated by independent curator Essence Harden.

Letter from the Executive Director

Equity flows from the top down, not muscled from the bottom up by those who also happen to be the focus of said diversity initiatives. These voices should determine outcomes, be held accountable, and be given credit for successes, and failures—not just be leveraged for institutional equity strategies.

Episode 29: Imani Jacqueline Brown

New Orleans-based artist, writer, and cultural organizer, Imani Jacqueline Brown, very carefully examines the underlying financial systems that destabilize and shape our lives, whether it be fossil fuel money, predatory development, student debt, or wealthy investment portfolios.

Collapse: Dewey Crumpler’s Alpha and Omega

Collapse marks a new phase in Dewey Crumpler's prolific career while serving as a reconfirmation of his deep commitments to art, visual sovereignty, and abstraction.

Black Feminist Insurgence

Anna Martine Whitehead, whose work engages with experimental spatial and temporal dimensions that can visualize Black queer relationships to these virtualities, investigates architectures of containment and resistance through an exchange of meditative gestures and lecture. 

Ceci n’est pas un mot: It’s Word Art

In the visual hothouse of the gallery, word art—particularly the word art of artists whose language fosters ambiguity—faces enormous challenges. Can an artwork’s visual and verbal impacts co-exist and survive each other's force? 

Interview with Takeshi Moro (tmoro projects)

When artist Takeshi Moro was offered a teaching position at Santa Clara University in 2013, he decided to open up a non-profit art space, tmoro projects, in his garage right across from campus.

Episode 6: No More Pickle Juice

Jay and Elena chat it up with Bay Area-bae Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle about her solo exhibition The Retrieval at SFAC Galleries and ask how she fights against her own erasure and finds solace in humor.

Episode 28: Chinatown Art Brigade

Chinatown Art Brigade creates public platforms through which neighborhood residents can tell their stories, articulate their demands, and assert their presence in a rapidly gentrifying area.

A Moment of Respite: Looking Back at PST: LA/LA…

Irina Contreras examines performances from PST: LA/LA that share "an interest in the physicality of the pause, recline, or moment of respite" to reveal how "contemporary Latinx artists are considering and acting alongside the current political moment."

The Tactical Utopianism of Sondra Perry

In simultaneous exhibitions in Seattle and Portland, Sondra Perry addresses exploitation, ownership, and the commodification of racialized bodies.

Episode 2: Cheryl Derricotte and Angela Hennessy

Cheryl Derricotte sits down with Angela Hennessy to discuss her exhibition at MoAD and how her creative process lives under the “tyranny of title,” as a phrase will get stuck in her head, compelling her to research and create the ensuing art.

Episode 27: Sarah Biscarra Dilley

Sarah Biscarra Dilley discusses maps as myth and legislation as literature to be interrogated, her research into the stories embedded in her yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash familial lands, and role of intuitive image making in her practice.

Paula Wilson: Floored at Williamson Knight

Paula Wilson elevates her own historical narrative and experience of body, introducing an alternative to the traditional imagery found in those institutions.

Fantasies and Fascinations: Social Photography at Grapefruits Art Space

Fantasies in Parallel, curated by Jess Garten and hosted at Grapefruits Art Space, is a group show of thirteen female and gender nonbinary-identifying Portland photographers.

Alien Agents

In popular culture, science-fiction films express the US's paranoia of immigrants and hybrid identities as alien agents. Tseng Kwong Chi and ADÁL create counter-narratives that challenge traditional science-fiction tropes that vilify the Other.

Decolonial Strategies: Anuradha Vikram, Michelle Dizon, and Việt Lê

"Decolonial Strategies" joins Anuradha Vikram, Michelle Dizon, and Việt Lê as they discuss the framework that art operates within, and potential strategies that artists, curators, and cultural workers alike can take to decolonize that framework.

Episode 5: Meh at Sports

In the spirit of March Madness, Elena and Jay tackle the relationship between art and sports culture.

Episode 26: Tyese Wortham

Tyese Wortham breaks down how CAST approaches their work and the nuances of Oakland’s cultural ecology—including hopeful examples of people self-organizing resources to hold onto their spaces.

Curatorial Privilege

The current institutional vogue for Harald Szeemann seems to embrace his visionary aesthetic—but not his vision for championing an art that was evolving, groundbreaking, and new, at the expense of institutional priorities. 

Interview with Artemisa Clark

"I think a lot about how you carry trauma and culture. How do we embody it and how do we learn it?" 

Round

"A sonic assertion this large requires a degree of submission or sublimation, reframing dissonance—which always feels like a kind of threat—as sublime." On Chris Duncan's 12 Symbols, Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet, and Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors.

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Adrienne Tarver’s seductive jungle landscapes blur the lines between looking and voyeurism.

Episode 1: Jacqueline Francis and Ebitenyefa Baralaye

Sculptor and designer Ebitenyefa Baralaye reveals to art historian Jacqueline Francis details about his relationship to clay as a material taking the form of obstruction.

Dan Bustillo & Gelare Khoshgozaran

"I think I need to walk into the simulacrum of a so-called Middle Eastern town at a US military training center and see how at home I really feel."

Episode 25: Vero Majano

Vero Majano’s work explores the cultural history of San Francisco’s Mission District, creating spaces to assert and remember the queer and Latinx communities that shape one of the city’s most iconic but highly contested neighborhoods.

How the Dirty New Media Movement Informed the First Virtual Art Galleries

Dirty New Media (DNM) is the inconformable art of disobeying software, and artists using DNM push against normative coding languages to see what will happen and to see how "dirty"—which for DNM implies both the terra firma as well as online pornography-raw or muddled their design can get.

It’s Elemental: Reclaiming and Redefining Space

The inaugural art exhibition of Ori Gallery launches the vision of a space that recontextualizes and elevates the artistic narrative of trans and queer creatives of color.

Bit Torrent: The Work of Cynthia Hooper

Cultivated Ecologies uses videos, maps, and graphics to chart the epically scaled works of 20th-century engineering that reconfigured California’s waterways, and upended the state’s ecological balance in the process. 

Astrid Kaemmerling

Walking artist Astrid Kaemmerling analyzes the manifold roles artists have played in gentrification processes beyond being its agent or victim.

An Empty Identifier: In Criticism of “Asian American” as Curatorial Construct

Sarah Hwang considers how Portland-based artists Ivy Lin, Samantha Wall, and Takahiro Yamamoto navigate the complexity of their identity through art.

Episode 4: Black Hoooooles

It’s Black History Month and what could be Blacker than black holes? 

Episode 24: Trisha Lagaso Goldberg

Trisha Lagaso Goldberg creates platforms to support artists in Hawaiʻi through exhibitions, programming, and her work as the Public Art Project Manager for the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture & the Arts.

The Propeller Group: We Are Restless, But We Will Not Rest (Even After Death)

The Propeller Group has interrogated and intentionally disrupted the space between what is defined as the Global North and the Global South, global commerce and global culture, communism and capitalism, and fine art and popular media.

Whose Place, Whose Space?: Extraterrestrial Stakes

Frances Bodomo and Larissa Sansour create poetic and fantastical extraterrestrial missions as alternative narratives to existing space programs, in order to explore, respectively, the tenuousness of Zambian and Palestinian national identity.

Laurie Anderson

Emily K. Holmes chats with Laurie Anderson about her deep concern for the current political moment, as well as the narratives and themes that infuse Anderson’s broad-sweeping creative practice.

Ben Kinmont: On Becoming Something Else

Ben Kinmont's antiquarian bookselling business is also an ongoing sculpture titled Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing).

Edgar Arceneaux: Playing in the Black Hole

Edgar Arceneaux’s practice treats reality as diverse and time as multitudinous.

Interview with Aaron Wong and Don Felix Cervantes

Aaron Wong and Don Felix Cervantes founded the artist-in-residence program TRADES as a means of fostering wider appreciation for O‘ahu’s vibrant but underappreciated and geographically remote contemporary art scene.

Rupert García

In Rupert García’s work, one sees the military-industrial complex, feels the patriotism, and hears the lies the government told.

Episode 3: What’s the deal with California?

Is the West Coast the Best Coast? Our two hosts consider collectives, competition, and compassion within the Bay Area art scene.

“The Unbearable Whiteness of Whiteness”

The unbearable whiteness of whiteness has been worked into an exhibition reconstructing color.

Tannaz Farsi’s Agents of Dispersal

Flowers are as gorgeous as they are cliché, and the artist is as suspicious as she is seduced by that which is popular and easy to love.

Three Movements through Klea McKenna’s Witness Mark

Witness Mark provides an evocative depiction of ritual, the objects of its acts, and the artifacts of its occurrence.

The Radicality of Women

Sexual harassment and assault in the art world have always been elements of the soft-power domination that global-capitalist culture enacts.

Light and Space in the Prison-State

Adjacent to the redeveloped neighborhood of Bunker Hill with its own history of displaced communities, the First Street Courthouse is anything but neutral.

Episode 2: Let it scroll, Let it scroll, Let it scroll

In this holiday episode of what are you looking at?, our hosts grapple with the constant stream of images and information clogging their overly-congested newsfeeds. 

Episode 23: Taraneh Hemami

Taraneh Hemami builds platforms for artists and activists to gather, find ways to address past traumas, create work, and weave together a collective institutional memory. 

Episode 22: Wei Leng Tay & Michelle Wong

Singaporean artist Wei Leng Tay and Hong Kong-based researcher Michelle Wong talk brought together a group of artists to explore public space, visuality, and post-Umbrella Movement.

Episode 21: Edra Soto

I’m using craft as a vehicle to create this social connection. And to provide awareness, educate, and also put these objects that I collected in other people’s hands.

A Different Kind of Treehouse: Máximo González’s The Collector

It’s hard to imagine a world without us, and yet an empty house and the image of dead, decaying trees convey those ideas. 

Don’t Look the Other Way: Escuela de Arte Útil

Arte Útil designates an art that overcomes the aesthetic role posited by modernism, and operates as a tool for social, political, and cultural change.

Jel Martinez

Jel Martinez re-creates graffiti-laden street walls in his large paintings, using a process that questions and reenacts acts of erasure.

Episode 1: Rooting For Everybody Black

what are you looking at? relaunches with Elena Gross, who is now permanently joined by artist and selfie-queen Jay Katelansky as co-host!

Whose “Again”? Reconciling Historical Erasures through Futurist Narratives

How, as Americans and as a global community, do we construct our pasts, presents, and futures?

Interview with Aria Dean

Aria Dean’s recent work has taken the form of material and textual articulations of a reality particular to the ontology of Blackness. 

Flouting the Work History

"...it suits me better to not live my life worrying about the steps I have to take in order to get to the end. You don’t really know where your life is going to go or how long you’re going to live."

Interview with Allie Hankins and Rachael Dichter

"...what I value most is the mutual care and interest, the friction, the compromises, the unexpected influences of working alongside another person."

Episode 20: Kim Anno

Weston Teruya talks with Kim Anno about about restorative justice, the ethics and process of building trust, the role of sports as a visual language, and building legislation to support artists in the city of Berkeley.

Kaori Yamashita

This rock is exceptional, if only for the fact that it is covered in white slivers of hair.

the once and future California, a utopic island of the imagination

In Rubbi's work, the spectator and participant are actively engaged in the recreation of something that they may know about, but have yet to really understand through their own experiences. 

Judy Darragh: FOIL

More than a political pun, Darragh’s work provides a nonjudgmental platform to brainstorm unconventional solutions.

Interview with Ellie Dicola

There are three common threads I see going through all of my work: gender and my perception of femininity, experiences of sexuality as they relate to trauma, and mental-health issues, which are linked in a cause-and-effect cycle with the trauma.

Interview with C. Davida Ingram

"I’m committed to having spaces to think about the conditions Black people and people of color are living in and what might produce our freedom—spaces for communion, dancing, good music—all the conversational prerequisites for creativity."

Episode 19: Kimberly Drew

“I like the idea that you can build more of an artillery of images and things that you have to base your own taste levels off of.”

Royce Allen Hobbs

For some, the need to remain concealed is a mode of both survival and self-preservation.

Being an Artist in a Small City

In a small city, if you want stuff to happen, you have to organize it.

The Big Lie

What does this initiative do to rectify decades of disempowerment of Latin American and Latinx people in Los Angeles?

Looking at Sound, Listening to Sight

"Soundtracks" materializes as a master class in listening, deviating from, if not rejecting, the implicit precept that museum art is visual.

Interview with Tom Marioni

I keep doing different things because I don’t like to repeat myself, but at the same time, I’m doomed to repeat myself because it’s what most people know me for—that one work from 1970.

Prompts for Inclusion: FAQ

Are you working to strip away bias and to foster greater inclusion, wherever you can?

Episode 18: Brett Cook

Brett Cook and Weston Teruya talk about creating skillful outcomes, bringing people into relationship with one another, and creating a culture of assessment and reflection. 

Episode 17: Gabby Miller

I am interested in utopias, but a utopia where everyone actually is there. And can actually be there. And that means not erasing history.