The NewCrits Podcast

Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Vijay Masharani for a conversation that begins with a confession about hating the highway and expands into an exploration of cliché, mortality, and what it means to keep making work from inside an unresolved illness.Masharani, who showed in this year's MoMA PS1 Greater New York, talks about his approach to video and drawing — work that hits hard and fast, straight down the middle, refusing easy resolution — and traces how his practice shifted after being diagnosed with blood cancer twice, including a hospital stay where he was ordering drawing paper from Blick's website on bedrest. He and Kurian dig into cliché as a kind of sedimented truth, Drake's theory of what makes a pop hit work, and why Philip Guston's relationship to mortality and mass has become a constant reference point for him.Throughout the conversation, Masharani resists the idea that his illness is a resolved, past-tense event — describing himself instead as living in a kind of purgatory, mediated by a monthly blood test that's essentially binary — and reflects on impatience, discipline, and why, even at his lowest, he never stopped being an artist. Timestamps 00:00 — “I hate the highway”02:47 — Cliché and immediacy04:53 — The deer in the green tank10:55 — Greater New York at MoMA PS113:01 — Cancer and recurrence14:25 — Art after cancer21:42 — A game of taste24:16 — Art and politics32:26 — The “stove toucher” tendency36:29 — Making exhibitions41:03 — Exhibitions as albums46:32 — Drake and the imperfect pop hit49:01 — Returning to art after cancer53:23 — Why keep making art?57:32 — Philip Guston and mortality01:00:54 — Soutine, painting, and mass01:03:01 — Living in purgatory01:05:27 — Modernism and illness Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on the highway. Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this. Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on there. I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway. Ajay Kurian: Really? Vijay Masharani: I hate the highway, dude. I think the highway is wrong. I think it’s American thanatophilia, as an urban spatial form. I hate the highway. Ajay Kurian: Vijay Masharani is an artist, writer, and educator based in the Bay Area. He makes drawings, videos, and texts that are obsessed with the letter, the glyph, the geometry of meaning. Work that hits you hard and fast and then refuses to let you go. His videos open cold. His drawings span from the highly structured to the loose and associative, and the whole practice is organized around a single conviction: if the problems of language make you uncomfortable, you can’t flee to the body. And if the body makes you uncomfortable, you can’t just retreat above the neck. He’s currently showing at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, a survey of the New York art scene that happens once every five years, which is the most eyes he’s ever had on his work. I’ve known Vijay since he was in undergrad. My first visit with him was back in 2016 at MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since then, we’ve gotten closer, collaborated on projects, and even spent a summer together at Skowhegan, where I was faculty and he was a participant. Not long after, he was diagnosed with blood cancer. Then diagnosed again. He’s made three shows since. We talked about what it means to make art from purgatory — not after a near-death experience, but inside one, where the blood test every month is essentially binary and the book is not yet closed. We talked about cliché as a sedimented truth, about why Drake said there has to be something wrong with a pop hit, about what Philip Guston understood that most painters don’t. And we talked about what changed in the studio after cancer and what stayed the same, and about why, in the end, he couldn’t stop making things even when he had every reason to. This dude was literally ordering paper from Blick on his hospital bed. Here is my conversation with Vijay Masharani. Vijay Masharani: I like clichés. I like so many clichés and I like stuff that’s right down the middle. I think in art there’s a bias toward the oblique, and every now and then it can feel really good to go down the middle. To me, that’s what a cliché can do. I think if people have responded to the work, for example, — especially the video work from early on — it’s because there’s something about the standard for video art, the way it stands apart from, or at one point stood apart from, though maybe still does from the more oblique or highly mediated kind of thing. I think the work for me was, hopefully, pretty visually forward and kind of frontal, but then not immediately digestible. That combination. Ajay Kurian: So what you’re saying is the video form in early video art may come off as a little esoteric or oblique to people used to watching TV and films, but your work goes more down the middle — there’s something more immediately explosive, something that can just hit and grab. There’s a hook and then there’s something to unravel the hook. Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I like hitting ‘em… I know that sounds stupid, like sports. I actually listen to a lot of NBA podcasts and they’ve definitely changed my syntax a little bit — but I talk about art with it, which is very true. I like to hit them hard and fast, but not in a way where it’s over after that. Ajay Kurian: Right. It’s not like that provides resolution. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: It’s just one method among many. Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. It makes you turn your head, but then you kind of stick with it, like, “Oh wait, what?” Maybe it’d be good to put something concrete to it. In the second video I have on view in this trilogy at PS1 — the green tank with the deer in it — Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it’s very Twin Peaks. On a formal level, looking at a giant rectangle of neon green, and then noticing a deer somewhere in it, and realizing, okay, this is an aquarium. That piece is one of those moments that’s extremely satisfying to look at. It’s mesmerizing. You fall into a place that doesn’t feel resolved, but it also feels like it gives you enough to enjoy it. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it’s the opening shot of the piece — we’re already in it,there’s no ramp-up to that. Now, I’m like, do I do this with water Pokémon now? Ajay Kurian: What? Vijay Masharani: Because the other one opens with a crab. Ajay Kurian: Oh, got you. A singing crab, yeah. Vijay Masharani: A singing crab. A deer that can breathe underwater, whatever. There’s something about starting with water, and to me — I think I’m using the term wrong, but mentally I call it a cold open, because a cold open is when you’re just dropped into something. So you can see how I’m using different terms to describe the same kind of deployment of immediacy. When I say “straight down the middle” or “frontal” or “drop in,” I’m referring to the same kind of move in art with different words. Ajay Kurian: And it always evolves. In terms of 3D animation and scoring, it seems like you’re a little more resistant to using pop music, or the quintessential rap song of the moment as a quick identifier — like, “oh shit, we’re here.” Vijay Masharani: Yeah, totally. It’s really tempting. Early on I think that was what felt interesting about video — the infinitely recombinable game of music and visual media. There’s still a fair amount of that in the workflow — for example, while I’m editing in Premiere, whatever’s on is just on. At least two of the songs in the new video, which is called O-----K — with five em dashes between the letters O and K, I can talk about the reason for that in a second — but two out of the three songs I kept as samples just happened to play while I was listening to NTS. One was a song I already knew, Young Thug’s “Love Me.” The other is by, I think, an indie rocker named Clarence Clarity has a song called “Cancer in the Water.” That’s another good way to demonstrate the straight-down-the-middle thing. I was trying to figure out what to put over the driving sequence with me and my dad, where I’m wearing the mask with the spinning element. Everything felt like it was trying too hard to evoke some sort of unconvincingly poetic juxtaposition between sound and image. I liked the visual so much, and then this song came on the radio and I was like, “that’s the one.” I guess it’s like this bedroom indie-pop thing but with a lot of weird producer flourishes — honestly, in a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy kind of way. So much maximalist production fluorishes. It feels super 2010 in that way. It’s not a very tasteful song, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it sounds like pop-baroque. Vijay Masharani: Yeah, a little pop-baroque, but really good. And the lyrics are like, “Fuck it up, put cancer in the water, put cancer in me.” Ajay Kurian: Jesus. Vijay Masharani: I was like, right, that’s perfect. Because in a way, it was too cute and metaphorical when there was a lyric with more interpretation that could tie back to what I wanted to talk about — but no, let’s just go for the most obvious, relevant, bluntest thing. Cancer in the water, cancer in me, period. Poison everywhere. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Vijay Masharani: Like, word. You know what I mean? Hopefully that illustrates what I’m talking about. Ajay Kurian: I really wanted to catch you in this particular moment because, for one, I haven’t seen you in two years. And two, you’ve been included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, the survey show that happens every five years. This is 2026 — I was in it in 2015. It’s a really fun show to be in, an exciting, super generative moment. I’d say this is easily going to be the most eyes on your work that I could think of, for now. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Zurich was cool. But the nature of the eyes is different. Ajay Kurian: Yeah — like at a Kunsthalle in Zurich, there’s definitely traffic and definitely plenty of people, it’s not some rinky-dink thing, but it’s just different. Vijay Masharani: It’s different. Ajay Kurian: There’s not a massive amount of tourists going through, whereas this is people from all over, just chilling, because MoMA PS1 is a thing to do. Vijay Masharani: One hundred percent. It’s cool. Ajay Kurian: You’ve been at this for a minute. We’ve known each other since you were an undergrad. Vijay Masharani: I think a decade now, ten years now — probably first studio visit in 2016, around this time, honestly probably spring. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, there’s a lot of nice feelings I have about this weather that I was just realizing today. But in that decade, I’ve seen you change so much — grow as an artist and as a person, come to terms with what making art means for you, what being in this art world means for you — and then having to deal with real-life shit, your whole life taking a turn toward something that could have been catastrophic. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I envy people who had leukemia once. I go on Reddit, and people are on there with their first leukemia diagnosis, and I’m like, they have it easy. Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ. Vijay Masharani: That’s just how far I am from being a healthy person. I’m like, “You lucky duck, you only had it once.” Because I had it twice. The second one is way crazier. Ajay Kurian: Really? Vijay Masharani: A second cancer diagnosis is way crazier than one, because with modern medicine, you get cancer and people are like, “Okay, it’s probably going to be this harrowing experience, but then you’ll be okay.” And then you get it a second time and you’re like, oh, fuck — because everyone knows you can’t just keep getting it. Ajay Kurian: * Laughs* Vijay Masharani: Eventually you have to put it away for good, you know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I remember telling my dad you got it again, and the look on his face was not heartening in the slightest. I was like, damn, you didn’t even try to make me feel good about this. Vijay Masharani: You don’t get to. You can’t just keep getting it. At a certain point you’ve got to kill every single cell. Ajay Kurian: This is a cliché to ask, but — how did it change your outlook on what it is that you make and how you make it? Vijay Masharani: I think it’s so total that, in a sense, everything we’re talking about is an answer to that question. It’s your life. The way I’m speaking, even about being direct, being straight down the middle — if there’s one thing being discussed in an encoded way, it’s an answer to that question, because pretty much all the language I use to describe my work is post-cancer. It’s stuff I’ve written and thought through. But to say something new and still try to answer it — I’d say, and people have asked me this, and I’ll quote my own interview: art problems aren’t problems. I don’t know, I’ve got real problems now so art became a lot of other things. I used to be the kind of person who’d be in my studio and things felt really impossible. You’ve been a witness to things feeling really impossible for me. We did a studio visit in 2022 when I was in the studio in Fidi, and there was nothing. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, you had a desk, some paper on it, and your laptop. Vijay Masharani: And horrible vibes like depression. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, the vibes were bad. The vibes were very bad. Vijay Masharani: Dude, I got a drawing board delivered in a piece of cardboard from Amazon, and it was in the corner of the studio. After you left, I didn’t take out the recycling — I just left it there, and it became like my pad, that I would lie down on, because I just would not do anything. I’d just lie down on a piece of cardboard on the floor. *Laughs* I’m serious. Ajay Kurian: *Laughs* No, I believe it. Vijay Masharani: That’s where I was at, dude. There was no art happening. There was just cardboard lying around. Ajay Kurian: That’s sometimes, I guess, part of the process. Vijay Masharani: It was so bad. I’m not saying that to dramatize it. Even though it is a mentally-ill orientation to melodrama, I’m not saying it to be dramatic. That’s descriptively what I was doing. Ajay Kurian: And that’s pre-cancer. Vijay Masharani: That’s pre-cancer, dude. Ajay Kurian: But in retrospect, could you even imagine a moment now where your studio would bring you to the place where you would be curled up on a piece of cardboard? Vijay Masharani: That’s why it’s so annoying. I look back on that time, when I was healthy, and I’m just like — honestly, sacko-pussy. *Laughs* Honestly, you know? I have real sympathy for… I don’t know, maybe I don’t have real sympathy for depressed people — Ajay Kurian: I catch that as depressed in the studio, with the work you are making. Vijay Masharani: In a way that it’s very self-produced. It was a “stop hitting yourself” kind of thing — you know the meme, where someone has a boot on their face, and then it pans out and the boot is on their own hand. Now I don’t do that. And it’s super easy not to now. It’s super easy to make the decision not to do that. In my opinion. Ajay Kurian: Mhm. Vijay Masharani: I don’t think you have to get cancer to make that decision. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I don’t think so either. Vijay Masharani: But I did choose to make that decision after getting cancer, for whatever reason. Ajay Kurian: Right. I think a lot of times people are in a room of their own making, and it takes a set of things, different for each person, to realize where the door is. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. It’s made me impatient, in that way — like, it is actually a decision, so can you hurry up and make it, because if you’re a drain, that’s a problem for the people around you. You know what I mean? We don’t have infinite time, you know? Ajay Kurian: I totally — Vijay Masharani: Get that. Ajay Kurian: But there are two sides of me when it comes to something like that, because there’s the pedagogue in me — Vijay Masharani: Me too. Ajay Kurian: — and I know you have that too, there’s never going to be a student who comes to you where you’re just like, “hurry the fuck up.” Vijay Masharani: Yeah, like, get over yourself. Ajay Kurian: There are nice, even critical, ways to say that so a person can actually hear it. I think we’ve both said some version of it more than once. There are people who are building with me, and I don’t like when they waste my time. And then there are people I’m trying to help build — I’ve created that situation myself, so that’s on me, and I’ll put the energy in and I’m not going to rush them towards whatever they need. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it normally doesn’t work also, if you rush people — they dig their heels in. It’s tough. I think the whole inquiry into the charisma of forms, and what you described as a mesmerizing quality in the work, might be part of that — you can’t just push someone. If there is a utility to what artists are good at: can we get people to rush toward that decision, through geometry, considered in the expanded sense? Ajay Kurian: I did this with Whitney Mallett — we played a game, it was part of one of the Whitney reviews with K8 Hardy and Sianne Ngai. Vijay Masharani: Oh yeah, I think I saw that. Ajay Kurian: A game of taste. Vijay Masharani: I don’t want to say I get embarrassed, but for taste stuff… I can try. Ajay Kurian: In that particular moment — the embarrassed ones are harder. For classes I used to bring in something that inspired me that also embarrassed me, and it used to be anime, because I grew up getting made fun of all day long for liking anime. Vijay Masharani: It’s in that category. There are things I’m embarrassed to do — every now and then I’ll pop open an incognito tab and play Pokémon Showdown. Ajay Kurian: *Laughs* You know what that is? You can doPokémon battles on the internet. Ajay Kurian: No, I mean, I understand it, but I haven’t done it. Vijay Masharani: I’m not really embarrassed about it, because I don’t do it very often. I’m just like, doesn’t everyone have some shit like that? It’s pretty mild — people are like jerking off to monkeys getting tortured. Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ. *Laughs* Vijay Masharani: I mean the president is a pedophile, you know what I mean? Like I don’t give a shit. *Laughs* It’s really fucked up, but I’m not that embarrassed compared to deviant activities going on in this great country. Ajay Kurian: Okay, so the one category I think I might still get something out of you on is: proud to dislike. Vijay Masharani: Ooh, proud to dislike. Okay. There’s so many — *Laughs* Ajay Kurian: I mean this is catnip for you. Vijay Masharani: I need to be a little more secure in certain aspects of my life before I start being completely honest about what I think about things. Ajay Kurian: Honestly, this feels really specific to the art world, and not so much other industries. Where, other industries, talking shit actually gets you something — you can monetize it. Vijay Masharani: It is actually like that in the art world too. I owe my career to talking shit about the Zabludowicz’s on Instagram. That was how I landed my first group show. Ajay Kurian: No shit! Vijay Masharani: So maybe that’s what I’ll still remain proud to dislike: the state of Israel. But in a real way, which I mean — that was 2017, when I was starting to write about the Zabludowicz boycott. Tiffany Zabludowicz had that Times Square space, and I’d just learned about the boycott through Twitter, because they were in the UK but they had a presence on Twitter. I was like, that last name sounds familiar. I’d just turned twenty-two. Clark Filio, a friend, had commented on it—he wasn’t describing it as a genocide in 2017— but he said, “this reminds me of the oppression of Palestine.” Something like that. I was like, hey man, your comment was the only one that acknowledged the boycott in the context of this exhibition. That was the first piece of writing I sent you, which a few years later turned into “The Status of BDS in Contemporary Art.” Ajay Kurian: Which is a really good piece. Vijay Masharani: It was an essay I published in Extra magazine. And then, Clark ended up putting me in my first group show because of it.

Screenwriter Ed Solomon discusses The Christophers and reflects on his career and creative process. Solomon discusses mentorship, writing intuitively, working with actors, navigating criticism, and finding a way through creative blocks. Hosted by Ajay Kurian 00:00 — Welcome to The Forum 00:18 — Garry Shandling 02:34 — Writing The Christophers 04:05 — Trusting the writing process 06:37 — When success gets in the way 08:37 — Letting the project evolve 10:08 — The four stages of competence 12:24 — Letting characters surprise you 15:04 — Writing for great actors 17:35 — Rehearsing with Ian McKellen 18:47 — The power of silence 20:19 — How scenes change each other 23:10 — The terror of letting go 25:28 — Finding the flow state 26:17 — Inspiration is bullshit 28:51 — When Lori became his mirror 34:17 — Give your characters a history 35:48 — Cultural tension in storytelling 38:08 — The pain of criticism 40:16 — How to take notes 43:34 — Managing creative emotions 46:28 — His mother’s influence 49:55 — The importance of mentorship 52:41 — Audience Q&A 52:59 — Getting through the second act 54:17 — Getting unstuck 55:00 — Working backwards 56:00 — What would be the coolest thing to happen next? 58:38 — Closing Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Three artists reflect on their experiences working as assistants to established artists. Ian Cheng, Darren Bader, and Jamian Juliano-Villani discuss apprenticeship, authorship, studio culture, and the lessons—both practical and personal—they carried into their own practices. 00:00 — Introduction02:36 — Becoming Assistants04:10 — The Studio as Education07:37 — Learning the Craft09:13 — Building the Impossible10:54 — Authorship14:54 — Power & Studio Culture18:37 — Learning Through Failure22:50 — Good & Bad Habits30:23 — Assistants as Teachers34:30 — Knowing When to Leave40:12 — Assistants & Authorship42:03 — Learning the Business45:28 — Art & Precarity47:42 — Why Do It? 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: Next to me here is Ian Chang. He’s an artist known for his live simulations, works that unfold over time using game engines and AI. His work has been shown at the Serpentine Galleries, MoMA PS1, Gladstone Gallery, and earlier in his career, he worked with Pierre Huyghe, which I think informs, uh, some of the ways that Ian had started to think about his work. But I’m curious to see what that relationship was. Pierre is an internationally renowned artist and has worked in massive ecosystems, taking over entire museum spaces and building things from bacteria to, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, going down the line. Next is Darren Bader. Darren is an artist whose work spans objects, language, and instructions, often questioning what an artwork even is or who it belongs to. He’s exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Uh, sorry, the Museum of Modern Art in Dallas and his practice consistently unsettles ideas of authorship, making him especially interesting voice here. And he worked for the artist Urs Fischer. Um, you mentioned another artist you worked. 00:01:11 Darren Bader: For, Donald Bachelor, whom, um, the late Donald Bachelor whose estate I work for now, but he’s um. Well, yeah. 00:01:19 Ajay Kurian: We’ll get there. 00:01:19 Darren Bader: I did, yes, I did my time with two artists, um, very, very educational. 00:01:25 Ajay Kurian: And last but not least, Jamie and Juliano-villani is a painter whose work moves quickly between images, cartoons, art history, and the internet, held together by a sharp, instinctive sense of composition. She’s shown with Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. And earlier in her career she worked for Dana Schutz as well as the painter Eric Parker. So, uh, that’s actually how me and Jamie met Eric. Studio and Banks’ studio were right next to each other, and we were both assisting these artists. And yeah, Damien was just like, yeah, she, she was just in a little room and we were all just working away. So everybody give it up for all these, all the artists here. All right. Who wants to go first? No. Um, what I’m curious about is, uh, in the studios that I mentioned that you all worked for, were those studios that you sought out yourself or was it just a job? Yeah. 00:02:36 Ian Cheng: Um, yeah, I was in grad school at the time at Columbia, and I was, um, had a terrible time there. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Um, I really just sat in my studio checking my email, getting no email and just, uh, just looking at the wall, waiting for the next crit to happen with nothing to say. And at the end of those two years of grad school, um, the one positive relationship I had was with, uh, Liam Gillick, who was like a kind of visiting professor. And I was like, what am I gonna do with my life? I’m gonna, I’m gonna apply as a UX designer to Google New York because I just need some totally no response rejection. And I thought, what else could I do? And I said, Liam, you know, can you hook me up with PR wigs, email? Like, I’d love to. I’ll be his dream printer. I literally pitched myself, I’ll be his dream. I can just like make anything. Um, and Liam was like, I’ll get back to you. And he gets back to me. He’s like, he used the words Pierre offers you his email, which was kind of interesting way to not like do the CC connection, but just to like, just take it from here, kid. Uh, email Pierre like pitched him like, you know, had a, had a quick meeting like, oh, I didn’t have no, had no credentials. Um, and simultaneously I thought, oh, fuck, like I need another job too. So I went to like Paul Chan’s website. Wow. Um, national philistine and just like emailed him like, hey, hi. I think like we have a lot in common. Like, can we meet? And so the next week, I met with both of them. And suddenly I had two artists kind of assistant jobs. Oh, wow. And yeah, it really kind of really began their shoot. 00:04:07 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really good taste too, you know? 00:04:09 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Those are great artists. 00:04:10 Ian Cheng: Well, how’s it go with people that you respect? I just thought like, oh, grad school is so bad. I didn’t respect anyone that came through. I should go to somewhere where I can speak a lot about this. Like, uh, it was the best school. Those two were like being effectively an apprentice and seeing how they lived life, like what they had for breakfast, what time they woke up, how they said no to people, how they protected their mornings was better school than school. 00:04:34 Ajay Kurian: Totally agree. Totally agree. Darren. Was it a job or was it a college? 00:04:39 Darren Bader: No no no no it was I mean, it was certainly a job insofar as you you lack the freedom that you, you um would prefer at many, many moment. But uh, no, it was a extraordinarily educational, especially with, with ers in particular. He is a real force of nature. Uh, and so, I mean, he’s just, he’s a presence. He, he’s. Always, he, he’s one of these people who, if you look at his work, you may say he’s phoning it in at times. There are also many, many, many times when he’s just creating very compelling work. But he’s he lives and breathes art every minute of the day. And, uh, it was just a very compelling environment to work in. Uh, it wasn’t always easy. I learned a ton. Um, much like what Ian said, you know, you learn about the routines, but it’s more about the relationships and how an artist can exercise power. I don’t mean that in any sort of, you know, um, manipulative or abusive way. Um, it’s just he, he was also very good at it. He if anyone I don’t Urs Fischer is physically also quite an imposing presence. He’s not Pierre um not or he’s he’s I mean he’s he’s he’s maybe five ten, but he’s very big. Uh, he’s very muscular. He’s covered in tattoos, deep voice, piercing gray eyes. Um, and so that’s a whole nother thing. And he makes these, this, this very fanciful at times and very tender art. So it’s a, but I learned so much just to just watching him operate. And then when he would let you in. 00:06:29 Ajay Kurian: Right. 00:06:30 Darren Bader: And he would say, hey, come over here. I want to talk about this work with you. What do you think of this? You’re like, okay, I’ll give my two cents. He’s like, oh, thank you. Fuck off. But he’s also but you know, he’s listening the entire time, right? He’s taking all this new account and he, he understands what it takes to make an artwork, which is not infrequently, uh, you know, no artwork in Ireland. It really does require a lot of hands on, you know, hands on deck and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t. 00:07:00 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, if anyone’s interested, there’s a good interview that Rick Rubin did with Urs Fischer. 00:07:06 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really? 00:07:07 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It’s long and sprawling, and, um. 00:07:12 Darren Bader: There’s some moments. 00:07:13 Ajay Kurian: Tetragrammaton. 00:07:14 Darren Bader: This is. 00:07:15 Ajay Kurian: A weird plug for another podcast. 00:07:17 Darren Bader: With Urs is also very, very bright. But he does he he’s not he. You wouldn’t know it until you meet him. And he’s extremely versatile. He’s able to jump around from topic to topic and we’ll get to that at some point perhaps. Yeah. 00:07:34 Ajay Kurian: Tell us about tell us about your time. 00:07:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember. 00:07:37 Ajay Kurian: And Eric. 00:07:38 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I, it was funny, I as a painter at the time, I never painted anything that wasn’t on a desk, so I actually just lied. I did not know how to paint at all. And I showed up and I was such a nervous wreck and he knew I did not know what the hell I was doing. And, you know, I think I got fired like twice in like a week. And then, uh, I think he felt bad for me. And then I really learned really quickly. So, um, yeah. And working for Dana too, I mean, working for painters is such a weird thing because you can’t really interrupt them when they’re doing their thing. It’s like someone like breathing or fucking or, you know, you’re like, hi, you know, you just gotta like leave them alone. Then when they’re done, you’re like, okay, maybe I can assist, you know? Um, but yeah, it was really strange. Just like, um, it’s such an intimate thing to help someone with, you know, I don’t know if, if you guys have ever seen anyone make a drawing, but can you imagine like getting in the middle of the drawing and trying to help? So I did that for people exclusively for years. So I’m just very annoying. But yeah. 00:08:42 Ajay Kurian: It was, it is very different, like the, the experience of working for a multimedia artist versus someone who has like a craft of painting is really different. And like the skill sets are really different. 00:08:55 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember I would see Ajay at work and it looked like someone just got murdered. Like he was just like, he would look so drained and exhausted and like lunch break because I don’t know what you guys were making over there. 00:09:06 Ajay Kurian: We were making a lot of things. 00:09:08 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Um, I’ve never seen anyone so stressed out from a job, honestly. No offense. 00:09:13 Ajay Kurian: Well, I was more stressed before I worked at Gladstone right before that. And that was definitely more stressful than working for, for an artist. Um, but, you know, banks is the kind of artist who, uh, when you look at it, everything looks really shiny, super fabricated, and it looks like everything has been shipped out to some faraway place to get made and then sent somewhere. We made everything in the studio. And what that meant is like, um, you know, when he didn’t know how to do something like he wanted, he wanted a wall of mirrors that broke itself. Uh, so the mirrors would just shatter. And of course he didn’t know how to do that. And so it was like, okay, well, we need to learn about hydraulics. So he just buy a shit ton of hydraulics. And then it would just be like, the studio would just be filled with oil everywhere because he didn’t know what he was doing. And then we’d start welding things together, trying to see if we can break a mirror. If you’ve ever tried to, um, you know, like with a can, like if you have a soda can, it’s really easy to crumple this way. But if you took your hand and tried to crumple the can that way, it’s very, very hard. That’s the problem with trying to break a mirror from the sides. So all of these engineering problems, things like that, that’s what we’re here to sort of figure out with him and how that process like gets started. He wanted to make things out of aluminum. And so he built a foundry. And I mean, it was totally illegal, but like we had a foundry and we were pouring metal all day long. So yeah, you might have seen me after pouring a ton of metal and just feeling like I may not have eyebrows anymore. 00:10:51 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. Yeah. 00:10:54 Ajay Kurian: But what’s, um. I mean, let’s say like, there’s walking through the doors, there’s walking through the doors and like starting your job and then there’s leaving, like, what were the, how did you feel about authorship in the middle of it? How did you feel about you contributing? Like, did peer did ers? Did they make you feel like, um, that you were all in this together or did they make you feel like, all right, well, this is what I’m doing. This is what I need done. 00:11:24 Ian Cheng: Definitely. This is what I need need to get done. Um, but with Pierre, he was so interesting working for him because he was constantly. What I respect about him is he just kept reinventing of what he was doing as an amateur. So when I started working for him, he had this idea that he really wanted to make aquariums. And it’s like not an easy thing. And not only do you want to make aquariums, he wanted them to combine like, like animals that didn’t live in the same ecosystem. Same kind of water. He just wanted to make it work. And we hired an aquarium company. And they, like there were so many moments at the aquarium company where like, you just can’t do that. And it fell on me to research how you kind of do it. And so we figured it out, figured it out, figured it out. It kind of like all the clearest memory I have was like, freeze. I think it was twenty ten. 00:12:07 Ajay Kurian: He had an art fair. For those who don’t know. 00:12:10 Ian Cheng: He had a special project there where he was gonna do an aquarium of, um, a hermit crab inside of a shell. He’s like, his shell is a Brancusi like head reproduction. So super beautiful idea, this Brancusi sculpture kind of walking amongst the the rocks. And then you see it’s this crab that’s inhabiting it. And so I had to figure out, because the aquarium people couldn’t figure out how to get this crab to live in this sculpture. And it turns out like hermit crabs, their, their, their butts are very sensitive. And that’s why they like, hide it. They’re hermits for that. Um, and we tried all these different techniques and it fell on me like, I think ten days before we just ship out where I just went like, fuck, we, I gotta go to Chinatown. I gotta buy ten conch shells, you know, conch, like these giant snails boiled them in his rice cooker. I ate them and then cleaned it out and like stuck that the idea was to stick that into the enclosure, the the the, the shell of the interior of the sculpture. So secretly it’s a real shell inside. And the hermit crabs were like, so happy. I was like, oh, I finally slept in like two weeks. Um, and so like these little puzzles were, I mean, I have strong memories of them. Um, but yeah, I mean, those are the, that’s pretty brilliant. Like not authorship level, but like engineering like this was really fun. Yeah. 00:13:24 Ajay Kurian: That’s. Yeah. Oh, I always wondered how that sculpture came together. 00:13:29 Ian Cheng: It’s pretty cool. Chinatown conch. 00:13:30 Ajay Kurian: Shells. Do you feel I mean, you said you don’t have a sense of authorship to it, but, um. 00:13:40 Ian Cheng: And I wouldn’t want it either. I mean, I felt I learned so much by being able to not have the pressure of any authorship. I could just sort of absorb by osmosis, be, you know, sometimes I would write an email and try to write it in his style and like so enjoyable, so freeing to just mimic someone. I think that’s the best way to learn. And that was for me, the best way to learn just to be this mimetic thing. And then, you know, I, I would have to go to like another memory just briefly is going to reinstall that same work a year later in Miami Basel. And it’s like the air conditioners were broken. It was like one hundred twenty degrees inside this convention center. And he wasn’t there. I was there on remote installing. 00:14:18 Ajay Kurian: Oh boy. 00:14:19 Ian Cheng: Fucking Marian Goodman, like, God bless her. She comes up to me in the middle of like, trying to put the rock here and the crab here and get everything working. She’s like, you respect that animal you respect. I do not like how you’re handling this. And you all have Pierre on the phone saying like, no, the rock has to go this way. And then Marion yelling at me for the rock kind of endangering this crab. 00:14:38 Ajay Kurian: Marion is, uh, was Pierre’s gallerist. Uh, she passed away at a hundred in. 00:14:44 Darren Bader: Late nineties. 00:14:45 Ajay Kurian: Late nineties. Okay. Um, but one of the great gallerists of of the world. Really? 00:14:50 Darren Bader: Absolutely. 00:14:51 Ajay Kurian: Um, any, any similar memories? Darren. 00:14:54 Darren Bader: No, no, it was, it was a different relationship. I mean, with your lead question. Uh, it was more of this kind of communal effort. He was he, I, I assume he still is to some extent, although he has a smaller crew now. Um, he, he nurtured this environment. He was certainly, you know, at the top of the food chain as well as, you know, it was very patriarchal, let’s say, yet it was. So he has a very he has a generous streak and he, he knows how to get people to do things and make them feel included. Mhm. Without it being this, this, this very stark line between I am the author. You are, you know, the the worker. Yeah. The subordinate, the clear subordinate, you know, And yet, of course, he was clearly the author through and through. Yet I see he does have this unique, if not unique. You know, he does have this ability, this capacity, this, this, um, you know, uh, propensity to just manage. He’s a good emotional manager. 00:16:01 Ajay Kurian: Was it almost like a like lead singer of a band kind of thing? 00:16:05 Darren Bader: Well, I mean, which band? You know. 00:16:06 Ajay Kurian: Some. 00:16:08 Darren Bader: I don’t know. I don’t I wouldn’t say that, uh, more more like, you know, Don Henley on drums. Uh, but, uh, I, I, it, it was just this unique experience. I also started later, uh, I mean, I had already done a number of art jobs and, um, basically I was looking for work as when a job would come to a close. Not just, just, it just ended. There was no understood that it was, it was, uh, finite. And I hit him up because we’d worked together, I met him when he did a show at Gavin Brown twenty two thousand and five, where I worked for Gavin part time then, and he was just approachable. We were able to talk about arthouse films and I asked him, can you want to be in the group show? The first group show I curated a show I created, and he was like, sure. Like, I had seen a piece of his in a book and he was just like, he was open to things. And so I think he appreciated my openness and invited me to be part of things. And I was there kind of at this, this, um, you know, uh, inflection point where moment where it was right as he was rising to these great heights. So I kind of got to go. He was swimming in cash because the art market was very, um, healthy then. And all the galleries he had worked with from a very young age, um, we’re doing extraordinarily well. And he was extraordinarily good at, um, making art and exhibition. So it was just this wonderful journey from he just basically took me under his wing. And it’s a very it was more personal in a way less task based. He just kind of liked having me around. And I, I could not be more, um, you know, grateful for that opportunity three, three years. And he basically and he kicked me out. He’s like, you’re doing well. You’re not focused. Get the hell out of here. I’m like, all right, I’m done. But we’re still friends. 00:18:16 Ajay Kurian: That’s good, that’s good. I’m glad it’s on good terms. 00:18:18 Speaker 5: It’s on good terms. 00:18:19 Ajay Kurian: Jamie. And for you, it’s because there is more like craft and skill. I mean, even though you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing in the beginning, you clearly learned and like that relationship over time. Did it feel like. Did it feel different? Does it feel like you were, um. 00:18:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I felt like I was growing with the people I was working for. Yeah. Which is really nice, you know, because you can just come in and then there’s like, you know, obviously everyone that you work for, you always have to placate to the maest

For nearly a decade, Marc Spiegler served as the Global Director of Art Basel, helping shape one of the world’s most influential institutions in contemporary art. Earlier this year, his New York Times opinion piece on the challenges facing commercial galleries sparked widespread conversation about the future of the art market and the pressures confronting artists, dealers, and collectors alike. In this episode, Marc reflects on his path from journalism to Art Basel, the evolution of the global art world, and the lessons he took from leading an institution at the center of it all. We discuss his recent writing, the expansion of the international market, the role of technology and AI, the economics of art fairs, and why he believes galleries need to rethink how they build relationships with collectors. Along the way, Marc shares his perspective on financialization, speculation, collecting, and what a healthier, more sustainable art ecosystem could look like. This is a conversation about leadership, markets, and how the art world can continue to evolve without losing sight of the artists at its center. Art Galleries Are Not OK , NYT Opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/art-basel-fairs-gallery-market.html?eafs_enabled=false Marc Spiegler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcspiegler/?hl=en Hosted by Ajay Kurian Produced and Edited by Peter Groppe 00:00 Introduction 04:23 Growing up around artists and becoming a journalist 08:12 The unlikely path to leading Art Basel 12:20 Leadership lessons and managing a global institution 14:08 Expanding Art Basel: Asia, digital strategy, and the future 17:05 AI, technology, and why change is inevitable 23:00 His New York Times essay and why galleries need to think differently 28:14 Financialization, speculation, and the art market 34:30 Collectors, gatekeeping, and the changing role of galleries 39:40 Resale contracts and protecting artists from speculation 44:55 Why art fairs cost so much 51:35 How galleries actually benefit from participating in fairs 52:15 Auctions, speculation, and the evolution of the secondary market 58:55 Have collectors become today’s tastemakers? 1:08:00 Museums, collectors, and building the next generation of patrons 1:15:00 Why galleries are struggling today 1:23:00 Advice for young galleries navigating the current market 1:30:00 What a healthier art ecosystem could look like 1:36:00 Closing thoughts 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: We’re living in an era of exhaustion, and artists and creators aren’t immune to this. We’re trying to figure it out, too. Welcome to spent from the new podcast. I’m your host, AJ Kurian, an artist, writer, and educator. I’ve been in the art world for nearly twenty years, shown all over the world, and taught at universities like Yale, Columbia, Parsons and Bard. The art world is a confusing and opaque place, but all of it tends to make a little more sense to me when I talk to one person at a time. Why do you think people blame you for this over financialization? 00:00:35 Marc Spiegler: I don’t know at all. I think it’s completely bogus. Like because. Because, I mean, first of all, like, like before I was running Art Basel and while I was running Art Basel, I was always against financialization. Like I’m literally was quoted in the New York Times talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach, the week of Art Basel, Miami Beach, and saying something like eighty percent of the art that’s sold next week will be worthless in twenty years. You know, and I wasn’t just talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach. I was talking about all of the twenty five fairs, but, you know, um, I was always very clear about the fact that people should buy art that they like, not buy art as an investment. You know, I mean, I had a funny thing, um, I wrote this article for the Business of Fashion column that I had last year. Um, and the title was something like we need to stop hyping art as an investment, you know, and, and, uh, Jamie Kenyon, your friend of mine wrote to me and said, I love this, this new mark unleashed. I’m like, dude, I’ve been saying this forever. You know, people are just noticing it now. But like, I was very clear about that. 00:01:39 Ajay Kurian: Mark Spiegler spent about a decade as the global director of Art Basel, which is to say for nearly ten years, he sat closer to the center of the art market’s money and power than most. He left that seat in twenty twenty two, and this past June did something he used to do in a prior life. He wrote an op ed for The New York Times, no less. Art galleries are not okay. The title alone got people talking. Many were infuriated that the man who’d spent the last ten years supposedly finalizing the art world was now saying it had gone too far. Around the same time, Pace Gallery let go of roughly fifty employees and fifty of their artists, and Marc Glimcher, the owner of pace, sat down with the times as well. Adam Lindemann, a collector and sometimes gallerist, responded with his own piece in Artnet, and journalist Barbara Pollock, among a handful of others, wrote a direct critique of Marc’s piece. We get into all of it. I first met Marc at a dinner in Basel in twenty sixteen, the year I did a solo booth with forty seven Canal. So I met him, in a sense as one of the artists inside the machine he was running. I’ll be honest about my expectations. I kind of assumed he’d be a bit of a douche. Instead, what I found was that Mark was quick and thoughtful and pretty fun to talk to, which is surprisingly rare at some of these fancy dinners. That wit can also function as a kind of armor. Mark has a beguiling matter of factness. He’ll answer you so plainly, so directly, that you can almost miss the moment he’s stepped neatly around the harder corners of a question. It’s disarming and it works. Going into this, I told myself I wouldn’t let him charm me away from pressing for an answer. I’ll let you be the judge, but I’d like to think I mostly held. We get into Mark’s past and where the art of it all started. Then we dip into the anxieties and inevitabilities of AI before getting to the meat of the conversation. Can you administer the market and still love the thing it sells for Mark? The answer is resoundingly yes. We cover his role in these machinations and how he sees things now, and what unquestioned truths need our critical scrutiny for the future, our worlds to thrive. This is spent. But Marc Spiegler isn’t. Marc, it’s great to have you. 00:04:22 Marc Spiegler: It’s great to be here. 00:04:23 Ajay Kurian: Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for sitting down with us. Um, there’s a big story to tell here, but I think I want to start out very local and very simple, which is starting with like, how did you even get into art? What I know you started as a journalist and I know that that’s like kind of maybe the. 00:04:43 Marc Spiegler: It goes further back. It does actually, it goes way back. In fact, it goes back to my birth because my mother was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the only, if not the only surrealist papercutting artist that I’ve ever heard of. Voila. See you. Look. That look was perfect. Okay, so she was trained by her grandmother in Alsace to do paper cuts, which was a very classic folkloric art form. Right? Using tiny scissors. Almost like sewing scissors. Um, so she learned those techniques. And then living in Paris in the sixties, she fell into surrealism. Um, and then she was part of a group of, of surrealists in Chicago where I grew up eventually. Um, and so she brought kind of the, the aesthetic and the thinking of surrealism into, in combination with the techniques that she had learned as a child. So. So my mother was an artist and then my best friend Ellen growing up went on to become an artist. And then my best friend in my teen years, Yoni, also went on to be an artist. So I was always surrounded by artists, you know, like I was I grew up in Chicago and then moved to upstate New York. My parents split up, and then I went to school in Philadelphia and then England, and then I ended up in New York, and I lived with Yoni, who was an artist. And so I was always surrounded by people who were going to SVA for the most part. So I was kind of in that group. And then I moved to Chicago to do graduate school, and I was hanging out with my friend Ellen, who was also an artist. And so I was always among artists. Um, but I trained as a journalist. Right. 00:06:16 Ajay Kurian: You went to graduate school for journalism? 00:06:17 Marc Spiegler: Exactly. At northwestern. And so I came out and then I was what’s called a general assignment reporter, which means you write about whatever seems interesting. Um, and, uh, I did a few kind of like art reviews, but I would never call myself an art critic. That’s a whole other thing, you know? Um, but, you know, I wrote, I wrote a big story in ninety four, um, about what was going on at the MCA Chicago. And that was noticed by people in New York, in the art press, because it was very in-depth. And I was an investigative journalist. And so I was, I wasn’t really afraid to write what I saw, which was that there were real issues between the board and the museum directorship at the time. 00:06:54 Ajay Kurian: Which I don’t think has changed very much. 00:06:56 Marc Spiegler: I’m not close enough to that situation. 00:06:58 Ajay Kurian: I’m not even saying in terms of that museum. I just oh. 00:07:00 Marc Spiegler: In general, yes, in general, that is a topic, you know, and what I wrote about was power. You know, I had a column called Power Lines, which was about media, business and politics. And I saw there was a lot of overlap with the art world, especially at the collector level, of course. Um, and then Bruce Wolmer, who at the time was the editor in chief of Art in action, which at the time was the single most important publication in terms of news in the art world, brought me in as his Chicago correspondent. And then when I moved to Switzerland for personal reasons, I continued to write for them and then started to write for lots and lots of other people. So it was basically like art was always part of my life. Like I was one of those kids that was dragged to museums by my parents. And then when I was old enough to choose, continued to go, you know. Um, but, you know, I came into the art world sort of in fits and spurts and was really like, there was this moment in the early two thousand where the other half of my business, which was writing about tech, collapsed completely in the first tech crash in two thousand and two. And so suddenly the magazines and the company I was writing for, I was writing about and writing for went out of business. And so I wrote more and more about the art world. And then in two thousand and seven, I was asked to apply for the job of director at Art Basel. 00:08:12 Ajay Kurian: Okay, wait. Hold on. How do you go from writing about journalism to being asked to apply for a position like that? It feels like there would be more steps. 00:08:24 Marc Spiegler: Uh, yes. Um, it was definitely, um, an unexpected series of events. And I definitely was not the archetypal candidate that you would have for that job. I mean, starting with the fact that I didn’t have much management experience beyond sort of, you know, editing sections and having writers working for me. Right. Um, and the fact that I didn’t really speak German properly, certainly not as well as I speak English and French and the fact that I’m not Swiss. So for all those reasons, I was an unlikely candidate, and I think I benefited from the fact that some of the likely candidates just did an interview. Well. Um, so I went through several rounds of interviews. Um, and I did have some things though, uh, I had a strong connection to America, which of course is a very important market. I think that was seen as an, as a, as a benefit. I came with a plan. I wasn’t asked, but I came with sort of a ten point plan of things that I thought Art Basel. I did an analysis of where Art Basel was at that time and things I thought it should do. 00:09:22 Ajay Kurian: Before this. You had done a business degree at Wharton. 00:09:25 Marc Spiegler: No no no no no no no no no no no, I had I that was like in twenty twenty and that was in like twenty eighteen. So I’m. 00:09:34 Ajay Kurian: Kidding. 00:09:35 Marc Spiegler: No no. 00:09:35 Ajay Kurian: No no. Okay. 00:09:37 Marc Spiegler: I have a political science degree. I have what’s called a social science degree from University of Kent, which is just like what you do if you concentrate your courses in one year. When you do a year abroad, then have a BA in Political Science from Haverford. And then I got a master’s in journalism from northwestern. Okay. I did a one week like finance for Non-finance people thing at Wharton, but I am not in any way a trained business person. I am someone who learned entirely on the job. 00:10:07 Ajay Kurian: How on earth do you learn all that on the job? Like, it just seems like such a big risk to take on somebody. I mean, you must have had a goddamn good plan. 00:10:16 Marc Spiegler: I had I had some good ideas, and also, like I was, I came into a triumvirate, you know, they they had candidates with different skills. And so they put us together into a triumvirate with a lot of complementary skills. It didn’t last long like the Roman triumvirate. It was within within nine months we were a co-directorship. But I benefited from the fact that I didn’t take over the whole job right away. You know, like I at first was responsible for the things I was closest to. Meaning uh, sponsorship, um, media and digital. And then later, when we became a co-directorship, I also took on the VIP and galleries sections, you know, but like I was, I was very much, I was still very much learning on the job, you know, like it’s, it’s weird when you go from, you know, when you’re a freelance journalist, like five hundred bucks is a lot of money to you, you know, um, when you are running a major international art fair, like you shouldn’t be thinking about any sum less than like fifty thousand bucks because that’s your, that’s your staff’s job and you’re micromanaging them. So you have to, you know, like it’s the scale at which you operate changes radically. And that was the thing I needed to learn. You know, there was a lot of learning on the job. I mean, one of the things that I learned was that when you’re in that kind of position, um, you people are constantly looking for clues as to what’s going on. So like, if you’re, you know, just a very concrete example, like my, uh, Uh, wife at the time, uh, became pregnant very, very early on in my, in, in my time at Art Basel. We hadn’t had kids, we lost a couple. And so I was nervous, excited, but also super nervous to see what was going on. And there’s like that fourteen week window. And I realized after a while that my staff was picking up on this and they thought something bad was happening because they could see me being nervous. And so I it really was a lesson in sort of what it means to be in that position where sort of all eyes are on you, especially internally, of course, externally as well. 00:12:14 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. 00:12:15 Marc Spiegler: You know. 00:12:15 Ajay Kurian: Was there again, is this a purely learning on the job? Did you have mentors? Did you have someone that I had? 00:12:21 Marc Spiegler: You know, I would say so. I had been friends with Sam Keller, who was our predecessor for many years, and had given me a lot of insight into the job because I was one of the many people he would ask for advice sometimes. Um, and he, he gave me a lot of, of lessons to live by and, you know, um, advice when I needed it. So I would say Sam was the one who really gave me the most tools. I had some other mentors, people who had been in business, you know. But I tried to learn from my own mistakes and also from other people’s mistakes, you know? 00:12:52 Ajay Kurian: So if there is a piece of advice that rings out in your head from Sam, can you recall anything that sticks out? 00:13:01 Marc Spiegler: God, there were so many. I mean, I think I think one of them was always remember that your your clients are your product. In other words, that when you run an art fair, you don’t actually own any art. You’re dependent upon your clients bringing the best art possible in essence. So it’s, you know, what you’re selling as a platform to them. You’re selling to them the access to the collectors that you can bring to the environment you can build, but you’re also dependent upon them for working, you know. So it’s a little bit different than a classical industrial process where you produce something over here and then you own that thing, and then you sell it to other people, you know. Right, right. So it’s a much more tight knit relationship, you know. 00:13:44 Ajay Kurian: And in a way, it’s like where most economies like kind of most media economies have gone, right? 00:13:50 Marc Spiegler: I mean, actually every social media company, the client is the product basically, because we, for the sake of convenience and, and affirmation, constantly feed social media companies with content, which they then sell to other people and then sell advertising off of. I mean, we’re all incredible dupes here. 00:14:08 Ajay Kurian: Um, when you got, when you started working, uh, for the fair with fair. Yeah. What did you see as like the, the path for growth? Like, what did you see were the shortcomings of the fair at that time? What did you see? The art world was at that time. And what did you dream that this could turn into? 00:14:30 Marc Spiegler: Well, I mean, it was very clear that we needed to embrace Asia. You know, at the time, you know, Art Basel had only Basel and Miami Beach. Within the ecosystem at the time, freeze had only. London. Um, yeah, that’s right, only London. Um and so the fair world was very, very Western and we felt like there was a whole group of collectors and institutions and artists that was sitting there waiting to be included, that galleries from the West wanted to go there. Um, and we just thought like, this was not the art world. It was kind of the art Western world, you know? So that was interesting to me, although I was nervous about it because I didn’t have a lot of experience with Asia. I also felt digital was really important. Um, you know, my, I always, I was very close with a lot of, a lot of my friends, my friends who are not in art tend to be in tech. You know, some of my closest friends are people who are like digital artists or, or Silicon Valley executives. You know, my, my ex-wife’s most recent job was running the digital strategy for the entire country of Switzerland. So I was always like very much crazy job. It’s a crazy job. Yeah, she’s the smart one, you know? Um, but but I mean, it’s it’s really, uh, sort of digital is something that I breathe. Like I, you know, I have all, I think that you do suspicions of surveillance capitalism and of the impact that digital has in our lives, you know, but, you know, I really believe that digital was going to happen, you know, and so I, and I inherited at Art Basel, uh, a website that no one could explain the structure of to me a, you know, a real fear of the digital, you know, and so sometimes through personal connections, sometimes because I was well advised, sometimes because people came to us, you know, we were the first fair to be on Facebook. We were the first fair to be on Twitter. We, um, we were approached by Instagram to do what are now called influencer tours, you know, where they brought a lot of people to Miami, you know, um, to post about it. Um, you know, when the pandemic came. You know, we launched the online viewing rooms, which was the result of a project we’d been working on for a long time. So I’m, I’m, you know, with all the caveats that an intelligent person has, you know, I am a technophile. And I think it’

Baseera Khan joins Ajay Kurian for a conversation that begins with a Garfield drawing contest and expands into an exploration of storytelling, identity, and the politics of material. Khan reflects on finding her artistic voice through tracing comics, navigating graduate school as a search for self rather than an entry into the art world, and developing works that blend performance, sculpture, painting, and sound. Together, they discuss Braid Rage , acoustic blankets, museums, language, surveillance, and the hidden histories embedded in everyday materials. Throughout the conversation, Khan shares how dreams, humor, intuition, and personal experience shape a practice that resists fixed definitions while examining capitalism, representation, and belonging. About the Guest Baseera Khan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, labor, material culture, and systems of power through sculpture, painting, performance, installation, and sound. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Participant Inc., and they were the winner of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist . https://baseerakhan.com/ 00:00 Intro 00:20 Garfield, Nermal & learning to draw through comics 05:20 Finding an artistic path through Cornell and self-discovery 12:20 Storytelling, language, and the influence of Michael Asher 18:50 Braid Rage , dreams, and making work without sketches 26:50 Fabric, family, and the materials of memory 29:50 The “I AM MUSLIMA” Nike project, identity, and capitalism 34:45 Performance, acoustic blankets, and surveillance 42:30 Petroleum, plastic, and giving museum objects a voice 50:50 Working with museum archives and historical collections 54:20 Reality television, identity, and staying grounded 1:00:30 Art, ambition, and closing thoughts 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian : Welcome to the forum from the new podcast. I’m your host, Ajay Kurian. The forum is a free monthly gathering in New York where artists and thinkers come together for a live conversation. Well, you’re about to hear was recorded in front of a live audience. For details on upcoming events, sign up for our newsletter at new dot studio. 00:00:19 Ajay Kurian : I was really tickled by this like, fact that I learned about Baseera literally just a few days ago, and just a few minutes ago, I had this idea. Um, so we’ll see how it goes. But basically we both got into art. Art meaning like drawing of any kind image making, um, through Garfield. And I didn’t know this until a few days ago. 00:00:47 Baseera Khan: So do you guys know who Garfield is? 00:00:50 Ajay Kurian : Yes. Okay. 00:00:52 Baseera Khan: Do you know who Nermal is? Of course you don’t. Because that was the femme cat behind Garfield. 00:01:02 Ajay Kurian : It’s true. What I wanted to see if Baseera would be down to do is if we did a little Garfield drawing contest right now. 00:01:12 Ajay Kurian : Do you guys. 00:01:13 Baseera Khan: Like that idea? 00:01:14 Ajay Kurian : Yes. 00:01:15 Baseera Khan: I haven’t thought about Garfield in a very long time. And I have to also tell you the reason why. The reason why I started drawing Garfield was not because I innately was interested in like, Garfield and drawing. It was that I was interested in the stories and the storytelling. And, um, my brother would always run to the library and rent all of the books. And he was in his phase where he didn’t want to share. I mean, he’s a very generous human. 00:01:49 Ajay Kurian : Is he older or younger? 00:01:50 Baseera Khan: Two years older. 00:01:51 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay. So it’s close. 00:01:53 Baseera Khan: He’s a generous human. You know, I know I’m being recorded. Love you. William. But at the time, he was going through a phase where he wanted everything to himself. So I would sneak the books out of his bag and I would trace them. I would trace the drawings and make my own books. And I think through tracing the books, I started creating my own version of the cat. So just my pardon. If the cat looks like other things. 00:02:24 Ajay Kurian : That’s totally fine. This is all in good fun. Um, and I also, it’s again, like, it’s just crazy to hear that that’s also how you came to it because weirdly, there’s ideas of familial surveillance. There’s ideas of like having to take a story and make it yours because it wasn’t being offered to you in the first place. There’s just like strange dynamics that feel like there’s parallels in the work itself. 00:02:52 Baseera Khan: One more thing before we start this drawing contest. Um. Garfield was a bully. 00:03:00 Ajay Kurian : This is true. 00:03:02 Baseera Khan: So I, I was interested in the narrative of how he kind of came into the room and took all his space. 00:03:10 Ajay Kurian : I never thought about it. 00:03:11 Baseera Khan: I was really interested in normal story, and I thought that I would fashion a career of what would normal do. 00:03:20 Ajay Kurian : Wow. 00:03:21 Baseera Khan: But that never happened because. 00:03:23 Ajay Kurian : My normal was the. It’s, I guess in the context of the comic, it’s like normal was the exhausting, annoying, um, cousin. I don’t know what what the relationship was, but it hearing it from like hearing it out. Like as an adult now I’m like, oh yeah. 00:03:43 Baseera Khan: Nermal was the intelligent, femme capable cat and she knew a lot and it intimidated the more rugged It kind of, you know, like boyish charm that Garfield kind of, like, took advantage of. It was patriarchy. 00:04:06 Ajay Kurian : For sure. I don’t think it was boyish. He had very much old man energy to me. 00:04:11 Baseera Khan: But sometimes I think that boys and old men are very similar. 00:04:16 Ajay Kurian : Okay, I can see that. 00:04:18 Baseera Khan: Anyway. 00:04:18 Ajay Kurian : Yeah, here we go. I can totally see that. All right. Um. No stopwatch. We’re just going to do this quick and see what comes out. All right, let’s go. I mean, I drew him like a, like a thousand times. I would say this is like a very psychedelic Cheshire I’m here for it, though. 00:05:00 Baseera Khan: I think that is the CIA. He was like, did you know? Did you really draw? Garfield, let’s do a contest. 00:05:09 Ajay Kurian : That’s that’s the. 00:05:10 Ajay Kurian : Rest of the interview. Is me just grilling you? 00:05:12 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. 00:05:15 Ajay Kurian : I want to start in all seriousness with. 00:05:19 Baseera Khan: I am an artist, I promise. 00:05:22 Ajay Kurian : She’s an amazing artist. So this is this is, I guess I’m I want to start here, but I also am curious about like this, this ten year lapse. Um, but this was your first major show in New York at participant Incorporated and, um. 00:05:37 Baseera Khan: It’s, it’s participant Inc you know, participant. I know that you like long words, but. 00:05:42 Ajay Kurian : I’m gonna get killed all night. So among other things, this is like when we first see the acoustic blankets, which we’ll talk about. This is the first time. Is this the first time where Brad Rage was performed? 00:05:56 Baseera Khan: Yes. 00:05:57 Ajay Kurian : Okay. 00:05:57 Baseera Khan: That was commissioned. Most of those works were commissioned by the by the gallery. 00:06:02 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay, cool. And how how did. I mean, how did that whole relationship start? 00:06:10 Baseera Khan: Actually was introduced to Leo through Jeffrey Gibson, who was. I was his teaching assistant at Cornell. Oh, cool. And he was doing his show, um, at that time with participant. He had just received a capital, a creative capital grant, and he was working on his solo show. And in a way, even he’s so big, you know, in our minds, but in a way, like that was one of his first shows. 00:06:37 Ajay Kurian : Right. 00:06:38 Baseera Khan: So he was like, you know, in due time, you know, I’ll introduce you to, you know, this magical person. And I was like, I’m going to jump the gun here and just go meet her. Um, so I went out to a show that she was doing. I saw Jeffrey show, introduce myself to her and brought her over to Cornell. And so we kind of started a friendship and a very cool kind of a work life relationship at that point. Mhm. 00:07:06 Ajay Kurian : Okay. So it developed over a period. And then like through those conversations, like, did she, I mean, did she get, was she in your corner from the start? 00:07:18 Baseera Khan: Leah’s in every artist’s corner. But I have to say that when I was in grad school, I had like Xerox printout cutouts of horses behinds. I, I was thinking about a fake book of like archiving, I, I refused to paint, but I was painting. It was a very, it was a very interesting time period for me. And, um, I’m, I’m just really lucky that I did it off site because Cornell is not really a place that people go to be artists. That’s my bad. 00:07:55 Ajay Kurian : It’s I mean, it’s yeah, it’s not like one of the super well-known MFA programs, but I do think it’s to me, what’s interesting about it is that like, I think a lot of people in MFA programs get a lot of attention before things are fully cooked. And I think sometimes it’s nice to just be away and like, have some time for things to, to marinate on your own time. Mhm. 00:08:18 Baseera Khan: I didn’t really necessarily know. I know this sounds like it sounds as goofy as me knowing how to draw Garfield, but I really didn’t know about Yale and about I didn’t even know what a tenure track position was when I got into Cornell. My dad on his like last days of health and wealth before he went to the cosmos. Right. He died. He was like, how did you get into Cornell? Because I was like failing out of every institutional interaction I ever had, like elementary school. I was put into a locker because they let you do that back then to discipline you. They put you in lockers. 00:09:03 Ajay Kurian : Oh my God. Wait. The administration put you in a locker? 00:09:07 Baseera Khan: Mhm. And we’ll talk about that later over drinks. Um, and then, you know, in college. Oh, gosh. Like failed out of that. I actually failed out of grad school too, but I got my I got my papers and I’m a professor. I’m a beloved professor. In fact, um, people like me, I’m very good at what I do. But what I’m trying to say is I really didn’t understand this world. Mhm. Even at my ripe age of thirty something. Mhm. When I entered into grad school, um, I was really happy that I could go to a school that I didn’t have to pay for. And in fact, they paid me a stipend because I did a tenure track or because I did a teaching assistant. Right. Um, and then I learned about myself. I, I was invested in learning from Iftikhar Dadi and Salah Hassan, who Salah Hassan started the first africana study, uh, department in the country. Wow. And Cornell is oftentimes looked upon for think tanks because it has created academia for a lot of, you know, indigenous studies, South Asian studies, queer studies. Um, it’s an incredible school. So instead of learning necessarily about contemporary art, I was trying to figure out where I fit into the world. 00:10:37 Ajay Kurian : I know notes, that’s just. 00:10:39 Baseera Khan: And then there was Leah, because I know that that was the that was supposed to explain the whole. 00:10:43 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. But it’s just so grounding. 00:10:44 Ajay Kurian : It’s so grounding to hear that like, that’s, that was the the cultivation of that journey. Like it’s a you didn’t it didn’t come from a place of like being hungry about an art world. It came from a place of just really seeing this place as a, you know, uh, almost like a temple of scholarship. 00:11:05 Baseera Khan: I mean, I wouldn’t say it was a temple of scholarship. I was very hungry about learning about me. 00:11:11 Ajay Kurian : And. 00:11:12 Baseera Khan: And not me as in Baseera Khan. But but. 00:11:15 Ajay Kurian : Where like. 00:11:16 Baseera Khan: Where am I? I know I exist, and I know there’s a ton of me out there. 00:11:19 Ajay Kurian : Mhm. 00:11:20 Baseera Khan: So where is that? 00:11:21 Ajay Kurian : So what was the first thing that really connected for you, at least in maybe let’s, let’s narrow it down to like visual culture. 00:11:29 Baseera Khan: Okay. I was going to say all the martinican writers and, and, um, you know, like I was, I was kind of going on the, like, I’m gonna be a theory militant person. 00:11:41 Ajay Kurian : Cool. 00:11:42 Baseera Khan: And I’m kind of not that anymore because I really like clothing, and I like champagne and pizza, you know, that kind of stuff. 00:11:51 Ajay Kurian : Sylvia Wynter was a dancer and a poet and, like, she was a star. So I think I think you can do both. 00:11:58 Baseera Khan: Yeah. And that’s what we’re here for. We’re trying to create these unique identities so it can be co-opted by capitalism. Um, so the question is again, please. 00:12:08 Ajay Kurian : I’ve forgotten. Um. Oh, the question was, uh, so okay, you said the martiniquan writers. So we’re talking cesaire. Um, I’m now everything’s falling out of my head. 00:12:21 Baseera Khan: Yeah. So you were asking me what was the first moment where I kind of got into the contemporary art world thinking about the visual. Like what compelled me in grad school? Actually, the thing that compelled me was Michael Asher. 00:12:37 Ajay Kurian : No kidding. 00:12:38 Baseera Khan: And that’s not visual. It’s an idea. It’s a spin. So I was really interested in the spin. So even if I’m making these beautiful paintings that like, ooh, yummy, like look at these colors, it’s the spin for me. It’s the storytelling for me. 00:12:55 Ajay Kurian : Why do you say spin? 00:12:57 Baseera Khan: Okay, so Michael Asher, I don’t even know what he looks like, but he did this project in Chicago where he his job was just to take a sculpture out from the front of the facade of, like, a museum and place it in its sort of antiquity, instead of having it represent what it means to be American. 00:13:22 Ajay Kurian : Okay, okay. 00:13:24 Baseera Khan: So so he was trying to, you know, take away a symbol that sort of it’s not oppressive. It’s just that, you know, when there’s two, when there’s two many representations of a certain kind of figure, I’m basically trying to explain like when there’s too many white dudes that are cool that that are monuments, right? Or they’re not cool and they’re monuments. That’s, there’s an oversaturation of that brand. So what he was like, let’s take this oversaturated brand of this white man and put him back into like a, a room in the museum where it belongs and give the front of the space kind of like a new look. 00:14:12 Ajay Kurian : Okay. 00:14:12 Baseera Khan: You know, something that’s more contemporary, something that that’s more like, um, the likeness of what Chicago is. 00:14:21 Ajay Kurian : But what’s interesting to me is that you’re using language that’s like couched in PR that it’s not like decontextualizing or it’s not like art historical language, it’s spin. 00:14:31 Baseera Khan: No, I’m using, um, Creole. Um, I’m using what Amy Cesaire taught me because again, like I woke up in grad school, I learned how to be a part of the art world kind of in grad school. So the most important lesson I learned is how you tell the same story. Mhm. So noticed I didn’t diss anybody. I just said there’s an oversaturation of a certain kind of brand which would be a white man. And so we want to, we want to let some love in some other kinds of different types of people in Chicago, right, that live there. So that particular project that Michael Asher did was really important to me. It wasn’t really PR talk. It was a kind of deconstruction of a English or French language, which is what Amy Cesaire was trying to do is not fight physically, but kind of like intellectualize the language itself. And I’ll give you an example in a description through cruelty, and something that Amy Cesaire would use as an example would be one version would be like, there is a mansion on the hill. There’s a mansion on the hill. Then he would say, instead of saying, there’s a mansion on the hill, you can say there are thirteen bathrooms on the hill. Does that make sense? So instead of saying there’s a mansion, there’s this legacy and this historical building that I, I should bow down to. I’m, I’m explaining something very specific, like there’s thirteen bathrooms in that structure on the hill, right? And it’s a way to just deconstruct and sort of like level out the kind of like, uh, grandeur of language. Right? Yeah. 00:16:32 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. I mean, it’s different than saying there’s like seven staircases or fourteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms. 00:16:40 Baseera Khan: Thirteen bathrooms. And what do we do in the bathroom? I mean, we realize ourselves. We look in the mirror. 00:16:48 Ajay Kurian : Wow. Wow. It keeps going. So this is okay. You’re getting to know yourself. You’re getting to understand what these different shifts in language can do for you. And I mean, in thinking about kind of that relationship of spin and this performance. I mean, the first person that came to mind for me was, uh, Matthew Barney. Um, in just in terms of thinking about kind of. So there was an earlier project of Matthew Barney’s drawing restraint, um, where setting up, uh, athletic restraints to then make a drawing was kind of the conceit, um, with oops. With this performance. There’s a whole lot of other things at play that complicate that kind of. I don’t know the the blankness of that situation. Um, for one, the cast of your body. So there’s ninety nine casts of your body that have gold chains, gold and silver chains in them, and you’re traversing them through these braids. And to me, I think one of the things that you said about this that I thought was like, just so nice and I hadn’t, um, I hadn’t really thought of it this way is that it’s a, it’s a piece about economies that masquerades as identity art. And that was really, for one, I feel like it was such a different moment. I’m curious, like, would you would you want to make something that masquerades as identity art now and what that means, but also like, how did that how did that whole process come about in terms of like thinking through this performance and thinking through like, this is this is the way I want to tell this story about these economies. 00:18:49 Baseera Khan: Um, okay. So the Matthew Barney part, um, people in their forties didn’t really grow up with the internet, um, or did not grow up with the internet. And then at some point in their twenties, they could choose to be a part of the internet, right? Mhm. Um, I was really into music and networking through the music scene in Denton, Texas. So any chance I got, I went through the portal, which would be a window in my bedroom. I’d sneak out, I’d, you know, change my clothing and I would go and see all these bands play in all these different, they call them manors because they were like, um, squatters. There’s a lot of squatting that was happening. It was pretty cool. It was very Berlin, kind of squatting. You know, they were all in school, but they were squatting homes, abandoned homes. Um, so one of the parties there was this artist who was a conceptual artist. He had just graduated, and he was on his way to New York and he was going to Columbia University. So I was like very in awe. I was like, what are all these things? What is Columbia University? And he sat me down at one of these events, one of these musical events, and he was like, do you know who Matthew Barney is? And I was like, who is that? You know, like, do you know what Printmaster is? And so he walked me through what grandmasters world was. Um, I think he had done grandmaster number one at the time. Okay. And that’s kind of how I got locked in. So there are certain artists I locked into because I was at the right place at the right time, You know, it’s like that. So in terms of the next question. 00:20:41 Ajay Kurian : Which is so you’re locking into Matthew

Erin Jane Nelson joins Ajay Kurian to talk about the gap between artistic success and creative fulfillment. They discuss the reality of making a living as an artist, navigating burnout, and why reaching long-awaited career milestones can leave you questioning what comes next.The conversation explores Nelson's evolving practice—from clay pinhole cameras and photography to spirituality, caregiving, and family history—as well as the emotional and financial realities that shape life in the studio. Along the way, they reflect on ambition, artistic purpose, and the kinds of relationships that sustain a creative life long after the accolades fade.Hosted by Ajay Kurian Edited by Peter Groppe00:00 – Erin Jane Nelson on the Whitney Biennial and making cameras from clay09:38 – Success, creative block, and the unexpected reality of becoming a full-time artist17:52 – Burnout, financial anxiety, and redefining an artistic practice23:30 – October 7th, Jewish identity, spirituality, and family history31:04 – Photography, caregiving, and finding balance beyond the studio40:06 – The economics of being an artist and why most careers aren't what they seem46:39 – Almost leaving art for law school—and the opportunity that changed everything51:41 – Ajay on ambition, loss, and rediscovering purpose through art Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Lucas Blalock’s photographs often look like they’re interrupting themselves. Objects bend out of place. Edits remain visible. Corrections become part of the image instead of disappearing behind it. Rather than using photography to create the illusion of clarity, Lucas uses it to expose the decisions, accidents, and contradictions that make images possible in the first place. In this NewCrits conversation, Lucas sits down with Ajay Kurian for a discussion about photography, discomfort, and what happens when the process becomes part of the final work. The conversation begins with a story Lucas has returned to in recent years: a childhood accident that resulted in reconstructive surgery using his own toe to replace his thumb—a collision of advanced medicine and old-world improvisation that he jokingly describes as “the first bad Photoshop.” Lucas reflects on discovering art through CD covers before museums, studying at Bard, and coming of age as digital tools began changing the medium itself. Instead of treating manipulation as something to conceal, he became interested in making it visible. Again and again, he returns to the same idea: images become more interesting when they stop trying to appear effortless. 00:00 — Intro 03:10 — The Disney Accident and “The First Bad Photoshop” 09:45 — Origin Stories and Discovering Photography 15:30 — Album Covers, Culture, and Looking Before Art 20:10 — Studying with Stephen Shore 26:00 — Photoshop as a New Problem for Photography 31:20 — Signature, Style, and Staying Strange 36:15 — Making the Worst Possible Image 41:00 — Working for Vik Muniz 46:10 — Labor, Accident, and Unfinishedness 50:20 — Pictures That Resist Digestion 54:15 — Photography, Bodies, and Sensation 58:40 — AI, Anxiety, and the Future of Images 1:03:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

SPENT: Episode Three | Whitney Mallet Whitney Mallet has spent years moving through magazines, galleries, performances, readings, and the shifting ecosystems that surround contemporary culture - not as an observer standing outside of it, but as someone committed to paying attention. In this conversation, Whitney sits down with Ajay Kurian to talk about criticism, instinct, and what it means to build a practice around curiosity. They discuss magazines as art projects, the lag between cultural change and cultural criticism, and why making connections between unlikely people, scenes, and ideas can create something more exciting than simply reinforcing what already exists. Whitney reflects on developing taste, not as something fixed or innate, but as something shaped through obsession, attention, and years of showing up. They talk about influence, authority, and the slow process of learning to trust your own perspective. Throughout the conversation, Whitney returns to a tension that runs through both criticism and creative work: the pull between analysis and instinct, busyness and reflection, skepticism and hope. What emerges isn’t a defense of optimism so much as a practice of remaining open. Believing that culture can still surprise you, that intensity is worth pursuing, and that staying curious might be one way of resisting disappointment. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits The Whitney Review of New Writing: https://www.whitneyreview.org/ 00:00 — Intro 04:50 — Running a Magazine by Instinct 09:20 — Taste, Influence, and Learning What You Like 15:10 — Building Unexpected Encounters 20:30 — Trusting Your Own Authority 27:15 — Information, Obsession, and Developing Taste 33:40 — Work as Practice 38:20 — Edging Burnout 43:45 — Busyness, Avoidance, and Personal Writing 49:30 — Disappointment, Intensity, and Staying Optimistic 55:15 — Criticism, Attention, and Cultural Delay 1:01:20 — The Internet, Institutions, and the Changing Role of Reviews 1:07:15 — Writing Without Permission 1:11:40 — Earnestness, Cynicism, and Seeing Through Things 1:16:20 — Breakthrough or Burnout 1:18:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

SPENT: Episode Two | Walter Price Walter Price’s paintings may present as loose, instinctive, and immediate, but behind them is a practice built on discipline, repetition, and consistency. In this conversation, Walter sits down with Ajay Kurian to talk about building a life around making work and what it means to remain committed to the process. Together they discuss ambition, routine, competition, and the challenge of continuing to evolve without becoming attached to outcomes. Walter reflects on making small paintings when everyone told him to scale up, embracing experimentation over certainty, and treating limitations as opportunities rather than obstacles. Again and again, he returns to the same idea: growth comes from pushing toward discomfort instead of away from it. Walter describes creativity as something active - a practice of showing up, staying curious, and refusing to get comfortable. At one point, Walter says he doesn’t want the cheers. He wants the boos. Not because he’s interested in proving people wrong, but because he understands what keeps him moving: there is always another level to reach. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits More about Walter Price: https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/walter-price 00:00 — Intro 04:15 — Growing Up 08:40 — Early Ideas About Becoming an Artist 13:25 — Consistency vs Inspiration 18:50 — Small Paintings and Ignoring Expectations 24:30 — Wanting the Boos, Not the Cheers 29:15 — Ambition, Restlessness, and Staying Hungry 34:10 — Experimentation as Practice 39:20 — Developing Taste and Trusting Instinct 44:45 — Limitations as Opportunity 49:30 — Growth Through Discomfort 55:10 — Routine, Repetition, and Showing Up 1:00:45 — Success, Satisfaction, and What Comes Next 1:06:20 — Curiosity as a Long-Term Practice 1:10:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

SPENT: Episode One | Yaya Bey Yaya Bey has built one of the most singular voices in contemporary music not by chasing consensus, but by trusting her own sense of practice. Across albums that move through R&B, house, soul, poetry, and memory, their work resists easy categorization - and she’s increasingly uninterested in trying to make it legible to people who insist on misunderstanding it. In this conversation, recorded ahead of the release of her new album Fidelity , Yaya sits down with Ajay Kurian for a wide-ranging discussion about what it means to make work on your own terms while navigating an industry that often wants to flatten artists into narratives that are easier to sell. Yaya speaks candidly about the limits of criticism, who gets positioned as the authority to interpret Black art, and what happens when audiences project meaning onto work instead of listening to what the artist is actually saying. Devotion to making music. Devotion to curiosity. Devotion to continuing even when the systems around you are exploitative, unstable, or actively discouraging. Yaya Bey talks openly about the realities of being a working musician - record deals, touring economics, budgets, labels, expectations, and the invisible labor that exists behind an artist’s public life. What emerges isn’t cynicism, but a kind of grounded determination: a belief that creativity survives because people keep making things anyway. Yaya describes hope not as optimism but as discipline: if you want to be free, you have to believe freedom is possible even when it feels impossible. Otherwise you begin believing in your own defeat. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits Yaya’s New Album, Fidelity : https://yayabey.bandcamp.com/album/fidelity Yaya’s Substack: https://substack.com/@yayabeybay?utm_source=global-search Upcoming Show Dates: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/15521055-yaya-bey?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGn-QGJBp8sdAH4IFe4bEeCmP3lrQR-VKQfb8hkYbMxaEaXsUZ1vfEY29Xw4Yo_aem_swM1Nk76aGvpG-4j_ajAFQ 00:00 — Intro 05:00 — Misreading the Work 08:00 — Who Gets to Interpret Black Art 12:35 — Grief, Joy, and Refusing the Assigned Story 15:45 — Being Polarizing / Being Protected 19:00 — The Politics of Interpretation 23:40 — Grief Beyond the Self 27:35 — Refusing Other People’s Narratives 35:20 — The Industry, Capital, and Finding Your People 41:30 — Discomfort as a Teacher 48:40 — Community, Poetry, and Becoming an Artist 52:00 — Becoming a Working Musician 57:15 — Loss, Stability, and Living Through Contradiction 1:00:00 — Making a Life, Not Just a Career 1:09:35 — Curiosity as Practice 1:12:30 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

He works through form, perception, and the politics of display — Kamrooz Aram on ornament, abstraction, and the unstable ground of how we see. Kamrooz Aram moves between painting, sculpture, and collage, using material, structure, and exhibition design to question how images are read and how histories are constructed. His work often begins in the studio, through process and formal decision-making, and expands outward into larger systems of meaning: how value is assigned, how objects are categorized, and how cultural narratives are embedded within visual form. Across recent exhibitions, he continues to return to questions of ornament, modernism, and the conditions that shape perception without resolving them into fixed positions. He explains: * How openness, curiosity, and “young artist energy” remain essential to sustaining a long-term practice. * Why restraint, stepping away, and not overworking are as critical as mark-making in the studio. * What it means to work within a structure or “mode,” where improvisation can emerge without forcing novelty. * How ornament and abstraction are historically entangled, and why their separation reflects biased art histories. * Why viewers project cultural assumptions onto form, and how ideas of “the decorative” or “the exotic” are constructed. * How value shifts depending on context, authorship, and belief, from museum objects to replicas and everyday materials. * Why art can create moments of transcendence through form, rather than through narrative alone. (00:08) Welcome + Returning to the Studio(04:20) Reclaiming “Young Artist Energy”(10:00) The Nonlinear Life of a Painting(15:30) Disruption, Destruction, and Letting the Work Shift(25:56) Sculpture as an Extension of Painting(28:10) Ornament, Abstraction, and Historical Bias(33:40) Time, Fading, and Letting Go of Control(52:45) Authenticity, Replication, and Constructed Value Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube. Follow Kamrooz Web: https://kamroozaram.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamroozegar/ Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978) has built his practice on dismantling the divide between ornament and fine art, renegotiating the art historical hierarchies that privilege Western forms of abstraction above others. His paintings and sculptures do not simply cross categories; they probe the structures that enforce them. Born in Shiraz, Iran, Aram emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, where he found himself forced to come to terms with a multitude of identities imposed upon him. These experiences left a lasting mark. Categories, he discovered, do not merely describe identity—they invent it. This recognition drives his work, which asserts that non-Western ornamental traditions carry the same intellectual weight and conceptual rigor Western art history has long reserved for itself. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio .— Full Transcript Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

She works through feeling, perception, and narrative — Rachel Rose on interior weather, unstable perspectives, and art as a way to process what cannot be easily named. Rachel Rose moves between film, installation, and painting, using sound, light, and narrative structure to explore how experience is shaped from the inside out. Her work often begins with an emotional register and expands into systems of history, perception, and embodiment. In her recent film The Last Day , she turns inward, tracing the psychological and biological complexities of motherhood, identity, and crisis without resolving them into clear frameworks. She explains: * How personal feeling becomes a starting point for building larger perceptual and narrative systems. * Why motherhood, postpartum depression, and identity loss resist clean cultural narratives. * How sound and light can destabilize reality and reorient one’s relationship to the world. * What it means to make work that stays with ambiguity rather than resolving into message. * How falling in love with characters becomes a method for discovering structure, rather than imposing it. * Why occupying unlikeable or unstable perspectives creates more honest and generative work. * How art can act as a container for experiences that are culturally unspoken or difficult to locate. (00:08) Welcome + Intro(00:31) The Last Day and the Mrs. Dalloway Transposition (01:37) Motherhood, Identity, and the Book Read Twice (03:35) Lake Valley, Saturn Return, and the Invention of Childhood (07:19) Excerpt: Lake Valley (2016) (10:57) Art School, Painting, and the Crisis of Meaning (15:01) Editing as Voice, the First Video, and Finding the Medium (22:34) Transcendent Experiences and the Power of Art Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Rachel Web: https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/ Rachel Rose (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. The work of Rachel Rose explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Recent solo exhibitions include: Science Gallery, London, UK (2024); GL STRAND, Copenhagen (2023); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2023); CC Strombeek, Strombeek (2022); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2020); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Geneva (2023); 3rd Jeju Biennale (2022); 9th Beijing Biennale (2022); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2022); Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, US (2021); Artspace, Sydney (2021); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021); A Tale of A Tub, Tlön Projects, Rotterdam (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Pittsburgh (2018); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 32nd São Paudalo Biennial (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2016); Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2016). She is the recipient of the Future Fields Award and the Frieze Artist Award. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Can you tell us a little bit about The Last Day? Rachel Rose: It’s a film that I wrote. Loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the book, but maybe I’ll just summarize the book briefly so that you understand what I did. The book takes place in a day, and it was written after World War I. It describes a bourgeois housewife, Clarissa Dalloway, going about her errands in her day at 50, about to throw a big party for her husband in the evening. She has an 18-year-old daughter that’s kind of separating and rejecting her. There’s a foil character, who’s equally important in the book, named Septimus Smith, who’s a World War I vet who Clarissa sort of passes by. It’s almost like sliding doors throughout the day. He’s suffering from severe PTSD from World War I. Clarissa throws a party and at the end of the day he kills himself. I had read the book in high school and not thought about it much again. I had always been into Virginia Woolf and that was that. And then one day, I have two kids and I was getting our Tesla fixed in Red Hook at the Tesla dealership, and I was texting my friend sitting there in the waiting room. She’s said oh, what a Mrs Dalloway day you’re having. And I was like, oh am I Mrs. Dalloway? Let me think about that. So I read it again and I was completely blown away. As a mother reading it, I now understood the book totally differently than I understood it as a 16-year-old because obviously the perspective and consciousness changes as that’s what Virginia Woolf does. But now I was sitting in Clarissa’s position, obviously I’m not 50 and my kids aren’t 18, but I was feeling her pain, her rudder, her sense of loss of identity, all the kind of acts of self-actualization she had reversed or given up in exchange for her motherhood. I was incredibly moved and so I decided to transpose it into a modern day New York story, and the Septimus character, I transposed into a labor and delivery nurse that was suffering from severe postpartum depression. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Rachel Rose: Which is something that I also suffered from. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Rachel Rose: So I kind of, in different ways, felt myself in the different characters. Ajay Kurian: So much of what I’ve understood about your work prior to this moment is like larger systems in which humans find themselves in. It feels like this movie is a shift to the internal weather, rather than the external weather. I know it's just a matter of what the focus is. They're all kind of an ouroboros of sorts, but did it feel like a shift? Did you feel like you were going into something more intimate with the film? Rachel Rose: Before making the film and also before having children, so much of my experience in making works was a combination of I’m feeling this thing. For example, I’m feeling really anxious. Could I attach it? Now of course there’s all kinds of internal reasons why I might be feeling anxiety, nothing to do with, let’s say the weather or something. Ajay Kurian: Sure. Rachel Rose: But can I attach it to something I’m spotting outside, and make the artwork the container for that connection. So the work was always coming from something that always began with a personal feeling, but the difference is, that you’re right to point out, in this film it doesn’t go beyond that. A guess if you’re talking about motherhood, but the film isn’t a political comment on motherhood structurally in society. It’s actually totally not that. Ajay Kurian: What you’re saying there, there was a moment in an interview, I can’t remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about the process that you go through to make anything. Which is almost like you’re a sensor that’s like feeling things around you. And then as soon as you feel it and kind of know that you’re feeling something that’s worth noticing, that you then almost zoom out to see what the feeling is doing. Rachel Rose: I’ve done it in some really rudimentary, almost stupid ways. Ajay Kurian: I love stupid. Rachel Rose: This film The Last Day, than I made, is me contending with my ambivalence, confusion, pain and ecstasy around being a mother. For me, that’s why I made it. To kind of figure something about that out and give voice to a crisis I feel many other women experience, but there aren’t clear places to put that necessarily. For example, if I think back to when I made Lake Valley when I was 28, that was a work that I made in the beginning of my Saturn return. Actually, it was just the year after I had that Whitney show, and I was beginning this new stage of oh, I’m a working artist now and I have a career and I’m like a grownup. Of course we all become grownups to a certain extent when we’re 18 and we leave home. But then there’s this second thing, which is your Saturn return. Many of us know it, where you experience a new version of adulthood, like what’s this thing gonna look like? So this work came from that. Questioning, what does it mean to turn 28? It sounds so, honestly trivial, but at the time it didn’t feel trivial to me. It felt somehow kind of big. Ajay Kurian: 28. I guess I thought you were older at that time, ’cause there’s so much that’s related to childhood here. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: Now it makes sense that it is a reckoning of the idea of leaving childish things behind, but then also those things translating into this, as you’re gonna see in a second, very baroque visual language of all these different ways of storytelling coming together. Before we continue, let’s just play this excerpt. This is an excerpt from Lake Valley from 2016. Rachel Rose: 10 years ago. So weird. Just to give the texture of this, at the time, I found and then scanned tons of early children’s, the kind of early proliferation of children’s books, 18th or early 19th century. That’s what all these textures and the surfacing of everything is made up from that and hand collaging, well on Photoshop, but collaging these layers. Ajay Kurian: And it’s kind of the story of this Rabbit-ish figure that gets lost essentially. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Lives in a suburban housing development and goes into the little tiny greenery right next to the house. But then it turns and imagines it as though it’s this forest, but it’s kind of just a whatever space. Much of this was a kind of return to how childhood is formed, culturally. and that it’s kind of a modern invention. Even the idea of the storybook is so modern, and this coincides with the Industrial revolution. The idea that you sit down and read your kids a book and that there’s an illustrated thing that they look at. This is like a totally recent thing. Ajay Kurian: So that structure that seems part of the scaffolding of this —before that, what was the feeling that started this project? Rachel Rose: Saturn return, becoming an adult, understanding ourselves through a childhood, which is a very recent — super recent idea. I mean, Freud, that’s extremely recent. But even the idea that there’s a separation between childhood and adulthood and that we define ourselves as different is also very recent. So I was questioning, why do I now feel like an adult and I didn’t before? And what does that mean in the history of where we are today? So that was the inception. Ajay Kurian: And then getting into that history takes you into the Industrial Revolution and the foundations of how we start thinking about that separation. Rachel Rose: Yes. And then separately, which is true for all my work, I also always have a thing I wanna learn how to do. “I don’t know how to do this” is to me, an essential project and point of making an artwork. When I complete the work, I might know a little bit more about how to do it. So in this case, I’d never done an animation before. I had no idea how to do it. And actually, I don’t think I had ever written a proper script, because up until this point, the two or three works I had made had been basically essays. This one, because it was an animation, I had to storyboard everything. So I had to write a very clear script. It was actually the first time I ever wrote a script. Ajay Kurian: What did that feel like? Rachel Rose: I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing. So it was that, and then it was the storyboarding, and then it was working on a traditional animation because this is hand drawn. Ajay Kurian: Let’s go back even further. Because you went to art school and you went in for painting. But then you started moving into film, seemingly suddenly. Was it like, I can’t think in this medium anymore? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I mean, I got obliterated in all the crits. Everyone hated on everything I did, and I felt so bad about myself all the time. Which wouldn’t necessarily happen in this. But yeah, I felt so bad about myself all the time and I felt like, why do I have to feel bad about myself for this pointless thing? I don’t think painting’s pointless, but… Ajay Kurian: You have a painting show that’s opening in like a few days? Rachel Rose: I don’t think the painting is pointless, but at the time I felt a major existential crisis, right? And when I say this is pointless, I meant all of art making, start to finish. What am I doing here? I wanna do something meaningful with my life. I want to affect change, I wanna contribute. What can you do in art? Seemingly like nothing. Ajay Kurian: So that was the takeaway. Rachel Rose: Well, no, that’s the crisis that I had at that point. And then I thought, if I became a documentary filmmaker, that could be politically actionable. So then I started learning how to make films immediately, thinking that when I graduated I would try to make my way into the documentary film world. So the best thing I could do is learn all the skills I could in the meantime. Ajay Kurian: Did it come as a shock to your professors at the time? And when you started making that first video piece that you thought was gonna be a documentary — when did you know that it wasn’t? Rachel Rose: I knew it wasn’t when I started editing, but not up until that point. I was driving around shooting this footage and doing these interviews. I didn’t understand how much it wasn’t a documentary film until I started editing, which was the first time I ever edited anything. And I just fell in love with the medium. I felt that this is it, this is me. I’ve been waiting all this time, and I was in the middle of my second to last semester of school at that point. It was like, let’s say November of my last year when I was finally editing. So I was like, oh my God, this is it. I love this medium so much. Ajay Kurian: Did everybody in the crits just shut the fuck up? Rachel Rose: I mean, I wasn’t showing anything at that point because I didn’t have anything to show. I was just working on my project or whatever. Ajay Kurian: But then you had a final piece. Rachel Rose: Yeah, but I guess what I’m saying is I fell so in love with editing. I felt like this is my voice. Ajay Kurian: I mean, that’s when I met you, when you were graduating from graduate school. Rachel Rose: That’s right. That’s when we met, because you were in that show. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I was in the show that Ian was in, at PS1. Rachel Rose: And I was coming over and bothering you guys during install, I remember that! Ajay Kurian: Yeah. So Rachel’s married to Ian Chang, another artist, they both show at Gladstone. An amazing artist in his own right. And we were in that show together and Rachel was asking for studio visits from everyone. Rachel Rose: Yes. I’m sure I was. And Josh came and changed my life Ajay Kurian: I believe it. To every person you were like, I’d love to show you this. And I was like, wow. I remember seeing it and I was like, this is her first video piece, that’s stupid. It really blew me away. It really towed that line. I hadn’t seen that much video art that felt borderline popular that could have been released in a gallery and it could also be released by Vice. It felt like it had the makings of something that were highly specific and rigorous. And in that particular piece, it was thinking about the border slash limit of life and death. What happens in that transition? How do we codify those things? And seeing it, it really shocked me. You were so proficient in doing this so quickly. It’s obvious that was your voice. It was a no brainer. Rachel Rose: I remember that feeling, I felt high during that period because I felt like after all this time of feeling like I actually wasn’t an artist and like I was wrong and it was time to pivot. Then I found this medium that felt like I could channel myself through it. And at the time, also in the art world, there was a place for making work like that. I think that’s changed now, but at the time there was. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I feel like your rise was in a moment when new media and video was being shown constantly. Now it’s harder to come by exhibitions like that and people that are gonna put the money into it. Because, what you can’t see in this excerpt, is that your videos are installed incredibly specifically. Actually, we can just see it on the website. Did you know that in grad school, was that already something that you were thinking about? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I had this position, I guess at the time, of hanging around in the art world. Which is okay, if I’m gonna do this, if these things are gonna be shown in exhibition spaces and not black boxes, then I should really use the exhibition space for what it can offer. I had screens made out of tapestries and carpets, and all kinds of ways that particularly address the way that the film sat in the space. So yeah, this was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we wrapped the room. You can’t see it in these images really, but the room is wrapped in this scrim. The same scrim that we’re projecting on, but it’s double wrapped. So it created this kind of moire effect with the light. And that moire effect was also in the film. So experimenting with things like that. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I guess your first solo exhibition was at the Whitney Museum. And even there, it was the scrim and the way that light was coming through the room. You couldn’t call it site specific, but it was site sensitive. Rachel Rose: It was, that’s exactly the word. I went in and actually edited and played with the blacks in the space. So the idea was that when there was black on the screen, it would be porous because obviously that is a dim projection of light. and you would see the outside world. So I projected a scrim that was in front of a glass. The whole film was about what we can access. And what we can in light and sound is obviously biologically determined, but what does it mean to take our biological form and extract it from this one? Let’s say you become an astronaut or something. What can you see and hear differently? Can you extend the limits of human perceptual capacities, not through drugs or alcohol or whatever else, but through just moving our body into a different environment off of the earth. Ajay Kurian: And what was the thing that you wanted to learn in this piece? Rachel Rose: Well, this piece came out of something really simple actually. I don’t know if it was a thing I wanted to learn, but it was a feeling I wanted to explore, which is that Ian and I had gone to see Gravity in Battery Park City. When we left, we walked home to the Bowery where we lived at the time. I can remember it exactly now, the feeling of leaving the theater and walking on the street and looking at the street signs and the traffic lights. Just like New York City laid bare and feeling actually very alienated from it. And it took that walk, or maybe a few block

Reginald Sylvester II approaches painting as a structure of discipline. What begins in daily rituals—routine, repetition, and care—extends into a larger philosophy about belief, responsibility, and endurance. Practice, for him, is not separate from life. It is shaped by it. Fatherhood, spiritual inquiry, and the demands of time become part of the architecture of the studio. Rather than protecting art from those pressures, Sylvester allows them to recalibrate how the work unfolds. The result is a practice grounded less in spectacle and more in sustained commitment. Abstraction emerges through this framework as an act of faith. To begin a painting without knowing its final form is to trust that meaning will surface through repetition and attention. At a certain moment, that commitment required stepping away from exhibition altogether, allowing the work to evolve privately before returning to public view. Rather than presenting artistic growth as clarity or mastery, Sylvester describes a practice built through persistence, where rigor, vulnerability, and belief remain inseparable. He explains: • Why daily rituals and discipline are foundational to sustaining a studio practice.• How fatherhood reshaped his relationship to time, responsibility, and ambition.• Why abstraction functions as an act of faith rather than a stylistic choice.• What it meant to withdraw from the exhibition to deepen the work in private.• How travel and research expanded the historical resonance of the work. Timestamps (0:00) Ritual and the Structure of Practice(5:00) Fatherhood and Responsibility(11:00) Abstraction and Faith(18:00) Stepping Away from Exhibition(26:00) Discipline and Repetition(34:00) Cutting into Surface: The Gates(41:00) Travel, History, and Material Memory(49:00) Persistence and Staying in the Work Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Reginald Instagram: @reginaldsylvester2 Follow Maximillian William Web: https://www.maximillianwilliam.com Instagram: @maximillian_william Reginald Sylvester II (b. Jacksonville, NC, USA, 1987; lives and works in Jersey City, NJ) creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that trace the generative threshold between the two mediums. Working predominantly in abstraction, he expands the language of his painting practice by incorporating materials such as rubber, tarp, aluminium and steel. His singular approach lends his paintings a sculptural presence and imbues his sculptures with a painter’s sensibility. While grounded in traditional painting techniques, Sylvester II ventures beyond the conventions of stretched canvas, working on surfaces that both absorb and reject paint. His layered, often multi-partite works investigate the language of his chosen mediums: stretcher bars are left exposed, becoming part of his compositions, while oxidised and patinated metal surfaces evoke the histories of gestural painting. Sylvester II also transcends the surface, creating monumental sculptures that reference forms observed through painting and from his environment. The artist is drawn to materials that relate to his personal history, spirituality, or broader societal narratives. In his approach to assemblage, Sylvester II appropriates byproducts of his making process, physically attaching studio debris to works to enrich their tactile quality and textural narrative. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here . Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: I’m gonna start off with the big questions, things that are really important to people. You are 37 years old. What the fuck is your skincare routine man? Reginald Sylvester ll: 39. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Reginald Sylvester ll: Knocking on 40, bro. Ajay Kurian: Oh my God. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Cold water and shots out to mom Dukes. Ajay Kurian: That’s really Mom Dukes and cold water. I remember this very clearly when Pharrell was asked, he said cold water too. Reginald Sylvester ll: He’s right. Closes up your pores, but, yeah 39, about to be 40. Ajay Kurian: And you’re a new father. Reginald Sylvester ll: And I’m a new father. Ajay Kurian: Congratulations. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Ajay Kurian: What’s family life right now? How do you do studio, father, all of the things? Reginald Sylvester ll: To be honest, it’s not much studio. It is just really wifey, Noah, supporting her, you know. She’s still getting back to a hundred percent and so I’m just support right now. I’m the calvary. Keeping it down. I fit in drawing, some reading when I can, but for the most part, I’m waking up, and it’s, what do you need, what you need help with, what does Noah need, and you need a break. I’m just support, you know, at this point. Ajay Kurian: That’s good. Reginald Sylvester ll: But the time away is gonna help the practice. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I think it always fuels it. Even if you’re not in the studio, other things are happening and you just brought life into the world. Your lovely wife brought life into the world. So how could that not affect? I was thinking about you having a kid and what that means for the studio practice, but also what that means for how you share your spiritual practice with the next generation, with your kin, and how that’s meant a lot to you. Is church a part of your life or is it a different kind of spiritual practice? How are you gonna pass this on? Reginald Sylvester ll: I grew up with my grandma going to the church. You know, that was how I grew up. But obviously as we grow and become adults, you start seeking after things on your own. So I’m just in big research mode right now. I’m just doing a lot of reading, a lot of research, things that feel true, and things that I stray away from. But I’m in a big learning research, discovery mode, lots of conversations with my pops, my mom. Ajay Kurian: And they’re open to those kinds of conversations? Because I know for myself, my parents are from Kerala, and there’s a huge Christian population there. So I grew up Christian and they’re very religious. And I thought learning about theology and the history of Christianity and all that stuff would build a bridge. It did not. It was like it created more hostility in a way because it’s like, why do you have all these questions? Why are you inquiring? What are the bridges that you have with your folks? Reginald Sylvester ll: So my dad, he went to theology school to become a pastor at a certain point. He’s done a lot of research and reading and so forth in his own life. And so when I come to him with questions, he’s very open arms, answering those questions, and guiding me with the questions. Sometimes, parents can be very opinionated, you know, that’s not what you know, that’s what we should be looking at is this soul. But it’s great because I think in terms of spirituality, for me, I just wanna get to the truth. That’s what it’s really about. And I think, through becoming an artist. Art is a thing that deals with truth. So once I made the decision to actually become an artist, it made me question a lot of things about, where I am, who I am, where I come from, you know what I’m saying? What do I believe? So I started to become a student of history and really just started to do a lot of reading, and then again, going back to my folks asking questions, did you hear about this? What do you think about this? Ajay Kurian: That’s beautiful. It’s nice that you have that relationship with your family. I mean, it seems like they’re all kind of artists in their own way too. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah. My dad, I guess I call ‘em like an artist and graphic designer. Growing up, I seen him do a lot of things with typography. Not really painting, but more so graphics. He did t-shirts, which is what led me to falling into streetwear, watching him kind of having a brand and doing his thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, he had a brand logo? Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I mean, Pops made shirts. But just seeing him kind of move like that gave me the confidence to wanna be a graphic designer or want to learn about typography or wanna learn about silk screening t-shirts. He was a big part of that. Ajay Kurian: I wanna start with Limbo first. This is a quote that hit me really hard just ‘cause it’s a heavy thing to say. You said ‘making that connection between abstraction and faith grabbed hold of me. Suddenly for me to paint or find an image became symbolic of how one lives life, with hopes of dying to then enter into the kingdom of heaven’. That’s a heavy ass thing to say. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I guess I didn’t mean it to be so deep or sound so heavy. Ajay Kurian: What is the Kingdom of Heaven for you? What is that? Reginald Sylvester ll: Kingdom of Heaven is to be with God, to be with Christ, to make it to paradise or spiritual paradise and how I attested that to painting. When I first came to New York for my second business trip in my graphic design days, I wasn’t concerned about being an abstract painter at all. But I ended up going to the Met and went to the abstract expressionist wing. First time with De Kooning, Gilliam, you name it — the guys, right? And I immediately felt like this is something I want to do. But I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. When I did start to research and read, I learned about De Kooning and him talking about finding an image, and it very much sounded like a painterly way of faith. Or how one goes through life, living life. We all try and I don’t know if people are religious or believe in God or heaven or after life or whatever, but we all live life the best we can in order to make it to that next place where our soul will rest, you know? He talked about finding an image and it made that connection for me. So I said, if I’m gonna be any type of painter, it would be an abstract painter. Because it was like a painterly motif that defined faith, or how I sought and see faith. ‘Cause faith is believing in things unseen, right? Ajay Kurian: For sure. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so if you’re in the process of making a painting, but you don’t necessarily know what that finished image is, but you’re working your way through it, that’s what that thing is. And so, I don’t know what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like. It’s been described in a few ways, but I hope to get there, you know? So to get to that finished painting, I don’t wanna say perfect painting, but the act of making to find my way to new images is what made that connection for me. Ajay Kurian: I remember I had to write something about On Kawara back in the day. And weirdly, after spending more and more time with the work, it felt like it was a practice of prayer. That every painting was a small act of devotion towards something unnameable. It didn’t have a shape or a way of being described, but you put in the work. It felt similarly related to thinking about what all this means here for somewhere else. It feels like that’s kind of the starting point for these 12 gates that are in Accra right now. How did this all come about? First of all, this space is fucking stunning. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, shout out to Limbo, man. That’s Dominique and the homie Diallo. Diallo suggested me to Dominique, who runs the Limbo Museum. Very forward-thinking in terms of the vision. But it’s a museum that basically uses abandoned spaces in order to give artists an opportunity to put together shows. They’ve started a residency program and I was the first artist to do the residency. Initially, when I went to go visit for the first trip, I thought we were gonna use the space that they used for the prior presentation when they did the inaugural talk and show. And she was like, no, I’m just taking you here to just show you the initial space, but this is the idea that I have for you. So she went to the University of Ghana, and I was like, you are gonna let me do a show and this is what we’re doing? She was like, yeah, and it was great because it was my first time on the continent and I’ve always wanted to do a show on the continent. My father always talked about taking the family to the continent. Obviously I wanna touch roots. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Reginald Sylvester ll: But then it was also challenging ‘cause I’d never worked at this scale before. How are you gonna treat this space? How is the work gonna function in this space? How is it gonna reverberate in the space? Diallo and myself had a lot of conversations surrounding that and he challenged me on a lot of things in terms of these gates from their initial intent and how they were shown. How to move past that and to allow them to do other things. And so, this allowed me the space to do so. Ajay Kurian: The first time you showed them was in LA . I just wanna show images of that exhibition, which had a great title, T-1000. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yep, I’m sure everybody’s familiar with Terminator. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’m super big into sci-fi movies that got that post-apocalyptic punk undertone. You know, brutalist, kind of futurist. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it shows. The work is definitely in that vibe and I remember when I was researching you, that I saw this show. But I do remember when you were fabricating those gates and I was checking the progress on Instagram, and I was like, shit, this is different. This isn’t a new step. Reginald Sylvester ll: Finding my way through making new types of paintings led me to sculpture. I’m a fan of painting first and being interested as a maker, you’re always trying to figure out, how can I push the work? How can I find myself? If I’m interested in sculpture, how do I find my way there? Being introduced to a new material, which is rubber, led me to really changing the whole process and way I make work. That led me to a form that was found by way of the byproducts of the paintings, which gave way to the gates. And so that’s the cutting that you see in the rubber. Because at one point I was researching and reading a lot about ready-made sculptures. I started to think about my paintings in the sense of a ready-made and how I can show all parts or all aspects of the painting. Making this curvature incision, and the shape that I was left with when it was laid on the floor in my studio reminded me of the floor plans used for the boats that were used in the transatlantic slave trade. Ajay Kurian: That’s interesting to hear. I always thought it was the other way around. I thought that you had that shape in mind and then that curvature got cut and it became that act of violence in the surface. But it’s interesting to hear that it was first a formal decision. One where it was like, let’s get to the truth of the material. Reginald Sylvester ll: The thought of even showing the substrate. I think that’s why I wanna continue to put myself in new situations in the studio. Because for me, and every artist is different, but that’s the way that I grow. So if the aesthetic of a material interests me, it’s for me to not really ask too many questions. It’s just to respond to it. So I was using a lot of military tent shell halves, they’re called pup tents. You basically button two of the tent halves together to make a full tent. I was buttoning them together to stretch them over the substrate, but because they don’t make a complete closure, you get access to the substrate. I thought, oh, I can be more intentional about that. This is happening by way of accident. I made a series of paintings with the pup tents, but I said, how am I gonna be more intentional about this access to revealing the substrate and how it changes the form and the structure of my work. The reason why I called them Gates, because thinking about that history along that journey. I mean, we’ve seen Amistad films, so how do I take this history and reverberate it into something, I don’t wanna say beautiful, but speak further into it. Ajay Kurian: It feels like the history of black culture in so many ways where it’s like you take shitty situations that are beyond the pale, and then you consistently make joy out of it. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yes. I think some of the best work is made from the most mundane things. I think that’s black and brown folk in general. We take a lot of the waste and cook and repurpose it into something great. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so I said, all those bodies that were lost along that journey, where do those souls lie? Scripture say that all souls return to the father once they pass. But I just thought that, maybe I can take this shape and I can reform it as this gate-like sculpture in order to give way for those souls to pass through, to have rest. Ajay Kurian: So in that early version, that’s sheet metal welded together and it has a structure underneath, but then this becomes airy and light. What does that translation mean for you? What does it mean to take it to this place of pure structure? Reginald Sylvester ll: A big part of my work and how I continue to try and grow, is I’m just paying attention to what interests me. I used to have a studio out in Ridgewood and I would look at a lot of the debris. The junk by the trash cans, the back of semi-trucks and how they oxidize over time, the environment of the city, the outside. And using that as a language to bring into the studio. So I did the same thing when I went to Ghana. Ghana’s a very interesting place because it excited me, but it also made me really upset. Because you see wealth and poverty right next to each other. You go to a hotel that’s around the corner from people who don’t even have clean water. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: That feels like Mumbai too. I remember going there and there’s like Prada on one side, and then this dude with his hands disintegrating from leprosy. It is so stark. Where I’m from, in the south, it’s still communist, and the discrepancy in wealth is much less extreme. But there’s certain places in various parts of the world where the jump is so crazy that it really fucks with you. Reginald Sylvester ll: And just getting a grasp on, why is this happening? So from my understanding of what they were telling me, when new individuals were elected or coming into power, certain buildings that had paperwork and had the okay to go forward — build this hotel, build up this certain area, build up these certain advertisements — if that project wasn’t complete by the time that individual who gave way for it to happen, the next person that came into power can say yay or nay on whether it’s finished or not. Which initially gave Dominique the idea for Limbo, right? Because you’re seeing all these great infrastructures half built and then the people that are living there have to deal with it. Anyway, getting to the language within the gates here, it was by way of seeing the advertisement signs and the structures that were exposed. It’s funny, I see Eric Mack in the back, my bro, and I thought about ‘em a lot. I told Dominique to reach out to Eric, because you would see a lot of torn away signages breezing in the wind. I was just thinking about the structure of these gates and the call or need for tension. You know, not as this solid form, but as this form that your eyes can kind of pass through. And then thinking about the space that they’re about to be exhibited in. It’s a very raw skeletal space. So I want the works to have this presence, where they’re there, but they also evaporate. Even these sight lines were very important for us because I want your eye to rest on the sculpture, but I also want your eye to be able to pass through the structure and just enjoy the space as well too. You have sculpture after sculpture that reveals a painting in the distance. So that was another reason why I wanted to stick to this th

When David Zwirner approached Ebony L. Haynes, the conversation didn’t begin with vision statements or prestige. It began with reality: exhaustion, uncertainty, and the question of whether staying in the art world was even possible. What followed was recalibration. If she was going to continue, it had to be on terms that reflected how she actually works—through care, risk, and sustained presence. That recalibration became 52 Walker. Drawing from her time at Martos Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster, Haynes speaks candidly about what it means to build exhibitions from the ground up: buying furniture on credit cards, drilling into gallery floors, maintaining impossible works by hand, and staying late because the work deserves it. For her, autonomy is not branding or independence for its own sake. It is the ability to stay present with artists, to hold risk without spectacle, and to let rigor coexist with joy. Rather than framing curatorial work as management or authorship, Haynes describes it as a practice shaped by trust, repetition, and care—one that resists burnout not by slowing ambition, but by rooting it in pleasure, responsibility, and belief. She explains: * How Foxy Production taught her to do every job herself, and why learning the whole system changed how she values labor. * Why belief in the work often comes before money, and what it costs to act on that belief anyway. * How maintenance, repetition, and care are not secondary tasks but central to exhibition-making. * What quarantine, racial reckoning, and institutional fatigue revealed about her limits—and her resolve. * How 52 Walker emerged not from a master plan, but from presence, honesty, and the willingness to say, “I have this idea.” Timestamps (0:00) First Encounter and the Permission to Care (4:00) Foxy Production and Learning by Doing(7:00) Installation as Commitment (16:00) Belief, Debt, and the Couch(18:00) Maintenance, Repetition, and Joy (21:00) Quarantine, Burnout, and Almost Leaving (25:00) Martos Gallery and the Small Fish Problem (27:00) Shoot the Lobster and Experimental Freedom (32:00) 52 Walker and Building a Program (41:00) Artists, Power, and Staying in the Work Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Ebony Instagram: @ebotron Follow 52 Walker Web: https://www.52walker.comInstagram: @52walker Writer, curator, and phenom Ebony L. Haynes is on a mission to reconfigure the art world. Working her way up from her first New York City internship at contemporary gallery Foxy Production (then based in Chelsea), the Canadian-born Haynes would eventually become the director of Marts Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster. In early 2020, Haynes was approached by David Zwirner for a sales director position. She countered with a pitch for an exhibition model resembling a kunsthalle, wherein exhibitions would last 3 months and allow for visitors to spend more time truly considering the art before them. That idea led to the October 2021 opening of 52 Walker, David Zwirner Gallery's TriBeCa location, with Haynes at the helm as director. Unlike traditional commercial galleries, 52 Walker does not represent artists, and is instead dedicated to curating programming at a pace similar to that of a museum — giving artists more opportunity to challenge themselves and experiment freely. The recruitment of an all-Black staff at 52 Walker garnered disproportionate attention, but her two-pronged approach to catalyzing change in the art world is more far-sighted than mere identity politics. In challenging the ever-shrinking attention spans of a cultural milieu that increasingly consumes art through social media, Haynes aims to empower artists to take risks and dig deeper in their work. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here . Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: What does it feel like to watch this right now? Ebony L. Haynes: You know, I haven’t watched this in a while. It stands so clear in my mind. The first time I experienced this artwork of perfection… Ajay Kurian: This was what I read and gathered was the first art experience where you were really rocked to your core. Ebony L. Haynes: There was a small space run by this formidable woman, Ydessa Hendeles in Toronto, who at the time I knew nothing about. I stumbled into this space based on some kind of art map. I was emotional, I remember crying the first time. I went back at least a half dozen times and it made me feel like pursuing something in the art world could really mean something. It was the very first artwork I ever remember feeling like this shit hits and there are so many layers to it. The first time I walked in, I didn’t know who Shirin Neshat was, you know? And it’ll be one of my opuses. I already had one. I thought Gordon Mata Clark and Pope.L is a show I did, and I’m like, oh, I can’t top it. But working closely with this artist and something around this work would be the next major emotional insurmountable moment for me. You have to visualize this two-channel video, before I knew what two-channel really meant. You know, I don’t wanna pretend like I was encountering this work and I knew all of the ways to talk about it. I walked into the room, and there were two screens. This window was a screen and the wall facing each other. So these performers are essentially facing each other and you’re sitting in the center. It was a purple carpet, very well installed. I come from a music background, so immediately I was like, the sound design was impeccable. Somebody really thought about six channels of sound and knew how to put the subwoofers in the right place to make me feel it when it hits that note. I was like crying for this woman. And also feeling a little bit for the man and I mean, it was… Ajay Kurian: There’s layers. Ebony L. Haynes: There’s layers. It’ll be a chapter. Yeah, it was huge for me. Ajay Kurian: It’s also such a different experience. Because I was watching this on my laptop and I was like, this is crazy. Then hearing it here, the hair on the back of my neck went… Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah when you see it, it was floor to ceiling, so it was larger than life bodies belting in front of me. I almost felt like I could feel the air out of the speakers. I mean, I was also there alone every time I went. Ajay Kurian: Wow. So this clocks as one of the formative experiences a hundred percent. In your sort of art upbringing, I’m gonna fast forward a little bit to when you actually make it to New York. Is your first job in the art world interning at Foxy? Ebony L. Haynes: Intern at Foxy Production, yep. Whenever I’m about to talk about Michael and John, Michael, Gillespie, John Thompson. I make it sound like we are really good friends and I hope we are, but we don’t text and call each other. But they know how important they were and are to my story. Foxy production was one I wrote to because of their program. I felt somebody, who at the moment when I applied, had worked in music mostly and that was my only full-time experience and writing about music. They were really kind of schmutzy and unmastered is what I remember saying to John in my letter. It was like this underground basement, party of a gallery where they were doing a lot of new media before many galleries. Maybe not. You know, I don’t know, but from my perspective. Ajay Kurian: They have that reputation, yeah. Ebony L. Haynes: So I just wrote them a letter and I was like, do you want me, I’d love to come and work for you for free. And they were like, cool, come on down. I did, and it was life-changing. I really expected it to be an internship where I go back and get a job in Toronto and it turned into a job for them. Ajay Kurian: And that’s when we met. Ebony L. Haynes: That’s when we met, so many years ago. That was 2012, I think. Something like that. Ajay Kurian: With people that are in the gallery world or in the commercial art world — my gallerist for instance, Oliver, he worked for Alexander and Bonin. And he really credits them as being the ones who really gave him his grounding and his understanding of what it meant to be a gallerist. Do you feel similarly? You worked at Foxy, then you worked at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, then you worked at Martos. Of those three experiences, what has felt like the one that’s grounded you the most? Ebony L. Haynes: Grounded me, probably Martos. You know, Martos and Shoot The Lobster. I have to say both because I was tasked to program three galleries bicoastally at the same time with a staff of one. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Ebony L. Haynes: Sometimes an intern or assistant, eventually it grew, but it took years. Foxy though, made me really appreciate what it means to learn everything about my job. They taught me how to make an invoice, what a performer was for shipping, what the difference between national and international crates are, and how to hang an art fair booth. Registrars and production art handling are my complete IV lifeblood. If my registrar and my art handlers are not happy… I’m the queen of Donuts install morning or let’s get some pizza. When it was Martos time, I’d do some beer after hours, but not at David Zwirner. Because. I remember one story, this show at Martos, Invisible Man. Pope.L created a new work for me and it was a fountain that hung upside down. I’d hired an art handling and production company to help me build that plinth and figure out how to hang it safely and successfully from the beam. No shade, in case anybody is associated with that experience, and much love to the crew. But they bailed before it was hung. They claimed, and to their credit I think it was hard, but they just were not gonna be responsible for it. So I had to figure out how to rent scaffolding and enlist somebody, who I’m thankful is now a partner in all things in my life and at the time was just my art handler and production manager, and another friend who I knew was art handling for another gallery. One night I slept there. Just so many late nights for this show right before we opened. I have so much love and appreciation for people who say they come into 52 Walker and it feels like an installation and it’s always new. I have to be involved. I would never ask anybody installing a show for me to do it without my involvement. I’m really respectful and admire people who are willing to troubleshoot with me, and especially those who feel excited by it and not burdened by challenges because some people do. Some people have an attitude of, it’s not my job, this is not what I signed up for. But those who really get excited by problem solving and we’re in it together — I will vacuum up the floor while you are mopping. We have to do it ‘cause then it just looks so good. Ajay Kurian: I think also sometimes there’s a fear that the curator will get in the way and when you can actually fully collaborate that is a beautiful thing and it’s something that I think artists would want more if they could trust it. I’m wondering when you felt like artists started to trust you? Was this Martos? Was this Foxy? I think you always had artists on your side. You were always friends with artists. You were always in the mix of things. But when did you feel like, oh, I’ve earned this trust now? Ebony L. Haynes: I would say it happened early, but you know, there’s different levels of trust. I remember one time at Foxy production, this wonderful artist who I now call a friend, Sascha Braunig, had her second exhibition there. First of all, the gallery needed to be painted. Ajay Kurian: You painted the gallery? Ebony L. Haynes: With Sasha. Ajay Kurian: You’re kidding. Ebony L. Haynes: We texted in the morning and was like, can you bring an extra shirt, like painting clothes? I have to preface what we continue with our conversation to say I’ve never advocated for a kind of paradigm shift with 52 Walker. Of course, my practice is my own. Everybody is afforded the right to their own practice and opinions. But if you didn’t make art, and a lot of curators did. But I didn’t make art in the studio, I studied photography. I only worked primarily as a commercial photographer. So to really understand how the artist is working. I can’t imagine asking someone to move a painting one inch on blocks on the floor for me. Ajay Kurian: Really? Ebony L. Haynes: I hate it. I actually save a lot of money with art handlers because I don’t book anything until it’s really time to hang. I move the blocks, unless they’re really big and I need help, of course. But I feel weird and they’re always so generous. Art handlers are the blood of the industry. They don’t feel weird hanging back and waiting for me to take 10 minutes to look at a wall, but I feel intrusive and disrespectful of their time, just having them be around. So I do a lot of my installing after hours. I do a lot of facsimile printouts, even just 8 by 10 and tape them together to move things that are not worth $10,000 or a million dollars, and just move the paper. There’s something about feeling like I’m connecting with what I’m hanging that feels important. Ajay Kurian: Oh yeah. When I am hanging a show, I’ll move something and then I’ll walk out the gallery and I’ll walk in and then I’ll move something again and I’ll walk out of the gallery and I’ll walk in. Ebony L. Haynes: Me too. Ajay Kurian: And I just keep doing that over and over again because what is the choreography of this emotional experience? Testing it as many times as you can to see does it hold and does it do the things that I thought in my head? And trying to separate yourself from what was happening in the studio or what was happening in a different moment in time to what’s happening in this space right now. You’ve had so much experience putting together shows. This signaled to me what Ebony was gonna be about. This is the artist Peter Williams. I think we both agree, maybe an underappreciated artist Ebony L. Haynes: A hundred percent. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t know that many people talking about Peter Williams. I don’t remember if you were the one who told me about him, or there was some moment when I was looking at this work and I was like, holy shit, this guy is incredible. Here you were doing a show of the work and making sure that he was taken care of. He had his share of health issues and required some real care. It felt like this was a moment where you really gotta showcase an artist and show people a world that they hadn’t seen before, which I think we’ll start to see more and more. And then 52 Walker happens. Ebony L. Haynes: The show is heartwarming for me on so many levels. This is just gonna be an ode to Foxy production. Michael and John, to their credit, it was an artist who had been presented to them and in front of me. I was very privileged to be the only employee. The owners of the gallery really heard me. They really listened to my opinions about the work. We had engaging conversations about the work, and they said, why don’t you go to Delaware and meet with Peter? This was one year out of grad school. I mean, I’m sure there are many good bosses out there. Ajay Kurian: No, that’s special. Ebony L. Haynes: For these gentlemen to put me on a train, not a plane, but put me on the train. It was more than just a studio visit. It was an invitation to, not just a show, but representation. There were no titles at Foxy production. By any measure, I was a gallery assistant, but I was also their registrar, art handler, and did the fairs with them. This was my real first experience with an artist bringing in an archive that was on slides in binders and really bonding with Peter and helping with his New York show. Ajay Kurian: I feel like Martos was when you planted a couple of flags. Invisible Man being the first where you could start to make a stake curatorially. How do you create a relationship with a gallerist, specifically a white gallerist, where you’re like, this is what I want to do, these are the shows that I want to do, and get the support that you need? Because I’ve proposed shows that didn’t happen because there wasn’t the support that I needed, but you pulled these things off and made it work. Ebony L. Haynes: For better or worse. I was unaware of what anyone else thought. I probably should have taken note a little more and I try to learn from that now. I knew that this show had to happen. Many questions were put to me as to its financial viability, production, and installation. I didn’t have answers, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t all peachy, you know? I got in trouble a lot, not just with Jose. I mean, not in trouble, but I had to have many private conversations with people I worked with and for — here’s an example. In this picture, this couch, Kayode Ojo. I was such a believer in this complete installation that I bought this couch myself on two credit cards. It was only $600, which makes you understand what my credit card situation was like. I had to resell it on Craigslist at the end. For Kayode and I, the belief in this work and the conversation in the show was so much more important than me to think 10 steps ahead. I just thought two steps ahead. And so the blindness of that was rewarding for me as a curator. You know, how are we gonna get those Jessica Vaughn’s up? Let’s figure out how to do this large format printing for the seats. And you know, there was no Patreon then, but I did some sort of crowdfunding. Ajay Kurian: How did you maintain this steadiness and not just burn out after doing a show like this? How do you not just crash and be like, fuck it, I’m never doing a show like that again. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, it’s so fun. Look at it. Look at this floor for context. I went to Red Hook a year before the show even opened to look at flooring that is reclaimed oak. It was pretty expensive. And the first show I do, I tell my boss, I love this floor. I am gonna drill a hole through it that will leave a mark for the life of the gallery and it’s still there. If you go in, you see I kept the piece, but the line marks this hole. Ajay Kurian: Oh, this is like your own little Gordon Matta-Clark. Ebony L. Haynes: It is. I mean art is so fun, you know, even the challenges. I think when I stop having fun in the challenges of each show, maybe my career will change. But I love working with artists. I love the conversations. I really have a good time. I’m not begrudgingly approaching an install because I have to stay till midnight. For me it’s more what’s for dinner at the gallery? Let’s go guys. Maybe when that changes, it’ll feel different. For this, I didn’t know what people would think. I didn’t know if it would be successful. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was excited for people to come in and see it. This Fountain, Pope.L was like fuck you, you’re gonna have to get on a ladder twice a day. First fill it with newly filtered water, and at the end of the day, drain it. Every single day, reset the timer. This was for eight weeks. That’s a lot of draining and filling. I would just laugh every time and send him texts and be like, you motherfucker, fuck you. I love you, but this is crazy. You know, it’s fun. That’s the answer. Ajay Kurian: There’s joy. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, there’s joy for sure. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s a moment in museums and art culture at large, after George Floyd, where everybody’s scrambling to figure out how they can address, what to them seems like this explosion of a crisis. Where it’s just been there all the time and no one’s been looking at it. So I think a lot of black creatives, a lot of black artists, a lot of anybody in the field, was trying to figure out how to not fucking quit and how to keep moving forward. That was right when you left Martos. It was the in between period, rig

He built a career on dark stages, scorched metal, and fragile narratives. Banks Violette looks back at the neo-goth label, the toll of self-destruction, and what it means to walk away from the art world and return on his own terms. Working between sculpture, installation, and sound, Violette treats subcultures, violence, and fandom as unstable stories rather than fixed identities. From Slayer panic and satanic scare headlines to burned stages and Jägermeister firepieces, his work tracks how trauma gets turned into image, how labor disappears behind polished objects, and how an artist survives a system that rewards collapse as much as rigor. He explains: * Why “neo goth” was a convenient label that flattened a generation of young artists and obscured the real story of illness, addiction, and burnout. * How murder cases, satanic panic, and The Sorrows of Young Werther reveal a long history of fiction being blamed for real-world violence. * What it means to make work about calamity and Weegee’s photographs without treating trauma as raw material or spectacle. * How class, fabrication, and hidden labor structure the work, from doing everything by hand in Brooklyn to orchestrating 14 chandeliers for Celine across the globe. * Why drugs once felt like the only rational way to survive a tiny career window, and what it took to trade that pace for a decade of near silence, family, and fishing. * How fan-level enthusiasm for Void, Smithson, and Judd can coexist with critical rigor, and why reentering the conversation matters if art is to function as a real dialogue. (0:00) Welcome and the Weight of First Impressions(3:00) The Blowtorch Narrative(7:00) Noise, Sunn O))), and the Gravity of Sound(12:00) Polke, Richter, Danto, Judd(19:10) When Stories Justify Violence(22:00) The Accomplice Problem: Art, Trauma, and Ouija(26:00) Invisible Labor, Class, and Who Really Makes the Work(34:00) Drugs as a Work Tool and the Decision to Disappear(47:00) A Decade Offstage and What It Means to Come Back Follow Banks: Web: https://ropac.net/artists/85-banks-violette/#Read: https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-version Instagram: @ banks_violette_616 Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Banks Violette: I feel like I’m catching up on sleep still at age 52. All the sleep that I missed in my twenties and thirties, I still feel like I’m trying to balance the books. Ajay Kurian: That’s fair. You know, there’s a camel theory of sleep that you can kind of keep it and grow it in a hump, and deposit it when you need it. Banks Violette: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds absolutely accurate. Ajay Kurian: This was the project that I really did foresee, and this was the moment that the press was largely calling a neo goth moment. There were a handful of artists at that time that were really maybe engaged in a neo-goth visual culture. But I wonder, did it feel like the right way to talk about your work at the time? Banks Violette: No. It felt like a convenient way of talking about the work because it was a way to organize a group of disparate artists and make them legible in a way that was easy for people to encounter. Ideas that were potentially easy to dismiss unless there was some kind of lens attached to it. Whether or not I ever felt like I shared a lot of commonalities with the artists that I was grouped with — not necessarily. Ajay Kurian: Of that sort of generation, were there artists that you felt like were your peers or fellow travelers? Banks Violette: It was always presented as if there was much more closeness, or similarity in our practices, when there wasn’t necessarily in actuality. So the person I can point to that I think I had the most in common with when I was working actively, was probably somebody like Gardar. He had a preoccupation with a specific period in art history, a specific kind of discursive lens that he was attaching to things, and a certain kind of political bent. I think that there were a lot of ways that we dovetailed, but then there’s a lot of ways that we were totally different. The one thing that I did have in common with a lot of the artists that I was grouped with was that we were all young and pretty engaged with self-destructive behavior. And you know, the artwork kind of reflected that. So on one hand, there was this goth thing, which is an inaccurate way of organizing that work, and then there’s what was actually taking place. Which was, here’s a bunch of people who were all probably not well, and let’s lump them together. But you can’t really be like, oh look at this group of artists who are all drug addicts. So instead, you know, there’s an easier way of doing that and say oh they’re all goth. Ajay Kurian: So they almost said that though. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was implied. Ajay Kurian: I want to go back to that era where you started in New York in order to understand where you are now. The image that I feel like was paraded around the most was probably this one where you’re lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch. When you search the name Banks Violette, this was the image that used to come up. Now I think Vanity Fair has the rights to the image and they’re not putting that on Google. Banks Violette: I had this experience, and I know a lot of other people, my friends and my peers, all had this kind of experience with people coming to the studio to take photographs of you working. And it would somehow turn into the “hey, do this, hey, do that”. And yes, I did definitely light my cigarettes with map gas, a hundred percent, hand on the Bible. I use propane to light cigarettes all the time, but that was definitely somebody trying to elicit that. So on one hand, that’s accurate. On the other hand, it is a totally theatrical presentation of what that moment in time looked like. If I had been necessarily in my right mind, would I have chosen to reveal that part of myself publicly? Probably not. I think there was a lot of that. People weren’t necessarily in the greatest position to author the way they were being perceived by people. Ajay Kurian: It was a fascinating thing to watch in the studio. Because on the one hand you were really private and there were things that I think were just for you and your world. And then on the other hand, seeing how you were able to move. For instance, I think the first time that I met you, I was an intern at the Guggenheim and they were doing this young collectors thing and came to the studio and you had this giant Jagermeister piece that you were working on. It was an incredible performance. It was all the ideas that you were thinking about, but it was the first time that I was hearing it. So you’re stringing together Smithson, Hegel, satanism and all these things that I am hearing for the first time. And I was like, this dude’s a fucking genius. Not to say that you’re not, but — Banks Violette: If I’m stringing together Hegel, satanism, and Smithson, then yeah, I’m definitely not. Ajay Kurian: What was fascinating to see after that was that you’d have other studio visits and this performance, it would be the same speech. And I was like, oh right, there’s some preparation to this. For a young artist, it dialed me in because it made me think about how none of that was untruthful and none of that was coming from a dishonest place. But you’re asked to do this thing again and again, and how do you not think about what this looks like, feels like, and appears as. How much of that was on your mind in that, like period of time? Banks Violette: The things that I refer to, gravitate to, and cite within my practice are things that I care deeply about. But they’re not necessarily things that somebody has deep and intimate knowledge of. Smithson’s practice or satanism or whatever it happens to be. These are the things that I think about a lot and I don’t wanna misrepresent them. Part of doing these things is figuring out a way to translate what is potentially this kind of esoteric language or something potentially marginal, and making it into something that other people can find themselves within. You know, the perfect example of that is a band called Sun, that I’ve worked with a number of times. Incredible musicians, incredible composers. But the last time I saw them — they just played at Lincoln Center last year. What they played at Lincoln Center was identical to what they were playing in Brooklyn in like 2000 at some lousy club. What they were doing in Lincoln Center is the same, but those things are really sophisticated. It is really easy to get caught up in the more outrageous aspect of what they’re doing or pointing a finger at something and being like, oh look how crazy this is. That’s never been something I’ve been interested in. I’m interested in these things. Deeply, sincerely, and I’m trying to communicate that. And there has to be a way of translating that. Sorry, this is all very vague. Ajay Kurian: I want to come back to sincerity ‘cause I think it holds a major role in how the work comes about and also the positioning of certain things. But maybe it’s also a good time to talk about where that deep sincerity for expressing yourself came from? What’s your background and your background with art? What made you gravitate towards art in the first place? Banks Violette: I’ve always made things. That’s kind of how I understand the world. I was always a kid in the back of the class, sitting and drawing and definitely not relating to anything outside. That’s always been how I view things or related to the world. I didn’t have any kind of background with contemporary art and certainly didn’t really know that much about art history. I had one of those sort of perfect, kind of what you hope for is the experience that people have in college. Which is not a vocational route, but you go there and you’re exposed to new information and your world expands and that’s how you discover what you want to do. So I went to undergraduate in New York City after a very long roundabout route of dropping outta high school and doing all sorts of other shit. Then going to undergrad and my intention was to parlay this kind of thing that I’d always done being the kid in the back of the class just doodling - and turning that into something, or being an illustrator or a graphic designer or something practical. Ajay Kurian: And your grandmother was an illustrator? Banks Violette: She was a really prominent illustrator and she illustrated some of the original Wizard of Oz books and she was one of the first King Features Syndicated artists. She had this amazing career as an illustrator. So within my family, it was always looked at as a very responsible career path, which is fucking not practical. So I knew a lot about the history of illustration, but I didn’t know anything about contemporary art or much about art history. In undergrad, I realized this is the kind of discourse that I want to be engaged with. And I was in school in New York City, so there were plenty of opportunities to meet professional working artists and galleries. That’s how I got involved with that. Ajay Kurian: You know, I like to draw too. And it was a skillset that I was like, oh I can do this thing. But then in high school, I had an art teacher who kind of showed me that it was a way to think through the world, to think through ideas. That you could embody philosophies into an artwork or a sculpture or a drawing, whatever it might be. That was through Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Arthur Danto. Those were the things that lit me up where I was like, holy shit, I had no fucking idea. Who were the artists that lit you up in that particular moment? That you were like, oh this is the club I wanna be a part of. Banks Violette: For contemporary art? Ajay Kurian: Or whatever, ‘cause if you’re an undergrad and you’re saying this is something that I want to do. What was that clique in art history that started to itch at you? Banks Violette: I mean, this is gonna sound strange, and I remember when we had a previous conversation in Connecticut it seemed kind of odd. But just seeing images of Judd and Marfa. There’s something about that that I responded to immediately. You know, as a teenager and making album covers, art and fire art for punk rock bands and playing in bands and stuff like that. Sort of assembling and creating this kind of culture that I was a direct participant in an active way. I think that there’s something really specific to that experience. The idea that you have to be an active participant in the culture that you are consuming, right? Instead of turning on the radio and something is handed to you, but instead you have to manufacture these things all out of whole cloth. So that sense that art had some kind of connection to a broader social thing I already had in my head. Ajay Kurian: In a DIY sense. Banks Violette: In a DIY sense and, you know, seize the means of production kind of sense, that you were responsible for creating things. That sounds very Pollyanna-ish, but there was something about seeing Judd that fully realized a landscape that this art inhabited and it was architected around this person’s vision. It was like, oh shit, this is not that dissimilar to designing this t-shirt for this band and now that is part of a collective social and cultural history that all these people are engaged with. There’s a thread that unifies those things. Ajay Kurian: And it is about contributing to a culture and potentially shifting a culture. But it’s not about the singular genius. You see yourself as contributing to something and that’s potentially the charge of it. It is something larger than simply one person’s gesture. Banks Violette: I think that was the biggest part about going to school and being exposed to people who were actively showing. This is what a gallery is, and this is you. Anybody can go there. If you don’t have a relationship to that and you’re looking at it from the outside in, it all seems very terrifying. It is designed to be a wholly exclusive space that is condescending in the extreme and then you suddenly get involved with it and you’re like, oh shit, it’s not. It’s a forum like any other. Like booking a VFW hall for your shitty hardcore band is not much different than curating a group show, kind of. Ajay Kurian: That’s great…But you went to Columbia for grad school and you had your first solo show while you were in grad school, right? Banks Violette: Well, yes and no. I was in the first year of grad school and I met a woman who’s an incredible video artist, Laura Parnes, who ran a not-for-profit art space in Williamsburg called Momenta with her husband. I had seen her at a show at Participant when it was on Broadway. It was this really amazing, very gnarly kind of punk rock video kind of thing. So I wanted her as a visiting artist at Columbia. She came to the studio and she was into what I was doing. She invited me to do a two person thing at Momenta, ’cause that’s how they did their programming. They would do two person, sort of spotlight shows. So I did that at the end of my first year in graduate school and it kind of just went out into the ether. But I did have one person who responded to that. It was this guy named Jose who had just opened this gallery Team in Chelsea and he had his own long, weird history. He came to the studio when I was in grad school and he invited me to do a show. So I already had a show in a gallery lined up by my second year of grad school, which probably made me like the most insufferable fucking person to be around, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: I hope you don’t mind me bringing this up. The story that I remember, and I need you to correct me if I’m wrong, but that the dean at Columbia said that you couldn’t show the work for that show as your thesis show and that you had to make a new body of work. Banks Violette: The story is way worse than that. I got in an argument with a guy and ended up throwing something at the wall. I didn’t realize that he was standing right by the wall, and it was a whole thing. There was like a departmental restraining order, which I’ve never heard of before, but it was this thing where I could not be in the room with him. It was right at that moment when Columbia was transitioning from it’s older, Madison Avenue, second generation Abex teachers, to staff that had been kind of poached from Yale. They were trying to shift the emphasis of that program. So there were some internal conflicts in the way that program was structured and I think I was kind of the casualty of that. Also my aim was not fucking awesome, apparently. Ajay Kurian: So the show that you ended up doing at Team Gallery, was that Arroyo Grande? Banks Violette: Yeah, it was. Ajay Kurian: It’s hard to find pictures of that one. To me, I think there are some immediate concerns from that exhibition that still carry through to what’s happening now. You know, it’s based on a very specific event, which is the murder of this young girl. Banks Violette: Yeah. I’m not unhappy with the show. It was a way of working through a bunch of different ideas and having them coalesce. But I can look at it now and be like, oh, that was a clumsy first attempt at addressing these set of concerns. Be it, you know, subcultures and the way people organize themselves in these potentially very antagonistic kinds of ways, the exigencies and accesses of faith, you know? What does it mean to look at something that is a horrific thing? What does that mean for a viewer? Those are all ideas that later on spun out into things like the Whitney show that we started talking about. It may have been a much more flat-footed attempt at addressing those ideas and kind of sorting out why am I interested in these things in the first place. Ajay Kurian: So this was a murder that was documented where these teenage boys murdered a young girl. I guess purportedly because they’re listening to Slayer. Banks Violette: They had a band, there was some dim idea on their part, and it’s always one of those things where you’re like, how much of this is true? How much of this is somebody writing this to make it conform to these preconceived ideas of what this looks like? Teenage boys in Arroyo Grande California who were huge Slayer fans, had a band, and decided that they were gonna kill their classmate as a way of propitiating, and having Satan or the Dark Ward support their shitty garage band. Even describing that is glibly skipping over that this is a tragic thing. I think that kind of tension at the heart of it is fundamentally really interesting. That the narrative becomes a way that we can wall off trauma or calamity or render it legible. If you are engaged with manufacturing that narrative, you are complicit in that process, and alienating the horrific fact of what you’re referring to. Ajay Kurian: So then this story becomes kind of a veil to cover up something else. Banks Violette: Yeah, and it’s also that idea of, we’re now talking about stories and that this group of teenagers believed this story and believed it to such an extent that they had to enact it in real world terms. And what’s the ultimate period at the end of any sentence? It’s death, you know? So the way of realizing that in its grossest form was the murder of their classmate. And that’s not an alien event. I mean, we started talking about Tipper Gore and that hysteria that I experienced in the eighties, the satanic panic and all those kinds of things. But you could trace that backwards to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and how that was supposedly responsible for an endless series of copycat suicides to the point where it was banned in some countries and cities. So the pedigree for these ideas isn’t solely based on a bunch of Slayer fans. In the 1980s, it was a thing. A kind of queasy relationship to fiction that proceeds and anticipates that in a number of different points in instances throughout h

He builds with fabric, scaffolding, and light — Eric N. Mack on tenderness as structure and the unseen labor that makes art visible. Eric N. Mack works between painting, installation, and fashion, reimagining how material, care, and collaboration shape contemporary image-making. His large-scale assemblages drape and lean, collapsing distinctions between surface and structure, styling and architecture, autonomy and support. His practice reveals how beauty, fragility, and display coexist within shared spaces of labor and care. He explains: * How gestures of rupture, cutting, and collage become ways to think through care, not violence. * Why stylists, curators, and unseen collaborators form the hidden architectures of art. * How fabric behaves as both image and body — draped, suspended, and alive to air and time. * What scaffolding, transparency, and light teach about the precarity of presence. * How tenderness and structure coexist as the real politics of display. * Why every act of making is also an act of attention — a choreography of support between maker, viewer, and space. (0:00) Welcome + Intro(01:00) Rupture, Reflection, and the Studio as World(05:00) Grace Jones and the Clarified Aesthetic(10:00) The Unseen Hand and the Architect of the Image(15:00) Collaboration, Care, and the Space of Display(20:00) Fabric, Fragrance, and the Politics of Form(30:00) Craft, Styling, and the Education of Looking(33:00) Art School, Value, and the Work of Belief(40:00) Draping Architecture and Breathing Structures(47:00) Fragility, Care, and the Social Life of Objects Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Raul Follow Eric:Web: https://www.artsandletters.org/exhibitions?slug=eric-n-mackInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ernatmack/?hl=en Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) is a painter who radically reconsiders the medium’s traditional conventions. By utilizing found materials, Mack creates richly textured compositions that investigate painting in an expanded field and formal concerns of the practice. In 2025, Mack presented a one-person exhibition and site-specific installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, as well as a solo exhibition of new works at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Mack attended The Cooper Union, NY (BFA) and Yale University, CT (MFA) and is the recipient of prestigious awards and residencies including the Chinati Foundation’s Artists in Residence Program (2023); the Rome Prize (2021-2022); the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017); the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island (2017); the Delfina Foundation Residency (2017) and the Studio Museum in Harlem Residency (2014-2015). One-person exhibitions include Eric N. Mack, Paula Cooper Gallery (2023); Scampolo!, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin (2022); Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FL (2021); and In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019). Major group exhibitions include Chronorama Redux, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2023); Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, NY (2015). Work by Mack is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Mack lives and works in New York. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio .— Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: When you’re putting together a show, I know you’ve talked about art being present for the world’s brutalities, but how do you conjugate that or stay present in the work with that? It’s not even saying that you have to, because it’s not your responsibility to do so. It’s more so, I see glimmers and I see the way that you think about how things come together and how they kind of fall apart. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. I have a lot of epiphanies that sit in the studio, that come from the studio that end up allowing me to think about the external world from the happenstances in the studio, and from coordinated or measured gestures of rupture. And those ruptures could have implications of or sit alongside what folks could regard as kind of a material violence, or violence to a material, or decomposition, or collage, or something for the work to feel chopped like the ingredients are chopped up. I love a good metaphor, like a good salad, it’s aromatic with all the ingredients. Nothing overpowers one another, but it’s transformative. It holds meaning, sustenance, and maybe a level of a counterpoint, maybe the sunflower seed gets stuck in your teeth or something like that, you know? Ajay Kurian: You gave us a lot to chew on, even in the press release. At the end of that, there’s literally seven hyperlinks to run through. We had The Clark Sisters, Nina Simone, a trailer for the Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, the Harlem Restaurant of which the show was named after, Sinners movie tickets. Eric N. Mack: Why not? Ajay Kurian: And Grace Jones on an Italian talk show or an Italian show. Eric N. Mack: A talk show, I think. It could have been Eurovision. Ajay Kurian: But that was serious. She was really in her pocket. Eric N. Mack: Yeah, it’s intense, ‘cause she’s in drag in a way. You know, she’s wearing this wig and I was like, the wig is architecture and the wig is like a hat. She’s architecture. If you’re watching the YouTube video or seeing the performance at the end, this camera pans out and she leans back and someone catches her as she falls and snatches her wig. Then she becomes this doll, this kind of copy of herself, this quotidian, you know the things that she would process with Jean Paul. She’s always around and I always think about her. She’s an interesting marker, because she’s such a clarified aesthetic. She’s a sound, she’s a voice and she also possesses her own tension. There’s incredible softness and vulnerability, but she’s also a tank, you know? The thing is, these images are also ones that she’s used herself. I just think that she will always be relevant. Ajay Kurian: There’s an ownership over the image too. There’s a way in which she’s self representing and it feels beautiful and antagonistic, but also really generous. To be both aggressive and generous at the same time isn’t an easy thing to do. Ajay Kurian: But I feel like, for her embodiment to be a black woman who is beautifully angular and masculine and feminine at the same time, it’s a lot to have to deal with, specifically in that moment of pop culture too. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. She’s an artwork. She’s her own artwork. There was an exhibition I did in London and I kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Misa Hylton. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was a stylist for Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. So she was a part of this kind of bad boy regime, but she was a part of their visual representation. She’s an iconic stylist. Everybody takes notes from her in New York. Ajay Kurian: Really? It’s so interesting ‘cause I think you’re the first artist that I’ve talked to that holds stylists in this regard. That the grooming of an image, the understanding of what it takes to put together a scene, an idea, a world building essentially, that it’s happening completely behind the scenes. You’re really picking out these people to be like, you’ve changed this whole scene. Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s what we do as artists. It’s just asking questions like, okay, what’s in the byline? Who did this? Who’s the architect? She called herself the architect, and I respect that. There was an awareness and a renewed understanding of her importance as these looks became more prominent again. The nineties in general as a kind of nostalgic, bygone era, that we were there for. So it also is an interesting thing to think about, who made the thing that sits in your heart or that sits with you, that rests in your references, and that you connect with? Who made that? Obviously, I mean, that’s what we do. That’s research. Maybe people don’t look at the production of the image as much as, you know, there’s a lot of romanticism around the fashion designer and who made the garment, but you won’t see the garment without seeing how it was put together and how it was aligned. The tension. Thinking about my good friend, Haley Wollens who has been working for a long time. I think more recently she’s done Dsquared, she’s done Au Claire, she’s done all of these important brands that end up being reconstituted, recomposed by this unseen hand. Ajay Kurian: That’s the thing. It’s a level of research that is fascinating to me because I think everybody gets caught up in the director and the designer. Even when you’re a kid, you watch the movie and you like the movie.Then there’s the kid that finds out who the director is. Then there’s the kid who finds out who the producer is. That’s a different kid. Eric N. Mack: It is a different kid. But you know, sometimes it’s meant to be that way. It may be structured for folks to be completely enamored with the superstar, with the actress or the actor. It was designed that way, you know? Ajay Kurian: Now I want to see behind that. Eric N. Mack: That’s what I do. I mean, that’s what I’m interested in. Questioning wasn’t enough, and was never enough. Like thinking about Amanda Harlech, she’s an incredible stylist who was a big part of the way that we experienced the early days of John Galliano and some of the more important days of Karl Lagerfeld. I mean, she’s established, but she’s a visionary and at a certain point she kind of sought Galliano out when he was finishing his degree at CSM. So there was a premise that was going around between them. They were collaborators. There’s something about the unseen magic in between these figures and some of the social qualities of discourse between two people that end up generating meaning for so many. Ajay Kurian: So what’s the plural for you? Do you feel like there’s similar relationships that you have in your practice? Of course, I know that you actually work with stylists and designers. There’s plenty of collaborative things that you’ve done. But when I think about the kind of classic idea of a painter, for instance. You have a studio practice, you go to the studio, you work, you come home and that’s potentially a very solitary thing. Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s up to me, and it’s up to artists to be able to question that, to reposition that. Sometimes that works, and the main collaborator at this point is the curator. Eric N. Mack: So for this exhibition, shout out to everybody at Arts and Letters, Jenny Chasky, Nick and Juan — these are really important people in actualizing the exhibition. It was through conversation and also acknowledging that everybody, they got eyes and it matters like that we are all seeing. And I’m not afraid to ask what people are seeing right in the room. Sometimes people think that just means I don’t have vision myself and that’s stupid. But I think also with time, it’s also a practice for me, to see what I get from that. Ultimately, I’ll make my own decisions about these things. But it’s really important for me to be able to reflect from people who are familiar with the space that I’m working in currently. You know, I’m scratching my head, I’ve been here all day, why is this not working? There’s people who have been up on the lift and been able to see what the space looks like from all these different vantage points. The material that the walls are made from are all significant aspects of architecture that many of us can take for granted. Ajay Kurian: I’ve been lingering on this picture, because it’s kind of the first thing that you encounter when you walk into the space. There is a piece suspended from, and kind of draping, in the wind. And it was a really cloudy, somewhat rainy day. Just seeing that floating above does inaugurate an experience and what you’re about to move into. Your work, maybe more recently too, has felt like a collaged brush stroke. I think a lot of people might think of the brush stroke as a unit of expression. And what I really like about how you’re using the bolt of fabric is that it becomes both brushstroke as an expressive entity, but also, it kind of carries all the social weight of the ready-made as well. They happen simultaneously. It’s just this kind of non-binary thing where you’re not choosing between one or the other in particular moments. They just happen to exist at the same time. So you just see this streak across the sky of a variety of fabrics, and you can feel what each of them does to you without being able to place it. It’s a nice thing because then you walk in and it almost felt more like portraiture to me. These are all just like iPhone pictures that I took because I was too late in asking arts and letters for pictures, so that’s all me. But they’re not bad pictures. Then you get into this kind of diaphanous space and it just completely opens up. The whole space just has this air of levity and there’s brushstrokes in the sky and it feels like a realm of possibility. I know I’m waxing poetic a little bit, but I just really enjoyed the show. This is one of those moments where just seeing materials come together was such a nice moment. Eric N. Mack: I took this picture too. When you sent it to me, I was like, oh good. Because when we got the documentation of the show or I was talking to the photographer, I was like, get this, and I wanted that shape, that jagged shape where the scarf enters the picture and how it’s held together and being able to see the other side of the room through that. It’s framing, but it’s also the implication of the transparency and opacity kind of playing. I mean, for me, this one’s such a chopped salad. you know? The beauty isn’t its presence and almost shies away from image or something, like a fragrance. I’m thinking about a fragrance. I’m thinking about how one experiences layers of scent and how transformative that is no matter where you are. You know, that’s abstraction. Ajay Kurian: Then what title do you think of when you think of the perfume notes of the show? Eric N. Mack: I mean, sometimes it’s just literal, like one is called On vetiver. Ajay Kurian: Okay, so it takes you there too. It’s direct. Eric N. Mack: So I’m imagining, a little vial of oil, that would just be something that the fabric could be dipped in, you know, imagining it being like drenched in oil or the lived life of the fabric being like worn. Ajay Kurian: There’s the presence of a body. It’s interesting the way you’re talking about visuality when it comes to a scent. Because it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like you’re able to imagine something without a picture. That it’s almost a posture with no body, or there’s something that gives an evocation of presence. And there’s a fragrance, this fragrance portrait of a lady that like, now I smell it everywhere. It’s everywhere. There was a moment when you could just pick it out of a room. As soon as I walked in, I’d have a picture, but it didn’t matter if it was the person or not, or if I matched it up. It was a different kind of picture. Eric N. Mack: I like that. Because it also is just about a material. It’s about like a plant or something. But it doesn’t give itself away and it doesn’t tell you about what it does or what it can do.The center figure is called bod. I thought that was really funny. But also thinking about bod cologne and just like a shorthand and thinking about the figure. Just trying to get there so it can carry notions of the viewer. There’s a lot I could say in terms of that work in relationship to the armatures. Ajay Kurian: The armatures are kind of new. I feel like there’s been kind of ready-made armatures in older works, but these are fabricated and then also kind of anonymous. There’s anonymity to them, to me, where it’s almost bureaucratic. It’s Subway poles and there’s this kind of brushed anodyne aluminum and it’s a highly specific form. It’s cantilevered and counterbalanced. There’s a lot of specific things, but then it also feels like a particular kind of architecture that’s city based. And then to have it have this delicate form draped on it. I’m curious about how these forms are continuing to develop, how you’re starting to understand them for yourself. Eric N. Mack: These were made really thinking about this space, the kind of variedness and wanting there to be an almost figurative element that would lean on the wall. Maybe the sculpture could be holding up the wall like a buttress or some kind of architectural element. Also, the kind of premise of scaffolding, and just thinking about how scaffolding is used as a structure for support. I mean this fabric, I’ve been carrying around for probably maybe eight years. Ajay Kurian: Wow. That was actually a question I had, do you have an archive of fabrics? Eric N. Mack: Absolutely. I love the properties of a pleated fabric and how, you know, thinking about structure and support, the fact that it could be almost self-imposed. It’s imposed on the surface. It’s like the structure comes from within, and it’s held through heat. I mean, that’s how pleats are made. And as the fabric contracts and then expands again. The form is communicated through that. Ajay Kurian: It’s really beautiful. It made me think of Matisse. Because it felt like a color study where this much red means something and this much red means something. And like then when you add dimension to it and light and all these other things, here is where the pleats stop and you can see a different orientation of color. It really is a different experience. It was a nice feeling to not have immediate vocabulary for what I was experiencing. Eric N. Mack: I think I was trying to describe an experience of looking at a painting and being like, how does this operate and why is it this specific form that’s significant? You know what I mean? And you look at it kind of pissed off. You’re just like, what? How does this do that? And why is it just one color that does it? Ajay Kurian: The first person that comes to my mind is Sam Gilliam and what that experience was like when first encountering that work. What was the first work of art that you can remember that pissed you off? Or that you had an adversarial relationship with? Sometimes things piss me off ‘cause they’re so good. Eric N. Mack: I’m trying to, I don’t know. I know there’s a lot. You can get angry at all the art out there, but really it is those gestures where you look at the side of the painting and be like, what? Oh, you painted that or you finished the edge like that or just these finalizing gestures that are about the craftsmanship of the work. It communicates to people who are craftsmen. I can’t think of anything that really pissed me off right now. Ajay Kurian: It’s good that you mentioned that moment of looking at the edge of a painting. To me, it’s something that I think about with your work where the line between craft and styling is completely blurred. So for instance, if you’re. Stretching Belgian linen and you’re building up a surface and then you’re applying oil medium. We know what that surface looks and feels like when it’s done right. And when it’s not, when it’s okay. The preciousness of when it really feels like luxury. With your work, there’s almost a slightly different motivation. That’s why it’s so cool to me that you can rattle off the most important stylist here, because to me, you understand that as a craft. You understand that as a world and how precise it

He builds worlds from devotion, labor, and light. Raúl de Nieves on myth, death, and the joy of transformation. Raúl de Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, stained glass, and music. His work merges ancestral craft with queer exuberance, creating ecstatic spaces where life, death, and rebirth coexist. Known for his intricate beaded sculptures and radiant installations, de Nieves transforms discarded materials into devotional objects that question permanence, value, and faith. He reflects on: * Why failure and fear are essential teachers * How myth, labor, and ritual shape his understanding of transformation * The link between spirituality and psychedelia in his creative process * The politics of beauty, excess, and craft * How performance and collaboration sustain his practice * The tension between art and commerce—and what it means to say yes * Why joy, respect, and self-love remain his most radical tools (0:00) Welcome + Intro(1:00) The Origin of “St. George and the Dragon”(10:00) Death, Culture, and Safety(21:00) Excess, Labor, and the Ephemeral(31:00) The Whitney Window(35:00) The Carousel and the Brand(43:00) Pact with the Devil(47:00) Celebration and Decay(53:00) Belief and Legacy(56:00) Joy, Respect, and The Smashing Pumpkins Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Raul https://companygallery.us/artists/raul-de-nieves @norauls Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’ visual symbolism draws on both classical Catholic and Mexican vernacular motifs to create his own unique mythology. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments.Recent solo institutional exhibitions include In Light of Innocence at Pioneer Works, Redhook, NY (2025), and imagine you are here , Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2023); A Window to the See, a Spirit Star Chiming in the Wind of Wonder… , Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2023); The Treasure House of Memory, ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2021); Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2021); and Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at Prospect New Orleans, Hauser & Wirth, The Highline, MoMA PS1, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, K11 Foundation, Documenta 14, Performa 13, ICA Philadelphia, The Watermill Center, The Kitchen, Artist’s Space, and numerous other venues. His work is included in public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. De Nieves was born in 1983, in Michoacán, Mexico, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody, thank you all for being here. Welcome to our NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves! I’m gonna give you some background as to what NewCrits is, I’m gonna give you a little introduction to Raúl, and then we’re gonna get into the conversation. NewCrits is a global platform rooted in aesthetic education. We’re committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship and courses that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions while honoring the intensity of their best methods. We have crits, but we don’t think about crits as a way to tear you down to build you up. That’s trauma we don’t need anymore. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique, rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention. These talks are an instantiation of that. The way that I think about art will be on display. This kind of conversation is the kind of conversations that we have in crits. It’s one where we’re building together. Now let’s get to the main event, which is Raúl here. Raúl de Nieves: Hello everyone. Ajay Kurian: All right, we’re gonna start with this image. I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. We were both also part of the five artists that were asked to collaborate with Tiffany and Company. So we were spending a lot of time together and it was really nice. Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist, that feels free of shame and free of hiding. You’ll see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown deaths as he does in his band Hairbone. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work. They are a faded coupling, archetypes, and fantasma characters emerge throughout his sculptures as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books, rituals, and beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There’s plenty of art that looks to religions, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up. Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened. The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He’s created new stained glass works for the windows of the entire building. They’re modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile. So when you see texts that might be darker, more bodily, even a little gross, you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing’s left out. Everything feels redeemed. After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the sense that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy as if he simply is a star. I think it’s easy for us to see someone like Raúl whose light shines brightly and think that’s just who he is, that it’s not the result of enormous amounts of work and discipline of the ability to bring death to an old self in order to birth a new one and find joy again and again. A person like that right now is worth talking to and hearing their stories. So please help me welcome Raúl. Raúl de Nieves: Thank you. That was very nice. Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Raúl de Nieves: I feel great. Today was a lovely day and being here is so nice. To be able to talk to you and share a moment of my life and just some of the things that mattered to me. So thank you for having me. Ajay Kurian: It’s really a pleasure. It’s an honor. I have loved your work, I’ve loved seeing it and I love learning more about it. This image was one that came up when I was reading about the work. I’ve seen this story told many times in your work, but this is from 2003 to 2005. This is a story of St. George and the Dragon, and I wanted to start here ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things that are formative in this particular image, the story itself and how you saw that story. Raúl de Nieves: I moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the CCA college. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take into the school because of the financial situation that I was in. So it’s really nice to know that you are providing mentorship to students, because there wasn’t anything like that in 2002. The internet was just starting and moving to San Francisco was such a dream of mine and I made it happen even though I didn’t end up going to the school. For me, the bridge of San Francisco, which always shined so much to a forgotten soul or this idea of the hippie, the queers, gay culture. It really attracted me to this idea of knowledge. But once I couldn’t attend the school, I had to find my own mentorships, and I saw that through my friends. The image of St. George and the dragon appeared to me through a woman who was selling embroidery at the store that I was working at. I ended up buying the embroidery off her and I started to really think about how I grew up in a religious household that spoke about angels and the defeat of the self. But in a more Catholic way, where you have to repent your sins and think about what it means to not follow the status quo of a normal way of thinking because heaven is the ultimate power of our existence. St. George, to me, became this mantra. I started to really ask myself who I was in the picture, and I decided to think that I was all aspects of this fable. The fable talks about a dragon that houses itself next to a water well, and the town is in fear that this dragon is gonna drink all their water. So they must gather their beans into a sacrifice because the dragon ate all the animals. As if the dragon shouldn’t eat the animals because the humans are eating the animals. I don’t think that the saint really exists in the image because that is up to the future to decide. So in a sense, I thought about some of the people in my life that I felt had that idea of themselves. Not going to school gave me an opportunity to seek these kinds of icons or lessons through things that appeared to me and I frantically started painting this painting over and over and over again. My goal was to paint 50 of them. I still haven’t painted 50, but once I moved to New York, it’s almost like the image faded away somehow. But it’s something I constantly go back to, and when I recognize it through my journeys, it reminds me of finding things to reflect on. Ajay Kurian: The part where you say that you can be every single character in the fable is what stands out to me because there’s the dragon or the snake, there’s St. George, and then there’s the townspeople that are afraid. There’s this sense that St. George is banishing the dragon, and there’s a sense that people think it’s a dragon but really it’s just this snake and it’s not that big of a deal. They’re afraid of this thing that maybe they shouldn’t be afraid of. To be able to embody the people that are violent and fearful, to embody the saint who comes to save the day, and then to embody this dragon figure is a lot to think about, especially right now. I wonder, can you still embody all those positions or do you feel like you have a different kind of sense of self right now? Raúl de Nieves: I definitely can. I think fear is man’s best friend as they say, and sometimes we really have to get to know our fears in order to understand what they look like. It’s one of the hardest things that we can allow ourselves to communicate with. Because sometimes that comes with a tragic death, addiction, or just being alive. I thought about this and the fact that this dragon was portrayed as the entity of the end of life. A dragon is essentially a mythical creature, so this idea of the myth or the flamboyant also became what I was thinking about. I was like, oh there is a fear of the other side of the human being that maybe we aren’t allowed to or we shouldn’t exercise. Which is our inner divas, our inner goddess, or our inner demons. But I still relate to each character because not every day is so jolly. One of the things that I’ve been trying to continue to exercise within myself is how to let go and what does that mean? When letting go, is it an idea or is it part of the past? Ajay Kurian: When was the first time that you felt like you befriended your fears? Raúl de Nieves: Definitely being in San Francisco. Knowing that there was a part of failure because I decided not to take on the academic route through the school. I felt afraid of debt. I just felt afraid that some of the things that I was working towards had an end there. But I think being afraid is what gave me this exercise to really think about what that looked like. It gave me an opportunity to grow and to start experimenting with what it felt like or what I thought an artist would do in school. What conversations would you have with your peers? Or what was a critique? Who was gonna tell me that this was right or wrong? I can be a masochist and that’s part of one of my best traits because I put myself through hell. But to me, hell is not the hell we live in. To me, hell is the entrance to the subconscious, the unknown and the act of finding what the dragon really looks like. Ajay Kurian: I refuse to believe that it happened. Like debt is such a primal thing and it’s just so hard. I’m thinking of my mother, for instance, and confronting her fears feels impossible. It feels like it’s never gonna happen. There’s incremental things that happen. But what I’ve seen in your work, how you continue to confront new challenges, how you reduce these binaries between life and death, open that passageway. There’s a part of me that’s so hungry to understand how you became friends with death, how you were able to really be okay with those moments of spiking fear, and to welcome this and understand that the dragon is really a snake. Raúl de Nieves: I guess it’s because I grew up in a house full of death, as they say. Essentially, I grew up knowing that death was a reality. I have two brothers and we’re all two years apart. My little brother who was six years old when our father died, has no memory of him. So for us to grow up looking up at the sky, and my mom being like, if you see an airplane, wave to the airplane, ‘cause that’s where your dad is. It was this sense of comfort because when growing up in Mexico, we didn’t see many planes flying over my small little city. So it was a rarity to find some sort of connection through an idea that my mom was planting on us. The celebration of death in my culture is one of the most beautiful things that we have. It’s such a rich and beautiful act of nature to embody this idea of the ephemeral aspect of life and how people are the closest things to us when it comes to a memory. Not having that person next to you creates an idea of sorrow. But for me personally, it has created an idea of safety. That’s why this aspect of life becomes so important. I have really intense conversations with my mom where I’m like, I’m gonna die first, and she’s like no, me, and I’m like, me. And then we’re like, oh my god, we’re so weird. But it’s funny, like I obviously don’t want my mom to die or me, but I’ve thought about death. What would happen if I died tomorrow? Would anyone even care? I don’t have children. I have a family, and I have a lot of friends. We’re seeing so much death every day, and it’s almost a normality. But it’s not celebrated, like we aren’t celebrating the death of people right now. We’re trying to understand the reality of why it is so easy to access this fear now. It’s almost like the fear is gone because it’s prominent and nobody’s celebrating it. We’re just really thinking about what tomorrow brings because it’s far away from us right now, but it can get close any moment. I think that’s when you have to start to really gravitate towards what would this look like if it really happened to me? Ajay Kurian: I was just thinking about this today, so bear with me if I don’t have a full thought here, but there’s this anime called Demon Slay. I’ve been watching it and it’s really brutal. The beginning of the story is really brutal and terribly sad. This new movie came out and apparently it’s like the biggest selling anime film ever. I was just thinking about why that would necessarily be the case? There’s a part of me that thinks exactly what you’re saying about this possibility of celebrating death. Understanding grief as a part of living and being alive. Because that brutality is so present, it almost allows you to sink your teeth into life and really experience something that feels more real and more charged. When I go to your exhibitions, I get the sense that life is charged, that you don’t fuck around. This is real, this is happening, this is important, and it’s joyful and there’s such a spectrum of emotions. This show El Rio, now several years ago, 2016, I just remember being floored by this one character in particular. The body language and behind all the pearls are bullets streaming down the fabric. I was actually shaken. It was such a beautiful, coy, strange sculpture that was in the press release. It alludes to saint or assassin. And I was like, Jesus Christ, this is a lot but it’s really beautiful. So you are left with — what do I do with all of this? Raúl de Nieves: As you can see, this character is wearing a military suit and it is covered in fake pearls, but it also drapes these bullets. You can’t see his eyes, but you can see their smile or their grim. That’s what reminds me that sometimes a saint can’t be a saint without the act of defeat, death, and renewal. So in a way, it is a double-sided image of the self. Not just of the person that decides to take on that role, but the reality of our personal selves and how we have the capacity to flip. It’s one of the scariest things to imagine because you can’t help it. Sometimes you question people’s actions and it’s hard to understand what it is that people are going through when they can’t communicate. This object was a really interesting thing to bring into this exhibition called El Rio, which to me, was work that just accumulated in my studio. It all related back to the idea of St. George and the Dragon, and how the fable really just became my ultimate teacher. I wanted it to teach me something. And it taught me a lot because it’s made me believe in the past. It’s made me understand that by thinking of something that once was here, or an idea or a memory; what would it be like if those memories weren’t here or if those people couldn’t tell you about their future or their stories. So it’s a sense of understanding that our lives come with so many stories from the past, and they usually relate to other people’s lives. Ajay Kurian: This is the next version of St. George and the Dragon. It’s such an insane piece. You really do have something masochistic in you, but it also feels so multidimensional. When you’re talking about the past, it does feel like time is folded on itself over and over again in the drawing itself. All of these things are related, but it’s not like it’s far away or near, it’s like all of the things at the same time. It’s 11 dimensions instead of three. Raúl de Nieves: Yeah. I think for me, spirituality is psychedelia. When you really reach that level of trust and belief and it comes with other people’s practices or ways of thinking, you can tap into something that just takes you there. And as you can see, the image of St. George is so fragmented and now it’s almost like a computer chip. But that was the whole point of using and abusing that image over and over. So that I could access more of myself through this idea of wanting to see the double-sided picture of the self. Ajay Kurian: Were you at all influenced by underground comics when you were growing up? Raúl de Nieves: No, I never was. I think Mario was the only thing we had access to in Mexico when we were little, but I never got into comics. I think I made this when I moved to New York and I learned about this artist, Augustin Lesage, who I believe was a mailman (coal miner). They would get home and make these very intense drawings. The influence of this idea of the self going into hibernation and hallucinating, or using your work ethics as a form to access the subconscious and this idea of psychedelia became so real. I don’t know if it was because I was l

She builds archives, conjures futures, and questions everything — Tamika Abaka-Wood on ritual, refusal, and the joy of cultural strategy. Tamika Abaka-Wood is a cultural anthropologist, conceptual strategist, and artist whose practice moves between community building, archival work, and spiritual inquiry. She’s the creator of Dial-An-Ancestor, an ongoing project that collects voice notes as offerings to the past, present, and future. Her work resists categorization, merging care and critique, and often asks: what are we remembering, and who are we remembering for? She explains: * Why she’s more interested in frameworks than mediums * How Dial-An-Ancestor creates a space for grief, communion, and speculative healing * The tension between facilitation and authorship in creative work * What it means to build archives that feel alive—not extractive * How refusal and withholding can be generative tools * Why she resists the singular identity of “artist,” and what she embraces instead * The ethics of visibility, looking, and representation in public programming * How joy and mischief shape her strategies for imagining otherwise (0:00) Welcome + Intro(04:15) Meet Tamika: cultural strategist, connector, world-builder(08:30) Refusing the artist title, reshaping the role(13:00) Strategy as creation(17:22) Dial-An-Ancestor: calling in future histories(26:08) Branding is not world-building(30:31) Building intimacy into the infrastructure(35:03) Refusal is not a pause, it’s a position(44:00) Grief, play, and spiritual maintenance(48:21) How to get involved with NewCrits Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Tamika https://tamikaabakawood.com/ https://www.instagram.com/tamikaka/?hl=en Learn more about Dial-An-Ancestor https://dial-an-ancestor.com/ About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio ._ Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody. Welcome to the July NewCrits Talk and Summer Party. Thank you all for coming! I met Tamika through my partner Jasmine, who's here tonight. From day one she was electric, a mile a minute, excited about anyone's excitement, game for anyone's game, a facilitator par excellence. Whatever you supplied, she'd give back threefold with tangents, detours, serious things and fun things, codified and color-coded. Tamika wants to help. She wants people to see their ideas through, and to excite them to build the worlds they're making and to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow without blinders on. She's not deaf to misery or darkness, but somehow she manages to channel her best energies to maintain a joyful persistence. It's only recently that Tamika has felt comfortable calling herself an artist, and she probably wants to chime in right now and question the importance of the name. Anyways, she has self-identified as a cultural anthropologist and I think that's definitely true. Her ongoing project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a beautiful testament to this where she gathers future histories into a building archive. But her work as a kind of conceptual strategist is also its own form of cultural anthropology. And I'm interested in people who are creating in multiple ways in multiple worlds. But really I insist on the term artist, not because everyone needs to be an artist, but because I think it allows her to momentarily assume the role of head creative and not facilitator. She's not alone, of course, but sometimes when you're in an ensemble, it's time for your solo. The group steps back and lets you play because what you have is special and singular, and the group knows you'll come back. But for that moment, it's about you, and this is a chance for that to happen. This is Tamika's world, and tonight we're all in it together. Please help me welcome Tamika Abaka-Wood. Tamika Abaka-Wood: That was so special, thank you. I feel so shy, I really do. That was beautiful. Ajay Kurian: Of course. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thanks for having me here. It is still surreal. Ajay Kurian: What's surreal about it? Tamika Abaka-Wood: What is surreal about it? I think you touched on it there. I definitely feel more comfortable in a facilitator role — a question asker role. You anticipated my reaction to the word artist, and you're a fine artist. Big A. Ajay Kurian: So they say. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Who's they? Ajay Kurian: I dunno. Ajay Kurian: There are prompts over there, so I'm gonna ask you one of the prompts and then we'll get into what these prompts are. How's your head, your heart, and your body right now? Tamika Abaka-Wood: Okay, let's start with body. I came back from London yesterday last night, so in my body it's like midnight, which is way past my bedtime. But my body feels relatively relaxed. I feel like my heart's beating maybe a little bit fast and I'll ease into this weird space. My head feels really unburdened and my heart's really open. I went to London because my mom is sick and I got to be there with her, and it reminded me that life is so much more important than anything else. And doing it with people is so much more important than anything else. So I feel really grateful that I was there and I feel really grateful that I'm here. Ajay Kurian: Oh, I'm wishing your mother well. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thank you. How's your head, heart, and body? Ajay Kurian: Let's see. I'm only gonna answer so many questions from you but I'll answer that one. My head is clear. I just got back from Bard where I was teaching for the last three weeks, so I need to clear out a little bit more. But I feel like, as I prep for these things, I try to do some breathing and get that clear. My heart is always open in these conversations because really it is a very responsive thing. I'm here to celebrate the things that you do and that makes it easy to have an open heart. And my body's okay. I want to start with Dial-An-Ancestor 'cause I think it's probably the project that has created the most iterations. Maybe it's the thing that's built a momentum in which this becomes an artistic practice and one that's of course related and implicated in cultural anthropology. But this is a very specific project and it's one that's very open and you have the ways that you want it to be. And that's interesting to me 'cause this is this is a vision — what you want it to be. So I want to hear the beginning. I want to hear how this started and kind of the bones to the flesh to where we are. Tamika Abaka-Wood: So Dial-An-Ancestor is a techno-spiritual hotline. It is gonna exist for a hundred years, which is obviously beyond my lifetime, purposefully. It asks people to do two things; to consider who is asked to listen and who is asked to speak. That is the most blunt, simple two questions that this artistic process asks. But it came around in 2021 when I was pregnant for the first time. I know it's so biographical, but I just think I wanna go straight there with you. I was pregnant for the first time and it was unexpected and it was really exciting and scary, and made me realize how precious and precarious time is. At the same time that I had this germination of life within me, I also got a call from back home in London that my dad was really sick, so I've got two parents that are sick at the moment. So it was conceptually holding life and death at the same time and being like, oh my God, I'm the link between what was before and what is to come, what do I wanna do with that? So it made me think about ancestry and links between the past and the future, but within my body for the first time. That's where it came from within my body, but also it was 2021 and I was new in America. Ajay Kurian: That's lot of new things. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It was a lot of new things at one time. But it came out of a learning experience, so twice a week I got on Zoom with seven people who are strangers that I did not know, and we had a self-directed course that was about unraveling our relationships to time. I know, it is like the weirdest thing to do. Ajay Kurian: How did that even happen? Tamika Abaka-Wood: I just know a guy that knows a guy. Honestly, that's how anything in my life happens. I have no idea. Just like through WhatsApp, there was this group. Ajay Kurian: Know a guy that knows a guy, that's like intellectual gangsterism. Tamika Abaka-Wood: No, true. Like I don't know anything. I just know people that know things and I get put on. So we were unraveling on our relationships to time, and this is where Dial-An-Ancestor really came from conceptually. Ajay Kurian: Of course it happened in a group. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It had to, there's no other way. Every good idea, if you really boil it down, comes from multiple dialogues and multiple references. Like you can't really locate it in one place or one person. There's a multitude of unraveling of references over a lifetime that leads you to one idea. An idea finds a person or a set of people at the right time. Ajay Kurian: And so this was that time. There were so many thoughts that were going through my head right then where I think that's true for all artistic creation. The funny thing is that when people take on the name artist, they do slough off the group. They’ll say that they're for the group. They’ll say that they're for the community. But there are instances, and I'm not damning all artists and I'm not saying that everybody does this — it’s not that severe. But there are instances where that dynamic falls away, and then the singular artist is raised up and we get the genius. And what I hear in what you're saying is that you're keeping all the things that make that rich and real and true. That's the time when I understand why maybe you shy away from the term artist because it does consolidate so much of that feeling of the one. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Ugh, yeah. So much of that is western ideology. It's never been real. It's never ever been a real thing. And this isn't to shun the idea of a singular artist, I think that's so important as well. Ajay Kurian: Absolutely. Tamika Abaka-Wood: I'm interested in the idea of the me within the we and vice versa. But for me, the way that I've been ignited, I definitely need external catalysts and factors to stimulate thinking and doing and practicing. I guess this is a really bastardized, quiet, and trite understanding of what an artist is, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. So I think the traditional understanding of an artist is someone standing in a room being like listen to me, I've got the answers, I’m an artist. I came up with this individual like singular genius thought and I'm being praised for it, like in silo. But nothing ever happens in silo. Whereas, I guess the thing that is interesting or natural for me through Dial-An-Ancestor is there are all of these things happening around me. What is the kind of consensus of what it is that we need as humanity right now? Or what mistakes are we making? Where are we tripping up? What is it that we're yearning for? What do we need collectively? And then is there something within that where I can play a role in at least moving us forwards as a people. So there's a step before the individual idea, which is based off of need. Ajay Kurian: But then that part of it does still take guts because I think there's so many times when you have conversations with people and people are like, that's a fucking good idea. You have an energy, but then it just fizzles and nothing happens. But the difference between somebody saying, this is real. We've all acknowledged that these problems are real, and the solution that we're collectively coming to is also real. So let's go do something. That step of doing something is usually terrifying enough that it stops 99% of people from doing the thing. So for you, what was the thing that made you start this. Let me start Dial-An-Ancestor and let me make this real in whatever way. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It's such a good question. So my background is in research insight and strategy, where you inherit a brief that has come from somewhere else and someone else and you don't really know what purpose it's serving ultimately. Whereas this kind of brief and idea I could fully see, and it almost felt as if there was no other choice but to try. I was really purposeful about being a guest in New York. It happened in 2021. I was living in Bedstuy, I was new and I wanted to be a good guest. So for a year I was like, I'm just gonna sit back and figure out how things are done around here. I think the steps to realizing Dial-An-Ancestor and making it real were baby ones, which involved other people. So it kind of spread the risk as well. There's an accountability that comes with doing things in groups, but there's also a spread of risk. So when I say it's our thing, not my thing, I think it's me being like, Hey, love me, I’ve got an idea. I have things to say, judge me, love me, pay attention to me. But also this is really scary and I can't do it by myself, and I know that I don't have the skillset to do it by myself, so who else is around me that I can lean on when things do get nerve wracking or I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing. Ajay Kurian: So just like the basic existence of Dial-An-Ancestor is that it's a hotline that you can call and record yourself as a future ancestor. I feel like we should listen to one. Tamika Abaka-Wood: We should listen to one for sure. Ajay Kurian: All right. I feel like we should start with “I wanna be a giant”. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Oh my gosh, yes. Start with “I wanna be a giant". This was anonymous by the way. I went full stalker mode to figure out who left this. DAA audio: Hi, I'm Reva Rutherford. I started the record a message before and then I realized I had my air pods in, which have water damage. So this is me calling again. I wanted to share a half written poem that I have in my notes. I write mantras and manifestos in my notes a lot. So yeah. Here's one. No more shrinking. I wanna be a giant. I want my titties to swing to the floor when I laugh. I want to step over all the fucked up towns white people create. I'm gonna be a giant so I can leave my big footprint on your ass if you fuck with me. I wanna be a giant. Unassailable. If you try and shoot me down the bullets ricochet. No more shrinking. Hear me roar. I'm trying to exchange tips with Godzilla at the kickback. Zine and pen in my back pocket so I can doodle newfound manifestos in the margins. I wanna be a giant, so big that I can grab the moon out the sky. I wanna be so big the moon gave the moves out the way for me. I wanna be a giant so I can stuff the clouds into my cone, smoke it and feel the entire world in my chest. I wanna be a giant so all the kids can play on my back when I lay down. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Right? So sick. So this person left a voicemail twice and the first time that they did it there was like a little stutter in their voice, which I actually really liked. But they left this message again and I had to listen back to it over and over again to catch the name, Reva Rutherford. I was like, who is this like secret notes app poet? I must find them. They're from New Jersey. It didn't take that long to honestly find them, but New Jersey poet. We ended up connecting and chatting afterwards, but they are so fantastic and I think there's something of a confessional aspect to being able to leave your truth to whoever is listening. Regardless of like where they're at, context, any of the various identities that we play with and perform and put on. It felt so pure and so wonderful that I had to second guess myself to be like, should I reach out? Is this kind of like breaking the spell? Is this being unfair to the person that left it? Thankfully she was into it, but what I'm trying to say is morally, there are a lot of questions that this throws up for me that I do not have the answers to right now. Ajay Kurian: Before getting into that moral quandary of stalking someone. Good intentions, we'll stick with that. But when you're doing something that's so based in community and collaborative, I think the question that comes up for me and something that I'm thinking about now is when you're beginning something, how long does it take before it turns into something that you believe in? You start dialing Ancestor and nobody's called, that's a thing that probably happened and then you get your first call. Tamika Abaka-Wood: So the way that people find out about Dial-An-Ancestor is mainly through like street intervention. So we paste them, I don't have time, I don't have money. I come from a very working class background where we grew up quite poor, but conceptually and the ideas that were instilled into me in these like limitless propositions, we were surrounded by them. So there's a really lovely playing with scale where it was like, nothing's impossible, but your material reality means that right now you have $250 to figure out how to turn this techno spiritual intergenerational exchange into something tangible that people can interact and fuck with. So how do you do that? That's a huge leap from how do we share knowledge intergenerationally to, you have $250. Like how do you actually activate that? I wheat pasted for the first time, it was the scariest thing in the world. 'cause like I'm trying to make friends. I'm in New York, I don't really know anyone that well. This is the kind of left field idea. Maybe one of the most visible acts of the way that I think that I've put into the world, which felt really scary for me. But people fucked with it immediately. Weirdly, it’s now like the tail end. We love a new thing, we love a launch. We don't really love maintenance and care. It’s really boring to see this same wheat pasted thing over and over again. And it makes me think so much — Mierle Laderman Ukeles, you know who I'm talking about? Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Ukeles. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Maintenance art and her manifesto. I dunno how, but I found it and I think so much of her work really resonates with me for that reason. The invisible labor that comes around maintaining a thing is not as sexy as the launch of a thing. So actually I'm finding it harder now than I did going out wheat pasting for the first time because everyone's like, oh my God, so cool, what is this? I wanna get involved. Whereas after four years it's oh, same thing again. Ajay Kurian: But now that you now you have all these stories, now there’s there's maintenance. You get people that are like, oh yeah I know that, they move on and that's fine. To me it's the ongoing stories and it is the thing of just constantly meeting new people that meet it where it is, and when they see it, they're like, holy shit, this is an archive of four years and it's gonna be going for another 96 and I can potentially be a part of it. And even what you were saying before about when people call, there is a very confessional tone. The energy on the phone is almost grave. They start talking and you can feel that they feel like either they're gonna make a detour and be like, I need to be irreverent about this. Or there's consequence and I need to treat this with consequence. I think that makes for a very fascinating project and a fascinating archive. But the, I totally hear you in terms of maintenance. So this is how the website exists. This is the format. But then you also have a deck for it. I guess I'm curious — who is the deck for? Tamika Abaka-Wood: Great question. I don't know how many people here are like in the big A art world. I have no idea how you people make anything happen because it is painstakingly slow. I come from a more so a break glass option. People reach out to me when it's ‘fuck, we've exhausted all options’. We can't do this internally. We need an outside point of view and process that is not our own to ma

She paints memory, sensation, and the space between languages. Candida Alvarez on intuition, inheritance, and color as a vessel for care. Candida Alvarez is a painter whose work explores personal and cultural memory through abstraction, vivid color, and layered visual language. She draws from Caribbean diasporic experience, family history, and city life to build complex surfaces that hold both clarity and mystery. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Chicago Cultural Center, with recent major exhibitions at GRAY Gallery, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez , and her first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop , at El Museo del Barrio. She explains: * Growing up bilingual and between cultures, and how that shaped her approach to painting and storytelling * Why color, surface, and rhythm carry emotion, memory, and political charge * Painting for resonance instead of clarity, and letting intuition lead the process * Using abstraction to hold grief, joy, labor, and inheritance in the same frame * Returning to domestic and familial spaces as a way to build intimate visual worlds * How risk, repetition, and instinct guide her through not knowing what the painting wants * The connection between care, culture, and making art that listens as much as it speaks (00:00) Learning to See as a Bilingual Kid(10:18) Color as Voice and Resistance(20:47) Working Through Grief and Reverence(31:02) Abstraction as Intimacy(42:11) Teaching, Listening, and Long-Term Practice(52:36) Making Shows that Listen Back(01:04:10) Holding Presence in a Fast World(01:14:32) Refusing to Be Defined by Trends(01:24:45) Language, Memory, and the Visual Archive(01:34:56) Painting as a Form of Freedom Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Candida https://www.candidaalvarez.com/ @candida_alvarez_studio Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s exhibition, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez , at GRAY Gallery NY here . https://www.richardgraygallery.com/ @ richardgraygallery Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop , at El Museo del Barrio here . https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/ @ elmuseo About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: “Dame un numero” which means “give me a number”, Candida’s mother would tell her. She intuitively knew that her mother meant a number from one to 26 in accordance with the alphabet. Selecting a number meant selecting a letter, and the letter would be her mother's compass to find out who is trying to contact her from beyond this realm. I love this story. It so quickly highlights how Candida is in this world and others, and the plays she sees in living. I met Candida Alvarez in 2023 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a residency program in Maine where we both were faculty that year. I got to see her process as an educator and an artist, and at the root of both is a profound level of observation and responsiveness. It's always fun to talk to Candida. But when you ask her questions about painting and her practice, there's a different level of focus than that emerges. One where I notice myself hanging onto her every word. There were many times when it felt like she was tapped into something past this world, and her words were like a tunnel to that elsewhere. In those moments, it's best to shut up and listen. So I went back and listened to the talk that she gave at Skowhegan. When she finished, she was going like a mile a minute, and then she finally finishes and she quietly stops and says, thank you. And in what became typical fashion of the end of a Skowhegan talk, the room erupted with both applause and foot stomps more like a stadium than an art talk. But then a hush came over the room as she opened it up to questions. You could even hear it in the recording, and it’s something that I can't really explain. You could hear the spotlight on her, the concentration on what she was about to say. What I wanna say is that Candida has a bit of magic about her, and after a long time, New York gets to feel it. So with that, I'm just gonna list off some accolades of yours. Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Luma Foundation, among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award, the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, among many others. Everybody give it up for Candida Alvarez! Candida Alvarez: Thank you. That was so beautiful. Ajay Kurian: How are you? Candida Alvarez: I'm not sure. Ajay Kurian: Let's start with a number. I feel like the number 2 is the one that always comes up for you. Candida Alvarez: Well, I was born the second day of the second month and I'm the second child. So I guess you could say 2 does circle around me. But if I asked you, what would you say? Ajay Kurian: I would say 23. Candida Alvarez: 23. Candida Alvarez: T? No, UVWX. Ajay Kurian: Anybody? Candida Alvarez: X? Ajay Kurian: X? Candida Alvarez: No, no. There's 20. It's Z. That's a big one. Ajay Kurian: Z, Y,, T, V, W, X, Y, Z. So Z, Y, X. Yeah. It's 20. It's X. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. Okay. X. Ajay Kurian: What do we do with X? Candida Alvarez: Malcolm X, Latin X. Ajay Kurian: Oh shit. Candida Alvarez: X-ray, Extra, Xavier — X is a hard one, but not really. X is like multiplication, right? X is the thing you don't wanna get when you go up to show your math teacher the answer to the problem and she goes, X it means wrong. Ajay Kurian: I feel like I guessed wrong. Candida Alvarez: No, you did what you had to do. You gave me a challenge because that's a long way down the list. If my mother asked me, I would say four. I never played that all the way at the end. Ajay Kurian: But you played that game enough that you knew like, don't do twenties. That's X. I'm new to this game. Candida Alvarez: It's all right. Ask me another question. Ajay Kurian: We're looking at your retrospective here at El Museo del Barrio and it's called ‘Circle, Point, Loop’. Here are some install shots of works that are called View from John Street. Candida Alvarez: Yeah, those charcoal drawings were from John Street, Brooklyn where I had a studio and that building's still there and there are still artist studios there. I was up on the second floor and it was a great space. It was one of my first spaces in New York. It was very dangerous. I remember one of my father's friends gave me a really old car to drive. I could see the plant and I could see the water beyond. I had a residency in Germany that was through a program in Philadelphia — creative artist network, I believe. And I learned about it through a fellow artist in residence, Charles Burwell, who was from Philadelphia. It was an opportunity for an artist to go away for a month and they chose the city. So I went to Cologne. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Candida Alvarez: Right. That's what I said. And I spent a lot of time at the Dome Cathedral. I was fascinated by it structurally and what it meant for the city. But also there was this above and below. So, below was the crypt of the church and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful space with little light bulbs and just sort of a very special place to chill out in after a big day of traveling around. The church was filled with a lot of art and stained glass. I met so many wonderful artists there. And they actually put together a catalog for me and they curated a show, and those drawings were a part of it that I actually did in John Street. So I came back with a lot of beer coasters — the circular forms, which I was fascinated by. And I just wanted to do charcoal drawings, which I had never really done, but I think it was the dust, and the dusty feeling. I just used charcoal and got to work. You can see the circular pattern came from one of those beer coasters, and tape was used to get some of those rectangular shapes. I used a razor blade to get these kind of whitish, almost dashed lines through the paper. I got totally engaged with them and after I did them, I didn't do any more. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I mean I've never seen a charcoal drawing from you since. It was really part of going to that show and like walking through the museum. I've known you for a couple years now and I've seen the work and I understand that color plays such a huge role in how you think about life. So it was surprising to see charcoal drawings and just the breadth of the work. There's so many different projects, there was so many different ways of working. Did this feel foundational? Because you talk about drawing a lot as really the root of what you do. Candida Alvarez: Well, I think there's something beautiful about blackness and black is a color. I mean, people don't often think of black and white as color, which I find kind of interesting. But it's really a beautiful way to see deeply. I love charting space using black and gray tones. There's something about commanding space with a very little tools, right? The stick of charcoal is kind of beautiful. That one thing that can create all this magic, I find really beautiful. I just didn't like the dustiness so much, you know? Charcoal is hard to pin down. I love the highlighting, the light and dark, and I also like taking pictures. You know, I had a camera for a long time and my first tool was a camera. Ajay Kurian: They almost feel like abstract photographs. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. I love black and white photography. I fell in love with it. I used to love Roy Decarava’s work, where he went from pitch black to white. And Harry Callahan. Ajay Kurian: That's when you can see that black and white are colors. Candida Alvarez: There was something poignant and very stark, and at the same time, the gray tones allowed for a time interval to be introduced into the compositions. When you just have black and white, your eyes move really fast. But when it's gray, your eye moves. Like it's on a tripod and it could be moved. It's more like when you're making films. I love classical film — vintage black and white films. Ajay Kurian: Did you grow up watching a lot of movies? Candida Alvarez: I think television was mostly black and white for a long time. But yeah, I did. Not a lot, but enough to keep me at the edge of my seat. I think to have a camera and to be suspended in time, to have Polaroids, that was magical to me. I really thought I was gonna do more work with a camera. But I still do work with a camera, because I take a lot of pictures for my own documentation. I just don't show them. Ajay Kurian: Why don't you show them? Candida Alvarez: Cause I don't need to. I just use them. Ajay Kurian: So they get used for compositions? Or how you think about the work? Candida Alvarez: Well, I love capturing details of my daily life. Ajay Kurian: So this is in the eighties and then by the nineties, that's when you apply to Yale, get in and go there. I think there are consistencies, but also there's some really major things happening. Candida Alvarez: There was more change. It was less photography and more about the body interacting. I came up with a way to identify a sort of a dimension to this idea of intentionality, which is the name of this case study with Mel Bochner. Of course, that was his big question to us all the time. What is your intention? That was a word that I held onto and I was trying to define it for myself. I wanted to have a formal way to define that. That was my curiosity, and so I wanted to move. When I got into Yale I was doing those multiple panels. They were really colorful. This all happened at Yale because I was trying to unpack something that was significant. I was really trying to mine my life experiences. These kind of ways of being in the world. Like the ways I listened, let's say in my family, the way I heard my mother, the way I paid attention, the way my father taught us a game of boxes, right? I love the systematic nature of that. I just like threading through the unexpected and I wanted to sort of use this language and invent a language that came outta something really familiar. Ajay Kurian: Mm-hmm. Candida Alvarez: But yet it was very conceptual. It like all of a sudden got elevated to something else. And so I love the retranslation of something unexpected. The mystery of making for me is very exciting, but the context is also really important — how it begins. And what are the questions and why is that so important? Well, it was a way to identify, right? Who am I as the artist? Why is it that what I was making was boring? To me, it was becoming boring. Because familiarity gets boring to me. Ajay Kurian: Could you see yourself in these? So we're looking at almost like a wavy grid of nails that have kind of looped wire around them and rubber bands. Candida Alvarez: But I was drawing with nails, pencils, and rubber bands because I was reconstructing the language. I was naming, I was using, it was kind of using the alphabet. It was a way to get back to a word or to a beginning point, like the word intention or the word convention I was using. I was kind of mimicking Mel in a way, but in my own little weirdness I was able to respond. So I was responding. Ajay Kurian: And did he see it as a response? Candida Alvarez: I think he was intrigued. I didn't reveal all my mysteries, you know, I just kind of went for it. Ajay Kurian: I don't think you ever do. Candida Alvarez: No, you can't. You kind of just do what you need to do. You don't have to over explain anything. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, then it dies a little. Candida Alvarez: I like to keep some mystery. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there's a lot of systems early on. I mean, there's always systems, there's always patterns and finding ways to make a composition based on kind of chance operations too. Like this one, tossing pennies literally happens from tossing pennies. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. But that also came at the beginning point. Goes really early back to my father who tossed pennies in the air for good luck. So as this inquisitive child, I'm more mesmerized by the fact that the penny is tracking a pathway. There's something about the penny being flung that was more interesting to me than the penny landing. But the landing was the luck. Somehow it's like what held the space. It kind of held the space in a way that that's what my father's desire was. So was that what he wanted? It was weird. What can I say? But I noticed it and I wanted to use it. This was one of the first pieces I did when I got to Yale and it was an empty studio and I just looked around the room and collected things. Those were all free for taking, 'cause they were just pieces laying around. So I just used them and I love the way that I felt free enough to organize them together. Because that was new for me. And then I had my son in 1991 and I was there in 1995. So that's my little son's hand, Ramon. He was in the picture too, so I made that little thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, right here? Candida Alvarez: Yeah. That's my son's hand. So my son was there with me too. So what happened was I had those pieces of wood paneling and then I just started tossing the pennies into them. Wherever they landed, I just traced them or I glued them down. Then I had these little pathways and I really was very intrigued about that. Like how to mark territory and how to create a space that was coming out of something intentional in a way. And also memory. So it was like solving a puzzle that I felt I had to create for myself as the artist. Ajay Kurian: You know, I feel like the word abstraction gets used a lot, and a lot of times people mean different things when they say it. And I love how much you bristle at the word abstraction because it bothers me too. I think people use it too freely and I'm using your words here where it's like we're abstracting all the time. When you think about your practice, what is a better word to describe what it is that you do? Candida Alvarez: I paint. I draw. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Okay. I'll take that. Candida Alvarez: What do I think? Like we were talking about Vernon Reid, I mean, I love Vernon Reed, and when he came out with that album Living Color, I was just blown away. I was blown away. 'cause he collaborated with Greg Tate. They were artists who worked with words. The lyrics are so incredible and powerful. I took that to represent what I do, you know, living color. I could never forget that. So for me, when I talk about painting — I love painting because I can use color and color is living to me and that means that it can change. It changes depending on where you situate that painting. What kind of light is on that painting? I love that. I love that it's alive and I think that's really what I like to do. I like to wrestle with color. There's something about that engagement that never ends. It's a conversation that's continuous. And I just love it. Ajay Kurian: I feel like that shift into color, like, I'm actually curious because to me, I've known your work when color was always there. It was like foregone occlusion. But in these works, like for instance in extension, you know, there's definitely color. How do you conceptualize a shift from a piece like extension to what we're gonna see in a bit? Candida Alvarez: Well, because these are all stepping stones. They’re all steps towards something and that's the mystery of making or being the artist, right? I mean, I only make these pieces 'cause I wanna try to understand something and I'm not really sure what that is yet. But it's the mystery of wanting to discover something that keeps me going. Ajay Kurian: This feels like a portal to me. There's a lot of mysterious works, but this one in particular really does stand out. Candida Alvarez: That's convention extension. Well, I was responding, because we had to read Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Ajay Kurian: Was he teaching there at the time? Candida Alvarez: No, this was Mel's class. I think for me, I was talking to myself, so I wanted to extend myself like a clock. I wanted to see myself like the Vitruvian man. I was like, I could be a star. I could be a man extending like a clock. Ajay Kurian: Candida’s talking about DaVinci's Vitruvian man. Candida Alvarez: Very famous. I’m sort of intrigued by history, and history that maybe people don't think I should be a part of, you know what I mean? By chance you bump into things or you're reminded of things. It's like you ask me a question and all of a sudden you take me on a tangent or something. And I might have not been thinking about that as a portal, but all of a sudden I can connect something that I was thinking about. I think it's having the courage to just do whatever the hell you wanna do. And we just get so locked into other people's expectations. When we're young, we're students, we hang on to every word and we try to be the best that we could be. But sometimes you just forget yourself in that equation, right? Because you're trying to be something that you think you should be as opposed to being what you really are. And so I think learning and unlearning is a part of it all. Ajay Kurian: Did you always have that courage? Candida Alvarez: Probably not, no. But I failed at trying to be perfect. I like to practice my penmanship, and I loved the practice of calligraphy. I tried to be good at math and I was terrible,

She paints distortion, vulnerability, and the psychic residue of history — Janiva Ellis on contortion as language and survival. Janiva Ellis is a painter whose work stretches emotional and political registers through fluid mark-making, surreal juxtapositions, and animated dissonance. Her paintings contort and erupt, channeling humor, grief, and ancestral hauntings. She’s exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial and at the Carpenter Center, and is known for refusing easy resolution. She explains: * Why cartoon logic and slapstick pain offer the perfect language for distortion, survival, and historical violence. * How she embraces ambivalence by showing unfinished or uncertain work as a form of radical transparency. * Painting not to perform virtuosity but to let discomfort, exhaustion, and doubt remain visible. * The tension between abstraction and legibility, and how it reflects a fractured sense of self and world. * Letting go of the “entertainer” impulse and choosing instead to rest, reflect, and resist institutional pressure. * How working through rage, shadow, and cultural projection allows the paintings to become psychological landscapes. * Why she paints for the terrain she’s in and how Germany, Berlin, and Kollwitz shaped one of her darkest pieces. (00:00) Relearning Joy: Art as Lifeline(08:02) The Cartoon’s Burden(17:00) From the Cruise Ship to the Studio(24:30) When Whiteness Becomes the Subject(32:00) Disillusionment and the ICA Show(41:00) Exuberance, Masochism, and Recognition(47:37) Working in the Dark: Technique and Intuition(54:10) Letting Go of Control and Embracing Vulnerability(1:00:44) White Spirals and Cultural Projection(1:07:18) The Value of Communal Witnessing(1:13:52) The Challenge of Raw Rage(1:26:59) Dream Recall and the Fade of Intuition(1:31:28) New Crits: Rethinking Art Education and Mentorship Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube . Follow Janiva https://47canal.us/artists/janiva-ellis https://www.instagram.com/janivaellis/?hl=en Janiva Ellis (born 1987) is an American painter based in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Ellis creates figurative paintings that explore the African-American female experience, while incorporating her journey of self-identity within the Black community. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here .Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio . — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Welcome to the 20th New Crits Talk. My name is Ajay Kurian and tonight for our 20th talk, we have Janiva Ellis here with us. Janiva Ellis: Hey guys. Thank you so much for coming. There's so many people that I admire here and strangers who came because they care. So thank you so much. Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna start with a little intro for Janiva and then we're gonna get into it. Sometimes when a person contorts themselves for so long, their reality itself becomes a distortion. If a person forgets their contortion, then the distortion is reality. More often than not though, somewhere deep down, the score is being kept - and that's what keeps it a distortion. The figures in Janiva Ellis's paintings are living in this wonky place, where contortion and distortion meet, where internal and social realities commingle and conflict. I think maybe that's why she favors cartoons. Because they can stretch like an accordion, get blown up by land mines, and freeze or burn without ever skipping a beat. They are projections of contortion and distortion. The cartoon, despite its flatness, here acts as an echo chamber for history's emotional and violent contradictions. Meanwhile, a richly detailed illusionistic landscape may in fact be entirely flat - a visual lie that we've accepted as reality. In the interplay, Ellis is able to conjure vivid but slippery tableaus that weigh as much on the sociopolitical as they do the privacy of one's most intimate thoughts. She is a skillful conductor. The haze is intentional; the confusion is part of the pleasure, and the finish is meant to be a question. She's an artist who knows how to simultaneously set a trap and set you free. Please join me in welcoming Janiva. Janiva Ellis: You tore that, you ate that the fuck up. Thank you. Ajay Kurian: It's my pleasure. Janiva Ellis: Thank you for seeing the work. Thank you for confidently putting words to it, engaging with it, and not shying away from your assumptions about the work because they're really right on and it’s cathartic to hear. Ajay Kurian: Thank you, I’m honored. It’s not easy to write or talk about your work. I don't know the dynamic of how I'm supposed to play it all out because it's charged, and I think in this conversation it'll be really nice to talk about how those dynamics stay charged and how they move and change throughout the work. There's been a lot of changes and that’s the reason why I wanna start with such an early piece. We're gonna start here and then we're gonna go all over. The development is amazing. I don't say that often and I'm not blowing steam. It's rare to see an artist where every show it gets better and better. I'm genuinely astonished because when I saw your first show, it was great but I'm curious what comes next. I remember Tyler the Creator talking about Vince Staples’ album. It came out and he was like, this is it. But then the next album was the one he was excited about. Janiva Ellis: Totally. Oftentimes in the studio, I've processed the idea, but I still have to make the show. I'm halfway through the painting and I got the idea, but then I have to finish the painting and I have to finish the show. But I cannot wait to take what I've metabolized and bring it to the next project. I'm on the hook for this project and I do need to finish this and get it out, but there's already so much enthusiasm for what I wanna say next. Then in the next project, I don't know what I'm doing. While I'm making, I know what future me needs to do until future me is present me, and then I'm confused again. Ajay Kurian: How do you stay in it and how do you keep that same energy? Janiva Ellis: I don't keep that same energy. I think it's an underlying drive. Sometimes I try and let the energy of the past project evacuate by taking a lot of space or creating interventions in the work that are challenges so that the part of my mind that's stimulated by problem solving is activated again. I try and take what I've learned and I'll keep notes. Sometimes I don't even know what that note meant, but let me interpret it in the now and run with that thread. So it's not necessarily about holding tight onto the thoughts that happened in the past, but maintaining the same enthusiasm around my curiosities and my desire to feel challenged by what I can create. Ajay Kurian: This painting is called the The Okiest Doke from 2017. Janiva Ellis: One of my friends said “don't get caught up in the Okeydoke”. It's either DeSe Escobar or Juliana Huxtable, and it could have just been the community. It could have just been something we all said. But it was very much a 2014 “we're out here” vibe. As with a lot of my titles, they come from notes I had taken about things I had said, or friends of mine had said on nights out about the predicament we'd find ourselves in and the joy we'd find in feeling like we were able to put language to this spiral we were navigating. Ajay Kurian: It always feels that way. The titles catch a vibe. I understand it sometimes and other times it washes over you. But then you click with the vibe of the image, and you can feel that vertigo of where the picture takes you to. Part of why I wanted to start here is this cartoon hand. This communion into cartoons is an interesting place to start, and also how you continue to use the cartoon in the work. In my understanding, the history of cartoons is a pretty fraught one, especially as we get into Looney Tunes and all that. The precursors of those cartoons is essentially seeing blackface and minstrelsy turn into the cartoons that become beloved characters and then become these characters that never die. They can always be distorted, can always work harder, can always explode, freeze, do whatever, and just come to life again. For that to be the person who's giving the wafer here feels wild. Janiva Ellis: This the cartoon’s burden. It’s like the burden of constantly having to endlessly embody a projection. When I started doing cartoons, it was literally out of the need for speed. I was taking my practice really seriously for the first time, and I felt a lot of shyness around pursuing what I wanted to pursue. I really wanted a level of grandiosity that I didn't know how to achieve and I also had a lot of self-doubt. So I decided, let's just go back to basics. You can communicate the things you want very quickly and easily by cartooning, and you can re-access your hand and your ability to draw by using cartoons. I think the fact that it speaks to the fraught of the way that white violence depicts blackness and the way that whiteness cartoonized black people was not the starting point. There's just so many moments where it was like, I'm gonna do this. Then the funny byproduct of that is that there's a critique to be had about whiteness. It's not the point, but oftentimes it's just there. There's a painting I did of a woman and I made her into Pinhead. Then I did some research on Clive Barker, who made Hellraiser. But where did Pinhead come from? And it came from African sculpture and I wasn't trying to give that, but obviously it gave that, and as I was painting, it worked out that way. There's violence woven through so much pop culture and so much of things I'm referencing from an organic place, from a place of resonance, that it doesn't take too much to connect those dots and I can just riff without trying to make a heady dialogue around blackface. It's already there. The history is there. Early on, people were asking me a lot about blackface and I'm like, yeah, that's inherently in there but I'm not trying to flatten that dialogue. I'm trying to create broader worlds for that representation to exist. Ajay Kurian: Did you always trust your intuition? Janiva Ellis: No, absolutely not. It's a constant moment to moment. I do feel really driven and I know that I'm strong, but I do also have doubt. There’s an underlying pulse that I trust, but topically I feel really disillusioned and really capable of falling for dumb tricks. So as I get older, I feel more capable and more self trusting. As the people in my life become reflections of who I want be surrounded by and the relationships I wanna see in the world — That really bolsters my sense of self worth, and that bolsters my trust in myself. But no, I didn't feel that way. Even when I started painting again after years of taking a break, I was like, what's the story there? Ajay Kurian: How did you come to painting? Why did you go away from it and what got you back? Janiva Ellis: I started painting as a kid and was always painting. My mom was very encouraging of me. Being good at something, finding what I liked and just doing that and finding catharsis in some way. So she's really supportive of that. I did that for a long time and went to schools that encouraged creativity. Went to college and that evaporated all of the excitement and enthusiasm I had about the potential to make something meaningful. Ajay Kurian: Did you go to an art school? Janiva Ellis: I went to California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and the experience I had alongside school was so deeply enriching in terms of self-identifying and finding people that inspired me. But the school experience was pretty stale and I don't know if this is a broad thing or if this still happens, but I remember the idea they told you that only 5% of you are gonna be doing this for the rest of your life. It was very like, y'all are gonna be failures and compete for who can actually make this a thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, that's horrible. Janiva Ellis: Yeah. Is that normal? Did people experience this in art school. That’s a thing, right? This idea that only exceptionalism will bring you fulfillment essentially, that was just the vibe. And then what I saw being labeled as exceptional, I was like, this is crazy, this is a bad art, what's going on? But I also knew just based on the kinds of things I attracted in my life that I was able to actualize and I was capable of fighting a heartbeat in what I wanted out of life. So I did have that feeling, but I didn't know how to get it and I didn't have models of what that really looked like. Ajay Kurian: But you knew you wanted to be an artist then? Janiva Ellis: I did deep down, but I was open to a lot of options of what that could look like and how art would enter my life, through teaching or through programs. I wasn't like, I'm gonna be a successful artist. That definitely was not something I thought was a given or something I was striving for outright. It didn't feel inherently valuable to what I had to offer the world. But it was there, and of course, I wanted to ultimately live a life where I was creating things that connected with people, and that I would have the respect of my peers and the respect of people who engaged with what I did. Ajay Kurian: So your first show at the gallery and entering the art world — what was that step? This is a painting from that show. Janiva Ellis: This was the first show. That moment was really a madness. I had gone to school, I had gone to New York, I had connected with people who I really felt were my people, I had crashed out, I went back home to Hawaii, tried to figure it out again. Spiraled deeply, decided to go back to the mainland, I grew up in Hawaii, so that's the context of that. I moved back 'cause that's where my mom lives and that's where I grew up. That's the context that shaped so much of my perspective in terms of growing up on an island, growing up very isolated as a black person, growing up with an immense wonder of the world and also doubt of my environment. So that was a whole thing. When I moved to New York, I finally was like, wait what? Black community, that's crazy. It was such a rich moment and the intersection of being like, I went to San Francisco and the queer community hit, now I'm in New York, it's black, it's queer, it's cute. So leaving felt really I'm abandoning, work that I put into finding my people. Janiva Ellis: But Hawaii had its own healing intersection and I knew I couldn't stay there forever, but it was a good detour. Then I moved to LA and my friend Jesse let me stay with him, and said you gotta do this, come on, you should paint. He helped me get canvases and helped me get things that I needed. I was like up in the air and I didn't have a solid job. I briefly worked on a cruise and I had made money bartending on this cruise. So I had a chunk of money from that. And that's when I was able to focus on painting 'cause I had that little savings and these materials and I started to make paintings. Very quickly, I think the enthusiasm of being somebody who had lived in New York, but also the novelty of being from Hawaii. Like really helps in people thinking you're cool. Like people are like, we wanna know more. Janiva Ellis: So that's an advantage. And I think when I got to LA, people were like, what's your deal? Or I've seen you around? I had spent some time partying in LA like years prior, so there was just some foundation there. Ajay Kurian: This is a totally random question, but having worked on a cruise, would you ever go on one? Janiva Ellis: No, I never wanted to go on one in the first place. The cruise I worked on was like a small Alaskan adventure cruise. It was a 60 passenger boat, so it was pretty intimate and it was freer, like middle aged to elderly, adventurous white, northwestern person. Ajay Kurian: Oh, so this is just, this is straight classes for you — you were this is classes of anthropology and whiteness. Janiva Ellis: It's all anthropology. It's like, this is how we're freaking it over here — it's data. It was actually a really crazy experience. Ajay Kurian: I can only imagine. I've been on two cruises and it was the wildest experience. Janiva Ellis: Did you see Sinners? Janiva Ellis: I saw Sinners. I loved Sinners. Ajay Kurian: Sinners is great. Janiva Ellis: It's so good. Ajay Kurian: We're going again on Thursday. Janiva Ellis: Good. I want the second time hits. Ajay Kurian: Oh, you've already seen it twice. Janiva Ellis: We saw it twice. Are you gonna see it in imax? Ajay Kurian: That's why we're going a second time. Because this is what's coming through for me. There's something vampiric here and there's something undead. Janiva Ellis: They're like in the warehouse, having a good time. The background scene is from, The Wiz, A Brand New Day , and I put him on top of there 'cause I was like, I feel like with all the incredible black media that I've been exposed to, for some reason there's just like some white guy constantly in the center. I think this early work, I was like, can we talk about this stuff? I feel like I wanna talk about these things. I didn't realize how maybe cryptic the work was being read. It felt so literal to me. In terms of just the tension of trying to thrive under white supremacy and microaggressions and all that. Ajay Kurian: Who thought it was cryptic? Janiva Ellis: Obviously non-black people, specifically white people. But the reflections I was having as I entered the art world were primarily through writing by people who weren't black or curating by people who weren't black. And I think, although I took that context into mind, it was louder. It just was louder than what I was, and what the conversations I was having with peers about the work. Ajay Kurian: As soon as I saw this there, the energy it was giving was, whiteness is on display and it's gross. Like this particular variety of toxicity. Janiva Ellis: The violence of it. Ajay Kurian: There's an enormous violence of it that's happening on so many different registers too, right? Ajay Kurian: Because there's overt things, but then there's the ways in which it shifts people of color’s visions of themselves. The internalized visions that people have of themselves is shifted by whiteness. Janiva Ellis: The parasite of how you self ideate through whiteness. Ajay Kurian: It's such an insidious space and it's very difficult to represent. I haven't seen painters represent that and I can't even actually think of anyone. Janiva Ellis: Yeah, thanks. Ajay Kurian: I hope it'll spawn other artists to think with it, but you're the first artist that I've seen that does that. Janiva Ellis: I just saw the Jack Whitten show and it was such a relieving experience to see the course of the work. I feel like a lot of the artists who are processing this information or doing it abstractly, it happens a lot more through music, cinema, and abstraction. Safety is a part of that. In terms of illustrating those sensations, it's not as common of a thing. It doesn't feel that safe to do that. And I think I just stopped caring. I stopped giving a fuck and being in LA felt like a frontier to not care. I had a really cute bedroom and that really helped me be like, I’m just going to do this. I like what my room looks like, I’m around my friends, and I feel inspired because I've left Hawaii. I came back to people who recognize me and I have nothing to lose. But yeah, this is edgy, but is it that edgy? It's not that crazy to be this painting Doubt Guardian 2 . No matter how much you commune and how much care, there's always an internal spiral and there's always an impulse to make sure you're protecting whiteness even within the insulation of community. Or maybe not. That's a generalization, but that is something that exists. It's an anxiety. So I did want