INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

Artist Dan Alvarado discusses his solo exhibition PANDORA'S SWIPE, a satirical take on the temptation, overstimulation, and hypersexualization of online dating apps. Opening on September 5 and running through September 22 at Bushwick, Brooklyn's Botanica Grove, Alvarado’s paintings, composed of digitally altered and collaged dating profiles, become a landscape of portraits across the ether.

Complimentary bright, colorful emojis ...

Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic Robin Givhan discusses her new book about fashion icon Virgil Abloh. She profiles Abloh’s legendary work and impact, revealing how the son of Ghanaian immigrants was able to infiltrate all aspects of our culture and inspire millions. Not only a remarkable biography of his singular creative force, the book is a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, geni...

Musician Bob Holmes of the New York-based trio Suss talks about his unique and ambitious Across the Horizon music series. Bob and Northern Spy Records invited eight innovators from the wide landscape of instrumental music to curate the first volume of Across the Horizon, which was released at regular intervals over the past year, culminating in a double vinyl, which is out now and available to Bandcamp subscribers of the series.

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and d...

Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Amanda Ekery collaborates with everyone, literally. Historians, artists, engineers, bakers, you name it. Amanda works with all to create projects that invite others to explore and share their stories. She weaves her experience in improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and performances.  

Her new album, Árabe, is about Syrian and Mexica...

Friends since childhood, Eraserhood Sound partners, Vincent John and Max Perla’s unique songcrafting process includes sourcing and learning to play vintage instruments, and using reel-to-reel equipment to create the exact sound they are after. EHS also features an in-house boutique record label that specializes in vinyl releases. Operating out of the studio built for Questlove, EHS is uniquely positioned to carr...

In Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and cultures to show how friendship can open up new levels of community. Through her inspiring prose, Vulchi reveals that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of resistance.

Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We are not taught ...

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.

Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.

Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part ...

JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.

Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and ...

A candid and expansive talk between INTERLOCUTOR Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen and Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the Managing Partner of CANADA Gallery. She plays a key role in shaping the gallery’s program and strategic direction. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Ma...

A Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Alex E. Chávez is the author of the book Sounds of Crossing: (Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño).

Chávez's debut album, Sonorous Present, an immersive poetic and musical passage, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance...

Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman in Menton, France. 

She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Her past research has centered around Cocteau’s Les enfants...

Julia Hannafin is a writer and artist from a two-mom family in Berkeley, California. Their first novel, Cascade, was published with Great Place Books in April 2024, an independent press founded by Alex Higley, Emily Adrian, and Monika Woods.

Cascade is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our b...

Lara Aburamadan is an independent visual artist, journalist, and co-founder of the Refugee Eye organization. Born in Gaza City, Palestine, she is now based in the United States. She holds a BA in the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Languages from Gaza University.

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Lara tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling; her work explores the social and political narratives for refugees and&n...