INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

aja monet is a poet, lyricist, writer, and community organizer from Brooklyn, now based in Los Angeles. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023 to acclaim, and it earned a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.

We published a version of this interview in the online edition of INTERLOCUTOR on February 1, 2024, and this episode is the full and unedited recording of the discussion...

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic v...

Tyler Nesler talks with leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker Blaise Agüera y Arcas about his new book, Who Are We Now? - an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.

Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities agains...

French-American artist Miles Hyman has a solo show, Secret Lives, up at NYC's Philippe Labaune Gallery through December 23. Hyman's recent paintings lead us on a journey through his sources of inspiration. From his early childhood memories of the Ferris wheel in Bennington, Vermont, to his travels with his jazz musician father, to the bustling streets of New York, to the romantic embrace of Paris, wher...

“Everyone is fascinated by crime,” says author/musician Harper Simon. “When you look at the history of song, romantic love songs may be the dominant mode of songwriting, but second would probably be songs involving crime—murder ballads, for one. Crime is a major theme in all songwriting.”

Simon offers a new and expansive contribution to this legacy with Meditations on Crime, an ambitious multi-media project that includes an...

Born in Los Angeles in 1968, guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson is known for a body of work that moves fluidly across genres. The son of legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, his musical lineage has deeply influenced his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings, and the wide-ranging twelve-album discography that blooms out of them.

In this interview, Anthony discusses his newly relea...

Gigi Chen’s work creates an aesthetic that combines her training as a traditional animator and painter, along with her love of the techniques of Old Masters. Entrenched in the art of storytelling, the work pulls together her love of contemporary idioms of cartooning, photorealism, texture, and design to produce works that coalesce into Love, Craft, and Fun.

Born in Guang Dong, China, and raised in New York, Gigi’s exhibition cr...

Pete Min co-runs the innovative Los Angeles label Colorfield Records. At Colorfield, artists are encouraged to compose in the studio and often play instruments they’re unused to. There’s as much emphasis on sound as there is on composition and musicianship, and “chaos and chance are a big part of the process.”

In this interview, Pete delves into what he calls his "sherpa" approach to guiding musicians out of their comfort zones...

Martine Johanna is a Dutch-born female artist who has been actively exhibiting her work since 2007, starting from little daily drawings to Amsterdam street art with a small band of brothers. Within two years, she developed into a full-blown painter, saying farewell to her job in design and going back to her artistic roots while part-time residing as a freelance lecturer at the HVA.

Johanna has exhibited internationally, includin...

Sayazake is a visual artist who operates in the realm of Photography, Illustration, and Painting. His work speaks to a conversation of adventure, spirituality, anime, and eccentricity.

In this interview, Sayazake talks about his expressive origins in performance and theater and what attracted him to pursue visual art in his early twenties, plus his thoughts on artistic influences, the commercial art world, his unique approaches ...

KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a ...

Jeffrey Everett is a successful designer, illustrator, and author working outside of Washington, DC. Jeffrey has had the pleasure of designing and illustrating for a wide variety of entertainment, corporate, and non-profit clients. Jeffrey has created designs for such bands as Jason Mraz, Social Distortion, Foo Fighters, The Decemberists, Flight of the Conchords, Gaslight Anthem, Lou Reed, The Bouncing Souls, and A Day to Remember....

Founded in 2020, Philippe Labaune Gallery focuses on graphic design by featuring high-level artists whose common point is to explore new territories and to decompartmentalize the borders separating various modes of expression: illustration, painting, comic strips and animation.

In this interview, Philippe talks in-depth about his lifelong passion for narrative art and how he came to start his gallery after a long career in the ...

The creator of the band the Bloods—the first out, queer, all-women-rock band—Adele Bertei has made a career as a singer, songwriter, writer, and director. Her resume, which spans decades and disciplines, is a who's who of the ’80s underground—performing and recording for artists such as Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Sandra Bernhard, and Matthew Sweet, to name a few.

But her formative years bore little resemblance to her celebri...

Known for his paintings featuring a solitary astronaut wandering through scenes filled with pop culture iconography, Scott Listfield creates works which invite viewers to perceive the contemporary world from a slightly askew and alienated perspective. He currently has a solo show, AM Gold, at NYC's Harman Projects, up through April 29.

Listfield calls AM Gold, "a show about music and time travel. I was inspired by the kind of p...

Zhivago Duncan was born to a Syrian mother and a Danish father in Terre Haute, Indiana. His fluidity across materials and cultural signifiers reflects the relentlessness of an investigative mind. With freewheeling creativity spurred by his curiosity, Duncan’s lifelong impulse towards painting demonstrates his desire to contemplate, negotiate and comprehend the “big picture”: the origins of sentient life and the universality of cons...

An interview with artist Vonn Cummings Sumner about his visual takes on the iconic cartoon character Krazy Kat, from George Herriman's wildly weird and wonderful newspaper comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944 and influenced countless artists working in many styles. Sumner currently has a solo show called Second Nature at Washington DC's Morton Fine Art, which is his second show at the gallery featuring Krazy Kat works.

The ga...

KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a ...