Reckoning and Repair

De escapismo a pasión, el viaje de Cabaio Spirito en el arte callejero comenzó en medio de la crisis económica de Argentina. Después de sus turnos en el restaurante, Cabaio y su amigo Nico descubren el estarcido; transforman las calles en lienzos. Al principio, se percibe como vandalismo. Pero en una exhibición en un sótano de Palermo, una epifanía: ¿puede un hobby ser arte? ¿Puede llegar a lo más profundo y despertar algo más? A m...

Cabaio Spirito is a street artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He began painting in the streets following the Argentine economic crisis of 2001 as part of the stencil collective Vomito Attack, a politically motivated group who used stencil art to unleash political commentary and anti-consumerist messages throughout Buenos Aires. Departing from Vomito Attack in 2005, he adopted the name Cabaio Stencil and began creating independent...

Maryury (Mar) Diaz Pacheco is a black feminist and visual artist of Afrocolombian descent. Around a decade ago, Pacheco migrated from her home country of Colombia to Buenos Aires, Argentina to study art therapy as she has a passion for using art to help marginalized populations and to create community. Pacheco is currently a member of a collective of feminist photographers called “Tejiendo miradas y Tertulia de Mujeres Afrolatinoam...

Santiago Cao is a performance artist, urban planner, educator, and investigator of public spaces, born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina with a Master’s in Urbanism from Universidad Federal de la Bahía in Brazil and a degree in Visual Arts from Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Argentina. Throughout the past decade, Cao has spent his time living nomadically, splitting his life between Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. With rega...

Marcelo Brodsky is an artist and human rights activist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Brodsky’s art practice began to take off in the late twentieth century following Argentina’s last military dictatorship, a horrifically violent time during which he was forcibly exiled to Spain. 

Situated on the border between installation, performance, photography, monument and memorial, Brodsky’s pieces blend text and images, often using...

In this episode, Hakimah Abdul Fattah  speaks with the founder and director of Twelve Gates Art, Aisha Khan. Aisha tells stories of her early dreams of space and community in Philadelphia, explores the meaning of art and discomfort in social spaces, and the need for care and community. 

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America", an AAMP and PAFA collabor...

In this episode, Jeanne Lieberman speaks with Christina Vassallo and Katie Parry of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Together, they explore how the museum unsettles a canon that reifies finished products and opens up the black box of artistic experimentation to Philadelphia publics in new ways. And they reflect on the ongoing work of transforming the forms of connection, collaboration, and conflict ​that emerge in museum workspaces....

In this episode, Hakimah Abdul Fattah speaks with Dejay Duckett, curator of "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America" and the Vice President of Curatorial Services at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. In a conversation on home, memory, and the power of art, Dejay reflects on the history of AAMP and the way art creates belonging.

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising ...

Adrianna Brusie speaks with core organizers involved in the upcoming exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America opening March 2023. Juan Omar Rodriguez and Ellie Clark at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts discuss their reflections on labor in art institutions and how they are turning inward to reckon with their curatorial and exhibition development practices.

This season was produced in connection to 2023 ...

Join us on  an eclectic jaunt with artist Emily Carris-Duncan and host Katleho Kano Shoro. Emily Carris-Duncan is an artist, a budding agriculturalist, and co-founder of the Art Dept in Philadelphia who is now based in Vermont. In this conversation, Emily describes how she transforms rocks into color, how she uses histories of black crafting to transform absence into ancestry, and her plans as a space-maker to someday build a ship ...

Life like Fragile Clay breaks down materiality and color as vivid depictions of what it means to be alive in a human body as an object that retains memory.

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America", an AAMP and PAFA collaboration curated by Dejay Duckett (AAMP), Judith Tannenbaum (PAFA), Mekhala Signal (PAFA), Michael Wilson (AAMP). This exhibit brings t...

On Creation ● ​On Beauty & Violence ● On Connection

 Shwarga Bhattacharjee is an artist based in North Philadelphia. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Shwarga moved to the U.S. in 2014. He received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and a BFA in drawing and painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dhaka University. Shwarga’s work draws from the duality of experiences as an immigrant. Hi...

In this episode, Tausif remembers the sonic environments of monsoon season, the urban resonance between Philadelphia and Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the complications and frustrations in national identities. 

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America", an AAMP and PAFA collaboration curated by Dejay Duckett (AAMP), Judith Tannenbaum (PAFA), Mekhala Signal (PAF...

What is the role of the artist, the power of silence, and the necessity of activism in fraught social worlds? In this episode Ghanaian artist, curator, and organizer Va Bene Elikem-Fiatsi and Anya Miller speak about life and death, sound and silence, action and stillness. It is designed for the listener to feel the urgency with which Va Bene performs and lives, and it forces the listener to understand how performance art and life b...

Under colonial order, what do mind and body internalize?  What colonial desires and banal attitudes have we yet to expel from within us? In this conversation, Sheida Soleimani's practices of care and labor light the path that host Angel Gutierrez walks with her. While tracing memories, Sheida has us consider care for self and for the web of relations we inhabit. Sheida's work, too, is concerned with the power wielded by i...

Bodies in Flux: Self-Portraiture Outside the Canvas ​is an experimental storytelling episode with visual artist Saya Woolfalk in conversation with Wang-Yao. Saya describes her self-portraiture project that unravels the history of stolen stories and identity. She guides us in a process of unlearning and re-imagination through her use of unexpected materials incorporating Hudson river school paintings, medicinal plants, and what we d...

What would it look like to put the tools of media production into the hands of people at the margins of society? Community media activists -- with help from organizations like Scribe Video Center -- have been engaged in this work for decades. In this episode, Louis Massiah discusses how his film projects harness the power of time-based visual media to help ordinary Philadelphians craft their own narratives about their lives and the...