Magic Praxis

Rachel Owens is a sculptor whose work is often socially engaged. She works with materials as varied as crushed glass, resin, and steel humvee truck bodies. Kate and Clarity visit her in her Brownsville, Brooklyn studio, where she discusses the logistics of creating large-scale public sculptures, how a work's function changes when it enters a private collection vs. a public space, and the role that sound often plays in her work.

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Chitra Ganesh is a multi-disciplinary artist working with myth, symbols and narrative. Guest host Maia Cruz Palileo, also a multi-disciplinary artist, was mentored by Ganesh in the Queer Art Mentorship program. During a visit to Ganesh's studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the artists discuss her exhibition "The Scorpion Gesture" at the Rubin Museum, a series of motion-activated animations which engage with the permanent collection of Himal...

David Shaw's intricate sculptures are composed through the juxtaposition of materials such as branches, dirt, steel, glass, holographic laminate, flocking, and found furniture. In our visit to his Brooklyn studio, he discusses his long involvement with the gallery Feature Inc., which closed in 2014 after the death of its influential founder, Hudson. He also reveals why a childhood near-death experience sparked his passion for deep ...

Susan Bee's paintings and collages have been described as "pastoral psychedelia," and "a savage mix of Expressionism and Pop schadenfreude." Born and raised in New York City by artist parents, Bee is a longtime supporter of feminist art and women artists. She spent her student days in the 1970s attending AIR Gallery events; she later joined the historic gallery and is currently a member. Bee is also a co-founder, with fellow artist...

Becca Lowry carves intricate wall-mounted sculptures out of wood, which she decorates with painting and weaving. She is interested in ideas of use, architecture, vulnerability and bravery, and has said she thinks of her creations as "shields." In our visit to her Connecticut studio, she discussed why she chose not to go to art school, her experience growing up as the daughter of a builder and a jeweler, and how objects can take on ...

Pinar Yolaçan was born and raised in Turkey, went to fashion school in London, and studied sculpture and photography at Cooper Union in New York City. Her work examines gender, power, and colonialism through a process she likens to anthropology. In this episode, we discuss her various series, such as Like a Stone, Mother Goddess, Maria, and Perishables, and what led her, in each, to create portraits in which subjects are adorned wi...

Jenny Dubnau is a painter of portraits. Her uncanny, highly detailed oil paintings are made from the careful study of photographs she takes herself. Kate and Clarity visit the artist in her Long Island City studio, and discuss contemporary vs. historic meanings of portraiture, Barthes' idea of the punctum, and how Dubnau taught herself to paint from photographs of cadavers found in the Yale Medical School library.

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Guest host Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, and advocate for artists. Her book The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life gathers essays from 40 visual artists, one of whom is Chloë Bass. Bass is a conceptual artist working in the field of social practice. Louden interviews Bass about projects in which she temporarily becomes part of other people's communities, in places such as Greensboro, Omaha, an...

Julian Kreimer is a painter who alternates between plein air painting and abstraction. Kate and Clarity talk to him in his Brooklyn studio about the sociology of urban plein air painting, gentrification in New York City, and how being in therapy made him a better artist. Kreimer wrestles with questions of plain air painting's relevance in an art world obsessed with the new, and explores the ways art can engage the visual, the polit...

Photographer Nona Faustine asks us to examine what it means to be an American. In her Brooklyn studio, Faustine talks with Kate and Clarity about the importance of paying tribute to under-recognized histories, notably the histories of slavery and of African American lives lost through police violence. Faustine discusses mourning rituals, the challenges of taking nude self-portraits in public spaces, and the lost art of the family a...