Art Grind Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Ep: 020 - Kurt Kauper - The Uncanny Valley Oct 15, 2018

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In this episode of Art Grind we sit down with Kurt Kauper, one of the most important contemporary artists of this generation, to discuss his upbringing, his studio practice, and what keeps him up at night”

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Ep: 019 - Lauren Amalia Redding - Silverpoint artist Oct 01, 2018

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In this episode of Art Grind, we talk to Lauren Redding - artist, writer, and one of the founders of H&R Studio. We discuss silverpoint, luck, and surviving as young artists in the 21st century

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Ep: 018 - Wright Harvey - Founder of Sugarlift Gallery Sep 17, 2018

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Wright Harvey, entrepreneur and founder of Sugarlift Gallery talks about truth, technology, and good gallery ethics.

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Ep: 017 - Hannah Faith Yata - Losing My Religion Sep 01, 2018

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In this episode of Art Grind, the brilliant Hannah Faith Yata opens up about her upbringing as a Jehovah’s witness, the inspiration behind her vibrant, surreal paintings, and the reason hundreds of chipmunks congregate in her backyard. We also have a new temporary host for this episode: Sophia Kayafas who is a brilliant painter and musician. This episode is put together by our new editor Lucas Fauble

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Ep: 016 - Stephen Shaheen Aug 18, 2018

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Our guest on this episode is Steve Shaheen, a well-known sculptor and stone carver. As painters, we had a lot of questions about the logistics involved in this particular strain of contemporary art-making: what happens when, during a process that is based on removal rather than addition or application, one makes a mistake? How does a sculptor store his works, which typically take up more 3-dimensional space than those of a painter? And how does carving massive blocks of marble that, if left unattended, could persist as they are for centuries to come, affect one's sense of permanence and legacy? Steve gracefully answers all of our novice questions about technique and logistics, weaving in humorous and instructive anecdotes about the hidden deformities of Michelangelo's sculptures and Rodin's incompetence with his own tools. We also get to hear the remarkable story of his leap of faith into a life as an artist at a vocational program in Italy as well as his efforts to erect a 9/11 memorial in his New Jersey hometown. Interview recorded, edited and written by Michael Gusev.

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Ep: 015 - Vincent Desiderio Aug 01, 2018

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This installment of the Art Grind podcast features a painter who has been a longtime personal role model for several of the podcast's hosts. Even as he is a creator of absolutely monolithic paintings, Vincent Desiderio, a veteran lecturer at the New York Academy of Art and elsewhere, also manages to be an incredible speaker on the subject of art; laying out an ideological landscape that encapsulates why artists (including Desiderio himself) do what they do and how they do it. Both as a painter and an art theorist, Desiderio seems to inhabit a sort of isthmus, a place which he himself describes to be a liminal boundary which, once you push past it, "you experience something that is absolutely unforeseeable...and that is a total engagement with the process of painting.” In this episode of Art Grind, Vincent Desiderio maneuvers flawlessly between mini-lectures on semiotics in painting, the advance of postmodernity and the elusive avant garde, and the constant reassessment and summoning of drive involved in making one's life as a painter. In recounting his own ongoing battle with this last topic, Vincent enchants us with stories from his own art career, encounters with art critics and other villains, as well as personal crises including the day that a crucial moment of his career coincided with a medical emergency. Resounding through much of these stories and lectures is the concept of 'terror' and of 'opting to thrive' in the face of it -- an undercurrent which is reminiscent of Antonin Artaud's famous claim that "No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.” Written by Michael Gusev. Interview recorded and edited by Michael Gusev.

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Ep: 014 - Frank Bernarducci - Visionary Art Dealer Jul 25, 2018

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We sit down with gallery director Frank Bernarducci, and discuss his new gallery, the state of the art world, and partying with Andy Warhol. Frank has been a groundbreaking curator and art dealer in NYC since the mid-1980s. In this episode, he tells us how his curatorial career began, what draws him to a work of art, and the do’s and don’t for emerging artists applying to his gallery.

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Ep: 012 - Joseph Grazi - Animal Liberation and Revulsion Jul 01, 2018

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In the past, the taxidermic animals, bones, and other natural materials employed in much of Joseph Grazi's art work have put him at odds with various animal rights activists, casting him in the role of a sort of curmudgeon of this corner of the art world. Verily, the artist would claim, his often controversial selection of materials might draw out negative reactions in some; however, it is precisely this moral panic that Joseph Grazi seems to want to beget in his audience -- demanding the answers to questions such as: What is it that we value about human and animal life? Why the uproar about poaching, but not about human trafficking in the same parts of the world? How do we place the living, the dead, and the animal, in our collectively constructed mental landscape? This installment of Art Grind has Joseph expounding on his upbringing in South Brooklyn, his intellectual clashes with animal rights essentialists, and the precise location of the absolute best pizza in all of New York (and therefore the world).

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Ep. 011 - Alessandra Maria - Iconographer and Iconoclast Jun 15, 2018

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Having cut her teeth at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Hawaii-based artist Alessandra Maria has continued to produce ornate works of pencil and gold leaf on paper stained with coffee or walnut ink. The works evoke a sense of timelessness - at once medieval and modern, blending a Byzantine iconography with an urge to create her own new icons. We got a chance to talk to Alessandra about her beginnings as an artist in New York, her new life in Maui, and the drive behind her work -- challenging traditional representations of the feminine, learning from sacred traditions, and always studying up on theory. Drawing from various lines of inspiration as the spatiality of snow, Islamic geometry, and walking ten miles to look at a Klimt, Alessandra takes us through her journey as an artist and a person, starting with her religious roots in Seattle, through being a broke Brooklyn art student, up to her search for a small scrap of purpose in bringing her mental iconography to life. Audio edited by Michael Gusev

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Ep. 010 - Fay Ku - Myth and transformation Jun 01, 2018

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What do you get when you cross images of sexual bondage with lush, botanical illustration and mythical/fairytale references of transformation? Give up? Well, artist Fay Ku has some answers for you, but first let’s take a look at where she’s coming from. Born in Taiwan, Ku came to the States at the young age of three. Ku studied Literature and the Visual Arts at Bennington College (1996) and earned an MS Art History and an MFA Studio Art from Pratt Institute (2006). Ku’s cleverly re-mastered and remixed fractured fairy tales have been the subject of twenty-one solo shows from Hong Kong to Hawaii and included in numerous group shows, most recently at Wave Hill’s Glyndor Gallery in Riverdale, The Bronx (Outcasts: Women in the Wilderness, 2017) alongside the works of Nancy Spero and at the cutting edge Lodge Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Latent Content Analysis, 2017). But back to the bondage, it’s not what you think, or what we think you think, or what we think you think the artist thinks, Ku has her own reasons for what she does. Curious? Then you’ll have to tune in because we’re not telling, Ku is, and about so much more. All shall be revealed, or some of it, or some of all of it, or all of some of it. You get the picture.

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