The Remix Podcast: Recent Episodes
The Remix
The Remix is a project-based curatorial team and podcast established to exhibit the work of underrepresented artists and research evolving business models in the art world. Founded in 2017 by three former colleagues from Mixed Greens gallery. It strives to create and promote new platforms that foster transparency, community, generosity, and the sharing of resources among artists and arts workers alike.
The Remix Podcast is on a search for new models in the art world. In accordance with values of transparency and community, we’ve decided to make our research public. Each interview is a conversation with someone we admire for doing something a little differently, tweaking “the system,” reframing the conversation, or trying something entirely new. The goal is to learn from these people so that we (listeners included!) have a better chance of creating art world 2.0 with a more inclusive and sustainable foundation.
Dexter Wimberly tells The Remix the dramatic story of how he went from a car accident on New Year’s Eve to founding his own company to becoming an independent curator and the founder of Art World Conference. We delve into how each decision was conscious, yet without a roadmap. From organically curating the artists he had admired over the years to curating Derrick Adams’s first solo museum show in New York City at the Museum of Art and Design (all in less than ten years), Dexter talks about the decisions he’s made, the artists with whom he’s worked, and the mentors he’s had along the way--from family and friends to historical figures. He talks generosity, impact, family, and the future. At the end it gets real: what does being an independent curator really mean?
Dexter Wimberly is an independent curator and entrepreneur who has organized exhibitions and developed programs with galleries and institutions throughout the world, including The Third Line in Dubai; Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco; and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, and Hyperallergic; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Wimberly is the Founder & CEO of ART WORLD CONFERENCE. He is also a Senior Critic at The New York Academy of Art.
artworldconference.com @dexterwimberly @artworldconference
The Remix welcomes Yulia Topchiy, Natasha Becker, and Paola Gallio, the amazing co-founders of Assembly Room, who staged 12 exhibitions, 16 performances, and monthly curatorial meetups in the gallery’s first year. They share their origin story—an arranged marriage—and how they fill a void for independent women curators. They didn’t think there was a need for another gallery so they created space and a home for independent curators: a commercial gallery with a nonprofit soul. The reasons why they made that choice includes finances as well as freedom, flexibility, and ownership over mission. They walk us through their Open Call platform, the gallery space vs the project space downstairs, what they’re looking for in a proposal, and their interest in mentorship, collaboration, and family. Toward the end of the conversation, their kinship with artist-run spaces becomes clear and there are shout outs to Spring Break, Pioneer Works, Canada gallery, A.I.R. gallery, and others who paved the way for their new model. We end on day jobs and dreams for the future. Picture utopia on a beach.
Assembly Room is an art gallery and space for independent women curators to achieve success through community. We believe in coming together to collaborate, break the rules, defy the status quo, and create compelling art, exhibitions, and experiences.Assembly Room’s three founding curators are: Natasha Becker, Paola Gallio, Yulia Topchiy.
assemblyroom.nyc @assemblyroomnyc
Francisco Correa Cordero started as an aspiring artist, working at many of our favorite institutions. He stopped making his own artwork in favor of creative collaboration and curating for love. Seriously. An experiment and act of affection turned into a career, a gallery, and a devoted following. Francisco speaks frankly about day jobs; how he can handle projects concurrently in the US and abroad; the importance of old friends and collaboration; and an ongoing struggle with time management. Does he want Lubov gallery to grow and challenge Hauser and Wirth or Zwirner for art market share? Listen to find out his definitions of success.
Francisco Correa Cordero is the founder and director of the contemporary art space Lubov in Lower Manhattan, where exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, The Village Voice, V Magazine, and Office Magazine, among more publications. He has collaborated on independent projects with White Columns, Recess, Silver Projects, Residency Unlimited, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and apexart in New York, and with espace HIT in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the executive coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York.
lubov.nyc @lubov_nyc
A native New Yorker, Katherine Gressel began her artistic and curatorial career responding to changes in the city. She dove into curation whole-heartedly when she found it combined many of her interests and now she finds herself a curator/educator/administrator who makes a living as an artist. How did she flip the script? During her conversation with The Remix, Katherine discussed her role at Old Stone House (the sight of the Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War) where she facilitates site-specific projects to make local history relevant to a contemporary and globally-minded general audience. She talks programming; community work; the challenges of working in a multi-purpose space; funding as an independent curator; how she loves to start every project with a space and a community rather than a specific topic; catalyst vs curator; grad school; and painting commissions. She talks about her deliberate effort to blur the lines between the different facets of her life and make them sustainable as a whole.(Shout out to Natalia Nakazawa in this episode!)*NOTE: Since this podcast was recorded, Katherine and the Old Stone house received the big NYSCA grant she mentions! Congrats, Katherine and Old Stone House! Check out their website theoldstonehouse.org and @oldstonehousebklyn for their 2020 schedule.***
Katherine Gressel is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. Since 2016 she has served as the inaugural Contemporary Curator at the Old Stone House & Washington Park (OSH), a nonprofit historic house and community center in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At OSH she has focused on how contemporary artists can help make local and national history relevant, and how OSH's unique space can inspire and incubate emerging artists. Katherine first started organizing exhibitions at OSH in 2009 with her original Brooklyn Utopias series exploring artists' visions for ideal cities.
In addition to organizing over ten major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine's exhibitions have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. She has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia.
katherinegressel.com theoldstonehouse.org @oldstonehousebklyn @eventpaintingbykatherine
Cara Ober was told print was dead and she created a luxurious, insightful, and deliberate print journal for the Baltimore art community. Cara talks with The Remix about how she sees the many facets of her life--both inside and outside the studio--as artwork; how she got a print journal off the ground; how she is a conscious and active member of the Baltimore artworld; and how she marches to the beat of her own drum. Creative collaboration is Cara’s passion and BmoreArt is a tool to capture her local art scene in a generous and generative way. She is doing the thing she looks for in institutions: to “seamlessly and elegantly represent the art from their place but put it into a global context.” Want to get Cara mad? Talk about exclusivity as an inevitable part of the art world, and do it in artspeak. Listen for details on exciting, newly formed and forming projects.
Cara Ober is the founding editor and publisher at BmoreArt, Baltimore’s art and culture magazine. She is a Baltimore-based artist, writer, culture producer, and curator. Cara writes about Baltimore's unique cultural landscape from the perspective of an artist and feminist. She approaches all kinds of cultural production from a constructive and critical perspective informed by material and pop culture, history, social movements, and politics. Over the past decade, Cara's critical reviews, essays, and interviews have explored the political and economic impact of the arts in Baltimore and the way artists maintain a professional practice and thrive in a city full of rich and diverse cultural traditions as well as serious social issues. She writes regularly about artist and museum culture and institutional values and the way they intersect and collide, assessing how this impacts artists, art communities, and establishes hierarchies and systems of value.Cara is a recipient a 2019 Rabkin Arts Writers grant, the winner of a Mellon Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, a Grit Fund Grant from The Contemporary via The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2015, and a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006. Cara earned an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MS in Art Education from McDaniel College, and a BA in fine arts from the American University.
Bmoreart.com caraober.com @bmoreart @caraober
Brian and Carolyn Jobe, the founders of Tri-Star Arts--an organization that connects and promotes contemporary visual art in Tennessee--join The Remix to talk about their journey from Tennessee to Texas to New York and back again. Both artists are educators and arts administrators who saw an opportunity (and a need) to connect contemporary artists and arts organizations across the entire state of Tennessee through listings, a speaker series, and other events. We get into the nitty gritty of their funding and how the founding of Tri-State Arts relates to a long-term vision that will manifest in the 2021 Tennessee Triennial, an event sure to attract nationwide interest. They talk about generosity, mentors, kindness, and time management. Find out how they balance their ambitious organization with their own practices and a family. They also give great advice for anyone planning to run a Kickstarter campaign.
Brian Jobe has previously worked at the Guggenheim NY and Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio. Carolyn Jobe has worked in arts administration for a variety of entities including the Chelsea Music Festival (NY) and Art Crating Inc. In addition to being arts administrators, they are both artists: Brian, a sculptor, and Carolyn, a painter, both exhibiting their work nationally. Through their programs, they enjoy facilitating beneficial connections and have a passion to see the contemporary art communities of Tennessee thrive.
@tristar_arts @tennessee_triennial @locate_arts
At 17-years-old, Elisa Jimenez manifested a dream to make art her life and life her art. She now works as a transdisciplinary artist and healer who surrounds herself with very talented people who believe in collaboration and conscientious capitalism. She traveled from TX to NYC to follow the dream and be herself. 25 years later, after working successfully as a solo entrepreneur, Elisa talks to The Remix about the influence of her family and friends (her tribe); her beginning as a mulit-disciplinary performance artist who spun webs throughout NYC to create a vortex of goodness; how a random passerby liked her dress and threw her into the world of fashion; artificial divisions; slow design; how her values have never waned, regardless of how hard that may be; what happens when health issues change your perspective; how to calculate loss and acknowledge success; and how to find systems to work with your personality. She talks ups and downs, the challenges, and upholding her ethics.
Elisa Jimenez is an interdisciplinary artist in fashion design, writing, drawing, painting, performance art, photography, and art installation. Her main ongoing project is called "The Hunger World," a world of marionettes ranging from 2 inches to 30 feet in height. Vogue discovered Jimenez as "the scoop" and has consistently acknowledged her as being at the forefront of the new avant-garde as well as one of the top 10 American Designers in the independent realm. Her designs have appeared in the pages of Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Dutch, Black Book, Paper Mag, Jane, and Trace. She has worked for a number of actors, musicians, films and television programs, including: Melissa Auf der Maur, Cher for her Believe album, Jennifer Connelly for her character in Requiem for a Dream, Marisa Tomei, Courtney Love, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sex and the City, Pink, Cameron Diaz, and art photographer Cindy Sherman. Jimenez was invited to be in the Barbican Gallery's exhibit and book Rapture: Art and Fashion Since the 1970s, curated by Chris Townsend of London. She was represented by Holly Solomon and continues to show her art and fashion in traditional and unexpected ways.
elisajimenez.com @elisajimeneznyc
beyondbrickandmortar
Koan Jeff Baysa takes The Remix from medical school to Mexico, collecting to curating, and commuting between Hawaii and NYC. As a doctor, Koan gave free medical attention to artists and his interest in both worlds quickly merged. Community, diversity, access, and inclusion are his mottos, with a goal of working in the area outside common thinking to inspire people to process geography and culture differently. Get prepared for his love of word play! The conversation turns to tech, medicine, and his work on Medical Avatar, a platform that emphasize visualization and patient engagement. We end on the importance of STEAM, Koan’s intense travel schedule, and where he finds artists. What would he have been if not a doctor or curator? You’ll never guess!
Kóan Jeff "KJ" Baysa is a physician and curator, born and raised in Hawai‘i, educated in San Francisco and New York, a member of the Association of International Art Critics, and alumnus of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He has participated in medical missions in conflict zones and develops health apps for handheld devices. He segued from a clinical medicine practice in Manhattan to a design and science curatorial practice in Los Angeles that bridges medical culture and social sculpture, with research interests in the neuroscience of memory and olfaction, human sensory perception/misperception, neurodiversity, and the cultural constructs of health and disease. He is Chief Medical Officer, Medical Avatar; Co-founder, Joshua Treenial; Senior Founder, Honolulu Biennial; Director, iBiennale; Curator, Institute for Art and Olfaction; Program Board Advisor, Art Omi; Cultural Advisor, World Council of Peoples for the United Nations; Alumnus, Advisory Committee of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; Cultural Agent, Curators Network; International Advisor, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza; Advisory Board, Kaus Australis, Rotterdam; Co-Founder, Mosaic NYC. A Ford Foundation grantee surveying contemporary art in Vietnam, he has curated exhibitions in China, Japan, Chile, Croatia, Mexico, Korea, Austria, Canada, Ireland, England, Ukraine, Holland, United Arab Emirates, and throughout the US, with upcoming projects in Iceland, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Finland, and Hawai'i. He is the Pacific Editor for d'Art International, writes catalog essays and reviews, and has lectured at the United Nations, MoMA, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, Hanoi University of Culture, and the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. Dr. Baysa divides his time between New York, Honolulu, and Los Angeles.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kjbmd/ @ibiennale ArtAndOlfaction.com
As a young writer, George Scheer visited Greensboro, NC, with fellow writer Stephanie Sherman and rediscovered his grandmother’s thrift store, founded in 1939, shuttered in 1997, and overflowing with surplus material culture. The result of that trip is a living museum called Elsewhere that’s had hundreds of residents, interventions, performances, and community meals. George speaks with The Remix about local vs. regional vs. national reach; how Elsewhere residents continually transform a 60-year archive into artwork (nothing leaves and nothing is sold); how he went about physically creating space in the store and his community; how an artist resident helped educate him on how to run a nonprofit; Elsewhere’s funding trajectory; succession; and how he sees institutions as instruments of change. The conversation covers the nuts and bolts of starting and growing a nonprofit to the point of sustainability. We end the conversation with George’s next stop of New Orleans and how a health scare has him thinking long-term about how environment impacts patient agency and recovery. What are Elsewhere’s ties to the Guggenheim? Did George work for Obama? Listen to find out.
George Scheer is an artist-founder, director, and cultural policy advocate who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is the Director of the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-founder of Elsewhere, an experimental museum and artist residency. As a cultural critic, George writes about arts, cultural policy, urbanization, and place. Other projects include Kulturpark, a public investigation of an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin, and South Elm Projects, a curated series of public art commissions. George holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications, MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University, and a PhD in Communication and Performance Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
cacno.org goelsewhere.org @elsewheremuseum @cacnola
Andrea Valencia Aranda is able to cultivate an international perspective from Mexico City to NYC to Rotterdam thanks to digital communication. Regardless of where she lives, she has figured out a way to work on major exhibitions--such as Cecilia Vicuña’s world-travelling retrospective--while also continuing (and embodying) her research on immigration, memory, and empty space. We talk about instability in the art world and Andrea’s anxiety dreams of empty spaces giving way to a career that investigates how we, as curators, can hold a space and support a community. Tune in for tips on sustaining an international practice as well as details on her amazing projects Open Doors and Se Habla Español--both of which emphasize community, inclusion, and understanding while working to subvert and deconstruct systems that divide and exclude audiences. How does she use soft power so powerfully?
Aranda is an art historian and independent curator from Mexico City. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Among her current curatorial research, she is working with sound art, immigration, feminism, and the poetics of empty spaces. She worked as an Assistant Curator at The National Museum of Art, Mexico City; as Liaison Manager for International Projects in the Office of International Affairs of The National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico; and she was Coordinator of the Pavilion of Mexico in the 57th Venice Art Biennale. In 2017, she co-founded the curatorial collective Se habla español. She is currently working with Witte de With Contemporary Art Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands as Exhibition Coordinator of the retrospective of Cecilia Vicuña.
@andycurator
In this exciting episode, we talk with our Season 4 co-host, Eva Mayhabal Davis. She takes us from the University of Washington to her first job in NYC at the Guggenheim Museum where she learned to spend significant time with art and facilitate conversations. We talk about her three partners in curating: the space, the artist, and the audience; how collaboration comes naturally to her; and how art is a path toward empathy and understanding. Eva walks us through the origin and trajectory of El Salón, a monthly program where she brings people together for food, company, and feedback. She reveals her hosting personality, how she chooses artists to work with, and how her choices resonate with her personal history. Does she have a secret white board full of artist names? Is she done with her education? Does her day job feed her curatorial work? Did she call her mom in advance of this conversation? You must listen to find out.
Eva Mayhabal Davis has curated exhibitions at BronxArtSpace, En Foco, Expressiones Cultural Center, MECA International Art Fair, Photoville NY, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon, and Ray Gallery. She is currently a Co-Director at Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial initiative, and in 2020 she will be the Curator-in-Residence at Kunstraum LLC. Based in New York City, she works with artists and creatives on the production of exhibitions, texts, and events. Her personal immigrant narrative drives her work in advocacy to advance equity and social justice values through the arts and culture. Born in Mexico and raised in the United States, she studied art history at the University of Washington. She is a founding member of El Salón, a meetup for cultural producers based in NYC. She has spoken on her curatorial work at the AC Institute, Artist Space, Queens Museum, The 8th Floor, Brooklyn College, Queensborough Community College, and NYC Crit Club. Her writing has been featured in Hemispheric Institute’s Cuadernos, Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal, CultureWork Magazine, and the Guggenheim Museum Blog.
evamayha.com @evamayha
Welcome to The Remix podcast Batch 4! This season, The Remix co-founders Courtney Colman and Heather Bhandari continue their research into new models in the art world by focusing on the sustainability of independent curators. Fortunately, the most perfect co-host agreed to join them: Eva Mayhabal Davis, an independent curator and organizer who cares deeply about the capacity of art to inspire empathy and understanding. In this introduction, they talk about common threads in the eleven interviews they recorded in the summer/fall of 2019 with a diverse array of curators who’ve forged their own paths and figured out ways to sustain their practices. You’ll meet founders, partners, and truly independent spirits who are breaking new ground in the art world.
Music theme by Marina Murayama
Marina Murayama’s musical writing explores themes of mixedness, decolonization, and accountability. Though Marina has roots in the classical tradition, their current music weaves together synthesized electronic textures and lush orchestral soundscapes. Follow them at www.murayamamusic.com
In this episode, Anita Durst takes us from her performances in the Meat Packing District in the 90s to managing Chashama’s 30+ spaces across diverse neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey in 2018. The Remix asks her to reveal everything from the logistics of running art programs in so many empty spaces to her vision for the future. Listen to the conversation transition from real estate to alien probes.
Anita Durst has been a star, a muse, and a patron of the avant-garde performing arts and emerging arts scene in New York City, since she was 18. She founded chashama in 1995 following the death of her mentor and artistic professor Reza Abdoh. While performing and working in his company, Dar A Luz, she learned the value of unbridled expression and how to value art objectively. In the wake of Reza’s absence she was driven to create a place for artists free of financial and subjective constraints. Anita has worked tirelessly for over 20 years to secure over one million square feet of space in New York City for artists.
She believes programs like Chashama are the vital building blocks to ensuring cultural capital in New York City. Anita was born in New York City and was the flower child to hippy parents living in New Foundland Canada, Ibiza Spain, and the suburbs of New York City. As a precocious teenager she resisted conventional schooling. Shortly after graduating high school she moved back to New York City to help care for her grandfather. Today, Anita sits on the boards of the Tai Chi Chuan Center and Bindlestiff Family Cirkus.
She is a proud mother who ensures her entire family eats healthy, practices mindful movement, and lives in the moment. True to her ability to be in the moment and greatest strength of objective thinking, she believes all art to be valuable.
Courtney and Natalia speak with Zeelie Brown—multidisciplinary, multidimensional artist, cellist, and community builder. Zeelie talks through her move to NYC from the south (where her art stems from), and showing up in contexts historically reserved for straight, white participants. Listen to hear which institutions were particularly welcoming to her unorthodox practice.
Through sound, textiles, and installations, Brown “depth charges wells of Afro-Atlantic dynamism to conjure up works which provoke a sense of environmental and cultural shifts. Her work meditates black freedom in the 21st century, and the renegotiation of the parasitic networks of power and privilege weft into the global, colonial world order. She was born in San Antonio and was raised between San Antonio and Pollard, Alabama. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Africana Studies (Fine Arts) which they used to open their heart and soul to jazz, philosophy, and other great arts of the black world.”
Conceptual artist Chloe Bass comes to talk with The Remix about building relationships and kindness. Her new project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is the culmination of years of working around the topic of intimacy. We discuss the challenges of translating experiences and memories into objects and the memes that poke fun of conceptual art. What does a studio day and a submission look like for Chloe? Listen to find out. Can she foster intimacy on the scale of a metropolis? We think so.
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.
chloebass.com @publicinvestigator
Leah Triplett Harrington joins The Remix to talk about The Rib, an online publication covering artists and artwork outside major city centers. We talk about filling a void in the art world and amplifying the voices of art communities across the country. Which state has the most impressive apartment galleries? Listen to find out.
Leah Triplett Harrington is curator, editor, and writer. She is the founding editor of The Rib, a publication dedicated to contemporary art and its communities outside of major urban centers. Her writing has most recently appeared there as well as Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism. In 2018 she opened Under a Dismal Boston Skyline at Boston University Art Gallery. In 2019, she became assistant curator for Now + There, a Boston-based public art non-profit. Leah has lectured at Boston University, Montserrat College of Art, Stonehill College, Tufts University Art Gallery, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Nathan Sinai Rayman started by founding the smallest, most inconsequential gallery in New York City (most likely the world). Now he’s exploring a franchise-ready, modular, flat pack gallery as an MFA candidate at Hunter. Can he populate the country with GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY? In this episode, listen to him explain his business plan that sells galleries, rather than art.
Rayman is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates different bodies of work. One repurposes capitalist systems as readymades and another blends the collisions of circumstance that make up one’s mundane existence. As an artist-in-general, he works in a variety of media: tapestries, photograms, sculpture, installation, performance, video, PowerPoint, and text.
Established in 2013, and recently relaunched as GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY, it sells the franchise GALLERY by GALLERYGALLERYGALLERY, which positions him as a dealer of galleries rather than art. Rayman has exhibited both domestically and abroad in solo and group shows and curated over 60 shows in his capacity as GALLERY Director. He has participated in the Vermont Studio Center residency in 2009 and the Santa Fe Art Institute residency in 2010.
gallerycubed.com @gallerycubed
Kelani Nichole talks to The Remix about her gallery, TRANSFER, and her involvement in The Current, a museum for digital art with a new model for collecting and showing the work. Kelani talks mentors and aspects of the traditional gallery world she flatly rejects. This is a must-listen conversation for everyone making digital work and anyone interested in showing, buying, and selling media art.
Kelani Nichole is a design strategist and exhibition maker based in New York City. Nichole is director of the Current Museum of Art, a cooperative collection of contemporary media art that examines technology's impact on the human condition. She is the founder and owner of TRANSFER an experimental gallery supporting artists with exhibitions of challenging variable media formats. Since 2016, TRANSFER Gallery in Brooklyn has been dedicated to women refiguring technology through exhibition and curation.
@transfergallery @current.museum
Willa Köerner leaves the internet to visit The Remix. She talks about why The Creative Independent exists to share creative challenges—including creative anxiety and making a living—and ways of paving your own path. We also delve into her new upstate NY residency, The Strange. It’s a place where artists can live in a remodeled barn in the woods without losing their internet connection. Listen to find out what makes The Strange so beautiful and strange.
Willa Köerner is the Creative Content Director of The Creative Independent, a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for practicing artists. Before TCI, Willa directed editorial and content strategy at Kickstarter, and before that, she managed digital engagement at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is currently a NEW INC mentor, and was formerly a founding member of Grey Area Art + Technology’s Cultural Incubator. Willa has worked as a creative strategist for a wide range of arts organizations including the Smithsonian, Electric Objects, and Art21, and has been known to write, edit, curate, and otherwise create for all sorts of cultural projects. She’s currently working with her partner, Daniel Morgan, to establish The Strange Foundation, an internet-infused creative space in the woods of New York’s Catskill Mountains.
thecreativeindependent.com thestrange.foundation @willak
Meet Kristen Dodge, founder and curator of September gallery and mom to several farm animals. The Remix talks with her about why she left NYC and the space it’s provided to her personal and professional lives. After showing 200 artists in the last two years, she has sage advice about measuring success.
Founded in 2016 in Hudson, New York, SEPTEMBER is an evolving platform for artists of diverse disciplines. The gallery is committed to engaging the surrounding community, while hosting artists predominantly from Upstate to Brooklyn to Boston. In the first two years, over 200 artists have exhibited at the gallery. The spirited ethos and activity of SEPTEMBER includes performers, academics, activists, chefs, curators, writers, and other creative thinkers, makers and doers.
She previously founded DODGEgallery, which held 56 exhibitions on New York’s Lower East Side between 2010-2014.
Camilo Alvarez joins us from Boston to discuss his trajectory from working at nonprofits to owning his own gallery to closing the space in an effort to rethink his relationship to the gallery system. After many years working in the art world, getting a master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard was a first step in positioning himself differently in relation to artists and audiences. What’s coming next? Listen to find out.
Camilo Alvarez was born in 1976 in New York, NY and resides in Boston, MA. He was born to Dominican parents and lived in Santo Domingo for 7 years. He received a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) and a Masters of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA).
He has worked at Exit Art (NY, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), MIT’s List Visual Art Center (Cambridge, MA) and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (NY, NY & Skowhegan, ME). He is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and is on the National Advisory Council of Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum.
He is the Owner, Director and Preparator at Samsøñ formerly Samson Projects, founded in 2004. He has given solo exhibitions to William Pope.L (2010), Rebecca Morris (2006), Kader Attia (2008), and Beverly Semmes (2017) among many. Samsøn’s programs and exhibitions have been reviewed by the New York Times, ArtForum, the Boston Globe and Flash Art. The gallery has participated in art fairs including ARCO (Madrid, Spain) MACO (Mexico City, Mexico), NADA (Miami, FL & NY, NY) and the Armory (NY, NY). Samsøñ placed works in the permanent collections of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Boston among others. In 2010, Samsøñ commenced sübsamsøn, a form of artist’s residency. As of 2017, Samsøñ became itinerant.
www.samsonprojects.com @samsonprojects
In this episode, Heather gushes over her former boss—art lover, collector, and Creative Capital board member Paige West—who was the forward-thinking founder of The Remix’s mom, Mixed Greens. They discuss public resistance when starting something truly new; innovative ways The West Collection shows artwork in a corporate setting; and her deep love of Creative Capital, an organization dedicated to supporting artists. Listen to find out what a “hot hall” is!
Paige West considers herself an all around contemporary art addict. She studied the business of art at Christie’s Education and NYU Arts Administration programs and has since promoted and supported artists by curating a major private collection comprised of more than 3,000 works by emerging and contemporary artists, producing documentaries on artists Salvatore Scarpitta and Vik Muniz (Worst Possible Illusion: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz), and starting Mixed Greens, a gallery that exhibited and sold original contemporary art both online and in its New York gallery. She is also the author of The Art of Buying Art: An Insider’s Guide to Collecting Contemporary Art.
Welcome to The Remix podcast Batch 3. This season, The Remix co-founders Courtney Colman and Heather Bhandari are joined by Natalia Nakazawa, artist and assistant director of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program. In this intro they talk about the ten podcasts they recorded, covering everything from new commercial gallery and residency models to strategies for navigating the art world with art that challenges current structures. They continue on their quest for viable new models in the art world, while meeting fascinating people along the way.
Many thanks to Niki Nakazawa and El Triple Filtro for our intro music!
theremix.nyc @theremix.nyc
theremixpodcast
In this grouping of episodes, we turn our attention to artists' expanding definitions of success and the reliance on a multidisciplinary approach as a means to survival. We discuss artist-run spaces, community-driven nonprofits, and the current state of art criticism. Batch 2 features interviews with artists Leah Tinari, Caroline Woolard, Matthew De Leon, Molly Surno, and Alex Paik; writer Paddy Johnson; and Recess founder Allison Weisberg.
Paddy Johnson says she's learned some of her most important lessons through trial and error, or in some cases error upon error. In her early years in New York, this meant repeatedly taking gallery assistant jobs and then losing them. She learned a lot about the business through this process including the fact that you can always blog when you can’t find a job. And thus, in 2005, she founded Art Fag City.
Art Fag City was Paddy’s way to participate in the art world and get immediate feedback. When Facebook became a thing, Art Fag City became Art F City. Professionalism kicked in while she managed to retain a fresh and candid perspective. We talk about income inequality, valuing time, speaker fees, and the belief that art and artists can contribute greatly to communities. While talking about artist-run projects as a movement we talk cat boxes, microwaves, puppies, and new models.
Paddy Johnson is the founding Editor of Art F City and an active independent curator. She has published in magazines such as New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Economist and lectures about art at venues such as Yale University, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2010 and 13, she was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards. Curating highlights include the Columbia MFA show at Judith Charles Gallery in 2015 and a retrospective of the work of Carol Cole at The Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina in 2018. She also has a podcast, Explain Me, with the artist William Powhida. http://artfcity.com/category/podcast/
After Cooper Union, Caroline Woolard started a shared studio space with friends and discovered a healing community that was necessary to sustaining an artistic career. She embodies the solidarity economy and explains how that is different from the sharing economy. We discuss online platforms, power, transformative justice, and believing in something. She is an artist and cultural organizer who imagines better futures.
Caroline Woolard employs sculpture, installation, and online networks to study the pleasures and pains of interdependence. Woolard has co-founded barter networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop (2008-2016), the Study Center for Group Work (since 2016), BFAMFAPhD.com (since 2014), and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative (since 2016). Recent writing on her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. Woolard’s work has been featured twice in the PBS / Art21 documentary series New York Close Up. http://carolinewoolard.com
Alex Paik is a community builder. He talks to us about why he co-founded TSA with friends in Philly and how it grew to be a network of spaces in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Chicago (the Gagosian of the artist-run world?!). We learn about the nuts and bolts of running the four spaces including dollars and cents, dispersing the workload, and why TSA chose to be a nonprofit. We also learn how Alex balances his art practice with his many administrative roles. Alex Paik is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been shown at galleries and art fairs nationally and internationally. He is the founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces; Curator of Satellite Art Show, an alternative art fair in Miami; and Chief Curator at Trestle Gallery, a non-profit arts organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. www.alexpaik.com
Matthew De Leon takes us from Connecticut to art school to becoming the drag performer, Untitled Queen. He gives credit to people along the way and talks about making community, redefining his practice, and resisting categorization. He samples and embodies everything from anime to art history to create social sculpture while working full time. The necessary element he added to his practice since getting his MFA: fun.
Matthew De Leon aka Untitled Queen is a visual artist, drag queen, and graphic designer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He creates elaborate, colorful handmade DIY costumes and sculptural body props that are used in intensely emotional and narrative performances. Through these means, he twists and explores themes of vulnerability, gender, race, and self-empowerment.
De Leon was born in 1984 on Governors Island, New York. He is the recipient of the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag Queen of the Year 2015. He has shown in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Kitchen, Boston Center for the Arts, Honey Ramka, and the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, among others. Residencies include Urban Glass and the SHIFT residency at EFA. www.matthewdeleon.com
Allison Weisberg started her career in the arts managing lines outside MOMA in the rain, and after a few key steps along the way, went on to start a nonprofit with deep community roots and a mission of inclusion. She is game for supporting and facilitating difficult, critical art where people can touch, participate, and be loud. Recess’s spaces in Brooklyn are hubs for intensive residencies and artist-initiated programming including Assembly, the organization’s diversion program for court-involved youth.
Allison Freedman Weisberg received a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Visual Culture from NYU. She worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art and then the Whitney Museum of American Art. Managing Youth and Community programs at the Whitney, Allison began creating inroads to contemporary art for audiences from diverse backgrounds. Her work uniting artists and publics lead her to start Recess in 2009. She has given lectures and presentations at venues such as Hunter College and the New Museum and contributed writing to wide-ranging publications from artist books to Art in America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her two children, and a disgruntled mutt named Edgar. https://www.recessart.org/
It’s a Leah Tinari love fest! She discusses the stages she went through when her gallery closed and how her expectations of the art world changed dramatically over the last two years. She talks sales over Instagram (once she figured out what a DM was) and going it on her own as an author/illustrator and the founder of Avenue Sea Creatures. Once she became a mom and questioned the arbitrary line between painter and illustrator, her world opened up.
Leah Tinari has a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After graduation, she moved to New York City and since that time has been a scenic painter; a freelance illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vice, Spin, Elle, and Paper magazines; a teacher at Parsons New School; and a restaurant owner. Leah has also created campaigns for Nike and Mini Cooper automobiles. Her fine art has been shown in galleries around the world and is also privately collected. Harlan Coben’s The Magical Fantastical Fridge was the first children’s book she illustrated. Leah is author-illustrator of Limitless, 24 Remarkable American Women of Vision, Grit and Guts, published by Simon & Schuster, with a publication date of November 6, 2018 and available in pre-sale now. Leah has also been breaking into the custom sneaker game and launched her custom sneaker biz “Avenue Sea Creatures” in the summer of 2017 and has been making kicks for the likes of Adriana Lima, Mark Hamill, Adrian Grenier, Caroline Vreeland, and Yves Durif. She lives and paints in the East Village with her husband and son. www.LeahTinari.com
Molly Surno is an artist and curator who uses her eclectic background to create dynamic and community-driven cultural programs. Molly walks us through her recent curatorial project with Spotify. In the process, she explains what transcendental screen savers are and what it was like to commission artists for the first video project on a major streaming service. She gives us examples of new models and has theories on why the art world is so slow to change. Why is she in New York and not Los Angeles? Listen to find out!
Molly Surno graduated with an MFA in Visual Art at Columbia University. She blends visual art, film, music, food, and technology to create performances and happenings. We of Me, her large scale sound performance, was exhibited at the Getty Museum in 2017 and as part of BAM's Next Wave in the fall of 2015. She has also been a resident of Recess, Pioneer Works, Steeprock Arts, and Watershed Arts.
In 2008, Surno founded her nomadic performance series Cinema 16, which pairs contemporary musicians with experimental films. Named after the New York-based avant-garde film society in 1947 and inspired by Maya Deren's Greenwich Village exhibition of experimental films, Cinema 16 has shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Kitchen, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Moving Image, among others. Surno has brought thousands of people together to experience avant garde cinema, performance, and music in each of these establishments.
Surno has also curated video artworks for the “Spotlight” (a new format on Spotify) version of the 2017 novel The Minefield Girl. Currently, she is the Art Director for Elsewhere, developing a rotating arts program called Landscape. Surno has worked for the team that created TEDx and as the first Outreach Director for Kickstarter. She now consults on cultural research, curating, and creative programming for brands and organizations such as Kickstarter, Spotify, Neuehouse, Sonos, Clif Bar, MANGO, and WhatShouldWeDo, among others. www.Mollysurno.com
Magda Sawon talks with The Remix about Postmasters’ history from the East Village to Soho to Chelsea to Tribeca. She is candid about her decision to use Patreon to address the gallery’s sustainability and the urgent need for greater transparency in the art world. We also talk about the value of what a brick-and-mortar gallery brings to the community and the challenges related to being relevant and risk-taking in the current climate. There is also advice on how to make a delicious DIY margarita.
Magda Sawon is a contemporary art gallerist and art world figure who founded and owns New York's Postmasters Gallery (with her husband Tamas Banovich), a gallery for young and established contemporary artists, especially those working in new media. The gallery currently occupies a large space in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. It is considered to be one of the country’s leading experimental galleries. @postmastersgallery
Larry Ossei-Mensah’s IG handle is @youngglobal and he’s truly on the move. Larry discusses how and why he’s using his MBA to work in the arts and support emerging artists. We discuss his travels outside of his hometown of NYC, his multiple overlapping projects, how he supports community in tangible ways, and how he engages institutions while remaining independent. Relevant advice to artists and curators pushed this podcast well beyond our poorly enforced 30-minute cap!
Larry Ossei-Mensah is a Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic who uses contemporary art and culture as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. He has organized exhibitions and collaborations with artists at commercial and nonprofit spaces, including: Firelei Báez, Ruby Amanze, Hugo McCloud, Brendan Fernandes and Peter Williams. He has advocated for and written on some of the most dynamic visual artists working today: such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Lorna Simpson and street artist JR. Ossei-Mensah is a co-founder of the 501c3 ARTNOIR. He recently served as the Critic-in Residence at ART OMI and currently serves as a mentor in the New Museum’s incubator program, NEW INC. He recently opened a solo show of Allison Janae Hamilton’s work at MASS MoCA. This summer, Ossei-Mensah will be co-curating a group show in Rome, Italy at Anna Marra Contemporanea featuring Derrick Adams, Firelei Baez, Abigail DeVille, Paul Anthony Smith, Alexandria Smith and William Villalongo. @youngglobal @artnoirco
Michael Foley wants to be excited about art again! He turned a bi@!% session into a 10-panelist (!) discussion about what is wrong with the art world and what can be done about it. He talks to us about showing work that can’t be shown elsewhere, how honesty allows for change, how art fairs and the ease of buying work online have changed the business model and “sunk the ship” of many dealers who stick to traditional sales methods. Are artists the best dealers? What do galleries offer in the age of social media? Do we do away with the 50/50 split? Does the definition of a gallery need to change? How do we foster open dialogue? We discuss it all! And we attempt sound effects. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go well.
Michael Foley opened Foley Gallery in the fall of 2004 after fourteen years of working with notable photography galleries including Fraenkel Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery, and Yancey Richardson Gallery. The gallery brings together fine line and obsessive precision in the disciplines of drawing, cut paper, painting, and photography. After eight years in Chelsea, the gallery has relocated to the LES, taking a storefront location on Orchard Street, just south of Delancey.
In 2009, Foley co-founded The Exhibition Lab, a study center for people involved in various aspects of fine art photography. Foley continues his interest in educating by serving on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography where he teaches and lectures on issues in contemporary photography. He has a private coaching practice for artists who would like to improve their work and navigate the art world. @foleygallery
Patton Hindle is a facilitator and ardent advocate for artists and their projects. She explains the importance of community, the difference between funding through Kickstarter and funding through Drip, and what kind of projects are good for each platform. Patton firmly believes artists should be paid and we should all be patrons. How does she balance all of this while she also runs a gallery? She shares her model for getting it all done.
Patton was appointed Kickstarter’s Director of Arts to help artists and arts organizations realize ambitious projects through the crowd-funding platform. Kickstarter recently launched Drip, a subscription-based platform that allows patrons to invest in ongoing projects, giving artists and creators access longer-term funding. She was previously the Director of Gallery and Institutional Partnerships at ArtSpace and the Director of DODGE Gallery. In addition to working at Kickstarter, Patton is a partner in the contemporary gallery yours mine & ours on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. @pattonhindle @kickstarter @yoursmineandoursgallery
Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger is curator at No Longer Empty (NLE) and the Director of the NLE Curatorial Lab. There, she uses art as a creative tool to address social, cultural, and political issues. She talks to The Remix about following her passion for site-specific work, education, community engagement, artists, and curating. She talks about nonprofits--why they exist and how they may evolve. She explains why No Longer Empty is NOT a pop-up and how NLE’s exhibition-making model is changing. She also has fantastic ideas on what cities should do with vacant spaces. Shout out to Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op, one of Rachel’s favorite projects in the recent past.
Rachel is co-founder of 1@111, a series of process-oriented conversations that focus on a single work, text, curatorial premise, or proposition. Independent curatorial projects have focused on the intersection of information, data, and art, and include: Once upon a Time, There Was the End at Center for Book Arts (New York, NY); Data Deluge at Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX); and Library Science at Artspace (New Haven, CT). Rachel has served as co-director of Sara Meltzer Gallery and curator at Exit Art, where she organized the final exhibitions Every Exit Is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and Collective/Performative. Publications include monographs, exhibition catalog essays, and contributions to Unfinished Memories: 30 Years of Exit Art (Steidl, 2016) and Art Galleries International: Post-War to Post-Millennium (Dumont Literatur/Kunst Verlag, 2009). Rachel received her MA in Curatorial Studies in Contemporary Art and Culture from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. @rachelgugelberger @nolongerempty
Ellie Rines tells the story of transitioning from showing work in an unstaffed window space to her current gallery space at 56 Henry. She talks candidly about the jobs she works to support her gallery, the fact that the gallery is her apartment (not a secret), and the love she has for her gallery community. She’s breaking traditional gallery rules with her choice of gallery staff, the small group of artists she represents, and the unique opportunities she gives to bigger-named artists who are represented elsewhere. We discuss growing up, social media, the danger of art fairs, extreme faith in her artists, and her strategies for making it work. She actually talks numbers! Hallelujah!
Ellie is the Founder and Director of 56 Henry Gallery, named by PAPER Magazine as part of “Chinatown’s New Art Gang,” and touted by Artinfo as a “small space with big ambition.” This isn’t her first small space though—she was previously the director of 55 Gansevoort, a window front and vestibule in the Meatpacking district. @56henry.nyc
The first batch of a new, 15-episode podcast series hosted by The Remix co-founders Heather Bhandari, Courtney Colman, and Steven Sergiovanni explores the challenges of creating and sustaining a business and career in the visual arts. The Remix is seeking answers to questions that are often asked in private. Topics include the struggling galleries, rising rents, a lack of patrons, a lack of diversity, and how we're all surviving and redefining our definitions of success while still remaining passionate about art.
The Remix is a project-based curatorial team established to exhibit the work of underrepresented artists. Founded in 2017 by three former colleagues from Mixed Greens gallery--Heather Bhandari, Courtney Colman, and Steven Sergiovanni--it strives to create and promote new platforms that foster transparency, community, generosity, and the sharing of resources among artists and arts workers alike. Visit us at TheRemix.nyc to learn more about what we're up to.