CUNY TV's Twilight Talks: Recent Episodes
CUNY TV
Twilight Talks is a series of conversations with arts and culture professionals about their work and unique perspectives on contemporary life. Born out of the new political reality — post-election 2016 — the talks are held at twilight overlooking New York City’s West Side.
Twilight Talks is produced by Emmy Award-winning producer Wilson Reyes and hosted by independent curator and writer Kevin Moore.
Goldberg mines queer and trans archives, connecting artists and organizers from previous generations to today's LGBTQ+ community.
Villalobos describes performing music with his brothers as a form of jubilant activism.
Whitaker redraws the boundaries of photographic realism to create alternate social truths.
Makos recounts the unique social creativity of the Factory and his friendship with Andy Warhol.
Kevin Moore talks to Artist Em Rooney. Rooney considers our place as biological, sentient beings inhabiting industrial environments.
Kevin Moore talks to Visual Artist and Filmmaker Rosa Barba. Barba talks about the versatility of film and its aptness for contemplating the modern world.
Haendel invests meaning in slow drawing as a form of homage to the social and spiritual work of his subjects.
Epstein captures the beauty and terror of the world in photographs rich in political import.
Photojournalist Ozier Muhammad reminisces about growing up among the Nation of Islam, bearing witness to famines, earthquakes, and political campaigns, and the necessity of seeking inspiration.
Silas Riener talks about dance traditions, broadening gender categories through dance, and improvisational performance as a forum on social cohesion.
Chidester talks about growing up in the mountains, performing on cruise ships, and the progress of millennials.
McGinty expresses mixed feelings about cat litter, wellness advice, and Clint Eastwood.
Kevin Moore talks with Rivka Galchen, Dasha Shishkin, Reiner Leist, Leo Rubinfien, Julie Curtiss, Alex Rosenberg, A. K. Burns, Ankit Shrestha, Francis Cape, Moyra Davey, Vera Iliatova, Nilko Andreas, Ben Gould, Hugo Montoya, Anne Lindberg and May Chatham
Writer Rivka Galchen talks about enigmatic terrains, from offbeat neighborhoods to scientific mysteries and arbitrary authority.
Artist Dasha Shishkin shares her delight in absurdity, decadence, and flawed materials.
Reiner Leist talks about life-altering moments, from large-scale traumatic events to daily, barely noticed routines
Leo Rubinfien recounts his firsthand experience of the World Trade attacks and the years-long attempt to make sense of it.
Artist Julie Curtiss talks about her multicultural upbringing and her attraction to French Surrealism and dark female archetypes.
Art publisher and appraiser Alex Rosenberg reminisces about his long life and relations with notable artistic and political figures as well as his involvement with Cuba and Israel.
A. K. Burns asks: what is valued? must art always be a salable object? and how do physical spaces direct our lives?
Ankit Shrestha talks about the importance of busking, doing cover tunes, and developing an international audience.
Moyra Davey demonstrates the power of triangular thinking, bringing together personal, historic, and artistic narratives that examine life in unique ways.
Francis Cape discusses woodworking as an angle on social injustice and the persistence of utopian ideals in late capitalist society.
Nilko Andreas talks about his musical influences, from classical to Colombian folk music, and introducing those repertoires to audiences in New York.
Vera Iliatova recalls the last days of the Soviet Union and adapting to life in New York in relation to her paintings, which depict teenage girls caught in a maelstrom of nostalgia.
Ben Gould tells how a recent diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome precipitated a career shift to performance art, through which he mines the expressive potential of his body's unpredictable energies.
Hugo Montoya details how a lifestyle of beachcombing and photographing led to a discipline of making simple, gestural sculptures out of common materials and found objects.
Anne Lindberg talks about the temporal effects of landscape, literature as confidence, and discipline as generators for her work.
Mary Chatham explains her process as discovery through materials, leaving preconceived ideas at the studio door, and embracing the in-between.
Coversations with Tabitha Soren, Carroll Dunham, Hugh Hayden, Lesley Lokko, Cheryl Donegan, Kevin Bewersdorf, Nanette Burstein, Mark Dion, Elaine Mayes, Olaf Breuning, Heidi Ewing, Chris Martin, Luc Sante, Laurie Lambrecht, Chelsea Culprit & Mary Carlson.
Carlson shares her enthusiasm for the lives of female saints and their various depictions in Medieval and Renaissance art.
Culprit talks about the expectations placed on female identity and visual strategies for overturning gender stereotypes.
Sante discusses teaching writing, anarchist legacies, and valuing histories of everyday life--including his own--through old photographs and ephemera.
Lambrecht elaborates a mindset of careful observation, knitting, and playing with the edges of the natural and social orders in which we live.
Ewing describes the free license granted by documentary filmmaking and getting into the headspace of different groups and characters.
Martin recounts his years as an art therapist and learning to find--and give--pleasure through his own painting.
Lesley Lokko discusses racial identity on different continents and diversity in education as a hope for solving global problems.
Artist Olaf Breuning talks about lightness and humor as points of entry into darker, more complex subjects.
Elaine Mayes reflects on forty-five years of documenting hippie culture, rock musicians, and her friendship with photographer Helen Levitt.
Mark Dion discusses his appreciation for folly buildings, obscure departments of science, and being implicated in nature's demise.
Bewersdorf muses on the broken promises of the internet and finding satisfaction in making Gifs, movies, and music.
Burstein describes biographical filmmaking and the pitfalls of public perception for controversial figures such as Hillary Clinton.
Hayden considers social camouflage and the underlying discomforts of modern American life.
Donegan flirts at the edges of categorical thinking and imagines the difficult--and opportune--stages of imminent societal change.
Dunham considers the power and limits of painting and its ability to materialize both personal and historical visions of the world.
Soren discusses journalism and art as different kinds of storytelling and her embrace of more complex notions of truth.
This episode is dedicated to some of the remarkable guests and moments that were part of Twilight Talks in 2019.
Filmmaker Jacquline Goss discusses her fascination with folly in relation to scientific ambition and American politics.
Caleb Crain explores the dark side of internet privacy and the fate of the novel in the 21st century.
Steciw discusses our alarmingly expanding and fractured media universe and attempts at momentary stasis and wholeness through play, humor, and irreverence.
Nisenbaum talks about painting as a mode of being present to others and, in those situations, confronting complex feelings as social beings.
Fred Tomaselli discusses the creation of tranquil and mystical spaces in his art as a protection against the onslaught of chaotic world events and toxic news.
David Benjamin Sherry mourns the loss of species on the planet and describes his approach to sensing the deep wisdom embedded in nature as a mild form of comfort.
Documentary filmmaker and City College professor Dave Davidson discusses his latest film, Cinema and Sanctuary, and CCNY as the first documentary film school in the US, led by German avant-garde artist Hans Richter during the 1940s.
Kevin Moore talks to photographer Barbara Probst about multiple points of view and photography as an obstacle--not an aid--to understanding reality.
William Wegman talks about the pleasure of puzzles, a dog’s perspective on life, and humor in art.
Karin Mamma Andersson discusses nordic light, the dog days of the world, and taking a long view of history.
Artist Summer Wheat talks about making paintings in three dimensions and honoring art by anonymous artists and craftswomen of the past.
Christopher Myers, a children's book illustrator, artist and writer, discusses the "maladies of modernism" and embracing the mess of mixed cultural identities.
Kevin Moore talks with artist and gallerist Janice Guy about how feminism and world politics have changed over forty years of making and exhibiting art.
Roger Ross Williams, the first African-American director to win an Academy Award, talks about documentary films satisfying a "hunger for truth" and empathy for the lives of others.
Kevin Moore talks with Swiss journalist and documentary filmmaker Jean-Cosme Delaloye about bearing witness to vulnerable lives, exercises in empathy, and political decisions that make a difference.
Artist Sarah Braman considers the lessons of community and family, of believing you can do what you put your mind to, respecting the pain of others, and art as a road to being your best self.
Kevin also talks to photographer and filmmaker Michael Halsband, who reflects on being a product of American pop culture and his portrait sessions with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Rolling Stones, and others.
In this episode, Kevin Moore talks to poet, artist, and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña about lost knowledge, the exploitative mind, and a long career of environmental art and activism.
André Aciman is a writer and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His books, from Out of Egypt to Enigma Variations, explore subjects ranging from sexuality to exile. Call Me By Your Name has reached wider popularity through a successful film adaptation, winner of Best Adapted Screenplay at the 90th Academy awards. Aciman has confirmed that he is writing a sequel, which will also be directed by Luca Guadagnino and likely to welcome back stars Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Aciman’s other books are gaining more attention and it won’t be a surprise to see more adaptations.
Laurie Simmons is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Since the 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, “walking objects,” and live models, creating photographs that resemble enigmatic domestic scenes. Her feature film My Art, which she wrote and starred in, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. A retrospective of Laurie Simmon’s work titled Big Camera/Little Camera is on view at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth until January 27th. The exhibition then travels to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it opens on February 23rd.
Painter Ellen Berkenblit talks about creative sustainability, her father's passion for photography, and learning to pause. A show of her most recent paintings opens January 29th at Susanne Vielmetter gallery in Los Angeles. Her work is also featured in a two-woman show with sculptor Sarah Braman titled True Blue Mirror, which opens February 9that the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco.