Brainard Carey's Blog, page 57

Jmy James Kidd

Jmy James Kidd makes dances, textiles and community spaces. She is the founder of Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, CA. Choreographic commissions include REDCAT, The Kitchen, Made in LA 2014, The Broad, The Getty, Pacific Standard Time 2013. Residencies include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BOFFO, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is visioning a Music and Dance Temple to be built somewhere sometime in the next 10 years. She frequently collaborates with her wife, musician Tara Jane ONeil (musical collaborator) Insta: @jameskidd_studio.

Perin Hailey McNelis is a dancer and botanist based in Patagonia, Arizona. Perin holds a BFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Perin started working with James Kidd in 2012 as a dancer in the Sunland Dancers group and as the PR manager for Pieter Performance Space.

Perin has performed at the Skirball Cultural Center, Machine Project’s Mystery theater, the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial, the Getty Museum, the Broad Museum and various galleries. Perin returned to her home in Arizona in 2015 to pursue interests in regionally specific ethnobotany and ecological work in the borderlands. Perin joined the Borderlands Restoration Network horticulture team in 2015 and now is the Assistant Manager for the Native Plant Materials program where she manages the seed lab and coordinates art+ecology programming. Perin is passionate about somatic practices, activism and geography – particularly in the form of land stewardship.

Books mentioned in the interview were: The Wild Kindness and A Pattern Language.

video still from BRINK. 2019, Created and performed by Nickels Sunshine, Jmy James Kidd and Dezmon OMega Fair. Video Directed by Brian Getnick 2019. Costumes by Jmy James Kidd. Sound Score by Dezmon Omega Fair.
Current work, iphone video still from rehearsal October 2020 in Landers, CA titled “Believers” Jmy James Kidd (dancer/choreographer), Perin Hailey McNelis (dancer/collaborator), Tara Jane ONeil (musical collaborator)

Tammy Nguyen

Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative.
She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects.
Born in San Francisco, Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The year following, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014. She has exhibited at the Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others.
Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library.


“This is how the village people bury their dead”, Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood panels, 24″ x 20″ , 2020


Martha’s Quarterly, Issue 17, Fall 2020, “There are No Edges on the Moon”

Philemona Williamson

Philemona Williamson is a narrative painter who has shown widely in the United States and abroad. Her work explores the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment.

The lush color palette and dreamlike positioning of the figures ensures that their vulnerability – of age, of race, of sexual identity – is seen as strength and not as weakness. “My figures navigate a world of uncertainty as they search for understanding—both internally and in ever-shifting environments. I see the figures as vehicles to explore the existence of the most vulnerable adolescents, those evolving people of color, grappling with what will define and identify them. My paintings give voice and space to invisibility.”

Williamson has exhibited her work for over 25 years at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC and recently, at her mid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in NJ. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner, National Endowment For The Arts, New York Foundation For The Arts and Millay Colony as well as serving on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education. Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions such as The Queens Museum of Art, Wisconsin’s Kohler Art Center, The Sheldon Museum in Nebraska, The Bass Museum in Miami, The Mint Museum in North Carolina, The Forum of Contemporary Art in St. Louis, The International Bienal of Painting in Cuenca, Ecuador and most recently at the Anna Zorina Gallery in NYC.

She is represented in numerous private and public collections, including The Montclair Art Museum; The Kalamazoo Art Institute; The Mint Museum of Art; Smith College Museum of Art; Hampton University Museum; Sheldon Art Museum; Mott-Warsh Art Collection, and AT&T. Her public works includes fusedglass murals created for the MTA Arts in Transit Program at the Livonia Avenue Subway Station in Brooklyn, a poster for the MTA Poetry In Motion and — for the NYC School Authority — a mosaic mural in the Glenwood Campus School. She currently teaches painting at Pratt Institute and Hunter College in NYC.

For Philemona’s latest project, she created a series of paintings for the children’s book Lubaya’s Quiet Roar, just out from Penguin Random House.

“The Gathering” 48″ x 60 ” oil on canvas 2019
“Here I Hold Becoming” 48” x 60” oil on canvas 2020

Ali LeRoi

Ali LeRoi is an Award-winning writer/director/producer best known for his work on the critically acclaimed series, CW’s “Everybody Hates Chris”, TBS “Are We There Yet?” and the breakout Hit for STARZ, “Survivor’s Remorse”. Ali has five Emmy nominations as well as one win, he’s a two-time winner and five-time nominee for NAACP Image Awards, as well as scoring several nominations from the Golden Globe, WGA, and others.  Ali’s major motion picture credits include producing and co-writing “Head of State” and “Down to Earth,” as well as producing cult- favorite, “Pootie Tang.”
His feature film Directorial Debut “The Obituary of Tunde Johnson” premiered at The Toronto Film Festival and is slated for release in 2021.
The book mentioned in the interview is Open City by Teju Cole.

Ann McCoy

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

She was awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She lectured on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, Nalini Malini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.  Ann McCoy and Kentridge did a conversation at the American Academy in Rome for his Tiber project, “Triumphs and Laments”, which was published in the Brooklyn Rail.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ann McCoy has exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Annual, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. She is known primarily known for her large format drawings, work with projection, installation, and bronze sculpture.

Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library.  Most of her work is based on her dreams, and their relationship to alchemical texts, and Christian alchemy in particular.  For McCoy, alchemy is a symbolic language of processes dealing with spiritual transformation.  Incarnation of spirit into matter is the key concept of the alchemical practice.  The imagination is the gateway to the gods.

Dream of the invisible College  (Size: 9 x 14 ft. ) pencil on appear on canvas (2018) photo credit: Peter Dressel
Processional with Resplendor (Size: 19″ by 7 ft. 2″ by 9 inches) cast bronze with silver crown (installation 2018) photo credit: Peter Dressler

Robin Pogrebin

Robin Pogrebin is a reporter on the Culture Desk of The New York Times, where she covers cultural institutions, the art world, architecture and other topics.

She is also the author, with Kate Kelly of the book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” published in September 2019. At the Times, she has also covered the media industry for the Business Desk and city news for the Metro Desk. Prior to joining the Times in 1995, she was an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News and, before that, a staff reporter at The New York Observer.

Her freelance work has been featured in magazines like Vogue, Town & Country and Departures, along with several book anthologies. Pogrebin, who also teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts, is a frequent moderator, radio guest and speaker. She lives in New York City.

Jessamyn Lovell

Self-Portrait in Blonde Wig, 2007

Jessamyn Lovell (b. 1977, Syracuse, NY) is a conceptual artist working with photography, video, performance, and surveillance contemplating class and personal identity. Lovell holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from California College of the Arts.

She is based in Albuquerque, NM where she is currently a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Director of the Art Department at the University of New Mexico. Lovell is a founding member and activist leader in the United Academics of the University of New Mexico, the institution’s new faculty union and a licensed and practicing private investigator.

Lovell has received international recognition for her artwork including Dear Erin Hart, for which she found, followed and photographed her identity thief. She received her private investigator’s license in 2017 for D.I.Y. P.I. (Do It Yourself Private Investigation), a long-term conceptual art piece. 

Self Portrait Mirror, 2017 Self-portrait taken on surveillance, from Do It Yourself Private Investigation (2016-current), 50″x70” archival inkjet print
Self-portrait taken on surveillance, from No Trespassing, (2007-2009), 40×70” archival inkjet print

Matthew Langley

Matthew Langley received his BFA from Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC in 1985. Since then, Langley’s work has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe through numerous group and solo exhibitions.

Recent exhibitions include; Big Circle at M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kiev, In Color at Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA and The Unified Field at Blank Space, New York, NY.

Langley’s artworks have also been included in various public and corporate collections including; the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage, and Construction, The Doris Patz Collection at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, Ernest and Young, PNC Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue, Norwegian Cruise Lines, MacAndrews & Forbes and the State Department of the United States.

He currently lives and works in New York.

Books mentioned in the interview were White by Kenya Hara. Hara has been the art director of Muji since 2001. Also mentioned were the books of John le Carré

Photo of studio with the large painting in process that is mentioned in the interview; Unfinished, 2020, 60 x 96 inches
Marine Drive, 2019, 38 x 31 inches, acrylic on paper
Zine by Matthew Langley and book by J Saltz

Sarah Lawson and Lee Norton

Sarah Lawson is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective, and act as UDP’s Publicity Director.


Lee Norton is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse Editorial Collective, where he also serves as the Development Director. He teaches composition and literature at Queens College CUNY, usually with a focus on the history and rhetoric of the life sciences, theories of genre, 20th-century fiction, and contemporary poetry, in some combination. He earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill; his critical work has appeared in Occasions; his poetry, in Ohio Edit, Drunken Boat, Supermachine, and several other magazines.

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Through the efforts of a volunteer editorial collective, UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a mission-driven small press that has published more than 300 titles to date, and produced countless prints and ephemera.

UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. In all of its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.

Here is a link to the pamphlet subscription mentioned in the interview and the regular subscription is here.

And here is some more writing on the reasoning / history that went into doing the pamphlet series, in the words of editor Daniel Owen.

Soviet Texts, the first representative selected volume of poetry by Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism.


The first batch of the 2020 Pamphlet Series, with work from Simon Cutts, Sergio Chejfec, Don Mee Choi, Steven Zultanski, and Aleksandr Skidan.


Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ autobiographical novel One Small Saga; and Laura Riding’s first book of poetry, The Close Chaplet.

Natalija Vujošević

Natalija Vujošević is an artist and curator based in Montenegro, Yugoslavia.

The focus of her research and practice is the presentation of archives through exhibition-making, seeking renewed modes of communication, engagement, and understanding through new interpretations and expanded forms. She has lead and curated this kind of work on a number of research projects and public presentations, such as:

Comrades / Women’s Movement in Montenegro 1943 – 1953 / with Nataša Nelević

A research project and exhibition dedicated to the AFZ archive (the anti-fascist front of women in socialist Yugoslavia. Archive + contemporary art interventions and interviews.

“Why Have There Been No Great Men Artists?” Collections of the British Council in cooperation with the National Museum of Montenegro, (with a focus on women artists and their position in collections and in the art scene.

Missing Stories / Forced labor in Nazi Germany, organized by the Goethe Institute Belgrade / Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade).

She is the founder and director of the non-governmental organization, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Montenegro, which has been active since 2015, which is dedicated to contemporary art theory, education, research, and archives. The Institute established the first award for the young artists in Montenegro (in cooperation with Trust For Mutual Understanding New York). In the National Library of Montenegro, they are developing an alternative book collection that consists of art theory, philosophy, and humanistic science written in the last 3 decades (after Yugoslavia).

Her recent artist research is focused around Issues of life on the sidelines of global capitalism: the fatal transition of the Western Balkans and the neo-colonial politics and the occupation of natural resources on the Adriatic coast.

The book mentioned in the interview was; Breathing / Chaos and Poetry / Franco “Bifo” Berardi.

The study of Nature, Installation in public vitrine, 2020, mirror, textile, curtains, South south lets go south Biennale Serbia.
Body Installation, 2017, ceramic tiles, textile, wood. Nida Art Colony