Critical Bounds Podcast

Conversation with Berette S. Macaulay, a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Her research and visual arts practice engage themes of belonging, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking. We discuss living a multiplicitous life, and the institutional lie that you must focus on One Thing, or be branded a failure. Interrogating the process of critical dialogue. What populations are still being overlooked in the art world? The influence of the Black Portlanders project. Working with artists who are creating work to, “...speak to some of the traumas, but not define ourselves by these traumas.” How institutional racism creates a challenge in even putting together a show that is about Black people. Tokenism in cultural institutions. The invisibility of power. Interrogating terms like “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, to unroot the mythologies of “Whiteness”. And so much more.

Conversation our conversation with arts advocate and curator Eva Mayhabal Davis (B. Toluca, Mexico). We talk about our mutual disdain for Picasso, Davis' art journey, her project El Salón, the prospect of gathering together again, our mutual anxiety at onscreen crowds (and the 80s and early 90s lack of cellphones), how she advocates for community through the arts, and what old hobbies became new again during the pandemic. Davis is a the Intake Paralegal at UnLocal, Inc, a non-profit organization that provides direct immigration legal representation, legal consultations, and community education to New York City’s undocumented immigrant communities. She is also a founding member of El Salón, Director of Transmitter NYC, curator for NYC Crit Club, and her writing has been featured in many publications such as Foundwork, Arte Fuse, Art Spiel, the Hemispheric Institute’s Cuadernos, Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal, Guggenheim Museum Blog, and Cultureworks Magazine.

Conversation with Satpreet Kahlon, a Punjabi-born, Seattle based artist, organizer, and curator, and the editor of New Archives, a nonprofit arts journal which focuses on art in the Pacific Northwest. We talk about Satpreet's work at (now-defunct) The Alice Gallery, including her first experience at curating the show "From Which We Rise", and its familial connections. We discuss the vibrations of Place, and Satpreet's US experiences living around the country. We touch on institutional tokenism, her work with yəhaw̓ Indigenous Collective, and the issues with "decolonizing". Side-eyeing the New York Times. Theories on how some work by BIPOC artists is largely ignored because it isn't easily digestible for hegemonic consumption. We hear about Satpreet's own artistic practice, the ways she interrogates space, and how her work "...moves against the framework of metal penii", embodying anti-monumentalism. The influence of Archive, and the words of Saidiya Hartman, and how not all curators are created equal.

A conversation with Sofía Córdova (She/Her/They/Them). We talk about her work Echoes of a Tumbling Throne, the dangerous inequality perpetuated by the tech industry, Her project "A Body Reorganized", which considers Sanctuary Cities, the history of the term "Sanctuary", and the humans affected by these policies. We have a full-on Star Trek tangent, and get into her band XUXA SANTAMARIA's label Ratskin Records, and life raising a tiny human in 2020. Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova @yagurmo-yal makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory potential, the internet, colonial contamination, mystical objects, and extinction and mutation as evolution, within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy.

Conversation with visual artist and formerly incarcerated poet, entrepreneur Halim A. Flowers about growing up in DC, Reaganomics and the myth of the "Superpredator", the importance of education and access beyond Eurocentric knowledge, making space to connect with people as fellow humans, the influence of hip hop and Basquiat on his work, and how art and culture can change minds and our world.

Conversation with 3.5 generation Japanese-American artist Michelle Kumata about her time at Wing Luke Museum, her project on the Japanese Diaspora in the US and Brazil, her work "Song For Generations", and how it deals with the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. We discuss the importance of listening to those from historically marginalized communities and really processing what is happening right now, then taking action as individuals to effect positive change. Plus, shoutouts to Wa Na Wari, Elisheba Johnson and Inye Wokoma, Roger Shimomura, Erin Shigaki, and Louie Gong

Conversation with African American contemporary realist, and figurative conceptual artist Afi Ese about using art to tell stories, group economics as a form of activism in marginalized groups, her former experience as a forensic psychologist and how we use research about inequity in place of action against inequity in our justice system (and many other places), a different way to look at reparations, the inherent problem with the term "BIPOC", Ese's thoughts on 2020 for art and artists, and how we can have more honest conversations across differences.

Conversation with Seattle-based Hispanic Latino artist writer, and curator Alexis L. Silva about finding your community in the art world, redefining success in a non-colonial context, the value of community museums, being a Person of Color in the art world, and why we should be building coalitions now, more than ever. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Conversation with Adero Knott, an emerging curator, inventor, and Founder of AK Prosthetics, an AdaptiveTech startup that makes customized prosthetics and adaptive wear accessible and inclusive. Her first foray into curating was with the show "Disability and Perspective", one of four exhibitions from the Commons Artist Project by Norman Teague and Fo Wilson, which debuted at MCA Chicago, about making art and life more accessible, how we might expand sensory experiences at museums and art galleries, being a dark-skinned, Black woman in the tech world, how to invest in her accessible prosthetics app, and her highly varied experiences with racism around the world.

Conversation with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin. We talk about Amelia's podcasts Wampum.codes, a podcast which features Indigenous people working with tech in a multitude of ways, and Dreamstacks, the developer podcast by Contentful + Algolia which Amelia hosts. We also discuss her former life as an early-internet hacker and simultaneous opera singer, her Mozilla Fellowship on "trustworthy AI" and using Indigenous value-systems in tech, and much more. (Image courtesy of artist)

Conversation with Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer Meghan Elizabeth Trainor (not THAT one) about Computational Witchcraft, Creating mythologies in order to truly own our places in spaces like tech that are historically unwelcoming to and erasing of womxn and other folxs who have been marginalized (because we have always been there, regardless of the dominant mythologies), using her project Witchcraft Memes to try to spark an interest in STEM for teens and tweens, using nurturance in community as a form of activism, her installation Elektron Oracle form the show Good Witch/Bad Witch at Museum of Museums in Seattle, curated by Bri Luna AKA The Hoodwitch, and much more.

A conversation with director Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman about his film work, the protests happening in both LA (where he is based) and Seattle (where I am based)this summer, police brutality, the houseless crisis, the perils of social media, AI as a symbiotic lifeform, and the rather banal-yet-dangerous role it currently plays in our lives, Star Trek, Covid, how smartphones have changed our brains, and his conversations with Paradise, CA residents that resulted in an upcoming film, "Tips on Surviving the End of the World".

Conversation with curator, writer, and cultural arts programmer Bethany Tabor about her work with Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, creating events that give space for people to talk and learn about Death and Dying. We discuss performance art, John Underwood, the founder of the Death Cafe Movement, artist Teresa Margolles, Dia de Los Muertos and the inextricably imperialistic relationship between US and Mexico, and how Covid has not actually changed our proximity to death.

Conversation with artist AJ Hawkins about how changing relationships to faith can change our relationships to grief and grieving processes, how the death of a beloved pet inspired a search to make sense of her own mortality, the necrobiome as a "microbiological afterlife", her project "The Reclamation", How Death Positivity includes issues like bodily autonomy and environmentalism, how art can be used to connect and communicate, and to cope with things that feel "too big", and a crash course on ecological disposition.

Conversation with curator, writer, and researcher J Simmz delves into our personal and larger societal relationships with death, Simmz work as an intuitive and conceptual curator, how she has found ways to move naturally with cycles of life and death in work and beyond, and how we might apply that philosophy to our current state—the possible deaths of our own harmful institutions—and what our might our roles at this moment in time be.