Podcast
Interviews by Brainard Carey
Hosted by Brainard Carey · EN
Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists Poets and more, like Vasari’s book updated. (Interviews with over 1200 artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)
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David Smalling
Apr 1400:27:02Tap to summarizeDavid Smalling portrait © Stefen Pompee Born in 1987 in Kingston, Jamaica, David Smalling lives and works in New York City. He studied Mathematics at Yale University, where he also trained at the Yale School of Art, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Drawing from the tradition of Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age, Smalling’s paintings examine how contemporary social codes and gender norms shape identity and behavior. Through carefully constructed domestic and ceremonial scenes, he explores themes of belonging, aspiration, and restraint, questioning the roles we inherit and perform. The exhibition of all new paintings on wood panels takes its title from the Elizabethan collar, the veterinary device colloquially known as the “cone of shame”—a protective apparatus designed to prevent an animal from tearing at its own sutures. The collar, as depicted in Cone of Shame, becomes a metaphor for conditional belonging: entry into a space that promises safety and prestige while quietly limiting autonomy. David Smalling, Party Favor, 2026 Oil on panel 61 × 91.5 cm — 24 × 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel. David Smalling, Cremaster, 2025 Oil on panel 51 × 61 cm — 20 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York; Photo © Charles Roussel. David Smalling, Follicular, 2025 Oil on panel 91 × 61 cm — 36 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel.
Transcribe →Catherine Birk
Apr 1000:23:00Tap to summarizeCatherine Birk (b. 1994, she/her) is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. Her interdisciplinary practice brings transgender studies, queer theory, and critical theory into the expanded field of painting. Catherine earned her MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024), and BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). Solo exhibitions include My mother is a horse., at the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI). She has exhibited in group shows nationally, including at Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston, SC), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison, WI), Real Tinsel (Milwaukee, WI), and D. D. D. D. (New York, NY). Catherine Birk | hut (interference), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium and netting on canvas 13 x 15.5 inches Catherine Birk | dam (for Morandi), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium, and Dragon Skin Silicone on panel with artist’s frame 17 x 21 inches Catherine Birk | hut (for Strega Nona), 202627 cast beeswax slabs; dried herbs and essential oils of rosemary, thyme, basil, sage, andoregano; cast urethane rubber; boltsDimensions variable: 11 x 14 inches each
Transcribe →Dean Erdmann
Apr 100:20:50Tap to summarizedean erdmann lives and works between San Diego, CA and Brooklyn, NY. dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist in moving and still images, sculpture, and installation. Their sculptural practice evolved from their image-making practice. They live and work between Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. Their work has been exhibited at ONE Archives, Mexicali Biennial, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Spiral Hall, Tokyo, Kavi GuptaBerlin, the Sheila Johnson Design Center, Torrance Art Museum, and Public Fiction, among many others. Their permanent public commission for the LA K-line Leimert Park Station opened Fall 2022. Over the following years, they collaborated with an evolving team of dedicated artists and producers—Grace Whiteside, Celeste Wilson, Christopher Duffy, Esteban Salazar-Cucalon, Michael Haddy, and James Corporan, —while receiving support from fellowships and residencies at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Urban Glass, and The Chinati Foundation. Installation view: dean erdmann, Vitrum, Company Gallery, 2026 dean erdmann, 700cc, 2026 Hot mold blown glass and steel armature 28 x 18 1/2 x 14 in dean erdmann, (detail image) razr 2 (front), 2026 Hot blown mold glass 23 x 23 x 9 in
Transcribe →Rochelle Voyles
Apr 100:21:57Tap to summarizeRochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist whose works explore the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and found images, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found images in order to decontextualize her experience of reality and decipher our collective relationship to photographs. She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2012. She is an upcoming resident of the Wassaic Project, and was a resident at The Peter Bullough Foundation, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and the ChaNorth Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Below Grand, 81 Leonard Gallery, Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, Field of Play Gallery, and Collarworks. Voyles has been published in blogs and online such as Collé, Shoutout LA, Paradice Palase, and The Jealous Curator. Her recent solo show “Unreliable Narrators” at 81 Leonard has been featured as a March 2026 editors select in Impulse Magazine, and as an editorial feature on Art Rabbit. Additionally, the show received favorable reviews in Art Spiel and White Hot Magazine. Neptune in Pisces, 2026Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood, 20 x 23 in. The Bowline at Dusk, 2025 Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood 32 x 31 in. Returned in Fragments, 2026 Mixed media; collage, paper, wood 8 x 7 in.
Transcribe →Leonardo Madriz
Mar 2500:23:38Tap to summarizeLeonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging. Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2014). Solo shows include Sisyphus Altered at Strobe, New York, NY (2023) and Can’t Forget, Dying to Know at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023). His installation Letters to Home was selected for CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM (2022), and a reformatted excerpt of Letters to Home II was presented by the DUMBO Projection Project (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Repair at Shadow Walls for Upstate Art Weekend, NY (2025) and I’m Not Alien, I’m Discontent at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2024). Permanent collections include the LSU Museum of Art. He is currently an adjunct faculty at the International Center for Photography. Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel Adorned in the Leavers’ Wake, 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery. Leonardo Madriz, Down Is the New Up (Möbius Recalibrates), 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery. Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel of Lacrimosa Guerrero, 2026. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery.
Transcribe →Torbjørn Rødland
Mar 2000:22:06Tap to summarizePhoto: Emma Jenkinson Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities. The physicality present in the work is driven by his use of film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes. Torbjørn’s first exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery’s New York location, Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs, is on view now through April 25, 2026. Rødland, The First Curtain, 2024-2026 Rødland, Forgetting Victoria, 2025 Rødland, Tavener’s The Lamb, 2024-2026
Transcribe →Kevin Umaña
Mar 1800:19:46Tap to summarizeKevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry, and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction. Umaña received his B.F.A from San Francisco State University in 2014. In 2025, Umaña received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Anderson Ranch (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019). In 2017, Umaña created a permanent installation at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. In 2026, Umaña will be participating in the MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire. Kevin Umaña, Revisiting the Roman Walls, 2026. Acrylic, oil, flock, ink, sand, marble dust, salt, resin, ceramics on canvas, 24 x 18 x 2 3/4 inches. Kevin Umaña, Sanguine and Spiraling, 2023. Acrylic, oil, vinyl paint, flock, ink, sand, gouache, ceramics on canvas, 24 1/4 x 18 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches. Kevin Umaña, The Clothesline Appearing as Aqueducts, 2025. Glaze on stoneware, 12 5/8 x 10 7/8 inches
Transcribe →Rob Davis
Mar 1100:24:04Tap to summarizeRob Davis was born in 1970 in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 with a degree in painting. His work has been exhibited both internationally and, in the U.S., It has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Luce Gallery, Turin; Rental Gallery, Long Island; and Untitled Gallery, New York. Davis currently lives and works in New York. Rob Davis, Clothesline, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 56 inches Rob Davis, Truck, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 48 inches Rob Davis, Window, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 36 inches
Transcribe →Jeffrey Heiman
Mar 1000:23:47Tap to summarizeJeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle, WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley. Jeffrey Heiman, Flip, 2026, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery. Jeffrey Heiman, Washing in the Sink, 2026, oil on linen, 34 x 40 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery. Jeffrey Heiman, Jenny Sleeping, 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery.
Transcribe →Professor Omar Kholeif
Feb 1800:37:25Tap to summarizePainting by Caroline von Grone, Omar the Prophet Omar Kholeif is an artist, author, curator, cultural historian and professor of global art theory and practice at the Glasgow School of Art and Program Leader of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice with the University of Glasgow. Luísa Correia Pereira World Child Front Cover Courtesy of Sternberg Press and artPost21 They work and operate under numerous guises, including as the avatar of Doctor O—The World’s Leading Pop Physician (TM). Born in Cairo, Egypt, they were raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Los Angeles, CA, and elsewhere. An author of over two dozen volumes on art, a curator of over 100 exhibitions, they are the co-founding director of artPost21, a not-for-profit publishing and broadcast platform for artists and their dreamwork. Simone Fattal imagine otherwise Cover Courtesy Sternberg Press and artPost21 Their recent books include, Nil Yalter: Circular Tension (2024), Otobong Nkanga: Stitched Dreams (2024) and Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (2023). Huguette Caland imagine otherwise cover Courtesy of Sternberg Press and artPost21 In 2025 their long-awaited critical biography on Huguette Caland was published as part of imagine/otherwise. Forthcoming in 2026 is Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child, published by Sternberg Press. Forthcoming projects include the curated group exhibition, Fellow Travelers at Tabari Art Space, Dubaiand a survey exhibition of their creative practice at The Third Line curated by Sofia Victorino.
Transcribe →