Mary Heilmann, a pioneering abstract artist who enjoyed a late-career renaissance after achieving global acclaim in her late 60s, died on Long Island on Friday at the age of 86. The Bridgehampton and Manhattan-based painter had suffered complications from a fall, according to a statement from her studio. 

Originally a ceramicist, Heilmann shifted course to painting after moving to New York, crafting off-kilter, geometric compositions that put an irreverent spin on hard-edged abstraction. She adopted a technique that allowed neon-bright colors to drip across her canvases in a sly commentary about largely male artists whose self-serious works dominated much of Manhattan’s downtown art scene. Heilmann’s work would later be featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Dia Beacon, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery in London.

“My inspiration for art doesn’t really come from the history of painting,” Heilmann said in a 2013 interview with Hyperallergic. “It comes from the community of art as it is now, and also popular culture, like movies and music and books and fashion, especially street fashion, not high fashion.”

Cultural strategist Bryan Joseph Lee has been appointed deputy commissioner of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), the agency announced today, August 17.

Lee, who will work alongside DCLA Commissioner Diya Vij, enters the post with extensive experience centering marginalized communities' access to and perspectives in performing arts throughout his career. Through his Harlem-based agency CNTR ARTS, Lee has spent the last five years as a consultant and creative producer for several arts organizations, ranging from the With Love Project and the Ghetto Film School to the Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

The news comes just six weeks after NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani approved $323 million in city funding for cultural affairs for the 2027 fiscal year, marking the largest-ever budget afforded to DCLA.

Entering Dean Millien’s high-ceilinged Bushwick studio, I found the artist watching a Marcel Duchamp interview on his laptop, surrounded by a menagerie of his aluminum foil animal sculptures. When I asked him why, he told me about his recent visit to Duchamp’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “Seeing his work helps my mind,” he said. “Great artists give me an idea of where I should go. I always trust myself as an artist, but I like to see how others have grown in the past.” 

While Millien’s background as a self-taught artist might differ from that of figures like Duchamp, his recent inclusion in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York is proof that the need to make art exists beyond the walls of the commercial art world. Still, what struck me in meeting Millien was his lack of interest in posturing. He’s driven by an urge to keep elevating his practice, taking in influences from art history while sticking with his instincts. Having grown up with a developmental disability, he has spent time working with the city’s ecosystem of organizations supporting artists with disabilities.

“My background doesn’t make me feel ostracized or anything,” he commented. “I always had intuition, a good feeling about what I liked and what I wanted.”

The artist was born in Brooklyn in 1972 to Haitian immigrants who settled in Ditmas Park. Millien’s core memories from his childhood center around toys and television: “My young mind was strictly focused on that. I was around art, and I just didn't know it.” This obsession was compounded when his father, in a moment of frustration, discarded all of Millien's toys. This early loss became a critical part of his creative development. He began making his own toys, initially out of scrap materials like sponges and paper. Eventually, he sculpted them out of aluminum foil, his primary material to this day for its durability and availability as a household staple. 

Clingy, thick-hot summer air followed me into Uffner & Liu gallery on a recent Friday afternoon. But as soon as I reached the top of the gallery’s stairs, I found myself pulled into a more temperate realm. Standing on the top step, peering through a steel grid covering Isabel Horgan’s egg-tempera painting “Mirage” (all works 2026) like the mesh of a fence, my eyes traced a light-dappled path into a verdant forest clearing. A lone figure clad in a spotless white gown appears to be digging, searching for something unseen. This enigmatic, fairytale-esque scene could have been plucked from any number of historical eras, were it not for the gas pipes poking up in the foreground. So begins Marooned.

The exhibition brings together 17 artworks by the 11 artists who comprise the Rhode Island School of Design’s 2026 Master of Fine Arts in Painting program cohort: Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, Callie Coccia, Siran Liu, Kati Lowe, Lucy Luckovich, Banshee Maria, Shiyeon Monk, Pavol Roskovensky, Talha Shams, and Ricky Vasan, as well as the aforementioned Horgan. Though this group represents a breadth of interests and aesthetic sensibilities, from airy, tactile abstractions to glossy, unsettling realism, curator Ajay Kurian unearthed enough throughlines in the selected works to knot together a visually and emotionally resonant net. 

Ringing the skylit room and extending onto the wood floor, the pieces share subtle points of connection and seem to converse with one another, their echoing colors, shapes, and ideas pinging around the room. The flock of hot-pink forms in Liu’s atmospheric abstract work “Horizon Patience,” for instance, echoes the curves of a lone hanger dangling in the aching, intimate domestic scene in a neighboring oil painting by Vasan, titled “Teach Me How to Write a Love Song.” In it, a woman in white, having a quiet moment, is reflected in a patch of bathroom mirror.

Meanwhile, with its bamboo stakes and red ropes that extend beyond the canvas, the ember red of Shams’s “ بندھن (Bandhan)” glows back across the room, layering into the smoky reds and titular maroons of Liu’s canvas. These gloaming hues also float through Lowe’s radiant ocular skyscape, “Cloud Interrupted,” and edge the fallen furniture in her grief-stricken diptych, “When the Chair Fell Silent.” 

Next to “ بندھن (Bandhan),” another pair of paintings shares a mixed-media sensibility, with imagery and objects that also spill onto the gallery’s white walls. A thorny tangle of steel branches, a small crocheted square of mossy mohair, a poem, and a frame encasing a grid of dandelion seeds that bring to mind wispy hairs or wishes compose Horgan’s poetic, layered material exploration, “wooosssssssssp (softly).”

To its left, Cangé’s “Into the Hinterland” spans two paintings on stretched canvas and linen. It consists of a silhouetted portrait and a cluster of patterned leaves, as well as a scythe sculpture and a forest scene airbrushed on the wall, depicting a blood-red human figure fighting off a trio of what appear to be wild dogs or wolves. Below, an airbrushed clump of uprooted flowers seems to tumble toward the floor, serving as a poignant symbol of blooming in the face of upheaval. Excerpted from the artist’s MFA thesis, The Maroon Cycle: Overture, this piece digs into the history of enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, who escaped into remote environs — and it anchors the exhibition in both title and concept.

One of the pleasures of visiting grad shows is the sense of discovery — of encountering up-and-coming artists, noticing what matters to a given cohort, and seeing how they’re each responding to the moment through their chosen medium. These painters make art despite the relentless chaos, rupture, and heartbreak swarming headlines and daily life, or because of it. In Marooned, each painting is like an island awash with a sense of yearning and desire and seeking, sending out a lighthouse signal into a fractured world. 

Marooned continues at Uffner & Liu (170 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 28. The exhibition was curated by Ajay Kurian.

Thieves made off with four major paintings by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina in under five minutes in a heist at the Museo Interdisciplinare Regionale (MuMe) in Sicily on Saturday night, August 15.

NINGBO, China — In May of this year, I took a short trip to Ningbo, China. I was especially interested in going because I knew that Wang Shu, the first Chinese citizen to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2012, built multiple buildings or complexes within the city — the world’s busiest seaport, on the coast of the East China Sea. In contrast to Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, and other Pritzker winners who rose to prominence late last century and in the early oughts, Wang was not interested in becoming a starchitect. As I was going to be in Ningbo for only two days, I knew that I would be unable to see all of Wang’s projects and settled for one: the Ningbo Historic Museum, completed in 2008. Because of Wang’s work, I knew that I would return to Ningbo before I had even arrived.

A Vermont Studio Center residency provides artists and writers from around the world with the time and space to deepen their creative practice while building a solid network of mentors, collaborators, and friends. Sessions run for two, three, and four weeks, and include resident presentations, open studios, and an acclaimed Visiting Artists & Writers program. 

Nestled in the Green Mountains, Vermont Studio Center hosts a global community within a historic, pastoral village. The walkable campus provides private studios, a dining hall, and private rooms in shared lodging along the banks of the Gihon River. Residents can explore swimming holes, hiking and biking trails, and the rural charm of neighboring towns as they expand their creative potential and build a creative community.

The fall 2026 open call runs from August 15 through September 30 and will fill residencies from July 2027 to December 2027. Each session welcomes 40 residents of varying mediums and genres at all career levels. All residents receive partial fellowships and 35% receive full fellowships. 

Learn more at vermontstudiocenter.org

When sculptor Shirley Tse was invited by her former student Anna Hrund Másdóttir to produce an original exhibition at her cooperative gallery Kling and Bang in Reykjavik, her first thought was to invite her friend and former teacher, the film and video maker Dana Berman Duff, to collaborate with her. 

Geography, landscape, desire and time are some of the interests these two artists shared. The result is an extraordinary manifestation of physical elements — breath, moon and tides — that bind us and the universe. 

Working under the name “Relational,” Tse and Berman Duff's exhibition The Universe Breathes Us was first staged at Kling and Bang in 2025, and again this summer at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. Both iterations included a live choral performance of an original song by Berman Duff and her husband, the composer-musician Alan Duff Berman. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of each of the elements and the subtly seamless ways that they animate each other. In Tse’s photograph “Orkney Moon” (2025), a soccer ball covered in rice paper rests in a green summer field on a Scottish island. Reborn as a moon, it migrates into a series of sculptures that fill the main gallery, contained by projections of Duff’s videos on opposite walls. In “The Other Side of the Moon Is Not Dark” (2025), a giant moon slowly rotates, and in “The Breathing Ocean (Portal)” (2026), the moon meets a video of the original Icelandic choir fracturing into a kind of northern lights. 

In an adjacent room, film and sculptural elements combine in the surprisingly moving installation Sun and Moon (2025). Suspended by thread from the gallery ceiling, Tse’s rice-paper moon casts changing shadows in the white light of Duff’s 16mm projector. The tail end of a big reel of film flaps incessantly.

I’ve followed and written about both Tse’s and Duff’s work for more than two decades. The Universe Breathes Us felt like a new and exciting departure. On August 4, we met at the gallery to talk about it. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.  

Chris Kraus: It's such a beautiful show and there's a lot of different things to talk about, but first, the title Relational — you joined up to form a collective?

Dana Berman Duff: Yes, we did.

CK: But it’s not a traditional collaboration — instead, you made your work in dialogue with each other’s. It’s a really interesting thing that happens maybe unconsciously when artists and writers work in proximity. How did the show come about?

Shirley Tse: If you watch the eight-minute Orkney Moon video in the hallway, you’ll get the context of our collaboration. I started researching tidal turbine power during a residency in Scotland two years ago. I’m really into sustainability in my recent practice and tidal power is a form of renewable energy. Initially, I thought this new work would be all about engineering — you know, the turbine blade, etcetera. But then I came across this sentence that completely changed my direction: “Tidal power is the only form of power we harness from the Moon.” Tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon, together with the Earth and the Sun: in other words, relational force. In that moment, I remembered reading in the book Yoga Anatomy a quote that talks about breathing: The most basic fact of breathing is not my body sucking air into my lungs and releasing it. Rather, when I inhale, the weight of the atmosphere pushes air into my body. And that immediately breaks the subject-object relationship! I was invited to do a show in Reykjavik, and I didn't want to do a solo show. I wanted to make this show a relational force with another artist that I admire so deeply. So I invited Dana to collaborate with me. 

DBD: I just wanted to mention that it wasn't a conventional collaboration — we each made our own pieces. It's a relational collaboration. My pieces wouldn't exist but for Shirley’s. 

CK: Sorry to be technical, but just to clarify things here, what is a tidal turbine? 

ST: Just like a wind turbine that turns blades to create energy for electricity, a tidal turbine is a form of renewable energy. You put a turbine through tidal currents, and the force of the tides pushes the turbine to generate energy. 

CK: That's amazing. 

ST: Yeah! Instead of solar power or wind power, it's lunar power! I thought that was so poetic and I had to make art about it. 

DBD: Hence all these moons.

CK: The exhibition notebook contains a lot of emails you both wrote while you were conceiving the show. I was really struck by something you said, Dana, in an email to Shirley about how one reason you left sculpture behind was that you wanted to work with time as an element, and you could only do that in film and video. 

DBD: Yes, but I started working with time long before moving to film. I was very influenced by both Buddhism and structuralist film. I realized that I was frustrated with making objects that were supposed to last forever. So I wanted to work with impermanence, though I didn't think of it that way then, but I started making sculpture out of liquids and things that would fall apart or degrade — and all of these works no longer exist. Film was the medium where I could really use representation and control time and explore the experience of looking — that it's very much like meditation. It's like being present in the moment for what's happening, yeah, like breathing.

CK: There's this insane calculation in the notebook where you’re dividing the rotational speed of the moon by its — volume? 

DBD: [Laughs] Essentially, it's just a scale exercise. I took the size of the real moon, the diameter of the real moon, scaled it to the size of that projected moon on the wall, and I ended up with a certain ratio. Then I took 29.5 days, which is the time it takes for the moon to fully rotate, and multiplied that by the ratio to arrive at two hours and 40 minutes.

CK: So it's kind of a math poem.

DBD: It is totally structuralist. For me, every choice needs to be based on some kind of structure, not on taste. And so I had to find a rational structure for this projection. And I was delighted that it turned out to be two hours and 40 minutes, which means that you can barely see it moving. It’s very like my other 16mm films. Barely moving. 

CK: You could say that breath is the overall theme of the show. Would you agree?

ST: Yes. Breath. Breathing.

CK: Everything’s held in place by the breath and that quote from Yoga Anatomy that you put on the wall, that “breath enters us all by itself” — we just have to allow it. How did you think about this while you were building the show?  

ST: Relational force, manifested by breath, is at the center of this exhibition. When you see a body moving, it's easy to think that that movement comes from the body itself, but the movement actually comes from the relational differences, the differential, between two bodies. So there's no A or B. It’s the dynamic that produces the illusion of A and B. This is very poetic, but I think it’s actually a critical stance as well. Our world is in a very chaotic moment right now. I believe that it is the individualist, isolationist mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. Our model of the relational, no-self, runs counter to the idea of the individual that's isolated, separate, and always wants to assert power over other things. 

CK: Yes, but I’m still curious how the Bobbing Moon sculptures that fill the main room came to be. The soccer ball moon from Orkney Moon has migrated onto suspended mesh squares that form rectangular fields. How did you arrive at these constructions? 

ST: The sphere form comes from the Orkney Moon project. The photograph of the white ball on the grass in Scotland, the hanging paper sculpture in the Sun and Moon installation, and the video on the small monitor all share the same title, Orkney Moon. Because I wanted to show that this sphere is not just an object; it’s an event, in different forms. 

Dana’s moon projection shows the moon from the sun’s, not the Earth’s, perspective. From there, you see the moon in 360 degrees, without any dark side. I thought seeing the moon from this perspective was so beautiful that I responded with the “Bobbing Moon” sculptures. Even though they don’t physically move, they suggest movement, resting in a delicate balance between their weight, tilting angles, and anchoring stones. My sculptures have always been fragile because I want them to reflect the fragility of our life-world. 

During the opening, people knocked the sculptures off their balance. People were kind enough to help me reset the sculptures by holding onto them. However, I had to gently ask them, "Let go, let go!" Without letting go, you will never find your center. 

DBD: Yes, and in this exhibition, we completely suspend “individual authorship”: All of the works are produced by Relational, even though many of them weren't even touched by the other person's hand. But because Shirley's mind exists, my work exists here. It’s all completely the product of the interaction. 

ST: Material and shape choices I used in the sculptures adhere to my current practice of not buying any more new materials. So all of this material was already in my studio, leftover from past projects. The tent poles make the sculptures collapsible- more sustainable in terms of transport and storage.

CK: Shirley, I think the use of sound in this exhibition is something new — but Dana, as a film and video maker, sound has always been an important element. How did you conceive the pervasive sound in this exhibition as a force?

DBD: Sound is a way I can work with time. I think of sound as another image space. When you hear something, you see something in your mind. As you walk through this installation, you hear breathing, and that would influence your body in this space. 

CK: It's like being inside a giant body. 

DBD: But then there's also, really at Shirley's urging, gradually coming in is the sound of waves, of the ocean, so we can bring it back to the tidal idea, and then there's a weird grinding noise of the underwater energy collection turbines. It's not a pretty sound, but I thought it was ethical to include it. And then there's a little musical piece composed by Alan that I wanted to add because it's soothing and calming. And then it returns to the choir. 

CK: Okay, the last question is, the sculpture in the other room is just so incredible. I just stood in the middle of it and it was so completely immersive and engaging and brilliant. The flapping of the 16-millimeter film, the football, the shadow that it cast. It's like every idea in the notebook and the exhibition is contained in those simple objects. I mean, that's a real coup. So can you talk about how you arrived at that?

DBD: I thought I should make the sun for Shirley's moon.

Since I work in 16-millimeter film and I have these projectors and I wanted to invoke something that's kind of apocalyptic and sad, that is, the disturbing sound of a 16-millimeter projector running out of film. Flap, flap, flap. And to most of us the sound is alarming and that's the feeling I wanted to invoke: “Oh no! The film is over!”

ST: When I came up with Orkney Moon the “sculpture,” I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever made, because I did not make it myself. I began without any plans, letting go of my ego and my prejudice. I observed what the children were doing and folded their interests into mine. And then Orkney Moon made itself! It was a solid three-dimensional thing in the beginning, but when I took the rice paper off of the football for my niece Sandra to "conserve" it, it became a drawing. When it was kicked by my nephew Tiger, it picked up chlorophyll and the soil. It was a drawing, not by me, but a drawing by the soil, the grass, and the action of kicking. I don't want this “thing” to be just sitting there as an object in an exhibition, so it needs to be activated, as an event. My dear friend Jessica Bronson suggested making a book that tells the story or gives it context somehow and that inspired the idea of making the exhibition notebook. Perhaps this project exists both in physical space and literary space that gives people the feeling of containing the whole world. 

“Anas was one of the journalists who ran into the line of fire,” reads a translated eulogy by independent journalist Doaa Shaheen about her late colleague, prominent Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, 28, who was killed alongside four other journalists on August 10, 2025, by a targeted Israeli strike on their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital.

“He covered events as they unfolded because he believed the Palestinian narrative was worth this effort and exhaustion,” Shaheen's voice note continued. “Our stories are worth all this suffering. They deserve our presence on the front lines, documenting the truth.”

Shaheen's oral eulogy is one of several devoted to al-Sharif on a new digital memorial for Gaza's martyred journalists. Developed and launched by the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) yesterday, August 12, “The Living Record” is an oral archive for remembering and recognizing the small but extraordinarily endangered community of Palestinian reporters, especially as the number of Gaza press fatalities by Israel since October 2023 hovers at around 240.

The Living Record launched with individual memorial pages for 24 slain journalists. Profiles and eulogies for another 21 journalists will be added throughout the fall, and the archive will continue to grow in acknowledgment of the historically high yield of targeted press fatalities during the Gaza genocide.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — On the first Friday of each month, a dozen or more exhibitions open across galleries, studios, and temporary spaces in Knoxville. For many people in the small city’s art community, the night is either an overwhelming jumble or a repetitive routine. Artist Lauren Farkas’s maps offer a way through.

“If everything is on the map, people get overwhelmed,” Farkas told Hyperallergic. “I put all the things that I would like to go to if I had enough time on the map.”

Farkas, a high school art teacher at L&N STEM Academy who has lived in Knoxville for nine years, said that she considers her educational work to be “a long-form performance piece.” She approaches each map as an artwork with a similar sense of structure: The geography remains fixed, while the shows and events shift from month to month.

Anchored by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and the University of Tennessee School of Art, the city's arts ecosystem extends beyond downtown’s familiar gallery circuit to include a growing network of artist-run spaces, community studios, and exhibitions that many attendees might otherwise overlook.

Farkas has used watercolor, tape, and digital animation, among other forms, to craft First Friday maps that help people make sense of the evening’s many possibilities — and feel confident exploring them.

 “It’s an invitation, especially for people who might not otherwise feel they belong in those spaces,” Farkas explained.

One map transformed a pair of white sneakers into a walking guide, with Knoxville’s streets and gallery locations etched directly into the soles so that each step echoed the idea of an “art walk.” Another was made entirely from locally harvested materials — paper mulberry pulp, goldenrod, black walnut ink, acorns, and charred wood — creating, as Farkas describes it, “a map of the place with the place.”

For Kelsie Conley, assistant curator at the KMA, the maps transcend the role of an ordinary event guide. “They slow us down and change the way we experience the city,” she said. “They still do the practical work of helping us move through the city, but the information becomes something you have to spend time with. They ask us to think about the city as something that is felt, rather than just a fixed collection of destinations.”

The maps began as a way to orient Farkas herself in the city’s vibrant arts scene. Three years ago, she was sitting at her desk, scrolling through her phone, and making a plan for the evening. She sketched a map for herself in colored pencil — an attempt to make sense of First Fridays and get to as many shows as possible, thinking her way through time and space. She shared it on her Instagram story. A few friends started referencing it, and a project took shape.

“It was useful for me, and someone else used it,” Farkas said. “I thought, ‘Maybe that’s a need or a deficit in the local art world here.’”

Farkas continued creating simple maps over the next few months, posting them to her Instagram story. Around month four or five, she tried using different materials — watercolors led to markers, embroidery, wood ash, gouache on vellum, and even a double-sided shadow lamp.

Her audience is not easy to track, and she doesn’t always know who is using the maps. Some follow along through her Substack; others may just learn about her work through word of mouth.

The maps have already changed how people experience First Friday; Conley also credits them with flattening the boundaries within Knoxville’s art scene. “There’s no hierarchy to them,” she said. Whether it’s an exhibition at a major gallery or in someone’s apartment, Farkas treats them as equally worthy of attention. 

Artist Josh Shorey describes First Friday as “a tradition and a distributed network” — a monthly event that has evolved organically, without a central organizing body. When a photographer who had recently moved to Knoxville from Los Angeles asked him how First Friday worked, Shorey found himself pulling up one of Farkas’s maps to explain it.

“Doing this for every First Friday builds a culture,” said Farkas. “It helps build consistency. I want people to see the value and interconnectedness of everything happening on First Friday.”

A few weeks shy of his 10th birthday, Anderson Taylor opened a museum in the small town of Cambridge, Illinois, with just one display case. Two years later, after expanding the collection to over a dozen cases of animal fossils, iridescent bones, and rare minerals, Taylor set a Guinness World Record as the world’s youngest museum curator.

Announced July 15, the award notes the curator's precise age as nine years and 340 days old when the Cambridge Natural History Museum opened on August 10, 2024.

Welcome to the 350th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Linda Lay sets up shop in the mobile home she grew up in, collapsing time and tenderly reclaiming the space through her vibrant art practice.

Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.

Linda Lay, Marina, California

How long have you been working in this space?

Three years.

Describe an average day in your studio.

An average day in my studio begins around 10 in the morning, as I’m most productive at the start of the day, and although I rise early, I like to first have coffee with my partner at home, which is nearby. In my main working areas I have little “stations” where I keep projects-in-progress, often with supplies close at hand, so that I can get right to it. I allow myself the freedom to start with whatever feels natural in the moment, as I know that will lead me to working on whatever has a deadline.

In art school, one of my professors observed that my “starting routine” for making art is something like what a dog does when they lie down for a nap — how they move around in circles on their bed until it feels right to settle in. I’m still very much that way, figuratively, of course.

The first thing I do when I enter the studio is open the windows for airflow and light. I then walk around to say “hello” to the space and plants, and if I feel the need to, I safely light some sage. I always burn incense as this helps me feel like I'm setting some sort of "intention" for the day. I often listen to podcasts or audiobooks once I get settled into working. (I love Fashion Neurosis by Bella Freud.) When I was busy converting this mobile home, which I was raised in, into my art studio, I was listening more to music from eras of my past that I may have listened to when I was a child and teenager, or what I listened to when I moved away from home at the start of the ’90s.

How does the space affect your work?

The space affects my work in two different ways: In one way, it’s the first time I’ve had a full art studio outside of home or shared studios. I have a lot of stuff from the past hung up at the moment, combined with newer pieces and projects. I’m able to be with it all in a way that’s private, and this is important to me. It helps my focus tremendously.

The second way the space affects my work is that it was once my childhood home, and it wasn’t a positive space. I didn’t know what to expect when I was given the freedom to make changes that I had so wished I could change as a child. Being in this very specific place, and having been able to change it without worry of perfect construction or traditional interior design rules, has made the space itself a very personal conceptual artwork.

I work in an intuitive manner with a lot of craft-inspired processes that mirror how things are made while being raised in poverty, which I was. Many of my artistic concepts have to do with synchronicities occurring in space and time, so it’s like I’m “communicating” with the past in a very direct way.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

The literal environment outside of my studio is the mobile home park I used to play in as a child in the ’80s. It was a great place to be, and I had fantastic friends. There was a playground and we used to stay outside all day long. I have an incredible memory of wandering around the park, giggling with my pals as pre-teens while the Live Aid concert was being televised. We'd occasionally leave our televisions in order to pretend to flirt with a cute boy who was visiting his grandparents for the summer. It's been great to consider moments like this while working on my art. There are two older women still there who I knew back then, the mothers of kids who were my friends. These older women are immigrants who were hard-working, like my own mother was. They often knock on my door and bring me food and check in. It’s very warm and comforting.

I am connected to the art community here on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the past three years I’ve been organizing and hosting a private monthly art salon, which has been great. Everyone must perceive their art as something more than a hobby.

There are people in my community who are focused on art in a big way — who are exploring many different concepts and work in varied practices and mediums. I returned to the area after living in Los Angeles for many years, and I’ve found my community here through hosting my salon and by attending local art and literary events. It’s a bit difficult to sift through the “sell art to tourists” mentality out here, but there is definitely more to be found.

What do you love about your studio?

I love that I have a history with and connection to my studio, and that I have made it something special. I love that I set parameters on spending money on materials when I was fixing it up. I visited a local charity shop that offers free, donated house paint. I got so many great colors from there, for free!

I love that I decided to play and “listen” to the space in keeping certain family mementos, plants, and objects in my work areas. I love that the studio itself is a work of art and that it has a story.

I am in heaven over the fact that I have space to make as well as space for my work to hang, as I have a specific aesthetic that isn't always easy to showcase with the works of others, especially in my community.

I love that I can finally have proper studio visits.

What do you wish were different?

I wish I had more parking available. We are only allowed one spot, and street parking is always taken.

What is your favorite local museum?

We don't have a lot of options outside of all things having to do with John Steinbeck, early California history, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so I'll say the Monterey Museum of Art. They showcase California art, and for a smallish town, they were able to swing a David Hockney exhibition in 2019 with mostly his iPad works depicting Yosemite. They support local artists, engage with the community, and they sometimes challenge our expectations, which doesn’t always happen here.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Fiber materials are my favorite.