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What’s My Thesis? is a podcast that examines art, philosophy, and culture through longform, unfiltered conversations. Hosted by artist Javier Proenza, each episode challenges assumptions and invites listeners to engage deeply with creative and intellectual ideas beyond surface-level discourse.
293 Episodes
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Painter Katie Hector joins host Javier Proenza for a conversation on portrait painting, image culture, and the shifting cultural frameworks that shape how faces and bodies are represented in art. Hector reflects on her studio practice, discussing her return to figurative painting and the role of photographic source material in constructing contemporary portraits.
The conversation also explores Hector’s concept of a “shadow practice,” including her quilting work made from repurposed painting materials, alongside a broader discussion of portraiture’s historical associations with power, representation, and beauty standards. Together, they consider how contemporary artists engage with the legacy of portrait painting while navigating the visual language of digital and internet-based imagery.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, painter Estefania Ajcip joins host Javier Proenza to discuss the personal and cultural experiences that shape her work. Ajcip reflects on growing up between the United States and Guatemala, her Indigenous family background, and the circumstances that led her to return to the U.S. as a young adult.
The conversation explores how family separation caused by immigration informs her paintings about absence and memory, as well as her path through art school at Pasadena City College and California State University, Long Beach. Ajcip also discusses developing a mixed media painting practice, navigating critiques in art school, and translating personal history into contemporary art.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles–based Chicano artist Raul Baltazar about the cultural and historical foundations of his practice. Baltazar reflects on the origins of his performance character “Seven the Aztec Bunny,” first developed through ceremonies at Self Help Graphics’ Aztec New Year celebration, and discusses how Indigenous traditions, Catholic symbolism, and community ritual inform his approach to art.
The conversation explores Mexican and Mexican American identity through migration, colonial history, and cultural syncretism, including reflections on La Malinche, the blending of Indigenous and Catholic cosmologies, and the preservation of ceremonial knowledge. Baltazar also addresses the generational lineage of Chicano artists in Los Angeles, the tension between community-based practices and art institutions, and the role of devotion, memory, and cultural continuity within contemporary artistic work.
Kristine Shomaker is a Los Angeles–based conceptual painter and arts organizer, and the founder of Shoebox Arts and Art and Cake at the Brewery Art Complex. In this conversation, she reflects on building artist support systems outside traditional commercial models, restructuring a nonprofit to sustain mentorship, and expanding art journalism focused on marginalized communities.
Shomaker also discusses her studio practice, including cutting paintings off their stretcher bars and reconfiguring them into sculptural installations, as well as her long-term collaborative projects Perceive Me and Color Response. The episode examines experimentation, adaptability, and the role of collaboration in sustaining artists locally and internationally.
In this episode, Haitian painter and muralist Olivier Arsène Ganthier, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, reflects on his artistic formation in Haiti and his current practice in Los Angeles. Raised in his father’s studio and trained at the National School of Arts in Haiti, Ganthier discusses the technical foundations of his education, the development of Haiti’s graffiti and mural culture, and the practical realities of building an art career across geographies.
The conversation addresses the Haitian Revolution and its economic aftermath, Western media narratives about Haiti, and the role of spiritual syncretism between Vodou and Catholic imagery in shaping visual culture. Ganthier describes his figurative painting as a form of Black representation that draws from archetype, animation, African masks, and diasporic experience, while also emphasizing the importance of business literacy, contract awareness, and public space as critical dimensions of contemporary art practice.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, ceramic sculptor and installation artist Liz Stringer joins the podcast for an in-depth conversation about sculpture, scale, and the body. Working primarily with ceramics, metal armatures, and welded structures, Stringer discusses how her practice emerged from a background shaped by medicine, illness, and early encounters with Roman, Gothic, and Baroque architecture.
The conversation explores monumental ceramics, biopolitics, and public space, including Stringer’s engagement with civic spectacle, parade structures, and collective ritual. Drawing on Enlightenment history, architecture, and lived experience, Stringer reflects on her recent MFA thesis work, which centers the viewer’s body within installations addressing armor, metamorphosis, vulnerability, and systems of power.
In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Frannie Hemmelgarn, director and co-founder of DMST Atelier, an artist-run space in Los Angeles developed in collaboration with affordable housing providers. Hemmelgarn reflects on the space’s origins during the pandemic, its community feeds and public programming, and the responsibilities of artist-run initiatives within gentrifying neighborhoods.
The conversation also turns to Hemmelgarn’s studio practice, which centers on handmade papermaking using upcycled materials. She discusses how the work emerged from transitions between painting and cyanotype, and how incorporating her late father’s papers shaped a process focused on grief, repair, and reconstruction.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Stephanie Sherwood, an artist and Exhibition Coordinator at the Brand Library in Glendale. Sherwood reflects on her dual role as a practicing artist and arts administrator, drawing on her experience working within municipal institutions such as libraries, city galleries, and public exhibition spaces.
The conversation explores Sherwood’s painting practice, including her long-term engagement with found materials, discarded objects, and containers, as well as earlier work focused on the body, still life, and abstraction. She discusses artist collectives, alternative pathways outside the MFA system, institutional labor, and the ways public art spaces shape access, experimentation, and community within the Los Angeles art landscape.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza speaks with Ever Velasquez, Director of Charlie James Gallery, about her path from collage and community organizing to gallery leadership, and the values guiding the gallery’s long-term commitment to artists in Los Angeles.
Velasquez discusses curatorial pacing, group exhibitions as frameworks for career development, and the labor behind gallery work, alongside reflections on collage as a lifelong practice and Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions as discipline rather than aesthetic. The conversation centers self-advocacy, boundaries, and responsibility as essential to sustaining artistic and curatorial practice.
Artist Joaquin Stacey joins Javier Proenza for a conversation on art, identity, and cultural formation shaped by migration. Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami before relocating to Los Angeles for his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, Stacey reflects on how geography, language, and institutional training inform his practice.
The discussion moves through painting, performance, and installation, with particular attention to Catholic iconography, mestizaje, diaspora, and the contradictions of living in the United States while remaining connected to Ecuador. Stacey also describes his use of fermentation and sourdough as both material and conceptual frameworks, challenging linear notions of time, labor, and artistic process.
Artist Flora Kao joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss the evolution of her practice from painting to large-scale installation, and how Taiwanese mourning rituals, Buddhist symbolism, and diasporic memory shape her approach to space. Trained at Otis and later UC Irvine, Kao describes discovering installation as a way to create experiences that “elicit a sense of wonder,” pairing conceptual clarity with meditative, labor-intensive processes.
The conversation traces her early years moving between Houston, Wisconsin, Taipei, and Boston; her family’s history under Taiwan’s martial-law era; and her transition from environmental science and strategy consulting into art school. Kao explains the cultural and personal significance behind folding 108 origami lotus forms each week for seven weeks—a ritual she adapted into a suspended installation of 756 hand-folded lotus at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
Kao also speaks about using archival photographs, bamboo prayer-leaf structures, and cyanotype processes to explore grief, family history, and the shifting landscapes of Taiwan and Los Angeles. She offers rare insight into sustaining an installation-based practice through grants, community networks, and long-term professional relationships, while navigating motherhood and the realities of working outside commercial gallery systems.
Artist Manuel Vdah Bracamonte joins What’s My Thesis? for a grounded conversation on graffiti, identity, and the lived conditions that shaped Los Angeles street culture in the 1980s and 90s. Born in El Salvador and raised in downtown LA, Bracamonte traces his earliest memories of tagging, the shift into “tag banging,” and how the social and political pressures of that era intersected with his development as an artist.
A pivotal high-school teacher introduced him to portfolio building and ultimately to the CalArts CAP program—a transformational moment that opened a different pathway into art, community, and education. Throughout the episode, Bracamonte reflects on moving from name-based graffiti to narrative, community-oriented mural work; researching Mayan hieroglyphs; and developing a hybrid visual language that holds both ancestral history and futurist possibility.
The discussion expands outward into questions of Latinx identity, diaspora, public art, youth mentorship, and the politics of presence—what it means to show up in spaces that often assume you don’t belong. Bracamonte’s reflections move between personal history and broader frameworks of street culture, muralism, pedagogy, and the ongoing transformation of LA’s art landscape.
This episode offers a direct, unfiltered look at how artistic practices emerge from lived experience, community ties, and the need to create meaning beyond institutional boundaries.
Artist Kelly Witmer joins host Javier Proenza to talk about material process, experimentation, and what it means to sustain an art practice in the desert. Based between Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, Witmer works across glass, ceramics, and painting, transforming the unpredictability of the kiln into a meditation on control, failure, and transformation.
In this episode, she traces her trajectory from photography and printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to her later exploration of sculpture and abstraction. The conversation moves through her early life in Pennsylvania’s Mennonite community, her relocation to Los Angeles in the 1990s, and the gradual evolution of her visual language — from figurative painting to material-driven forms that balance fragility and chance.
Witmer also reflects on the changing realities of the art world: the economics of desert living, the value of art school, and the rise of Instagram as both tool and trap for visibility and survival. Along the way, she discusses her fascination with prehistoric art, Utah pictographs, and the enduring human impulse to leave marks in stone and clay.
A grounded, candid conversation about process, persistence, and the quiet negotiations between art, livelihood, and place.
René Camarillo is a Mexican-American craftsperson from East Los Angeles whose practice resists the hierarchies of the art world. Trained in apparel design at LA Trade Tech, fiber and material studies at Cal State LA, and textiles at RISD, Camarillo positions weaving and garment-making as acts of cultural inheritance, labor, and community survival rather than commodities of privilege.
In this conversation, Camarillo reflects on rejecting the label of “artist,” his experience with exploitation in fashion and sweatshops, and the deep political stakes of textiles in shaping both history and everyday life. The dialogue explores craft versus fine art, sustainability, gentrification in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and the importance of teaching weaving, dyeing, and self-reliance through Grow Lincoln Heights and his brand Dust of Course.
With a Fulbright in Japan to study indigo farming, Camarillo embodies a practice that is at once monastic, technical, and communal—insisting on fundamentals in a moment dominated by spectacle and commodification.
Artist Sheng Lor reflects on her journey from a Thai refugee camp to a studio practice in Los Angeles. Born to Hmong parents displaced by the Secret War in Laos, Lor discusses culture shock, grief, and the intergenerational legacies that shape her art.
Her loom-wrapping series transforms discarded weaving tools into sculptural memorials, addressing the histories of labor, invisibility of craft, and Hmong spiritual traditions. This conversation explores how weaving, diaspora, and ritual intersect in contemporary art and the Los Angeles art scene.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles–based painter Elmer Guevara returns to the podcast ahead of his upcoming exhibition at Charlie James Gallery. Known for his densely layered figurative paintings, Guevara reflects on how memory, history, and inherited trauma shape his visual language.
The conversation traces his evolution from graffiti to oil painting, his deep engagement with South Central Los Angeles, and the ways he reconstructs the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings through scenes of everyday life. Blending autobiography with collective history, Guevara explores how painting can act as both a historical record and emotional archive, layering his family’s Salvadoran experience with the city’s shifting social landscape.
Host Javier Proenza and Guevara discuss the aesthetics of the working-class home, the ethics of representing trauma, and the enduring influence of Caravaggio, Bay Area Figuration, and documentary photography on his approach to storytelling. What emerges is a portrait of an artist using realism and symbolism to reimagine how communities remember themselves.
Listen for insights on painting, social history, and the emotional terrain of Los Angeles—then see Guevara’s new work on view at Charlie James Gallery, opening October 25.
Artist David Lloyd joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on a career that spans CalArts in the early 1980s, formative years at Margot Levin Gallery, and decades of navigating the shifting landscape of the Los Angeles art world. Known for his commitment to formalist abstraction, Lloyd discusses what it means to sustain a painting practice over forty years while adapting to the changing priorities of galleries, art fairs, and collectors.
The conversation delves into his most recent body of work, where Lloyd integrates his own archive of paintings, drawings, and ceramics into AI image generation. By transforming these digital hallucinations into trompe l’oeil abstractions through resin, collage, and material experimentation, he considers how technology can challenge conventional definitions of painting while remaining rooted in physical process.
Other topics include the legacy of CalArts conceptualism, the burdens of postmodern theory and art education, the precarity of mid-level galleries, and the paradox of elitism within the contemporary art market. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the importance of generosity, resilience, and longevity in sustaining a life in art.
Listen for insights on:
Abstract painting and formalist traditions in Los Angeles
The role of AI in contemporary art practices
The realities of the gallery system and art fairs
Postmodernism, art education, and theory fatigue
Building a career across decades in the art world
Artist Kristen Huizar joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on drawing, printmaking, and the act of documenting Los Angeles. Born and raised in Commerce, CA, she traces her path from community college to Cal State Long Beach, where persistence and community shaped her practice.
Working with wax pastels on plastic vinyl, hand stitching, and large lino cuts, Huizar explores repetition, process, and the archival impulse. Her drawings function as reportage—capturing overlooked city views, everyday details, and the rapid changes of East L.A.
The conversation considers Chicana identity, community studios, and the politics of representation, offering insight into how artists both preserve and reimagine the city.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Emma Christ, editor at Artillery magazine and gallerist working between Portland and Los Angeles. Christ reflects on her beginnings in photography, formative years at Bard and Reed, and her transition from artistic practice into gallery management, editing, and writing.
The conversation traces her early influences—from Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston to mentorship under No Wave photographer Barbara Ess—before moving into immersive installation work and a graduate thesis on trans-corporeality and the porous body. Christ discusses her experiences in institutions such as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, her role in supporting artists within commercial gallery structures, and the gendered dynamics that continue to shape the field.
Throughout the episode, Christ shares candid insights into navigating the hierarchies of the art world, balancing writing and curating, and the importance of advocating for emerging voices across both editorial and exhibition platforms.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles printmaker Israel Campos shares how his work bridges Mesoamerican codices, Mexican revolutionary art, and the mural traditions of his South Central upbringing. Known for his meticulous intaglio prints, Campos reclaims visual histories disrupted by colonization—collapsing linear perspective, weaving ancient mythologies, and drawing on the political legacies of artists like José Clemente Orozco.
From growing up in a garment factory household to exhibiting at Charlie James Gallery, Campos has shaped a practice that circulates both within galleries and directly to his community, merging economic sustainability with political intent.
🎧 Listen now to hear how Campos’ art collapses past and present into a single visual language of resistance.
#IsraelCampos #LatinxArt #Printmaking #MesoamericanArt #MexicanMuralists #PoliticalArt #LosAngelesArt #ContemporaryArt #WhatsMyThesisPodcast #CharlieJamesGallery #JavierProenza
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