The NewCrits Podcast

He builds with fabric, scaffolding, and light — Eric N. Mack on tenderness as structure and the unseen labor that makes art visible.Eric N. Mack works between painting, installation, and fashion, reimagining how material, care, and collaboration shape contemporary image-making. His large-scale assemblages drape and lean, collapsing distinctions between surface and structure, styling and architecture, autonomy and support. His practice reveals how beauty, fragility, and display coexist within shared spaces of labor and care.He explains:* How gestures of rupture, cutting, and collage become ways to think through care, not violence.* Why stylists, curators, and unseen collaborators form the hidden architectures of art.* How fabric behaves as both image and body — draped, suspended, and alive to air and time.* What scaffolding, transparency, and light teach about the precarity of presence.* How tenderness and structure coexist as the real politics of display.* Why every act of making is also an act of attention — a choreography of support between maker, viewer, and space.(0:00) Welcome + Intro(01:00) Rupture, Reflection, and the Studio as World(05:00) Grace Jones and the Clarified Aesthetic(10:00) The Unseen Hand and the Architect of the Image(15:00) Collaboration, Care, and the Space of Display(20:00) Fabric, Fragrance, and the Politics of Form(30:00) Craft, Styling, and the Education of Looking(33:00) Art School, Value, and the Work of Belief(40:00) Draping Architecture and Breathing Structures(47:00) Fragility, Care, and the Social Life of ObjectsFollow Eric:Web: https://www.artsandletters.org/exhibitions?slug=eric-n-mackInstagram: @ericnmackFull TranscriptAjay Kurian: When you’re putting together a show, I know you’ve talked about art being present for the world’s brutalities, but how do you conjugate that or stay present in the work with that? It’s not even saying that you have to, because it’s not your responsibility to do so. It’s more so, I see glimmers and I see the way that you think about how things come together and how they kind of fall apart.Eric N. Mack: Yeah. I have a lot of epiphanies that sit in the studio, that come from the studio that end up allowing me to think about the external world from the happenstances in the studio, and from coordinated or measured gestures of rupture. And those ruptures could have implications of or sit alongside what folks could regard as kind of a material violence, or violence to a material, or decomposition, or collage, or something for the work to feel chopped like the ingredients are chopped up.I love a good metaphor, like a good salad, it’s aromatic with all the ingredients. Nothing overpowers one another, but it’s transformative. It holds meaning, sustenance, and maybe a level of a counterpoint, maybe the sunflower seed gets stuck in your teeth or something like that, you know?Ajay Kurian: You gave us a lot to chew on, even in the press release. At the end of that, there’s literally seven hyperlinks to run through. We had The Clark Sisters, Nina Simone, a trailer for the Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, the Harlem Restaurant of which the show was named after, Sinners movie tickets.Eric N. Mack: Why not?Ajay Kurian: And Grace Jones on an Italian talk show or an Italian show.Eric N. Mack: A talk show, I think. It could have been Eurovision.Ajay Kurian: But that was serious. She was really in her pocket.Eric N. Mack: Yeah, it’s intense, ‘cause she’s in drag in a way. You know, she’s wearing this wig and I was like, the wig is architecture and the wig is like a hat. She’s architecture. If you’re watching the YouTube video or seeing the performance at the end, this camera pans out and she leans back and someone catches her as she falls and snatches her wig. Then she becomes this doll, this kind of copy of herself, this quotidian, you know the things that she would process with Jean Paul. She’s always around and I always think about her. She’s an interesting marker, because she’s such a clarified aesthetic. She’s a sound, she’s a voice and she also possesses her own tension. There’s incredible softness and vulnerability, but she’s also a tank, you know? The thing is, these images are also ones that she’s used herself. I just think that she will always be relevant.Ajay Kurian: There’s an ownership over the image too. There’s a way in which she’s self representing and it feels beautiful and antagonistic, but also really generous. To be both aggressive and generous at the same time isn’t an easy thing to do.Ajay Kurian: But I feel like, for her embodiment to be a black woman who is beautifully angular and masculine and feminine at the same time, it’s a lot to have to deal with, specifically in that moment of pop culture too.Eric N. Mack: Yeah. She’s an artwork. She’s her own artwork. There was an exhibition I did in London and I kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Misa Hylton. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was a stylist for Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. So she was a part of this kind of bad boy regime, but she was a part of their visual representation. She’s an iconic stylist. Everybody takes notes from her in New York.Ajay Kurian: Really? It’s so interesting ‘cause I think you’re the first artist that I’ve talked to that holds stylists in this regard. That the grooming of an image, the understanding of what it takes to put together a scene, an idea, a world building essentially, that it’s happening completely behind the scenes. You’re really picking out these people to be like, you’ve changed this whole scene.Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s what we do as artists. It’s just asking questions like, okay, what’s in the byline? Who did this? Who’s the architect? She called herself the architect, and I respect that. There was an awareness and a renewed understanding of her importance as these looks became more prominent again.The nineties in general as a kind of nostalgic, bygone era, that we were there for. So it also is an interesting thing to think about, who made the thing that sits in your heart or that sits with you, that rests in your references, and that you connect with? Who made that? Obviously, I mean, that’s what we do. That’s research.Maybe people don’t look at the production of the image as much as, you know, there’s a lot of romanticism around the fashion designer and who made the garment, but you won’t see the garment without seeing how it was put together and how it was aligned. The tension.Thinking about my good friend, Haley Wollens who has been working for a long time. I think more recently she’s done Dsquared, she’s done Au Claire, she’s done all of these important brands that end up being reconstituted, recomposed by this unseen hand.Ajay Kurian: That’s the thing. It’s a level of research that is fascinating to me because I think everybody gets caught up in the director and the designer. Even when you’re a kid, you watch the movie and you like the movie.Then there’s the kid that finds out who the director is. Then there’s the kid who finds out who the producer is. That’s a different kid.Eric N. Mack: It is a different kid. But you know, sometimes it’s meant to be that way. It may be structured for folks to be completely enamored with the superstar, with the actress or the actor. It was designed that way, you know?Ajay Kurian: Now I want to see behind that.Eric N. Mack: That’s what I do. I mean, that’s what I’m interested in. Questioning wasn’t enough, and was never enough. Like thinking about Amanda Harlech, she’s an incredible stylist who was a big part of the way that we experienced the early days of John Galliano and some of the more important days of Karl Lagerfeld. I mean, she’s established, but she’s a visionary and at a certain point she kind of sought Galliano out when he was finishing his degree at CSM. So there was a premise that was going around between them. They were collaborators. There’s something about the unseen magic in between these figures and some of the social qualities of discourse between two people that end up generating meaning for so many.Ajay Kurian: So what’s the plural for you? Do you feel like there’s similar relationships that you have in your practice? Of course, I know that you actually work with stylists and designers. There’s plenty of collaborative things that you’ve done. But when I think about the kind of classic idea of a painter, for instance. You have a studio practice, you go to the studio, you work, you come home and that’s potentially a very solitary thing.Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s up to me, and it’s up to artists to be able to question that, to reposition that. Sometimes that works, and the main collaborator at this point is the curator.Eric N. Mack: So for this exhibition, shout out to everybody at Arts and Letters, Jenny Chasky, Nick and Juan — these are really important people in actualizing the exhibition. It was through conversation and also acknowledging that everybody, they got eyes and it matters like that we are all seeing. And I’m not afraid to ask what people are seeing right in the room. Sometimes people think that just means I don’t have vision myself and that’s stupid. But I think also with time, it’s also a practice for me, to see what I get from that.Ultimately, I’ll make my own decisions about these things. But it’s really important for me to be able to reflect from people who are familiar with the space that I’m working in currently. You know, I’m scratching my head, I’ve been here all day, why is this not working? There’s people who have been up on the lift and been able to see what the space looks like from all these different vantage points. The material that the walls are made from are all significant aspects of architecture that many of us can take for granted.Ajay Kurian: I’ve been lingering on this picture, because it’s kind of the first thing that you encounter when you walk into the space. There is a piece suspended from, and kind of draping, in the wind. And it was

He builds worlds from devotion, labor, and light. Raúl de Nieves on myth, death, and the joy of transformation.Raúl de Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, stained glass, and music. His work merges ancestral craft with queer exuberance, creating ecstatic spaces where life, death, and rebirth coexist. Known for his intricate beaded sculptures and radiant installations, de Nieves transforms discarded materials into devotional objects that question permanence, value, and faith.He reflects on:* Why failure and fear are essential teachers* How myth, labor, and ritual shape his understanding of transformation* The link between spirituality and psychedelia in his creative process* The politics of beauty, excess, and craft* How performance and collaboration sustain his practice* The tension between art and commerce—and what it means to say yes* Why joy, respect, and self-love remain his most radical tools(0:00) Welcome + Intro (1:00) The Origin of “St. George and the Dragon”(10:00) Death, Culture, and Safety(21:00) Excess, Labor, and the Ephemeral (31:00) The Whitney Window (35:00) The Carousel and the Brand (43:00) Pact with the Devil (47:00) Celebration and Decay (53:00) Belief and Legacy (56:00) Joy, Respect, and The Smashing PumpkinsFollow Raúl: Web: https://companygallery.us/artists/raul-de-nievesInstagram: @noraulsFull TranscriptAjay Kurian: Hi everybody, thank you all for being here. Welcome to our NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves! I’m gonna give you some background as to what NewCrits is, I’m gonna give you a little introduction to Raúl, and then we’re gonna get into the conversation.NewCrits is a global platform rooted in aesthetic education. We’re committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship and courses that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions while honoring the intensity of their best methods. We have crits, but we don’t think about crits as a way to tear you down to build you up. That’s trauma we don’t need anymore. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique, rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention. These talks are an instantiation of that.The way that I think about art will be on display. This kind of conversation is the kind of conversations that we have in crits. It’s one where we’re building together.Now let’s get to the main event, which is Raúl here.Raúl de Nieves: Hello everyone.Ajay Kurian: All right, we’re gonna start with this image. I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. We were both also part of the five artists that were asked to collaborate with Tiffany and Company.So we were spending a lot of time together and it was really nice. Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist, that feels free of shame and free of hiding.You’ll see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown deaths as he does in his band Hairbone. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work. They are a faded coupling, archetypes, and fantasma characters emerge throughout his sculptures as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books, rituals, and beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There’s plenty of art that looks to religions, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up.Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened. The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He’s created new stained glass works for the windows of the entire building. They’re modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile. So when you see texts that might be darker, more bodily, even a little gross, you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing’s left out. Everything feels redeemed.After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the sense that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy as if he simply is a star. I think it’s easy for us to see someone like Raúl whose light shines brightly and think that’s just who he is, that it’s not the result of enormous amounts of work and discipline of the ability to bring death to an old self in order to birth a new one and find joy again and again.A person like that right now is worth talking to and hearing their stories. So please help me welcome Raúl.Raúl de Nieves: Thank you. That was very nice.Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling?Raúl de Nieves: I feel great. Today was a lovely day and being here is so nice. To be able to talk to you and share a moment of my life and just some of the things that mattered to me. So thank you for having me.Ajay Kurian: It’s really a pleasure. It’s an honor. I have loved your work, I’ve loved seeing it and I love learning more about it. This image was one that came up when I was reading about the work. I’ve seen this story told many times in your work, but this is from 2003 to 2005. This is a story of St. George and the Dragon, and I wanted to start here ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things that are formative in this particular image, the story itself and how you saw that story.Raúl de Nieves: I moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the CCA college. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take into the school because of the financial situation that I was in. So it’s really nice to know that you are providing mentorship to students, because there wasn’t anything like that in 2002. The internet was just starting and moving to San Francisco was such a dream of mine and I made it happen even though I didn’t end up going to the school. For me, the bridge of San Francisco, which always shined so much to a forgotten soul or this idea of the hippie, the queers, gay culture. It really attracted me to this idea of knowledge. But once I couldn’t attend the school, I had to find my own mentorships, and I saw that through my friends.The image of St. George and the dragon appeared to me through a woman who was selling embroidery at the store that I was working at. I ended up buying the embroidery off her and I started to really think about how I grew up in a religious household that spoke about angels and the defeat of the self. But in a more Catholic way, where you have to repent your sins and think about what it means to not follow the status quo of a normal way of thinking because heaven is the ultimate power of our existence. St. George, to me, became this mantra. I started to really ask myself who I was in the picture, and I decided to think that I was all aspects of this fable.The fable talks about a dragon that houses itself next to a water well, and the town is in fear that this dragon is gonna drink all their water. So they must gather their beans into a sacrifice because the dragon ate all the animals. As if the dragon shouldn’t eat the animals because the humans are eating the animals. I don’t think that the saint really exists in the image because that is up to the future to decide.So in a sense, I thought about some of the people in my life that I felt had that idea of themselves. Not going to school gave me an opportunity to seek these kinds of icons or lessons through things that appeared to me and I frantically started painting this painting over and over and over again. My goal was to paint 50 of them. I still haven’t painted 50, but once I moved to New York, it’s almost like the image faded away somehow. But it’s something I constantly go back to, and when I recognize it through my journeys, it reminds me of finding things to reflect on.Ajay Kurian: The part where you say that you can be every single character in the fable is what stands out to me because there’s the dragon or the snake, there’s St. George, and then there’s the townspeople that are afraid. There’s this sense that St. George is banishing the dragon, and there’s a sense that people think it’s a dragon but really it’s just this snake and it’s not that big of a deal. They’re afraid of this thing that maybe they shouldn’t be afraid of. To be able to embody the people that are violent and fearful, to embody the saint who comes to save the day, and then to embody this dragon figure is a lot to think about, especially right now.I wonder, can you still embody all those positions or do you feel like you have a different kind of sense of self right now?Raúl de Nieves: I definitely can. I think fear is man’s best friend as they say, and sometimes we really have to get to know our fears in order to understand what they look like.It’s one of the hardest things that we can allow ourselves to communicate with. Because sometimes that comes with a tragic death, addiction, or just being alive. I thought about this and the fact that this dragon was portrayed as the entity of the end of life. A dragon is essentially a mythical creature, so this idea of the myth or the flamboyant also became what I was thinking about. I was like, oh there is a fear of the other side of the human being that maybe we aren’t allowed to or we shouldn’t exercise. Which is our inner divas, our inner goddess, or our inner demons. But I still relate to each character because not every day is so jolly. One of the things that I’ve been trying to continue to exercise within myself is how to let go and what does that mean? When letting go, is it an idea or is it part of the past?Ajay Kurian: When was the first time that you felt like you befriended your fears?Raúl de Nieves: Definitely being in San

She builds archives, conjures futures, and questions everything. Tamika Abaka-Wood on ritual, refusal, and the joy of cultural strategy.Tamika Abaka-Wood is a cultural anthropologist, conceptual strategist, and artist whose practice moves between community building, archival work, and spiritual inquiry. She's the creator of Dial-An-Ancestor, an ongoing project that collects voice notes as offerings to the past, present, and future. Her work resists categorization, merging care and critique, and often asks: what are we remembering, and who are we remembering for?She explains:* Why she’s more interested in frameworks than mediums* How Dial-An-Ancestor creates a space for grief, communion, and speculative healing* The tension between facilitation and authorship in creative work* What it means to build archives that feel alive—not extractive* How refusal and withholding can be generative tools* Why she resists the singular identity of “artist,” and what she embraces instead* The ethics of visibility, looking, and representation in public programming* How joy and mischief shape her strategies for imagining otherwise(0:00) Welcome + Intro(08:30) Refusing the artist title, reshaping the role(13:00) Strategy as creation(17:22) Dial-An-Ancestor: calling in future histories(26:08) Branding is not world-building(30:31) Building intimacy into the infrastructure(35:03) Refusal is not a pause, it’s a position(44:00) Grief, play, and spiritual maintenance(48:21) How to get involved with NewCritsFollow Tamika: Web: https://tamikaabakawood.com/ Instagram: @tamikaka Learn more about Dial-An-Ancestor: https://dial-an-ancestor.com/Full TranscriptAjay Kurian: Hi everybody. Welcome to the July NewCrits Talk and Summer Party. Thank you all for coming!I met Tamika through my partner Jasmine, who's here tonight. From day one she was electric, a mile a minute, excited about anyone's excitement, game for anyone's game, a facilitator par excellence. Whatever you supplied, she'd give back threefold with tangents, detours, serious things and fun things, codified and color coded. Tamika wants to help. She wants people to see their ideas through, and to excite them to build the worlds they're making and to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow without blinders on. She's not deaf to misery or darkness, but somehow she manages to channel her best energies to maintain a joyful persistence.It's only recently that Tamika has felt comfortable calling herself an artist, and she probably wants to chime in right now and question the importance of the name. Anyways, she has self-identified as a cultural anthropologist and I think that's definitely true. Her ongoing project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a beautiful testament to this where she gathers future histories into a building archive.But her work as a kind of conceptual strategist is also its own form of cultural anthropology. And I'm interested in people who are creating in multiple ways in multiple worlds. But really I insist on the term artist, not because everyone needs to be an artist, but because I think it allows her to momentarily assume the role of head creative and not facilitator.She's not alone, of course, but sometimes when you're in an ensemble, it's time for your solo. The group steps back and lets you play because what you have is special and singular, and the group knows you'll come back. But for that moment, it's about you, and this is a chance for that to happen. This is Tamika's world, and tonight we're all in it together.Please help me welcome Tamika Abaka-Wood.Tamika Abaka-Wood: That was so special, thank you. I feel so shy, I really do. That was beautiful.Ajay Kurian: Of course.Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thanks for having me here. It is still surreal.Ajay Kurian: What's surreal about it?Tamika Abaka-Wood: What is surreal about it? I think you touched on it there. I definitely feel more comfortable in a facilitator role — a question asker role. You anticipated my reaction to the word artist, and you're a fine artist. Big A.Ajay Kurian: So they say.Tamika Abaka-Wood: Who's they?Ajay Kurian: I dunno.Ajay Kurian: There are prompts over there, so I'm gonna ask you one of the prompts and then we'll get into what these prompts are. How's your head, your heart, and your body right now?Tamika Abaka-Wood: Okay, let's start with body. I came back from London yesterday last night, so in my body it's like midnight, which is way past my bedtime. But my body feels relatively relaxed. I feel like my heart's beating maybe a little bit fast and I'll ease into this weird space.My head feels really unburdened and my heart's really open. I went to London because my mom is sick and I got to be there with her, and it reminded me that life is so much more important than anything else. And doing it with people is so much more important than anything else. So I feel really grateful that I was there and I feel really grateful that I'm here.Ajay Kurian: Oh, I'm wishing your mother well.Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thank you. How's your head, heart, and body?Ajay Kurian: Let's see. I'm only gonna answer so many questions from you but I'll answer that one. My head is clear. I just got back from Bard where I was teaching for the last three weeks, so I need to clear out a little bit more. But I feel like, as I prep for these things, I try to do some breathing and get that clear.My heart is always open in these conversations because really it is a very responsive thing. I'm here to celebrate the things that you do and that makes it easy to have an open heart. And my body's okay.I want to start with Dial-An-Ancestor 'cause I think it's probably the project that has created the most iterations. Maybe it's the thing that's built a momentum in which this becomes an artistic practice and one that's of course related and implicated in cultural anthropology.But this is a very specific project and it's one that's very open and you have the ways that you want it to be. And that's interesting to me 'cause this is this is a vision — what you want it to be. So I want to hear the beginning. I want to hear how this started and kind of the bones to the flesh to where we are.Tamika Abaka-Wood: So Dial-An-Ancestor is a techno-spiritual hotline. It is gonna exist for a hundred years, which is obviously beyond my lifetime, purposefully. It asks people to do two things; to consider who is asked to listen and who is asked to speak. That is the most blunt, simple two questions that this artistic process asks. But it came around in 2021 when I was pregnant for the first time. I know it's so biographical, but I just think I wanna go straight there with you. I was pregnant for the first time and it was unexpected and it was really exciting and scary, and made me realize how precious and precarious time is.At the same time that I had this germination of life within me, I also got a call from back home in London that my dad was really sick, so I've got two parents that are sick at the moment. So it was conceptually holding life and death at the same time and being like, oh my God, I'm the link between what was before and what is to come, what do I wanna do with that?So it made me think about ancestry and links between the past and the future, but within my body for the first time. That's where it came from within my body, but also it was 2021 and I was new in America.Ajay Kurian: That's lot of new things.Tamika Abaka-Wood: It was a lot of new things at one time. But it came out of a learning experience, so twice a week I got on Zoom with seven people who are strangers that I did not know, and we had a self-directed course that was about unraveling our relationships to time. I know, it is like the weirdest thing to do.Ajay Kurian: How did that even happen?Tamika Abaka-Wood: I just know a guy that knows a guy. Honestly, that's how anything in my life happens. I have no idea. Just like through WhatsApp, there was this group.Ajay Kurian: Know a guy that knows a guy, that's like intellectual gangsterism.Tamika Abaka-Wood: No, true. Like I don't know anything. I just know people that know things and I get put on. So we were unraveling on our relationships to time, and this is where Dial-An-Ancestor really came from conceptually.Ajay Kurian: Of course it happened in a group.Tamika Abaka-Wood: It had to, there's no other way. Every good idea, if you really boil it down, comes from multiple dialogues and multiple references. Like you can't really locate it in one place or one person. There's a multitude of unraveling of references over a lifetime that leads you to one idea. An idea finds a person or a set of people at the right time.Ajay Kurian: And so this was that time. There were so many thoughts that were going through my head right then where I think that's true for all artistic creation. The funny thing is that when people take on the name artist, they do slough off the group. They’ll say that they're for the group. They’ll say that they're for the community. But there are instances, and I'm not damning all artists and I'm not saying that everybody does this — it’s not that severe. But there are instances where that dynamic falls away, and then the singular artist is raised up and we get the genius.And what I hear in what you're saying is that you're keeping all the things that make that rich and real and true. That's the time when I understand why maybe you shy away from the term artist because it does consolidate so much of that feeling of the one.Tamika Abaka-Wood: Ugh, yeah. So much of that is western ideology. It's never been real. It's never ever been a real thing. And this isn't to shun the idea of a singular artist, I think that's so important as well.Ajay Kurian: Absolutely.Tamika Abaka-Wood: I'm interested in the idea of the me within the we and vice versa. But for me, the way that I've been ignited, I definitely need external catalysts and factors to stimulate thinking and doing and practicing.I guess this is a really bastardized, quie

She paints memory, sensation, and the space between languages. Candida Alvarez on intuition, inheritance, and color as a vessel for care.Candida Alvarez is a painter whose work explores personal and cultural memory through abstraction, vivid color, and layered visual language. She draws from Caribbean diasporic experience, family history, and city life to build complex surfaces that hold both clarity and mystery. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Chicago Cultural Center, with recent major exhibitions at GRAY Gallery, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, and her first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio.She explains:* Growing up bilingual and between cultures, and how that shaped her approach to painting and storytelling* Why color, surface, and rhythm carry emotion, memory, and political charge* Painting for resonance instead of clarity, and letting intuition lead the process* Using abstraction to hold grief, joy, labor, and inheritance in the same frame* Returning to domestic and familial spaces as a way to build intimate visual worlds* How risk, repetition, and instinct guide her through not knowing what the painting wants* The connection between care, culture, and making art that listens as much as it speaks(00:00) Learning to See as a Bilingual Kid(10:18) Color as Voice and Resistance(20:47) Working Through Grief and Reverence(31:02) Abstraction as Intimacy(42:11) Teaching, Listening, and Long-Term Practice(52:36) Making Shows that Listen Back(01:04:10) Holding Presence in a Fast World(01:14:32) Refusing to Be Defined by Trends(01:24:45) Language, Memory, and the Visual Archive(01:34:56) Painting as a Form of FreedomFollow Candida:Web: https://www.candidaalvarez.com/Instagram: @candida_alvarez_studioFollow GRAY Gallery:Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s exhibition, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, at GRAY Gallery NY here.Web: https://www.richardgraygallery.com/Instagram: @richardgraygalleryFollow El Museo del Barrio: Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio. here.Web: https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/Instagram: @elmuseoFull TranscriptAjay Kurian: “Dame un numero” which means “give me a number”, Candida’s mother would tell her. She intuitively knew that her mother meant a number from one to 26 in accordance with the alphabet. Selecting a number meant selecting a letter, and the letter would be her mother's compass to find out who is trying to contact her from beyond this realm.I love this story. It so quickly highlights how Candida is in this world and others, and the plays she sees in living. I met Candida Alvarez in 2023 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a residency program in Maine where we both were faculty that year. I got to see her process as an educator and an artist, and at the root of both is a profound level of observation and responsiveness.It's always fun to talk to Candida. But when you ask her questions about painting and her practice, there's a different level of focus than that emerges. One where I notice myself hanging onto her every word. There were many times when it felt like she was tapped into something past this world, and her words were like a tunnel to that elsewhere.In those moments, it's best to shut up and listen. So I went back and listened to the talk that she gave at Skowhegan. When she finished, she was going like a mile a minute, and then she finally finishes and she quietly stops and says, thank you. And in what became typical fashion of the end of a Skowhegan talk, the room erupted with both applause and foot stomps more like a stadium than an art talk.But then a hush came over the room as she opened it up to questions. You could even hear it in the recording, and it’s something that I can't really explain. You could hear the spotlight on her, the concentration on what she was about to say. What I wanna say is that Candida has a bit of magic about her, and after a long time, New York gets to feel it.So with that, I'm just gonna list off some accolades of yours. Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Luma Foundation, among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award, the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, among many others. Everybody give it up for Candida Alvarez!Candida Alvarez: Thank you. That was so beautiful.Ajay Kurian: How are you?Candida Alvarez: I'm not sure.Ajay Kurian: Let's start with a number. I feel like the number 2 is the one that always comes up for you.Candida Alvarez: Well, I was born the second day of the second month and I'm the second child. So I guess you could say 2 does circle around me. But if I asked you, what would you say?Ajay Kurian: I would say 23.Candida Alvarez: 23.Candida Alvarez: T? No, UVWX.Ajay Kurian: Anybody?Candida Alvarez: X?Ajay Kurian: X?Candida Alvarez: No, no. There's 20. It's Z. That's a big one.Ajay Kurian: Z, Y,, T, V, W, X, Y, Z. So Z, Y, X. Yeah. It's 20. It's X.Candida Alvarez: Yeah. Okay. X.Ajay Kurian: What do we do with X?Candida Alvarez: Malcolm X, Latin X.Ajay Kurian: Oh shit.Candida Alvarez: X-ray, Extra, Xavier — X is a hard one, but not really. X is like multiplication, right? X is the thing you don't wanna get when you go up to show your math teacher the answer to the problem and she goes, X it means wrong.Ajay Kurian: I feel like I guessed wrong.Candida Alvarez: No, you did what you had to do. You gave me a challenge because that's a long way down the list. If my mother asked me, I would say four. I never played that all the way at the end.Ajay Kurian: But you played that game enough that you knew like, don't do twenties. That's X. I'm new to this game.Candida Alvarez: It's all right. Ask me another question.Ajay Kurian: We're looking at your retrospective here at El Museo del Barrio and it's called ‘Circle, Point, Loop’. Here are some install shots of works that are called View from John Street.Candida Alvarez: Yeah, those charcoal drawings were from John Street, Brooklyn where I had a studio and that building's still there and there are still artist studios there. I was up on the second floor and it was a great space. It was one of my first spaces in New York. It was very dangerous. I remember one of my father's friends gave me a really old car to drive. I could see the plant and I could see the water beyond. I had a residency in Germany that was through a program in Philadelphia — creative artist network, I believe. And I learned about it through a fellow artist in residence, Charles Burwell, who was from Philadelphia. It was an opportunity for an artist to go away for a month and they chose the city. So I went to Cologne.Ajay Kurian: Wow.Candida Alvarez: Right. That's what I said. And I spent a lot of time at the Dome Cathedral. I was fascinated by it structurally and what it meant for the city.But also there was this above and below. So, below was the crypt of the church and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful space with little light bulbs and just sort of a very special place to chill out in after a big day of traveling around. The church was filled with a lot of art and stained glass. I met so many wonderful artists there. And they actually put together a catalog for me and they curated a show, and those drawings were a part of it that I actually did in John Street. So I came back with a lot of beer coasters — the circular forms, which I was fascinated by. And I just wanted to do charcoal drawings, which I had never really done, but I think it was the dust, and the dusty feeling.I just used charcoal and got to work. You can see the circular pattern came from one of those beer coasters, and tape was used to get some of those rectangular shapes. I used a razor blade to get these kind of whitish, almost dashed lines through the paper. I got totally engaged with them and after I did them, I didn't do any more.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I mean I've never seen a charcoal drawing from you since. It was really part of going to that show and like walking through the museum.I've known you for a couple years now and I've seen the work and I understand that color plays such a huge role in how you think about life. So it was surprising to see charcoal drawings and just the breadth of the work. There's so many different projects, there was so many different ways of working. Did this feel foundational? Because you talk about drawing a lot as really the root of what you do.Candida Alvarez: Well, I think there's something beautiful about blackness and black is a color. I mean, people don't often think of black and white as color, which I find kind of interesting. But it's really a beautiful way to see deeply.I love charting space using black and gray tones. There's something about commanding space with a very little tools, right? The stick of charcoal is kind of beautiful. That one thing that can create all this magic, I find really beautiful. I just didn't like the dustiness so much, you know? Charcoal is hard to pin down. I love the highlighting, the light and dark, and I also like taking pictures. You know, I had a camera for a long time and my first tool was a camera.Ajay Kurian: They almost feel like abstract photographs.Candida Alvarez: Yeah. I love black and white photography. I fell in love with it. I used to love Roy Decarava’s work, where he went from pitch black to white. And Harry Callahan.Ajay Kurian: That's when you can see that black and white are colors.Candida Alvarez: There wa

She paints distortion, vulnerability, and the psychic residue of history — Janiva Ellis on contortion as language and survival.Janiva Ellis is a painter whose work stretches emotional and political registers through fluid mark-making, surreal juxtapositions, and animated dissonance. Her paintings contort and erupt, channeling humor, grief, and ancestral hauntings. She’s exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial and at the Carpenter Center, and is known for refusing easy resolution.She explains:* Why cartoon logic and slapstick pain offer the perfect language for distortion, survival, and historical violence.* How she embraces ambivalence by showing unfinished or uncertain work as a form of radical transparency.* Painting not to perform virtuosity but to let discomfort, exhaustion, and doubt remain visible.* Letting go of the “entertainer” impulse and choosing instead to rest, reflect, and resist institutional pressure.* How working through rage, shadow, and cultural projection allows the paintings to become psychological landscapes.Why she paints for the terrain she’s in and how Germany, Berlin, and Kollwitz shaped one of her darkest pieces.(0:00) NewCrits Podcast Intro(1:34) Ajay Kurian introduces Janiva Ellis (08:02) The Cartoon’s Burden (17:00) From the Cruise Ship to the Studio (24:30) When Whiteness Becomes the Subject (32:00) Disillusionment and the ICA Show (41:00) Exuberance, Masochism, and Recognition (47:37) Working in the Dark: Technique and Intuition (54:10) Letting Go of Control and Embracing Vulnerability (1:00:44) White Spirals and Cultural Projections (1:07:18) The Value of Communal Witnessing (1:13:52) The Challenge of Raw Rage (1:26:59) Dream Recall and the Fade of Intuition (1:31:28) New Crits Upcoming Classes and ServicesFollow Janiva:Web: https://47canal.us/artists/janiva-ellisInstagram: @janivaellis—Full TranscriptAjay Kurian: Welcome to the 20th New Crits Talk. My name is Ajay Kurian and tonight for our 20th talk, we have Janiva Ellis here with us.Janiva Ellis: Hey guys. Thank you so much for coming. There's so many people that I admire here and strangers who came because they care. So thank you so much.Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna start with a little intro for Janiva and then we're gonna get into it.Sometimes when a person contorts themselves for so long, their reality itself becomes a distortion. If a person forgets their contortion, then the distortion is reality. More often than not though, somewhere deep down, the score is being kept - and that's what keeps it a distortion. The figures in Janiva Ellis's paintings are living in this wonky place, where contortion and distortion meet, where internal and social realities commingle and conflict.I think maybe that's why she favors cartoons. Because they can stretch like an accordion, get blown up by land mines, and freeze or burn without ever skipping a beat. They are projections of contortion and distortion. The cartoon, despite its flatness, here acts as an echo chamber for history's emotional and violent contradictions. Meanwhile, a richly detailed illusionistic landscape may in fact be entirely flat - a visual lie that we've accepted as reality. In the interplay, Ellis is able to conjure vivid but slippery tableaus that weigh as much on the sociopolitical as they do the privacy of one's most intimate thoughts.She is a skillful conductor. The haze is intentional; the confusion is part of the pleasure, and the finish is meant to be a question. She's an artist who knows how to simultaneously set a trap and set you free. Please join me in welcoming Janiva.Janiva Ellis: You tore that, you ate that the fuck up. Thank you.Ajay Kurian: It's my pleasure.Janiva Ellis: Thank you for seeing the work. Thank you for confidently putting words to it, engaging with it, and not shying away from your assumptions about the work because they're really right on and it’s cathartic to hear.Ajay Kurian: Thank you, I’m honored. It’s not easy to write or talk about your work. I don't know the dynamic of how I'm supposed to play it all out because it's charged, and I think in this conversation it'll be really nice to talk about how those dynamics stay charged and how they move and change throughout the work. There's been a lot of changes and that’s the reason why I wanna start with such an early piece. We're gonna start here and then we're gonna go all over.The development is amazing. I don't say that often and I'm not blowing steam. It's rare to see an artist where every show it gets better and better. I'm genuinely astonished because when I saw your first show, it was great but I'm curious what comes next. I remember Tyler the Creator talking about Vince Staples’ album. It came out and he was like, this is it. But then the next album was the one he was excited about.Janiva Ellis: Totally. Oftentimes in the studio, I've processed the idea, but I still have to make the show. I'm halfway through the painting and I got the idea, but then I have to finish the painting and I have to finish the show. But I cannot wait to take what I've metabolized and bring it to the next project. I'm on the hook for this project and I do need to finish this and get it out, but there's already so much enthusiasm for what I wanna say next. Then in the next project, I don't know what I'm doing. While I'm making, I know what future me needs to do until future me is present me, and then I'm confused again.Ajay Kurian: How do you stay in it and how do you keep that same energy?Janiva Ellis: I don't keep that same energy. I think it's an underlying drive. Sometimes I try and let the energy of the past project evacuate by taking a lot of space or creating interventions in the work that are challenges so that the part of my mind that's stimulated by problem solving is activated again.I try and take what I've learned and I'll keep notes. Sometimes I don't even know what that note meant, but let me interpret it in the now and run with that thread. So it's not necessarily about holding tight onto the thoughts that happened in the past, but maintaining the same enthusiasm around my curiosities and my desire to feel challenged by what I can create.Ajay Kurian: This painting is called the The Okiest Doke from 2017.Janiva Ellis: One of my friends said “don't get caught up in the Okeydoke”. It's either DeSe Escobar or Juliana Huxtable, and it could have just been the community. It could have just been something we all said.But it was very much a 2014 “we're out here” vibe. As with a lot of my titles, they come from notes I had taken about things I had said, or friends of mine had said on nights out about the predicament we'd find ourselves in and the joy we'd find in feeling like we were able to put language to this spiral we were navigating.Ajay Kurian: It always feels that way. The titles catch a vibe. I understand it sometimes and other times it washes over you. But then you click with the vibe of the image, and you can feel that vertigo of where the picture takes you to.Part of why I wanted to start here is this cartoon hand. This communion into cartoons is an interesting place to start, and also how you continue to use the cartoon in the work. In my understanding, the history of cartoons is a pretty fraught one, especially as we get into Looney Tunes and all that. The precursors of those cartoons is essentially seeing blackface and minstrelsy turn into the cartoons that become beloved characters and then become these characters that never die. They can always be distorted, can always work harder, can always explode, freeze, do whatever, and just come to life again. For that to be the person who's giving the wafer here feels wild.Janiva Ellis: This the cartoon’s burden. It’s like the burden of constantly having to endlessly embody a projection. When I started doing cartoons, it was literally out of the need for speed. I was taking my practice really seriously for the first time, and I felt a lot of shyness around pursuing what I wanted to pursue.I really wanted a level of grandiosity that I didn't know how to achieve and I also had a lot of self-doubt. So I decided, let's just go back to basics. You can communicate the things you want very quickly and easily by cartooning, and you can re-access your hand and your ability to draw by using cartoons.I think the fact that it speaks to the fraught of the way that white violence depicts blackness and the way that whiteness cartoonized black people was not the starting point. There's just so many moments where it was like, I'm gonna do this. Then the funny byproduct of that is that there's a critique to be had about whiteness. It's not the point, but oftentimes it's just there.There's a painting I did of a woman and I made her into Pinhead. Then I did some research on Clive Barker, who made Hellraiser. But where did Pinhead come from? And it came from African sculpture and I wasn't trying to give that, but obviously it gave that, and as I was painting, it worked out that way.There's violence woven through so much pop culture and so much of things I'm referencing from an organic place, from a place of resonance, that it doesn't take too much to connect those dots and I can just riff without trying to make a heady dialogue around blackface. It's already there. The history is there. Early on, people were asking me a lot about blackface and I'm like, yeah, that's inherently in there but I'm not trying to flatten that dialogue. I'm trying to create broader worlds for that representation to exist.Ajay Kurian: Did you always trust your intuition?Janiva Ellis: No, absolutely not. It's a constant moment to moment. I do feel really driven and I know that I'm strong, but I do also have doubt. There’s an underlying pulse that I trust, but topically I feel really disillusioned and really capable of falling for dumb tricks. So as I get older, I feel more capable and more self trusting. As the people in my life become reflections of who I want be surrounded by a

He paints exhaustion, desire, and the ghosts of modern life—Aaron Gilbert on how to stay human in a fractured worldAaron Gilbert is a painter whose work bridges the mythic and the domestic, capturing moments of intimacy under the weight of spiritual, political, and economic pressure. He’s exhibited internationally and is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery. His paintings are both tender and prophetic, filled with symbolic ruptures, spectral presences, and radiant color.He explains:* Growing up in a creative family and abandoning a career in engineering to pursue painting—while becoming a father.* Why he doesn’t chase “great art,” but instead builds images that hold his full self—flawed, contradictory, and reaching.* Painting not to reflect the moment, but to prophesize what lies beyond our broken stories.* The struggle to maintain mystery, emotional precision, and resistance within large-scale work.* How brand logos become talismans, color becomes spirit, and art becomes a tear in the fabric of what we think is real.00:00 Welcome to NewCrits01:06 “People still seem to fuck—and that’s a good thing.”02:24 What does it mean to paint history now?04:07 “I wanted to make the worst WPA paintings ever.”05:01 Intimacy vs. Monumentality10:14 Painting the workplace: a shape-shifting host12:34 From engineering to painting14:20 Becoming a father and an artist, simultaneously15:53 “These might be the only paintings I ever make.”17:01 Art as a lifeline for the socially awkward20:00 Too private to paint?24:01 The artist as prophet30:39 What’s missing in art school? Elders.37:08 SpongeBob as an exhausted adult42:45 The levity of “Hot Moms”47:00 Floating balaclavas and unsolved images50:00 Spectral figures and ghostly presences52:00 Medieval symbology and the power of icons52:53 Giotto and the doorway between worldviews54:06 Enchantment vs. extraction in Western philosophy55:03 Mark Fisher, hauntology, and lost futures56:16 Logos as spiritual metaphors—enter Adidas57:10 The metaphysics of branding and seduction59:50 White holes, time loops, and painting as rupture01:03:15 Against the heroic posture in painting01:04:24 Imperfection as access to potential01:09:00 Influence, indebtedness, and divergence01:13:00 Time as a mystery—Carlo Rovelli and quantum thought01:14:10 Consciousness, rupture, and looped time01:15:03 Final thoughts and an invitation to see the work in person01:16:00 Thank you, Aaron GilbertFollow Aaron:Web: https://www.aaron-studio.com/Instagram: @aaron_gilbert_studioFollow Gladstone Gallery:Learn more about Aaron Gilbert’s exhibition, World Without End, at Gladstone Gallery here.Web: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/Instagram: @gladstone.gallery—Full TranscriptAjay Kurian: Hi everybody, I want to thank you all for coming. This is the 19th NewCrits Talk. NewCrits is a global platform for studio mentorship, we have 16 artists on our platform that you can meet with directly, and we offer studio mentorship, professional mentorship, portfolio reviews and contract coaching. It really is a platform to democratize our education.The one thing that we do in person are these talks. But we're also starting to offer classes. Our first class starts tomorrow, which is called New Identities for Dangerous Times. We'll be offering three more courses in the fall with some more artists that will all be announced soon. Okay, that's it for NewCrits.We are worn out psychologically, physically, financially, ecologically, spiritually. We've suffered injuries and lost loved ones, limbs and homes. We've struck out and played on lost love and conjured hope. Ours is an age of exhaustion, and Aaron Gilbert paints the exhausted of the earth. The figures in Aaron's paintings are weary, beyond weary, but nevertheless, we see them on dates playing with their children, buying one another with desire and holding one another with heat for all the exhaustion.People still seem to fuck. And that's a good thing because in a way that erotic charge is hope. A hope for a new tomorrow, for new life, and for survival. Now with all that I saw in Aaron's work, it would still be enough. But what compels me to stay longer is a strange sort of enchanting that many of the paintings hold.They're pictures that hold their own ruptures in very subtle and sometimes secretive ways. They're paintings of modern life with wormholes to other moments, other feelings, and other spirits. We're not just in the present. We are with the ghosts of many moments and I can't help but think that they're there to help us find redemption. And in the moment we find ourselves in, I welcome all the redemption I can. Please welcome Aaron Gilbert.Aaron Gilbert: Thank you. That was really beautiful, actually.Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling?Aaron Gilbert: I'm good. It's nice to see everyone here.Ajay Kurian: You got your tequila.Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, and a room full of people that I'm really happy to have a conversation with. So this is great.Ajay Kurian: Aaron has a show up at Gladstone Gallery right now. It's up until April 19th and I thought we should just start there. The first thing that crosses my mind, especially looking at older work and now looking at the new show, is that a lot of these paintings feel like history paintings in their own way. How does that sit with you? What do you think about the space of history painting?Aaron Gilbert: That's really something I was trying to contend with in a very different way. Probably about six years ago, seeing Diego Rivera's murals at the National Palace in Mexico City for the first time. I was really knocked over by the scope and the scale of that project. It felt like a lifelong undertaking. In a way, it felt like a visual form of Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, and it just made me think that there was a much further reach I could do.There was a much bigger set of questions that I could go for more directly. I think this show was a beginning to me trying to ask and respond to those questions. In a way, I wanted to make like the worst WPA paintings ever made. Not that they're bad paintings, but that they kind of hit at how I feel viscerally about the world that we're living through in relation to what it should be.Ajay Kurian: When you say the worst WPA paintings, I'm trying to see what energy that conjures in the work, because to me, you tow the line between finding something that feels structural but also extremely intimate. And when I think about murals, intimacy is not the first thing that comes to mind.Aaron Gilbert: That's where I take issue with a lot of history painting, or where I have maybe a different way of approaching it. I think mine's kind of an inverse, you know? So if you think of a classic history painting; it's like a top down telling of history. Here are archetypes of the workers and here is this historical figure. But for me, what I'm engaged with is this idea of how can I, as someone knowing all these contradictory and all these facets of myself and my life that are pulling in different directions and that are compromised in different ways.How can I still in some way find a way to be transformative in this world? How do we start with the lives that we actually inhabit and figure out how to move outwards and address these larger societal, historical forces? So it's kind of a reverse process, but with the same set of concerns.Ajay Kurian: In this painting here, there's so many things going on and so many places to start, but in terms of thinking about particularity first, do you find that structure helps you to then start orienting these stories? Or how does a painting of this vast kind of start coming together in the questions that you're trying to tackle?Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, so this is a painting I didn't know how to do before I did it, and I just kind of knew that was going to be the case. The way I approach it is I start making drawings and there's a full size work on paper that's the same scale as this drawing. Initially, the painting started with this very small sketch of the mother, and the daughters staying on the tub, braiding her hair. And I liked that gesture. Then I was thinking the mother would be looking out the window and I didn't know where yet, but maybe there's a courtyard. So initially she was ground level. And then because I'm working on paper, I started to think it was a lot more interesting in terms of the power dynamic of her gaze, for her to be higher up and looking down at someone or something outside. Because it was a work on paper, I was able to cut it and move it up.This was gradually built piece by piece. And the only way I knew to approach it was to start with these small and intimate vignettes, begin to tie them together and think about how to build a full constellation within a piece.Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. As soon as I see that scene or focus in on it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's an Aaron Gilbert painting right there. But then to see that become a story that unfolds into other stories and then has a larger constellation within it, is something that structurally makes sense to me. In the early work that I had seen of yours, there's an intimacy that's based in a single room.Aaron Gilbert: Right, right. It is a very close, self-contained, tight composition.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, and then in a lot of these paintings, there's something that's happening where there's a zoom-out, there’s different things happening in the same picture, and there’s different gatherings of how people are organizing themselves in different related stories.Aaron Gilbert: With those earlier works, I was always thinking that the power of this work is if I can have this palpable feeling of larger societal and historical forces. So it might just be a couple in the kitchen preparing food or it could be very self-contained, seemingly. But how can I deliver in a way where you feel these larger social forces and you feel that the figures themselves might have one set of intentions, but t

Ajay Kurian: I've been trying to think of a way to aptly describe what it is that Salome Asega does because the way she's thinking about a practice, artistic and otherwise is something that is hard to recognize if we maintain the terms of our discernment into what an art practice is meant to look like. But once you see what she's up to, you can't unsee it and you start to see how this paradigm is one we need to cultivate. With that in mind. The phrase I've come to is that Salome is a culture gardener. She knows which introductions to make, which bee needs what flower, and she gets that the ecosystems are stronger than individuals, more nimble, less brittle. She also understands that in her words, inclusion ain't shit. What she's after is equity, and that means understanding that specific and specialized needs are met. Like which plants need more shade and which ones need more light? What does it take to create the conditions for genuine growth? And how do we grow together?The growth we're accustomed to is the growth of capital, and that's the world we usually live in. To quote her again, right now, there's a group of cis hat white men in Silicon Valley that are actively working to build a future for us. Without our consent, we are living in their imagination, and I'm very interested in leveraging the power of collective imagination to present counter futures.She's done this in projects ranging from Powrplnt to the Iyapo Repository under appointment as an art and tech fellow at the Ford Foundation. Currently, she's the director of New Inc. The New Museum's Own and First Museum led cultural incubator. And with it, she's planting her largest garden yet.Please give it up for Salome Asega.Salome Asega: That was really nice – thank you. I think you did the artist talk for me.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we can just drink now. No, it came to me today when you sent me the radio show. But I think, maybe my first question is how does that term feel to you? How does it feel to try that on?Salome Asega: I don't know if I've ever asked you this question, but at New Inc I like to ask people if they're an architect or a gardener.Ajay Kurian: No shit.Salome Asega: Have I asked you this question? Oh my God. Maybe it's a thing we started after you, but are you an architect or a gardener?Ajay Kurian: I'm definitely a gardener.Salome Asega: Why? What's the difference for you?Ajay Kurian: Okay. Actually, I said that impulsively. The reason I said it impulsively is that the very first show that I ever did in New York, was making a kind of garden as the exhibition. The thrust of the show was to almost think ontologically that everything has a dual status as both garden and gardener, so we have the ability to tend to other things, but we also are a thing that can be tended too. That's been foundational in how I think about a lot of things that I do and also how I see the world moving. It's not as totalizing. I think back then, I was a young artist trying to look for the answer. But I'm really curious, now you have me thinking, what is that difference and what does that mean to you?Salome Asega: I always answered that I thought I was an architect because I was more interested in creating the infrastructure for things to exist. But then people would read me as a gardener. They said, for the same reason that you just gave, that I was in a habit and practice of tending to and caring for, right? Letting people grow in the ways that felt natural to them.Ajay Kurian: I think a lot of people have this idea of what architect means, which is this singular genius that feels very male. It feels like it has all this baggage with it. Whereas, considering how you grew up and with all the computer engineers in your background, did it give you a different sense of what architect meant?Salome Asega: For sure. One of our family activities was taking a computer apart and putting it back together again. Engineering, architecture, all these hard skills were never done singularly, they were always done as a group. You'd want to share this with someone you love, right? So I think that's always been part of my practice. I did my MFA in design and technology at Parsons and I learned all these things around physical computing. Then I would take out all these microprocessors and server motors through the back door, and run the workshops that ended up becoming part of Powrplnt, the Iyapo Repository and a lot of the projects I worked on. But it was never about becoming like a singular genius, coder, programmer on my own.Ajay Kurian: What was your first relationship to art?Salome Asega: That's hard to answer because I grew up in a city that didn't have cultural institutions in the way that we have in New York. And so I would count some of my first experiences with art as like my uncles coming over to family gatherings and playing music.And art is just woven through our culture. I also have another uncle who painted a mural for a local Ethiopian restaurant in Vegas. Having to sit there and do my homework while he's painting – these are some of my early experiences with art. But then in terms of capital A art, I remember in high school learning that there was a James Turrell Installation in the Prada store in the Caesars Palace Casino.Ajay Kurian: Amazing.Salome Asega: The performance of going to the strip parking lot, my Toyota Corolla at 16, going through the casino, having the confidence to walk into the Prada store knowing I don't have any money, going to the back and just like sitting there to experience that James Turrell exhibit. And then walking back out through the casino, and being like “I saw art today”.Ajay Kurian: James Turrell was in your orbit at 16? James Turrell was not in my orbit at 16. How did that happen?Salome Asega: I had really good teachers in high school, one of which was Mr. Brewster, who ran the AV club. I don't know if you knew this about me, but I used to write and produce a daily 10 minute show for my high school.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that adds up.Salome Asega: So I had many late nights where I'd be editing the show with friends and Mr. Brewster would put us onto music. I remember the first album he gave me was a MIA mixtape and he would just feed us art books, so that's how I learned about James Turrell. He also put me onto Marilyn Minter when she did her Las Vegas Billboard project. That’s another experience of getting in the Toyota Carillo and driving down the strip and being like that’s a Marilyn Minter billboard.Ajay Kurian: Did that feel like it had a different kind of cultural capital to you than what you were familiar with before?Salome Asega: It read as New York. If I was to go back to my teenage mind, this felt like validated art because it came from a big city.Ajay Kurian: And you didn't think of Las Vegas as a big city?Salome Asega: No. No. I was alive for our centennial celebration. I was living there at a time where the city was expanding so quickly around me. We lived on what was considered the edge of town, and now if you look at a map, we're like squarely at the center. We'd have scorpions in our backyard. We no longer have that.Ajay Kurian: The only thing I'm genuinely intensely afraid of is scorpions.Salome Asega: They’re so cute.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we're gonna skip it.Salome Asega: Okay. Okay.Ajay Kurian: The other thing that comes to mind, I remember going to Vegas when I was really young, probably actually around 15 or 16, and I don’t remember why exactly. But I went to a very fancy private school, and to get shit on in so many different ways for so many different reasons and also being brown in a school that was largely white; there was something that I couldn't fully articulate yet, but I felt small in a lot of different ways. And clothing was one of the ways where it was like, even if I can't buy these clothes, I want to be able to walk into these stores and take up space. So I remember Vegas being the first time where I got to see if I could flex that. And my family's just like - what is wrong with you? Why does this even matter to you, you're not buying anything? I haven't thought about this in a very long time. I completely forgot that Vegas was the first time that happened. But you see all those stores, all these spaces, and all these things that don't feel like they're for you, but in Vegas it does. Because it's so glitzy.I'm wondering like. Was that also a place where you were like, okay, I just want permission for all of these spaces?Salome Asega: Yeah, Vegas very much is a playground. I think for that reason it’s a place that is studied by designers and architects, because the city's design allows for this kind of performance and fantasy. You can be whoever you want there and the architecture encourages that actually. So I think combining that strip design with the kind of fantasy of the desert itself, the spiritual aspect of the desert, which is also a place where you can metamorphosize. You can be whoever you wanna be. I think I was encouraged by design to experiment and play, based on where I grew up.Ajay Kurian: That, in a sense, makes it feel like it's possible to integrate the spiritual and the material.Salome Asega: I feel like I know what you're gonna pull up.Ajay Kurian: This project came to mind. One, because it's treating technology in such a different way, which feels foundational to the way that I see you treating technology routinely. Disembodiment towards embodiment, it's always to take you back to your body in a different way. It's always to extend yourself, but it's in a way that feels generative that I don't know if people always think about it that way. Could you talk about how this project started to come about and where this came from?Salome Asega: I think I started these VR sketches called possession when I was in grad school and I was given one of the first Oculus headsets, like it was a dev kit and it didn't even have a fancy name yet. It wasn't on the market, it was meant for artists to just

NewCrits provides one-on-one studio visits, portfolio reviews, and mentorship with some of the world's most visionary artists.This week on NewCrits, we sit down with artist and educator Sagarika Sundaram, whose textile-based sculptures and installations blur the line between human and nature. We explore her early training in Batik, the detour into graphic design that led her back to fiber art, and how felt-making became central to her practice. Sagarika reflects on artistic sabotage as a creative tool, the tension between sustainability and artistic freedom, and her evolving relationship with video work. Plus, a deep dive into Rasa theory, the power of disgust in art, and the role of intuition in her expansive practice. Sagarika Sundaram creates sculpture, relief works, and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. Sundaram’s work has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center, Garrison, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times (Roberta Smith, Martha Schwendener) ARTnews (Alex Greenberger) and has been featured by Artnet and Juxtapoz Magazine and PBS. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Sundaram lives and works in New York City. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

A BDSM dungeon for alchemist Bitcoin investors. A druid hideaway in the abandoned Palo Alto headquarters of the corporation Theranos. A crossover between Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones where Walter White cooks meth for White Walkers. These are some of the images that Elaine's work conjures up for people.In this case, the writer and art historian Colby Chamberlain. I like to look at Elaine's work thinking about the shifts in difference between visual prose and visual poetry. There are narratives, ideas, concepts, but there's also evocations, atmospherics, and rhythms that key you in as well. spite the notable iciness from some of the work, you can still sense a beating heart.It's the reason I return to the work and get excited for new shows of hers. There's a feeling of the post apocalyptic, a sense of dread, there's violence and the vestiges of religion, but from the way these works come together and how each show operates, I get the sense that this is a person wrestling with belief, not someone who's already sworn it off.And it's those struggles that I'm interested in. Why do any of us fight the fights we do? And what does it say about us?Edited Transcript of the TalkAjay Kurian: I've always loved your work, and there was a specific moment in 2014, at Ramiken Crucible, where I was genuinely floored.It was so quiet in there. It was so beautiful and eerie. The scent in the air, everything about it felt meticulous but also carefree. It wasn't overly theatrical or overdone.And I just want to start from the beginning, because there's an arc of the visual poetry that you start making and it would be interesting for me to understand how certain things started to congeal, how certain sculptural forms started to congeal for you. This is the first show that you did at Ramekin Crucible in 2011 called “without true bazaars”. Do you even remember this show?Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, it's interesting to see it. It was so long ago.Ajay Kurian: Fourteen years.Elaine Cameron-Weir: When I see these images, I immediately think about how I had no money, and was really just working with what I could get my hands on.But, you know, that wasn't an obstacle at the time. It was normal. But looking back, the simplicity of what I was doing and the type of materials…I mean, it doesn't feel like student work, but because I was just out of school, I was so young, and I wasn't fully formed, it still feels transitional. But it was a such an opportunity to learn about what I was doing in public, and it could have goneAjay Kurian: I feel like first solo shows, it's like you have nothing to lose. So it's just like, fuck it, do what you want to do.Elaine Cameron-Weir: And limited resources, so you can't just go crazy - you’re contained.Ajay Kurian: What was before this? Were you in art schoolElaine Cameron-Weir: Yes. I'm from Canada and I grew up in Alberta. It's like the Texas of Canada, if you're not familiar. Yeah. above Montana, but I went to Art School right out of high school. It's way less of a commitment there because it's so cheap. It's not like a fraught decision. Like should I spend all this money to go to art school? It's like, try it.Ajay Kurian: So that was a BFA program?Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes, at the Alberta College of Art. They had amazing, world class facilities. So I actually learned how to do very niche metalworking. They had a glass blowing shop, ceramics; you could cast bronze there. So I got a really technical education. I was in the drawing department, and we had to go draw cadavers at the hospital. But then there were really good instructors as well where it was really their mission to teach and they were really good at making you think about what you're doing.And then I graduated from there and I didn't really know what to do. I was working at American Apparel and the rents were getting jacked up in Calgary where the school was because there was an oil boom going on. I had to leave. So I moved back in with my dad And I turned his garage into a studio.And I hated it there so much. It's the small city that I went to high school in. so I immediately applied to grad school in New York without knowing anything about any school in New York. I just did a quick search and I was like, okay, we're going to just apply to all of these and get out of here.And that's how I ended up in New York. I went to NYU. I graduated in 2010.Ajay Kurian: Okay. when did you meet Mike? Mike is the owner of Ramekin Crucible.Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't know what year, probably 2010 or 11, at a party. At the Jane Hotel.Ajay Kurian: It's so interesting to hear about those early conversations with your first gallerist because there's so much history that happens in that moment and then looking back on it retrospectively you're like wow what was that?Elaine Cameron-Weir: I think we were both learning a lot, you know? And we took a chance on each other. It sounds crazy now, like we met at a party, but that's how you used to meet people. And we had mutual friends, like Borden, Capalino. So we met at this party, and we got to talking and then a studio visit with him and Blaize (Lehane, former director at Ramiken Crucible). The building I was living in had just caught fire right before the visit. A lot was going on for me personally, but it ended up working out really well because I didn't have to pay rent for like six months, which is one of the reasons I could stay in New York. The work I was making, was similar to what I made for that first show.I think I made this piece actually in school, that long stick thing. it's just a piece of MDF, or maybe it's actual wood. It was coated in a pouch of rolling tobacco. I think that piece was in my grad show at NYU.Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna skip to the next show. This is the first time, you start using brass in the work. It sounds like you already had a decent understanding of, how to make almost anything based on your education. These brass leaves - did you make those yourself? Was that outsourced? How did that happen?Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I made it all. Except the piece of those, cast aluminum things at the top. You can't tell what they are, but I made those with my dad in Canada.Ajay Kurian: What are they? I remember seeing, there's been a couple of iterations of them. I remember seeing them here. I remember seeing them at an art fair where the whole booth was filled with almost like a rhythm of these, for the lack of a better word, “blanks.” Do you consider them kind of blanks or what are they made out of?Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, I was kind of thinking about an ingot, which is like a cast piece of metal And a photographic plate or a blank. I used to go, I still go to the NYU library and they had amazing books from NASA there. They had this great atlas of photographs of the moon, like before they went to the moon. the photographic technique is done in scans, so it's kind of like stripes. the book is large and you can flip it.And each page - I was kind of thinking each as sort of like a page from that book - it was like plotting something in the round into a flatness.Ajay Kurian: Scale-wise, they’re almost like a oversized book.Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, that's the reason for the scale, something that you could potentially hold. And then they're on this rail, because they don't actually hang on the wall. They're always meant to sit on something and lean. So they're like an object, they don't have a thing on the back that you can stick them on the wall.Ajay Kurian: Yeah, they feel like tablets.Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah.Ajay Kurian: Which, as you'll see as we progress, there's this sense of religiosity or ritual or the transcendental. It goes through very specific vocabularies.This was the show that I fell in love with. This is Venus Anodyamine. These are large clamshells. Were you able to find the two halves of each of them?Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I later on made a piece where I did find one whole one and then I stopped making them because I was like, I found a whole one. So no, they're just the halves.Ajay Kurian: So, there's this long piece of brass that falls into the clamshell where a piece of paper thin mica is suspended, and then there's frankincense on top of the mica. and a flame underneath it, so you can smell frankincense throughout the room.And it was so beautiful. I grew up religious. My parents are from South India, so Christianity is big. a lot of those scents, a lot of that ritual. just gets imparted in you. The ways that I think about space and how I move through it are defined in a lot of ways by those early forms of ritual.And to me, it felt like that might've been the case with you too. Maybe it was more distant, but I'm really curious because there's all these moments in which I see you pulling from the, wealth of iconography in Western Christianity - symbols, and so on. Did you grow up with that?Elaine Cameron-Weir: No. I grew up in a small place, small town, and then moved to a small city. Most people around us were religious. If I slept over at a friend's house on Saturday we had to go to church. Some families were very strict, but my mom was very anti religion.Ajay Kurian: Really?Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah. Not in a discriminatory way, but she was just like, we're not having that. You're not doing that. You're not baptized. My parents weren't married until later on, like when I was a teenager. And I grew up thinking they were married because everyone else's parents were. I remember one day I asked my mom, like, Where are all the wedding pictures of you and dad? She looks at me. She's like, we're not married.I was shocked because at eight or nine, I just assumed, you know. But I was always interested, maybe because of that and it being around me and it was something I observed. I watched people speak in tongues through this little window thing when I was a kid, so I would observe these things as an outsider.Yeah. It really made me dig into it in a different way, I guess. But it was sti

I met Steve this past summer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where we were both resident faculty. I quickly fell in love with his wit (biting), his work (also biting), and his tenderness (much less biting). In our conversation here, we cover his first experience with an artwork, his relationship to portraiture, and the origins of Modernism in the auction block.He’s unabashed in his distaste for prioritizing personal hardship to make art. In his own words, “This idea that we’re going to get together and have a party for our pain, and somehow art is gonna come out of that..? No baby, you better go to an observational drawing class.” Regardless of whether you agree with Steve’s perspectives, listening to him tell it is thoroughly enjoyable. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Hey everyone, Welcome to the third episode of the NewCrits Podcast with me, Ajay Kurian. This month, I interviewed Jamian Juliano Villani.  We recorded this live at O’Flaherty’s, a gallery Jamian started with Billy Grant in the East Village.  It was an incredible turnout, as Jamian tends to draw a crowd,  and the conversation was great.  We talk about her insane family, the way she works, the blurry lines between taste, comfort and expression.  We even talk about the time we didn’t talk for a year.  What I hope you take a way from this conversation is that Jamian is far from cynical or nihilistic.  She believes in the spirit of art in her own way, and is contributing to it in as she likes.  We don’t always agree, but we don’t have to.  Jamian is a powerhouse of a person and artist and I was happy to be in conversation with her.  We’ve edited this episode, but if you’d like to watch and listen to the whole thing, flaws and all, check out our Youtube channel where you can see the uncut version.  I hope you enjoy.  Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Sometimes his images work towards the mysteries a person can hold. Other times, they might explore the tension created through juxtapositions, or wisps of narrative and context, leaning further into abstraction. Altogether, his work foregrounds the possibilities and problems of photography today. In this conversation, we discuss: * Elvis Costello's "Green Shirt" and "emotional fascism"* Negotiating Identity in Photography* Collaborations with Solange and Telfar* Going for the "difficult" image instead of the "iconic" one* Abstraction through rupturing representation* Moving past racial cliches, even the new ones!Follow Janiva:Web: https://elliottjeromebrownjr.com/Instagram: @elliottjeromebrownjr Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Ser Serpas was born in 1995 in Los Angeles, California and lives and works in New York. Primarily interested in death and legacy, her work is preoccupied with its own urgency in the face of fossilization. At present, she's taken to sequestering the mundane. Serpas' work takes the form of unstable assemblages of found objects in which painting, sculpture, drawing, and text bring together personal memories and traces of everyday life. She mashes bits of her life, both real and imagined, into anti-portraits. Some of which she deems fit to share within the context of exhibitions and performances. Precarious assemblages of disparate objects found in the street, which bear the mark of their uses, constitute her most well-known series to date. More recently, she has taken to using photos shot on her iPhone during college as source material for intimate views on unstretched canvas, wood panel, and paper. The unique way she reframes the body and tension in both her sculptural and text-based installations, which distort components of our shared architecture, carries into her atypically cropped portions of stolen archetypical intimacy. (02:22) “Monakhos” and the ghosts inside the frame(07:30) The Collector: absence, imprint, and waste(15:51) Confidence is knowing when to stop(17:46) Training AI to hallucinate bodies(30:38) Ruined objects, ruined selves(35:00) The aesthetics of survival(48:20) Horror, unreason, and the art of discomfort(55:00) Control, labor, and designing your lifeFollow Ser: Web: https://maxwellgraham.biz/artists/ser.Instagram: @ser_sera— Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe