Seeing Color

Hi everyone. I hope you are well. I've been getting ready for the new semester and just saw this Netflix show called The Chair in preparation, which makes fun of academia. Obviously, there were many parts made for dramatic effect, and it was trying to tackle way too many subjects in way too little time, along with being produced by the same people from Game of Thrones gave me pause, but there were a few nice moments that felt also true that made me laugh, along with Sandra Oh's great performance. I'm not sure if that is a strong recommendation or not to see it. But anyway. This week I am returning back to the Las Vegas community through the Rogers Art Loft Residency and I am speaking with the amazing Vogue Robinson, a poet, author, mentor, and teaching artist. Originally from Perris, California, Vogue got her BA in English at San Diego State University before eventually landing in Las Vegas. Vogue was the poet laureate of Clark County, Nevada (2017-2019) and is the first Black woman to receive the Silver Pen

Hi everyone. I hope you are well wherever you are as we are mid-way through August. Summer seems to have come and gone. At least it has for me. I have been mostly preparing for my classes in the fall and for a show I'll be having in November. Otherwise, I have nothing new to report. But for this week, I have a great artist to present to you, so let's get to the introductions.For today, I am interviewing Camilo Godoy, an artist and educator born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York City. His multidisciplinary projects are concerned with political histories and memories. Camilo's work engages with the intersection of history, race, gender, and sexuality and is informed by Queer, Latinx, Feminist, and Black perspectives. Camilo got his BFA at Parsons and is currently completing an MFA at Columbia University, which we discuss in greater detail the politics surrounding elite institutions and academia in the art world. We also get into how Camilo mines archival materials for his work, the role of an educator,

Hey everyone. Hope you are doing well. I just finalized a 4-channel video during my time in Shanghai and had a chance to exhibit it to the local art community. I am currently preparing to leave back to Zhuhai in a bit. I also just finished my time at the Rogers Art Loft residency and held the closing talk last week, so thank you to all who swung by. It was a wonderful experience and I hope to visit everyone in Las Vegas soon. I will be posting the conversations I had with the local Las Vegas Community over the next few months, interspersed with previous interviews I conducted. So stay tuned.For today, I will be talking to Brent Holmes, a multi-disciplinary artist with a deep affinity to words- historical, epistemological and ontologically themed creative projects. Holmes also seeks to create a dialogue through several culinary projects, on the nature of communication, and morality and identity. Brent holds no degrees and says he most likely never will. Being the son of an entertainer, Brent is thoroughly trav

Hey everyone. Happy Tuesday. We are in the midst of summer and time is going by quite quickly. I've been spending some time in the quiet suburbs of Shanghai before heading back to Zhuhai. There's a small but strong artist community here and it has been great getting to know the people here. Otherwise, I have been working on a 4-channel video and prepping for a show in the fall. I have also been recording a ton of interviews with the Las Vegas community through the Rogers Art Loft residency, through which and I am excited to share with you my chat with the amazing Erica Hector Vital-Lazare. Erica is a professor of Creative Writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada. She is also a poet, writer of fiction, and the co-producer of the photo-narrative installation Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas. Furthermore, Erica is the editor of McSweeney's Of the Diaspora, a series revisiting classic Black works in literature. I thoroughly enjoyed

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing well wherever you are. As I mentioned previously, I am currently part of the Rogers Art Loft residency in Las Vegas and they have been putting me in touch with the local community and helping me meet people for the podcast. I have been speaking with quite a number of wonderful artists and cultural workers and these conversations will be released throughout the summer and upcoming fall season. For today, I am excited to share with you the first one of these talks as I speak with Shahab Zargari, an Iranian-American filmmaker, record label owner, and musician. Shahab takes me through his journey from working in advertising to making his own independent films and what drives him to tell the stories that he tells. We also talk about the pronunciation of names, Iranian films, Mad Men, and how he got a shoutout from Kevin Smith. Shahab also talks about his latest short film, Oh, the Guilt, which is a coming-of-age story set in the 1990s featuring a Persian-American as the main chara

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing well. I have been working quite a bit the past few weeks. I did a quick virtual artist talk with my good friend, Justin Favela, for the Rogers Art Loft virtual residency I am currently part of. I have also been recording quite a number of interviews with the Las Vegas community, so keep an eye out for these episodes in the upcoming months. Also, on June 30th and July 14th at 6pm PST, I will be doing live interviews with Jennifer Kleven and Dr. Erika Abad, with a quick Q&A afterwards. I will post the links on social media as the dates get closer. I hope to see a few of you there.For today, I am interviewing my good friend and the amazing artist, Yvette Mayorga. Yvette is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois who interrogates the broad effects of militarization within and beyond the US/Mexico border and intervenes in the colonial legacies of art history. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging. Yvette got her BFA w

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing well wherever you are. I just started my virtual residency at Rogers Art Loft, where I will be interviewing local Las Vegas artists and cultural workers. There will be a few live events, so I'll post them as they come about. Stay tuned!But for today, I have a really special episode with Dr. Jeffreen M. Hayes, a trained art historian and curator who advocates for racial inclusion, equity, and access. Jeffreen has extensive curatorial experience and some of her projects include SILOS, Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, and Embracing the Lens: BlackFlorida project. Jeffreen is also the Executive Director of Threewalls, a space that intentionally develops artistic platforms with artists to help manifest the organization’s vision of art connecting segregated communities, people and experiences together. In this episode, Jeffreen was extremely generous with her time and labor as she talks about her journey through different arts organizations, fro

Hey everyone. I hope you are well. I got my first vaccine shot. Hoping to get my second in a few weeks. I also have been traveling through parts of southern China and trying to grasp the art scene more. My students just had their senior year exhibition which I am proud to see their work hanging. It brings back memories of my undergrad. I have have one more week of school and then a month of meetings before I head to Shanghai. Time is moving fast. Anyway.For today, I have Dan Wang, an artist, writer, and organizer. Chinese-Midwestern by birth and currently living in Southern California, Dan’s art work has been shown in several solo exhibitions and scores of group shows, and has inhabited venues ranging from museums and art centers to street demonstrations and toilet stalls. His texts have been published in books, journals, webzines, exhibition catalogues, as commissioned art projects, and in a range of artists’ publications. As a cultural organizer, Dan has also worked in several collaborative configurations,

Hi everyone. Hope you are doing well. Things are okay so far on my end. School is ending soon and the temperature is getting hot and humid very quickly. My Chinese is steadily getting better and I have a few shows planned for the coming months, so I have to get back to my video editing as the deadline approaches. I also am doing a remote residency via Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas in the coming summer, as well as a residency in Shanghai. I'll keep you updated about any upcoming events as they happen.For today, I have a really wonderful chat with Addoley Dzegede, a Ghanian-American interdisciplinary artist who grew up in South Florida and is now based in Pittsburgh. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, Europe, and Africa, and she has been at residencies such as at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, Osei Duro in Accra, Ghana, Thread: a project of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Senegal, and many more. Addoley employs different materials, textile traditions, and notions of “au

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing well wherever you are. The George Flyod trial finally finished up and I feel institutions are already forgetting how much more work there needs to be done. As always, the question is where do we go from here and what else can we do. Only time will tell. We shall see. But for today, I am interviewing Dr. Yewande Pearse, a neuroscientist and science communicator. Born and bred in North London, Yewande got her Ph.D. from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Lundquist Institute at Harbor-UCLA. Her research interests focus on rare genetic disorders of the brain, and stem cell therapy.I first learned about Yewande through a show she curated me in at Naval LA, where she sits on the Programming Committee. I also watched some of the programming related to the exhibition, which focused on the impact of genomic studies on three aspects of identity: race, gender and politics. Yewande also hosts a few mo

Born and raised in Southern California, Noé developed his passion for art education working at the Skirball Cultural Center and Armory Center for the Arts in Los Angeles before getting a BA at UC Irvine. After, Noé completed an MFA in Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design. Noé is also part of Michelada Think Tank, a collective of socially conscious artists, educators and activists working towards racial equity in the arts. More recently, Noé also joined Admin, a space for arts administrators to support one another, discuss pressing issues, and workshop new forms of cultural institutions. In addition to all this, Noé works as the School, Youth, and Family Programs Educator at the Brooklyn Museum. I first met Noé through my good friend, Carol Zou, a previous guest of the show. Carol and the rest of Michelada Think Tank were doing a project for Open Engagement in Pittsburgh and the whole collective stayed at my place. At the time, I was taking care of a bunny named LeBun James and coming home late to

Hey everyone. I hope you are well. It has been crazy this past week with all the mass shootings that has been happening in the US. I don't have much to add other than what a previous guest of this show, Tereneh Idia, recently posted, which is that the people of the global majority needs to unite to end white supremacy, that too many have adopted white supremacy as their ideals, their love, their body, their mind, their work, their art, their heart and their soul. This is something we all have to work on as the global majority. This work never ends. Don't be afraid to find someone to talk to about these topics. These discussions needs to be out in the open. With that in mind, stay safe wherever you are.For today, I am interviewing Khaty Xiong, a poet born to Hmong refugees from Laos and is the seventh daughter of fifteen brothers and sisters. She is the author of Poor Anima, the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. Most recently, Khaty was awarded a 2

Hi everyone. As usual, I hope you are doing well wherever you are. I went to Guangzhou this past weekend and visited a few locations where my family lived. I have some new ideas jumping around in my head and maybe will start something new soon. I will keep you updated.For today, I have a wonderful chat with Jeffrey Augustine Songco, a multidisciplinary artist exploring the complexity of self-portraiture. As a gay American man of Filipino ethnicity, Jeffrey's work is a place of representation — an opportunity to playfully cast himself as the protagonist of a postcolonial queer narrative. Jeffrey got his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. While our paths did not cross in Pittsburgh, there was a shared sense of familiarity as I talked with Jeffrey in the way we both approach our work. We discussed Jeffrey's beginnings as a child actor, the creation of his secret society, and how he ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I hope you enjoy this.Links Mentioned:Jeffrey

Hey everyone. Hope you are doing well. The Lunar New Year came and went without much trouble and teaching started back up at my university. Over the break, I caught up on some work, cooked a bit, and read some books. I was able to finish Raven Leilani's Luster and Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Both were a good break from some of the more dense art theory I sometimes put myself through. I recommend you check both out. Anyway. For this episode, I am interviewing Jen Liu, an artist working in video, painting, biomaterial, sculpture, and performance on the topics of national identity, labor economy, and the reinterpretation of archival artifacts. Jen got her BA in creative writing from Oberlin College and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She has attended residencies such as De Ateliers, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Pioneer Works, and many others. Jen has also exhibited in venues like The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. Her past awards include a Guggenheim Fellowsh

Hey everyone. Happy Lunar New Year. I wish you good luck and hope lots of fortune befalls upon you this coming year. It is the year of the ox and hopefully a lucky year for those of you born on the year of the ox. In what is normally a time for celebration, instead I hope that we can all reflect and take a breather for our physical and mental state in whatever situation we are in. It isn't clear for how long COVID is here to stay, much less the uneven distribution of vaccines and the rise of all these new virus strains. So with all that in mind, 新年快乐 and 恭喜发财! On today's episode, I am chatting with Lyndon Barrois Jr., an artist who breaks down and re-configures the language of print, design, and popular culture in order to investigate underlying ideology, ethics, and conceptions of identity. Lyndon got a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design from Washington University in St. Louis. I was put in contact with Lyndon through a series of coincidences, starting

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing ok this winter season wherever you are. The Corona virus keeps mutating and vaccines are coming in too slowly so I wish you the best in whatever situation you are in. I am currently on winter break from teaching until after the Chinese Spring Festival, which I am spending staying at home and working on some new projects.It is also Black History Month, although hopefully you are celebrating Black History Month year round and not just the month of February. It is important to remember and acknowledge our painful histories as opposed to keeping them hidden from view. This is not a one month sort of thing but a constant work against the forces of racism. I hope that is something we all keep in mind.But for today, I have a really special episode with Ilana Harris-Babou, an artist who uses music videos, cooking shows, and home improvement television as a starting point for her work. Ilana's sculptures and video installations are, in a sense, an abject exploration of the American Dr

Hey everyone! Wow...what a month. Since my last episode, I had to wrap up my university classes around New Years, got a bit busy grading, and thought it would be a ho-hum sort of holidays. Instead, the underbelly of American's history reared its head for all to see right in the heart of Washington D.C. I am not sure what else there is to add to that event that hasn't already been said over and over about white supremacy in all its forms. I am still not sure what to think about Biden being president but I can only hope for something better than the status quo set by the past white liberal ideas of a melting pot. And Martin Luther King's birthday just passed yesterday, the timing of which reminds us both how much and how little has changed. We shall see. But for today, I have a really special guest, Maree ReMalia, a choreographer, performer, teaching artist, and certified Gaga instructor. An adoptee born in South Korea and raised in Ohio, movement practice and performance has supported her in an ongoing process

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing well and somewhat prepared for the new year. For me, classes are winding down and I am looking forward to spending more time editing some videos in the backlog. But as the year comes to a close, I still think about how much time has passed and what a crazy surreal year it has been. I'm sure we have all been coping through these recent events in our own ways. But wherever you are, I wish you a wonderful and merry holidays.For today, I have on the podcast Weston Teyura. Born in Hawaii, Weston received a BA in studio art and minor in Asian American Studies from Pomona College and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Weston has curated exhibitions for Southern Exposure, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Berkeley Art Center. He is one of the core members of the Related Tactics collective, a group of artists, writers, curators, and educators of color creating projects and opportunities at the intersection of race and culture.I met Weston briefly during my time in the Bay A

Hey everyone. I hope you are doing well and safe. I'm doing okay. I just found a new apartment since my lease was not renewed at my last place. Everything is moved in and now I am slowly unpacking. Otherwise, I am just teaching and learning Chinese. I'm trying to start back up some new work but have been spending a lot of time just reading. I got a standing desk which helps alleviate my wrists and I hope that will motivate me to start video editing. I know these are all just excuses but you know. Anyways...For today, I am presenting the last of my interviews during my time at Vermont Studio Center from almost a year ago. I wish I could be better at getting through my interviews more timely but juggling the whole podcast project by myself does have its limits. With all that aside, I am chatting with Angelique Scott, an artist, educator, and activist who creates work about blackness as a social and cultural identity. Angelique arrived halfway through my time in Vermont for a shorter period, but we quickly got t

Hi everyone. I hope you are safe wherever you are. I am currently back in Zhuhai and settling down. I still have quite a lot to do such as unpacking and getting a multi-entry visa but otherwise, after four COVID nasal tests and two anti-body tests, I am out of quarantine. Life feels strangely normal and post-COVID here with China having essentially tested everyone and closed its borders to the world. I hope with all the news on the vaccine that the world can open up soon. We shall see. But for today, I am interview Yon Natalie Mik, an experimental dancer and researcher who works at the intersection of dance, performance studies, and ethnology. Natalie began her dance career studying classical ballet before branching out to other dance forms and disciplines. Currently, Natalie is pursuing her Ph.D on choreography and ghosts in contemporary transnational Asian performance. I met Natalie during my time in Berlin and even saw two of her performances, but I did not have a chance to interview her until recently ove