We talked with people and we listened. (Artblog 2003-2025)
Sometimes we recorded the conversations for Artblog Radio. Sometimes interviews worked better as written stories. In all events, we loved talking with artists, arts administrators, gallerists, museum workers. We loved to learn and to share with you the joy in our discoveries.
As a Chinese-born artist making a life for herself in Philadelphia, Yixuan Pan thinks a lot about translation and the limitations of language. In fact, since earning her MFA from the glass department at Tyler School of Art last year, she has built a rich and varied practice around the insights gained from living with confusion. Here she speaks with Matt Kalasky, ahead of her February 28th collaborative performance at Vox Populi Gallery, about starting with wonder and chasing art across media. Can a conversation where no questions are allowed qualify as studio time? Listen to find out. Matt interviewed Pan at Moore College of Art and Design’s TGMR radio station on February 13th, 2018; the podcast is 21 minutes long.
Read MoreMatthew interviews Serbian performance artist, Tanja Ostojic, whose recent project was a research and art mission to meet and work with all the women she could find who bore the same name. She met and worked with 33 Tanjas with her same last name. The Tanjas project raises issues about naming, identity, gender, war and migration.
Read MoreMatthew Rose hears about about the Noble Art of Collecting and calls up the author, Mari Shaw, to find out more about what propels collectors to amass art purchases into an array that they live with and sometimes give to museums.
Read MoreThe Fabric Workshop and Museum, founded in 1977 by arts visionary Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud, is celebrating its 40th birthday with a major retrospective exhibit. Process and Practice: 40 Years of Experimentation hilights archived ephemera from the institution’s famed artist-in-residence program that has been preserved for decades in “artist boxes.” Artblog’s Imani Roach spoke with Susan Lubowsky Talbott, the Museum’s Executive Director, about exhibiting “failures,” engaging the public, and her legacy. What was the most surprising thing she discovered in those artist boxes? Listen to find out. Imani interviewed Susan at the Fabric Workshop and Museum on January 9th, 2018; the podcast is 30 minutes long.
Read MoreYou’ve probably seen Kelli Morgan around town, presenting her research, working with students, moderating conversations with artists, and generally staying busy as PAFA’s first Winston & Carolyn Lowe Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Fine Arts. Now she’s heading off on a new adventure as Associate Curator of American Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Artblog’s Imani Roach spoke with the Detroit native on the eve of her departure about her unconventional path to museum work and her fresh vision for curating the American canon. Listen to hear her advice for aspiring young curators and much more. Imani interviewed Kelli at Moore College of Art and Design’s TGMR radio station on January 3rd, 2018; the podcast is 39 minutes long.
Read MoreWit Lopez is a fiber artist, performer and independent curator whose work encourages audiences to touch, manipulate and even wear it. Artblog’s Imani Roach spoke with this former theater kid about accessibility, performing for the camera and confronting their body as a spectacle. Can marginalized artists use humor to subvert their relationship to art institutions? Listen to find out. Imani interviewed Wit at Moore College of Art and Design’s TGMR radio station on December 12th, 2017; the podcast is 34 minutes long.
Read MoreImani chats with poet, dancer and playwright, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, about his libretto for “We Shall Not Be Moved” — an Opera Philadelphia O17 festival world premier with music by Daniel Bernard Roumain and direction by Bill T. Jones. Brutal and poetic in equal measure, the story unfolds as a band of North Philly teens flee the violence and school closings of their neighborhood to take refuge at the abandoned Osage Avenue site of the 1985 MOVE bombing. Throughout the opera, dancing ghosts and a dense web of black cultural references, old and new, demonstrate the past is always with us.
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