Art on the Air

Art(s) on the Air with Kristopher Monroe

Join Tamara for an interview with Kristopher Monroe: "writer, editor, and freelance culture assassin with over two decades of experience writing about the arts and other symptoms of human creativity." He was born and raised in Atlanta, where he began his freelance writing career, then lived in Seattle and NYC before settling in Savannah in 2013. 

You've probably read Kristopher's arts column in the Savannah Morning News, which he wrote for many years. He's also contributed to publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, Village Voice, Juxtapoz, Dazed & Confused, Beautiful/Decay, and Swindle. Lately he's been serving as the current Chair of the Savannah-Chatham County Historic Site and Monument Commission, AND has returned to his first writing love - sci-fi and cyberpunk - and is actively looking for an agent for his recently-completed first novel!

Check out Kristopher's work and follow him here:

https://www.cultureassassin.com/
https://www.instagram.com/savartscene/
https://www.amazon.com/What-Tired-Web-We-Breed-ebook/dp/B07XPD8PH6 

Topics in their chat include:

What Kristopher means by calling himself "a cultural assassin;" how the World Trade Organization protests impacted his life trajectory; how he fell into writing about fine art, street art, and pop art despite no formal art education; how 2013 was the last time that either Kristopher or I had a full-time job (!); his years spent balancing a weekly SMN column with 1-2 columns in the Do magazine; how he has blossomed into full adulthood in his community work; and how in the past couple of years he has gotten back to his early love of sci-fi and surrealist creative writing - one short story is available on Amazon for $1 (with cover art by local designer and art aficionado Don Sanders!) - plus a full novel; and his obscure skills with running and fixing a 35mm film projector. 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Anna Young Byrd

Join Tamara for an interview with commercial photographer and SCAD grad Anna Young Byrd, who works out of Sulfur Studios. She fell in love with Savannah at age 12 when her sister came to attend SCAD, and has now lived here since 2017. Two years out of school, she's at such an exciting time in her career - just about to transition into doing her freelance photography full-time! 

Anna's goal during a shoot is to make the subject feel like "the coolest person ever," and her dream project would be shooting Dave Grohl for a Rolling Stone cover. 

The main design element she focuses on in her work, especially during the editing process, is color. From her site: "Anna is a forward-thinking, hard-working, and inquisitive artist. She is the first to introduce herself, the first to think, and the first to solve a problem. Her fulfillment in life is to bring joy to others. What better way to do that than taking some kickass photos."

Check out Anna's work and follow her here:

https://www.annayoungbyrd.com/
https://www.instagram.com/annas_eyeball/ 

Topics in their chat include:

How being a people person is so beneficial to her work in making her photo subject feel comfortable as quickly as possible; how coming to Savannah and finding other creative people made her transition from introversion to extroversion; using a digital Nikon as her first camera when she was young and experimenting; how the current trendy look in digital photography is to make it look like it was done with film - light leaks, grain, dust marks - i.e. the perks of digital but with the aesthetics of film; an added bonus of working in photography is working with her hands - putting lights and backgrounds together, and breaking things down; how getting her "big boy camera" allows her to take photos with huge file sizes, big enough to print at billboard size; the importance of using a reference photo to show clients her inspiration/direction/essence of her idea; she takes us through the start-to-finish process of a shoot; how choosing the wrong music once hurt her connection with a model on a shoot; being the creator of her set; how photography is the study and control of light; what is a "treatment book?"; how one's artistic community can help each other through imposter syndrome; and the elaborate setup and editing process it took to create her beautiful shot of a Neutrogena jar leaning over in water. 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Nathaniel Thompson

Join Tamara for an interview with photographer and multidisciplinary artist Nathaniel Thompson. He was born in Thailand, grew up on St. Simon's Island, and has now lived in Savannah for about 4 years. He primarily uses vintage and analog devices such as early digital cameras, 1980’s slide projectors, medium formats, 35mm, and instant film.

Nathaniel finds inspiration through his current geographical location, road trips, and historical reenactments, depicting images of everyday architecture that are both nostalgic and beautiful, and the relationship between the past and present. 

He has a show up now through June 21st at Cafe M here in Savannah, which includes photographs, a vintage iMac displaying his images, and a hand-bound limited edition photo book for sale.

Check out his work and follow him here:

https://www.nathanielryanthompson.com/ 
https://www.instagram.com/nr.thompson/ 

Topics in their chat include:

Nathaniel grew up with a photographer dad and grandpa and received his first camera at age 6 (a digital Kodak point-and-shoot); in high school he entered Reflections, the PTA-run art contests, and won multiple times up to the county and/or state level; armed with his first film camera, he took a 3ish-months-long solo road trip from Ohio all over the eastern U.S., generally just sleeping in his car; how his drives on the small roads between Savannah and Brunswick inspired his love of folk and outsider art, as well as estate sales and thrift stores to find ephemera and vintage photography equipment; how he recently spent time with Nomadic Photo Ark, learning their darkroom process and how to use their vintage 4x5 camera; what is lomography film?; development is happening very quickly here in the south, and he is driven to discover sites and buildings and document before they've changed; what was Kodachrome film, other than the title of the Paul Simon song?; and the recent shift of people going back to printing out photos and hanging them up in their home, or even reenacting "vacation slide viewing" by having PowerPoint parties (!). 

 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Katie Glusica

Join Tamara for an interview with textile maven Katie Glusica. She came to Savannah in 2008 to pursue her MFA in Fibers from SCAD, where she would have access to a then-rare and sought-after jacquard loom. 

Post-graduation, she exhibited her personal textile work in tons of renowned shows, including the Smithsonian Craft Show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, and a SCAD booth at Design Miami of Art Basel. She uses weaving as a means to engage her viewer with the quantum concept of wave/particle duality. 

At the same time, Katie launched her business of repairing and restoring handmade rugs, caning, wicker, and rattan. In recent years she has *also* done consulting work with the Telfair Museum and the Owens-Thomas House, assisting them with various textile preparation, installation, and appraisal. 

Check out her work and follow her here:

https://www.instagram.com/katieglusica/ 
https://www.katieglusica.com/ 

Topics in their chat include:

How landing a part-time job at a rug restoration shop in Richmond during undergrad inspired Katie's lifelong work; at her fine craft shows she created an immersive gallery space to create an "experience;" she built her business of restoring furniture and rugs with an eye toward sustainability, which is antithetical to the design world which relies on you consuming every few years; her work with the Oglethorpe Plan Coalition, dedicated to preserving the Savannah Downtown National Historic Landmark District; her message to artists: tenacity is very important and don't be afraid to hear "no;" rugs are a special niche even within the special niche of textiles, and not taught in very many academic spaces; what does "deaccessioned" mean?; and how the Jacquard loom, developed in 1804, was the first machine to use binary code. 

 

* More info on the Oglethorpe Plan Coalition:

The National Historic Landmark District in Savannah, Georgia, designated in 1966, is now under threat from excessive and inappropriate development. The district is supposed to be protected by local ordinances, but increasingly, important provisions in these ordinances are not being enforced. The National Park Service grades the district as “threatened,” and preservationists are now grouping together to take action to restore the district’s integrity.

https://oglethorpeplancoalition.org/ 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Curtis Bartone

Join Tamara for an interview with Curtis Bartone, printmaker and SCAD printmaking professor, who's lived in Savannah since 2001. His paintings, drawings, and etchings focus on the uneasy relationship between human beings and the natural world, exploring the idea of wilderness and how it has changed from being a real place–mysterious, unknown, and pristine–to a distorted fiction.

Curtis does a great job breaking down all the ins and outs of various printmaking processes, including lithography, intaglio, and etching, and also his subject influences -- from Italian Renaissance painting and 17th-century Dutch still life to 19th-century scientific illustration. 

Check out his work and follow him here:

https://www.instagram.com/cabartone/
https://www.curtisbartone.com/ 

Topics in their chat include:

Our perception of the natural world vs. the reality of it; his fascination with animals who have been brought / have migrated to an area where they aren't naturally found; how Curtis started out as a painter but fell in love with printmaking in an etching class during grad school at Northwestern; what is Bavarian limestone?; the Tamarind Institute, a a lithography workshop in New Mexico; the art of purposefully leaving some areas of a piece unfinished; how printmaking is the art of "thinking in layers"; his experience doing an artist residency in Iceland; how much he's learned from bearing witness to his students' printmaking experiments in his 20+ years; and the best artist advice he's gotten. 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Mary Hartman

Join Tamara for an interview with Mary Hartman, who moved to Savannah in 1996 to get her M.F.A. in Painting from SCAD and has lived here ever since. She works with vine and compressed charcoal, pastel, and acrylic washes, traditionally on heavy hot pressed watercolor paper, but lately has branched out into canvas and panel as well.

Her work is very distinctive - an abstracted, gestural way of depicting realism. The subjects of her ethereal drawings include: horses and other livestock; still life objects such as lemons, juice presses, and cast iron pans; and anvils; as well as portrait commissions. 

Check out Mary's work and follow her here:

http://www.maryhartman.net/ 
https://www.instagram.com/maryhartmanstudio/ 

Topics in their chat include:

How Mary spent the pandemic delving into lots of virtual foundation & drawing classes on classical technique; the different types of erasers one can use on charcoal, including parts of your hand; how the starting of a piece is the absolute worst but using toned paper or laying down an immediate field of charcoal helps a bit; her love of depicting a lemon; what is liquid pencil?; her night owl tendencies; the technical aspects that have to go into framing a charcoal or pastel piece - floating mats, and spacers in the glass; how you can currently view Mary's work upstairs at PW Short on Whitaker St., and finally - she's working toward putting on a solo show sometime in the next year, possibly called Decommissioned! 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with the Nomadic Photo Ark

Join Tamara for an interview with Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher, who have been on the road since July 2021, working from their Nomadic Photo Ark - a converted cargo trailer equipped with a full black & white darkroom and photo editing space. Together they're creating A Portrait of US, "photographically exploring and recording audio of the divisions and similarities in ideologies within our current American culture as we emerge from the pandemic." 

Monica & Adam are documenting the U.S. one community at a time, one person at a time, one story at a time, and have been working here in Savannah since early March. They have an exhibition up at Sulfur Studios, with a closing reception this Friday, April 7. 

Check out the Nomadic Photo Ark project and follow them here:

https://portraitofus.substack.com/
https://www.instagram.com/nomadicphotoark/
https://www.nomadicphotoark.com/ 

Topics in their chat include:

How this project perfectly combines Monica's training in analog photography, plus Adam's experience of traveling and working in audio recording and editing; what is the first radio station that ever played Lady Gaga?; Monica's 1800's-type steel camera that was built in the 1940s; the process of shedding your worldly goods to live on the road; how this long exhibition at Sulfur Studios has allowed them to analyze their how they pair art & sound for display; how they made a typical "rookie mistake" with their trailer early on in their project; how they juggle the administrative tasks involved in their work, such as constantly booking artist residencies; and how Adam edits peoples' response down to 5 minutes.  

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Kamryn Shawron

Join Tamara for an interview with Kamryn Shawron, who moved to Savannah from Ocoee, Florida about 10 years ago to earn her SCAD degree in Fibers, and now works as a multimedia artist. Her work focuses on the integration of portraiture, embellishment, and fibers, and she describes it as "stitching and sewing beads into both found and original photos, canvas, and everything else."

Kamryn has created a large body of work stemming from her own photos shoots, which she directs and designs, using friends and family as models, and then embellishes the photos to craft her desired narrative(s). In the past 2 years, she's had both a group and a solo exhibition at galleries in Atlanta, and she also installed a large piece in the Whitaker Street Windows, which locals will know as the tall windowed column just outside of Starland Yard. 

Check out Kamryn's work and follow her here:

https://www.instagram.com/kamrynleelu/
https://www.kamrynshawron.com/

 

Topics in their chat include:

How Fibers artists Tricia Cookson and Sam Norgard influenced her early career; describing her art as "painting with beads;" the post-college transition and how being furloughed during COVID was what really gave her the time first to create a big extensive piece, and then to launch her full-time art career; lessons she has learned about running a needle back and forth through a photograph as opposed to a piece of canvas; does Kamryn's way of working make her a crow, a raccoon, or a surgeon?; her words of wisdom when it comes to stitching various areas across a large surface; her "Mystery Bag" pieces and how she loves decorating and embellishing them; and the theme of celebration/joy/happiness in her work.

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Jessica Leigh Lebos

Join Tamara for an interview with Jessica Leigh Lebos: Writer, Adopted Southerner, Anti-Socialite, Camellia Thief (and, as we decided during the interview, Public Menace).

She arrived in Savannah around 2005, and then spent years writing 3 columns a week during Jim Morekis's era of the Connect Savannah, where she was voted Best Newspaper Columnist. She's also a 2022 Winner in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

In 2018 she compiled her essays into a book called "Savannah Sideways." Since then, she publishes regularly to a Substack (which you can subscribe to), and has a second novel due to come out soon! 

Read Jessica's work and follow her here:

https://jessicaleighlebos.substack.com/ 
https://www.instagram.com/savannahsideways/
https://www.amazon.com/Savannah-Sideways-Jessica-Leigh-Lebos/dp/0692950877  (But we encourage you to shop local ;) )

Topics in their chat include:

Spending her first Savannah year living on Tybee Island; her view that the writing is just the deliverable for the privilege of the research, thought, visits, and conversations she gets to do; how a Savannah River visit by Ralph Nader in the 70s eventually led to the Clean Water Act; her recommendations for for the best camellia viewing around town; will Jane Fishman's musical "Johnny Mercer and Me!" eventually make it to Broadway?; juggling other copywriting gigs, including for Savannah Bee Company; and can she be a cross between Carrie Bradshaw and the Joan Didion of Savannah? 
 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with William Kwamena-Poh

Join Tamara for an interview with William Kwamena-Poh, who moved from Ghana to the U.S. as a young man. After studying art in college, he eventually arrived in Savannah in 1995 and has been here ever since.

He's a full-time artist with a City Market studio, a busy schedule of selling (and winning awards) in art fairs across the country, and he even had a solo exhibition at the Jepson Center for the Arts in 2019-20. Through his gouache paintings, William depicts scenes from Ghana, in order to communicate to diverse communities about a people who have been disenfranchised and viewed negatively throughout the years. 

Also, William was one of 5 artists profiled in the recently-released Savannah episode of the Amazon Prime show "The Story of Art in America!"

https://www.williamkfineart.net/
https://www.instagram.com/kwamenapoh/ 

Topics in their chat include:

being taught to draw without holding/using an eraser; how making $600 in a 1-night art show in Chicago in the late 80s made him move there; how screenprinting teaches you to really pare down your work's shapes and colors; his philosophy on being open to bargaining when you sell art at fairs; opening his City Market studio AND a gallery in 1996; how he started painting with gouache literally because a tube cost less than a tube of watercolor; his love of driving cross-country for shows; and working toward a big museum show coming up in 2025 at the Dennos Museum in Michigan.
 

Tune in and get all the details!