Art on the Air

Art(s) on the Air with Sharon Norwood

Join Tamara for an interview with Sharon Norwood, a conceptual artist whose work spans several media to include painting and ceramic. She was born in Jamaica, then raised in Canada, before moving to the US to earn BFA and MFA degrees in art & painting from schools in Florida.

Sharon's work investigates the ways in which race, gender, and cultural identity shape our perceptions of ourselves and other people. In her work the curly line becomes a metaphor for the “black body." She is an active educator and lecturer, and her work is part of public collections at notable institutions such as the Gardiner Museum, Washington & Lee University Museums, The Telfair Museums, and The National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Check out Sharon's work and follow her here:

https://sharonnorwood.com/
https://www.instagram.com/sharonnorwoodartist/ 

Topics in their chat include:

Sharon and other family members emigrated from Jamaica to Canada when she was about 9 years old, which plunged her into a period of muteness; getting her BFA and MFA degrees after an early career in graphic design; a "controversially famous" poet uncle; how her time at art school began with her trying to get better at painting realistic portraits, but because she was then the only student concerned with mixing colors for painting dark skin tones, her work immediately became tagged as "political" or "about race," when that wasn't even her intention; so her work then became an examination of *that* phenomenon; how many porcelain tea sets are luxury items; her group show in 2019 at Laney Contemporary; her great practice of traveling around the US and Canada for artist residencies; and a recent installation she did in the drawing room at the Owens-Thomas House, in which she also incorporated sound.

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Will Penny

Join Tamara for an interview with Will Penny, who grew up in Ontario and first moved to Savannah about 20 years ago, to get his BFA in Painting from SCAD. After graduation he moved away, later returning for his MFA in Painting, and has been in town ever since. 

* Special note that on Weds 5/22 and Thurs 5/23, he will participate in a two-day event at Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum: a light and sound festival entitled “Celestial Seafarers,” featuring Will and 6+ other local artists.
Info and tickets here:
https://www.shipsofthesea.org/celestial-seafarers

Will is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates an assortment of media ranging from painting, video, sculpture, programming, and projection. His work aims to combine traditional art making tools with new technologies, to create space to explore themes such as embodiment, presence, fantasy, and the sublime.

Check out Will's work and follow him here:

https://www.willpenny.com/
https://www.instagram.com/willpennyart/ 

Topics in their chat include:

During his BFA Will focused on refining his skills at painting realism, but when he returned for grad school he focused more on exploring concepts, and took elective classes in motion media design and visual effects; his interest in nostalgia (ex. the history of hockey masks) and working through his childhood of the 80s and 90s, both the good memories and the more traumatic ones; working through your memories, with all of the associated emotional attachments; how he came to be represented by Laney Contemporary; the whole emerging element of how archival work that incorporates technology or media is, whether it might degrade over time, and whether a museum or artist should maintain it; how his past series of 3D printed pieces were exploring the "sublime experience" of nature (but ended up too expensive to continue to produce); lessons he learned from his Big Mouth Billy Bass AI project, both from the summer heat outside of Green Truck and indoors at the recent ArtFields Festival; and his upcoming two-day event at Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum: a light and sound festival entitled “Celestial Seafarers,” featuring Will and 6+ other local artists. 

Tune in and get all the details!

Art(s) on the Air with Autumn Gary

Join Tamara and David for an interview with Autumn Gary, a largely self-taught American/First Nations painter, sculptor, and art instructor from Portland, Oregon. Her practice revolves around therapeutic art outreach, public art, and intertribal collaboration with indigenous/native arts communities.

Mark your calendar: Autumn and Alexis Javier (of Sulfur Studios) will have a joint exhibition at the #art912 space in the Jepson Center from July 19 until next February 9, with an Artist Talk & Reception on July 18! 

Check out Autumn's work and follow her here:

https://www.instagram.com/autumn.gary.art/
https://www.telfair.org/exhibitions/of-one-mind/ 

Topics in their chat include:

Growing up in an artistic and inclusive environment; making pilgrimages to the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory in Quebec; learning the Mohawk language and discovering how many words and feelings are untranslatable between it and English; having moved to Savannah in 2008, largely as the result of a dream; her sculpture project at the Savannah Center for the Blind and Low Vision, which was a collaboration with the blind users of the center; the center's Training Sidewalk, which recreates the various topographies of a city, so blind people can practice getting around; what she and AJ are planning for their collaborative sculpture and immersive Jepson Center exhibition coming up in a few months; the unstructured way she teaches at the Telfair's art summer camps; the awesome surfing metaphor we came up with toward the end of the show; and dancing with seniors. 

Tune in and get all the details!

 

* And some cool podcast news: Feedspot has highlighted Art on the Air as one of the Top 3 Georgia Art Podcasts on the web. Hooray! 

https://blog.feedspot.com/georgia_art_podcasts/

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 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!

Art(s) on the Air with Gabrielle Torres

Join Tamara and Melissa(!) for an interview with Gabrielle Torres, who earned her MFA in Painting from SCAD in 2021. She works in collage, installation, sculpture, etc, with media that runs the gamut from paint, wires, chains, live plants, fabric, and plastic bags.

In just the year since she graduated, she's shown her art at Sulfur Studios, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah Cultural Arts Center, Savannah State University, and the September Gray Gallery in Atlanta, as well as having completed an Artist Residency at Sulfur Studios. Whew! 

https://www.gabrielleelizabethtorres.com/

Topics in their chat include: what Gabrielle's early artwork of horses represented to her, teaching art to kids as early as possible, explaining to gallerists the watering process for her artwork, the symbolism of English ivy, the location that her thesis show shared with recent horror movie "Halloween Ends," and using her Sulfur residency to talk to Savannahians about colonialism and other weighty topics. 

Tune in and get all the details! 

Art(s) on the Air with Jennifer Mack Watkins

Join Tamara for an interview with Jennifer Mack Watkins, a printmaker with a studio in Sulfur Studios. She was born in Charleston and holds a B.A. in studio arts from Morris Brown College, an M.A.T. from Tufts University, and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Pratt Institute. Her work investigates the societal constructs that can leave women feeling isolated, resisting definitions of femininity based on widely held notions of beauty and cultural norms.

If you happen to be in NYC in the next couple of months, Jennifer currently has a piece on view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art(!) - "The Power of Portraiture: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints," October 13, 2022–February 7, 2023.

https://www.instagram.com/mack_jenniferprints/
http://www.mackjennifer.com/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675828/you-gotta-meet-mr-pierce-by-chiquita-mullins-lee-and-carmella-van-vleet-illustrated-by-jennifer-mack-watkins/ 

Topics in their chat include: Shina plywood (a soft wood for woodblock printing), what Jennifer's dream print shop would contain, what is risograph?, what getting rejected from an AP art class in high school inspired in her, and the soon-to-be-published children's book she illustrated: "You Gotta Meet Mr. Pierce!" 

Tune in and get all the details! 

Art(s) on the Air with Erin Dunn

Join Tamara and David as they interview Erin Dunn, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Jepson Center. Her retrospective "Feels like Freedom: Phillip J. Hampton," has recently opened and will run through January 2023, and you have to go see it! 

We chat about how Erin got into curation, tips and advice for anyone looking to enter the field, and the steps a museum takes when art arrives for an exhibition and needs to be checked over for any degradation, plus lots of specifics about the Hampton exhibition and his incredible artistic range. 

Toward the end David gets to ask her his favorite query, and she really knocks it out of the park!

Connect with Erin and her curatorial life here:

https://www.instagram.com/erindunn_art/

https://www.telfair.org/exhibitions/feels-like-freedom/ 

 

Bonus - a mini-interview with painter Laura Till Barton (at 56 minutes) about her most recent series of large-scale figures and interiors.

 

https://www.instagram.com/laura_barton_fine_art/ 

Get the answers to such burning questions as:

What are Erin’s favorite and least favorite aspects of being a curator?
What were the steps involved for her to curate and put up her current exhibition?

How did Philip J. Hampton’s work run the gamut from social realism and speaking about the Black experience in Savannah, to the expressionist/conceptual art that had begun to boom in the art world in general? 

Why might artists want to avoid making too much work on newsprint? 

 

Tune in and find out!

Art(s) on the Air - Talking Storm Drains and other murals with Jen Palmer and Dana Richardson

Join Tamara for interviews related to the City of Savannah's current "Storm Drain Art" public mural project, which is taking place all over the city. From their site https://waterconnectsusall.com/ : 

"What connects us to these waters, plants, and wildlife we don’t see? It is the storm drain in front of our homes, schools, offices, parks, grocery stores, restaurants, and gas stations....This project is part of a larger campaign to lift the lowly storm drain to a level of prominence, so we are reminded of our connection to our rivers and ocean. We are reminded that our actions impact the wildlife and local economies that depend on our waters staying healthy."

The first half of the show is a group interview at Heard Elementary School, with storm drain muralist Jen Palmer; STEAM Lab teacher & 5th grade teacher Angela Willis; 4th grade teachers Deanna Fanning and Ms Green; Assistant Principal Mary Ann Rogers Lamberth; AND three students from the school.

In the second half, Tamara interviews another storm drain muralist Dana Richardson, on site at White Bluff Elementary School. The discussion includes her other mural work (including at the Jepson Museum and Starland Dairy), and her work as an art teacher at Savannah Christian, including her theory about the process of teaching paralleling the design process.   

https://www.instagram.com/jenpalmerart/
https://www.jenpalmer.art/

https://www.instagram.com/danawrich/
https://www.danarichardsonart.com/

Get the answers to such burning questions as:

What do the science teachers recommend that homeowners do, to keep yard detritus from blowing into the storm drains?

What animals have the kids found in the creek behind Heard Elementary?

What are Dana's thoughts on teaching students about representational vs. conceptual art, and the ways we can appreciate each in their own way?

 

Tune in and find out!

Art on the Air presents Carmen Aguirre and Harry DeLorme

Two long for Field Notes for your listening pleasure!

First we spoke with Carmen Maria Aguirre about her exhibition at Roots Up Gallery, her role as curator of Grand Bohemian Gallery Savannah during the health crisis, and what she's got planned artistically now that we're sheltered in place.

Then we talked with Harry DeLorme about his 30+ years making environmentally-conscious artwork, as well as all of the work that he's been doing for Telfair Museums as Senior Curator of Education as they work to get more content online.

Two great interviews that you won't want to miss!