How does your art engage the world? How do you speak to the issues and ideas of our time? What do you hope others will remember about your life, your beliefs, your work?

The exhibition Teresita Fernandez / Robert Smithson, SITE Santa Fe opens a portal for us to consider our place in the landscape and explore the legacy of two significant artists. Their vibrant visual exchange feels both time sensitive and timeless.

This dialogue with artist Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, deepens our appreciation of resonant and divergent perspectives. Embracing change, they show us the way to and through a few of the entanglements that come with being an artist and being human. 

Host: Cathy Byrd Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio featured with permission, as follows:

Recordings on site at Spiral Jetty, Salt Lake, Utah, 2013, courtesy Anamnesis Audio. 

Extracts from Teresita Fernández, Cuajaní (2024), directed by Teresita Fernández and Juan Carlos Alom; 16mm film converted to digital video, black and white, sound; duration 20 minutes, 9 seconds.

Extracts from Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970); 16mm film; duration 35 minutes; © Holt/Smithson Foundation 2024. Blister Creek by Blue Dot Sessions

Related Episodes: Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe, Louis Grachos, Land Arts of the American West

Related Links: Teresita Fernández, Holt/Smithson Foundation, SITE Santa Fe

Today, we take you to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, for our first experience of the yearly gathering known as March Meeting. The Sharjah Art Foundation designs these programs to resonate with issues and events of the moment. March Meeting 2024 is no exception. Across three days, artists, curators, educators and writers from near and far converge to consider the power and purpose of collective creativity.

 

Here, we bear witness to diverse artistic energies behind grass roots initiatives in the Global South. Finding strength in numbers, creative activists collaborate on initiatives that bring positive change to the vulnerable communities where they live and work. All embrace multiple voices. None are unafraid of messy entanglement. They give us hope, they show us the way— to a more inclusive, sustainable, and livable future. 

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

 

Special Audio: Alex Pierce and Zoe Annesley, “Beneath a Tent, a Performance for Strings and Voice”; Bint Mbareh, “Lentil Soup as an Antidote to Rampant Wildfires”; dhaqan collective “Camel Song” and “House of Weaving Song”; La Revuelta YouTube channel; Episodio 7 - El podcast de Anamá Rojas, June 2021; Vela Vela; Stanza for Lumi

 

Related Episodes: Sharjah Biennial 15—with Hoor Al Qasimi, Searching for Libertalia—with Shiraz Bayjoo, Creating Community in Kazakhstan—with CEC ArtsLink, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity

 

Related Links: Sharjah Art Foundation, Topsoil, Sakiya, dhaqan collective, La Revuelta

With six independent curators, we explore a growing trend in the field of contemporary art. We discover that the covid epidemic and a global economic recession have not weakened their resolve to navigate the field on their own terms. Viewing challenges as opportunities, these women are channeling their creative freedom into projects that maximize resources and engage new communities.

What sparked this story: In September 2022, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art welcomed more than 40 new members during IKT’s annual Congress in Kentucky. Most are independent curators. Listen to find out what motivated this shift.

Featuring: Monique Long, Juste Kostikovaite, Lindsey Cummins, Amethyst Rey Beaver, Sarah Burney, Claire Schneider

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Music: Danver County by Blue Dot Sessions

 

Related Episodes: International Curators Champion Creative Resilience, Curators Consider Climate Change, Curating in a Time of Global Change

Related Links: International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, Great Meadows Foundation, Monique Long, Juste Kostikovaite, Lindsey Cummins, Amethyst Rey Beaver, Sarah Burney, Claire Schneider, KMAC Museum, Benham School House Inn

 

Egyptian artist Magdi Mostafa's interactive environment for the 2018 Dakar Biennial of Contemporary African Art turns the sounds of analog technology into a vibrating aesthetic force. Acting like tiny radio receivers, his handmade electronics make audible the otherwise silent electro-magnetic fields emanating from today’s myriad digital devices. He exposes the reverberations of energy emission and loss in our battery powered, wi-fi connected contemporary communications. 

In “Transmission Loss,” electronic residue becomes the main signal—the core source of energy for an audio playscape. Mostafa invites us to turn a field of full frequency noise into a sonic composition. By tweaking the dials of tone generators and manipulating vibrating devices, we can alter sounds, discover patterns and explore the mysterious interactions of feedback and inter-device communication. 

Sound Editor: Jonathan Pfeffer | Special Audio and Photos courtesy Magdi Mostafa

Related Episodes:

Samson Young Presents Hong Kong Mixtape

Stephen Vitiello

Live from Dak'Art 2018

Related Links:

Magdi Mostafa

Dak'Art 2018

Hong Kong Mixtape introduces our first guest producer: composer and artist Samson Young, and the sound art community of Southeastern China. Young orients us to a set of nine compositions with sonic program notes.

Hong Kong—a vibrant, densely populated urban center, a major port and a global financial hub—offers rich source material. Artist composers take us to the heart of student-led street protests during Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement*, invite us to feel the vibrations of traffic lights and trams, immerse us in a traditional funeral ceremony and share the sensation of abstract computer-generated hip-hop. 

Samson Young’s personal field recordings capture site-specific sounds far from Hong Kong—the singsong of a North Carolina tobacco auctioneer and a peacock clock inside the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

The set of short compositions will be broadcast on radio stations in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., and released as a podcast episode on multiple internet platforms, including Fresh Art International.

Sound artist composers and their works, in order of appearance:

Joyce Tang: Gloucester Road; Larry Shuen, Gynopedi No 1 Remix; Austin Yip, Philosophy One–Microsecond; Edwin Lo, Rabbit Travelogue: Central Region (Excerpt); Lee Cheng, Tram Ride on Sunday Afternoon; Alex Yiu, Alter ego (stereo mix); Samson Young, Tobacco Song and Peacock Clock; Fiona Lee, Tide

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio Sources noted above | Images courtesy Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong 

Related Episodes: Samson Young on Songs for Disaster Relief; Every Time A Ear Di Soun; Stephen Vitiello on Sound Art

Related Links: Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, Samson Young, Umbrella Movement

*More on Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement of 2014, rephrased from The Guardian : Hong Kong's so-called “umbrella revolution” turned the city’s gleaming central business district into a virtual conflict zone, replete with shouting mobs, police in riot gear, and clouds of tear gas. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents – young and old, rich and poor – peacefully occupied major thoroughfares across the city, shuttering businesses and bringing traffic to a halt. They claimed that Beijing reneged on an agreement to grant them open elections by 2017, and demand “true universal suffrage.” 

In October 2017, CNN reported the Umbrella Movement's return: Almost three years to the day after the 2014 Umbrella Movement shut down parts of Hong Kong, thousands of people once again took to the streets. As the city's government marked the 68th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, protesters wearing black braved stifling heat and pouring rain to call for the release of "political prisoners" jailed last month, including Umbrella leaders Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow. Those arrests marked a turnaround from 2014, when the trio helped bring out hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to call for a more direct form of democracy in the former British colony.

At the 57th Venice Art Biennale, Miami-based curator Tami Katz-Freiman guides us through the multi-media installation that artist Gal Weinstein created for the Israeli Pavilion. The artist used glue, mold, metal, and felt to transform the shining white cube into a monument to decay.

As you listen the conversation we recorded in 2017, keep in mind the mounting tensions in the Middle East today. Consider the larger question of how nations choose to represent themselves in the context of a high profile international art biennial. Weinstein's project reveals the enduring power of art to serve as portent and marker of change.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Images: Courtesy Israeli Pavilion and Fresh Art International

Related episodes: Sounds of the Venice Art Biennale 2017, Lisa Reihanna on Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Samson Young on Songs for Disaster Relief

Related links: Israeli Pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale, Gal Weinstein, Tami Katz-Freiman

 

What happens outside the art scene inspires many of today’s curators, filmmakers and artists. They mine the conceptual depth of personal and communal rituals and routines. Community gardens, shared ride systems, public processionals, weathervanes, home improvement projects, live streaming radio and selfies on the internet are just a few of the subjects and sites of their research, commentary and engagement. Projects that elevate our view of the everyday reveal life as an art form—translating the mundane into the extraordinary.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Camionnette Chérie,  original sound by Claudette et Ti Pièrre; TET CHAJE, mix by Michelange Quay; David Walters, Mesi Bondye; Yosvany Terry, Conga Reversible

Related Episodes:

Marcus Gammel (2107), Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Sounds of Miami Art Week (2016), New Performance Art (2016), Cesar Cornejo (2015), Jllian Mayer (2014)

Related Links:

Giscard Bouchotte 

Tap-Tap Chéri  

Sculptors of Grand Rue, Haiti 

Ghetto Biennale 

Jeremy Deller 

Jeremy Deller, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007/2017 

Cesar Cornejo 

rootoftwo

Whithervanes 

EN MAS’

Tide by Side 

Clair Tancons

documenta 14 Public Radio

Jillian Mayer

400 Nudes

Around the world, a growing number of listeners are falling in love with internet radio on-demand. Audio programs on a range of subjects are easy to access on laptops, computers and mobile devices. You can listen for free to podcasts in more than 100 languages. Among early adopters of the medium (we've been podcasting since 2011), Fresh Art International is one of 500,000 shows in this growing field.

We launched Fresh Art International to fill the gap in public awareness of contemporary art and culture. Our Miami-based podcast explores the center and fringe of art scenes across six continents and the Caribbean Archipelago. Fresh Art International is building a diverse oral history of contemporary art, film and architecture. We design listening experiences to stimulate, inform and inspire you for decades to come.

In the studio at Jolt Radio, Miami, we introduce four young podcasts that delve into local art and culture: Meet Them Mondays, with Christian Portilla; Kidnapped for Dinner, with Kristen Soller; Art&Company, with Alette Simmons-Jimenez; and Sunday Painter, with Alex Nuñez. Find out how and why they create their Miami-centric podcasts, what subjects interest them, and most important—when and where you can listen.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Images Courtesy Our Guests

Special Sound and Related Links: Meet Them Mondays, Kidnapped for Dinner, Art&Company, Sunday Painter

 

Activism has long been a way for artists and curators, writers and filmmakers to engage with global flashpoints, inspiring new perspectives on visible and unseen causes. Over the last century, public interventions, performative protests, and works created for public marches and events have led communities to participate in art experiences and make art themselves.

The Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter, Dreamers and Climate Change Activists expose sexual harassment and assault, race-based violence, immigrant rights violations, and the impact of sea level rise. The issues have energized today’s culture production. Contemporary artists and curators increasingly lead and invite calls to action in response to these vital concerns.

Voices in this conversation: Andrea Bowers, Ralph Rugoff, Catherine Morris, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Manolis D. Lemos, Tania Bruguera, Maria Elena Ortiz, Maria Alyokina

Sound Editor: Julien Borrelli | Special Audio: Andrea Bowers, Manolis D. Lemos, Pussy Riot | Photography: Credits in captions

Related episodes: Andrea Bowers on Environmental Activism, Ralph Rugoff on the 13th Lyon Biennial, Catherine Morris and A Year Of Yes, Tania Bruguera on Art Activism, Maria Aloykhina on Political Art

Related links: Agora, The Highline, New York; Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminism Art, Brooklyn Museum; Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, Sala de Arte Público Siquieros

Dancer choreographer Jenny Larsson enlivens our understanding of how the Far North's deep cold is essential to the balance of the Earth's biosphere. With the group known as Wild Beast Collective, she creates the interpretive dance performance Searching for Arctic Winter.

“In the winters up in the arctic when there’s no sunlight and no snow to reflect the moon, all that’s left is darkness. It’s a scary thought, these weather changes…”

Born in Sweden and based in Miami, Larsson is artistic director of the multidisciplinary international collective that hosts an annual residency in Florida. Wild Beast’s mission is to explore, stretch and deepen the experience of contemporary art by presenting site-specific projects and staging free public events to connect with local communities. Environmental issues inform and influence their work.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Wild Beast Collective

Related Episodes: Deborah Mitchell: The Artists as Guide to the Everglades, Art and the Rising Sea, Adam Nadel on Getting the Water Right, Jorge Menna Barreto on Environmental Sculpture, Rauschenberg Residency on Rising Water, Artist Residency in Everglades, Andrea Bowers on Environmental Activism

Related Links: Jenny Larsson, Wild Beast Collective

 

From inside Centro Léon, Santiago, Dominican Republic, we introduce Tilting Axis, a roving arts initiative that aims to bridge the geopolitical gap between Caribbean territories by sparking creative collaborations and cultivating cultural connectivity. Organizers Annalee Davis, Natalie Urquhart, Sara Hermann and Joel Butler talk about the genesis of Tilting Axis, why they're here and what will unfold during the fourth annual gathering.

About Tilting Axis 4: The 2018 convening in the Dominican Republic is a collaboration with the curatorial studies program Curando Caribe and two institutions — Centro León, Santiago, and Centro Cultural de España, Santo Domingo. Exploring the theme Caribbean Cultural Ecologies: Connecting Pasts, Presents and Futures, artists, curators, stakeholders, instigators and activists debate ideas about the Caribbean’s interdependent future, reimagining their collective potential.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sandra Vivas, After LaMonte Young

Related Links: 

Tilting Axis

Centro Léon

Centro Cultural de España, Santo Domingo

Today, we take you to meet to artist Deborah Mitchell in her studio on Miami Beach, to talk about the ways that Florida’s southwest coast inspires her. The contested landscape, endangered by encroaching urban development and sea level rise, is where she engages as an artist and an advocate for North America’s only subtropical wilderness: The Everglades. Mitchell’s mindful practice expresses her affinity for this fragile ecology, and her desire to learn, share and preserve its science and history.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Deborah Mitchell | Photographs courtesy the artist and Fresh Art International

Related links: The Everglades, Big Cypress, Deborah Mitchell, Artists in Residence In Everglades (AIRIE)

Curators and artists whose passion is social engagement share their experiments in relational aesthetics—participatory performances, interactive installations, community events, and inside/outside exhibitions—invite viewers to become co-creators, to take ownership in the creative process.

Curators Jochen Volz (São Paulo Biennial, Live Uncertainty, 2016), Susan Cross (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Material World, 2010-2011, The Workers, 2011-2012), James Voorhies (Bureau of Open Culture, MASS MoCA, The Workers) and Stephanie Smith (SMART Museum of Art, FEAST, 2012, and Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, Declaration, 2018) share their perspectives, as do artists William Pope.L (Baile, 2016), Theaster Gates (Soul Food Pavilion, 2012) and Marinella Senatore (Estman Radio, ongoing).

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio:

William Pope.L, Baile, São Paulo Biennial There Is Only Light (We Do Not Know What To Do With Other Worlds) performance-reading, July 2011, MASS MoCA. Produced by Bureau for Open Culture Theaster Gates, FEAST, SMART Museum of Art, University of Chicago Marinella Senatore and Estman Radio recording, courtesy Marinella Senatore and Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Contemporary Art

Related Links:

Live Uncertainty, Material World, The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility, FEAST: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Declaration, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Exhibition Award, Exhibitions on the Cusp

“This Persian Garden Project will be providing visitors with a private, yet public environment in which to engage important social and cultural issues by gathering and gardening through conversations, screenings, readings, and communal performances. I’m imagining it as a hub for activism and healing—a home for all marginalized, mediated, untold, and less celebrated stories.”

Bahar Behbahani, 2021

The art of Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahani responds to the history and character of the complex landscapes that surround her—reflecting on her cultural origins and immigrant experience. Conversations with the artist across time reveal how she has immersed herself in the form, poetry, and politics of the Persian garden. Now, her vision extends to designing and programming a public environment for activism and healing where she aims to engender a communal sense of hospitality, resistance, and resilience. When Behbahani reaches her goal, a new Persian garden will flourish in Manhattan—cultivated by the hands and minds of artists and historians, thinkers and doers from cultures around the world that call New York City home.

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Bahar Behbahani, Suspended (2007) and All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2019), courtesy the artist

Related Episodes: The Awakening, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens

 

Related Links: Bahar Behbahani, Ispahan Flowers Only Once (2019-ongoing), All Water Has a Perfect Memory/Wave Hill Public Garden, 9/11 Memorial

Today, we bring you Fresh Art International LIVE from Dakar, Senegal. We made the journey to West Africa in May 2018, to capture sounds of local art and culture and to document our first encounter with the biennial of contemporary African art known as Dak'Art.

In the first of our two live streaming broadcasts, you'll hear Marisol Rodríguez (Mexico City/Paris), one of the biennial's guest curators, talk about her work with a team of creatives based in the Hurricane Zone (Mexico's Yucatàn Peninsula, Central America and the Caribbean).

Also LIVE: our show from la Boite à Idée, or Idea Box, a cultural hub in Dakar's Mermoz district. In the garden of this space is where cultural activist Ken Aicha Sy, founder of Wakh'Art Music introduces us to a few of the creatives engaging in the local art and music scene. You'll hear from Ms. Sy, along with Franco-Senegalese artist Gabriel Dia, jazz guitarist Paride Pagnotti, I Science vocalist Corinna Fiore, and composer Nathan Fallou Fuhr. A modest local songwriter introducing himself simply as "Jean-Pierre," steps up to the microphone with his guitar to voice our melodic good-bye-for-now.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special audio courtesy ZAM ZAM, Paride Pagnotti, I Science, Nathan Fallou Fuhr and Jean-Pierre 

Trinidad-born photographer Johanne Rahaman shares hope for a better world in her Black Florida project—a modern archive of images that tell the story of Blackness in America today. Follow our Sunday morning drive to Perrine where we visit Flavas, the town's favorite breakfast spot, and stop by the House of God, home of the sacred steel ensemble known as The Lee Boys. Find out why Rahaman is taking the time to dignify the character of rural and urban black communities across the state. Keep listening to discover how she will celebrate Black water rights on Miami's South Beach during Urban Weekend 2018.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio courtesy Johanne Rahaman 

Related links: Johanne Rahaman, Flavas Miami, House of God, The Lee Boys, Zora Neale Hurston, Urban Beach Weekend Miami

Today’s conversations on Miami’s Caribbean Arts Remix reveal the genesis and goals of the three-year old Third Horizon Film Festival and the first-ever Tout-Monde (all the world) Festival. Both initiatives aim to introduce some of the boldest of today’s emerging Caribbean-born artists, filmmakers and musicians in Miami, a portal to the international contemporary art and culture scene.   Sound editing: Anamnesis Audio

We follow artist Joana Choumali from the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Bienniale to Dak'Art 2018, as she explores the shared experience of migration and violence in her birth country. Her embroidered photographs trace stories of loss and longing—depicting lone figures disappearing from home and reappearing in foreign environments, and giving shape to the emptiness left by the casualties of terrorism. Needle and thread express Choumali's empathy with the fraught human condition.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis Audio | Photography: Joanna Choumali and Fresh Art International

 

Come with us to the legendary Key West for conversations about creativity on two live streaming Fresh Art International radio shows. This cultural outpost sits quite literally at the end of the road, Mile 0 of U.S. Route 1, the highway that runs up the Atlantic Coast, from Florida to Canada. At the Studios of Key West, you'll find out what inspires the Studios’ director, why a painter who came to visit never left, and how three artists in residence have fallen in love with the island dream. Inside The Green Parrot bar, you'll meet Key West's Minister of Culture, the Parrot’s resident poet and a band from New Orleans that loves to play here!

Sound Editor Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: recorded in situ by FreshArtINTL, Band at The Green Parrot: Dave Jordan and the NIA| Photography: Monica McGivern

Art and Sports? Curator Franklin Sirmans brings them together in The World’s Game exhibition at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. Immersive installations, paintings, sculptural objects, photographs and videos by forty artists reveal how the universal language of this transnational game can define beauty, make social statements, create a sense of community and express a shared passion. Timed to coincide with the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, the exhibition celebrates soccer as the portal to a world of contemporary art.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special audio: Stephen Dean, Volta and Perez Art Museum, Miami 

Miami Marine Stadium inspires this tale of modernist architecture and Biscayne Bay, of speedboats and rock stars, of skateboarding, street art and a storm named Andrew. Advocates and artists, architects and restoration specialists tell the story. 

We begin with a flashback to our 2016 episode with dancer choreographer Hattie Mae Williams. Her creative intervention at the stadium is just one example of how the site has beckoned artists for decades. Fast forward to 2018. Miami’s International Boat Show has come the marine stadium’s home on Virginia Key for the third year in a row. The stadium is now in the first phase of a complete restoration. Don Worth, one of the founders of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, talks about the ten years of activism that led to this moment. The stadium's original architect Hilario Candela, restoration architect Richard Heisenbottle, conservation specialists Rosa Lowinger and Kelly Ciociola explain the restoration process. Among local artists behind the 200 layers of paint that now cover the concrete venue, Hox and Abstrk voice their support for the stadium's face-lift. Over the next three years, the legendary venue will come back to life, reclaiming its identity as a top destination for cultural experiences in Miami.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio from Concrete Paradise exhibition at Coral Gables Museum, courtesy of Little Gables Group | Feature photograph by Diana Larrea

Today's conversation reveals the role of private investment in temporary and permanent public art across the U.S. Contemporary art collector Cricket Taplin, who with her husband Martin Taplin once owned the legendary Sagamore Art Hotel on Miami Beach, explains her philosophy on collecting as a mode of civic engagement. Curators Claire Breukel and Dina Mitrani tell how they introduce the work of local and international artists through public art. Miami-based artists Rosario Marquardt and Roberto Behar of R&R Studios share stories behind their privately sponsored and public-funded projects from Florida to California. In a special Fresh Art International flashback, Dejha Carrington talks about the waterfront intervention she realized in 2016, through the Miami Foundation's Public Space Challenge.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery: Hiraki Sawa’s Hidden Tree, 2007 

Related links: Cricket Taplin and the Sagamore Art Hotel, Unscripted Bal Harbour, R&R Studios

American virtuoso Jason Moran is a genius jazz pianist known for performing experimental compositions in collaborative projects with visual artists—among them, Joan Jonas, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper. For the 56th Venice Art Biennale, artistic director Okui Enwezor invited Jason to stage and animate two sound environments. The multi-faceted artist brings the full range of his creative practice into play for his first museum show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this year. In our conversation, Jason Moran shares the discoveries he made while realizing recent collaborations with artists Julie Mehretu and Kara Walker.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio courtesy Jason Moran: Summon, Katastrof Karavan, Three Deuces, He Puts on His Coat and Leaves

Today, we invite three women writers to talk about Cuba as a character in newly released films. Our portal to the Cuban psyche is the 35th Miami Film Festival that brings diverse cultural perspectives to the big screen in theaters across Miami, Florida. Sharing their expertise and personal knowledge of Cuba's socio-political landscape are two sisters born in Miami, to Cuban parents: writer and filmmaker Carmen Peláez and food writer Ana Sofia Peláez. New York based journalist and filmmaker Michelle Memran joins us to remember her own encounters with the culture while making a documentary film with Cuban American playwright María Irene Fornés.

In this conversation, we consider the value of creativity, resilience, family and friendship in Cuba. The country’s historic relationship and chaotic rupture with the Soviet Union is the backdrop for the three stories we introduce. (The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union catapulted Cuba into a life-changing economic crisis from which Cubans around the world are still recovering.) The films: Cuban Food Stories, director Asori Soto; The Rest I Make Up, director Michelle Memran; and Sergio and Sergai, director Ernesto Daranas.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Featured Sound Tracks courtesy of Miami Film Festival:  Cuban Food Stories, The Rest I Make Up, Sergio and Sergai

“In a way, I've always been working on the edge of both a larger dominant society engagement and a deep engagement with my communities. My focus is really digging deep into blackness.”

Andrea Fatona, 2021

 

Toronto-based curator and scholar Andrea Fatona has been addressing institutionalized racism on her own terms since the 1990s. Our conversations across time reveal the depth of her commitment to making visible the full spectrum of Black culture in Canada. Engaging with Black communities to build an online repository while addressing algorithmic injustice, she and her collaborators are illuminating the work of Black Canadian cultural producers on the global stage.

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio 

Special Audio: Hogan’s Alley (1994), courtesy Vivo Media Arts, Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden and Whitewash (2016), Nadine Valcin, courtesy the artist

 

Related Episodes: The Awakening, New Point of View at the Venice Art Biennale

 

Related Links: The State of Blackness, Andrea Fatona/OCADU, Vivo Media Arts, Okui Enwezor, All the World’s Futures/56th Venice Art Biennale, Cornelia Wyngaarden

What is The State of Blackness?

The State of Blackness website shares digital documentation of a 2014 conference that took place in Toronto, Canada. The State of Blackness: From Production to Presentation was a two-day, interdisciplinary event held at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Harbourfront Centre for the Arts. Artists, curators, academics, students, and public participants gathered to engage in a dialogue that problematized the histories, current situation, and future state of Black diasporic artistic practice and representation in Canada. The site is now expanding to serve as a repository for information about ongoing research geared toward making visible the creative practice and dissemination of works by Black Canadian cultural producers from 1987 to present. 

 

What is Algorithmic Injustice?

Algorithms come into play when you do a search on the internet, taking keywords as input, searching related databases and returning results. Bias can enter into algorithmic systems as a result of pre-existing cultural, social, or institutional expectations; because of technical limitations of their design; or by being used in unanticipated contexts or by audiences who are not considered in the software's initial design.

On Miami Beach, we meet American writer Kurt Andersen to talk about the role of creativity in the Trumping of America. Besides writing novels, he has opined on America’s political landscape for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and his own Spy Magazine. Kurt Anderson is host and co-creator of Studio 360, a New-York based culture magazine show. His latest books explore a certain peculiarity in America’s DNA: a deep passion for fiction and fantasy. He delves into the complexities of this unshakeable character trait in Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and You Can't Spell America Without Me, a book he co-wrote with actor Alec Baldwin, our favorite Trump impersonator. Read these books and you will understand the United States in the age of the country’s 45th president.

  Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Featured audio track, You Can't Spell America Without Me via Penguin Press 

In this conversation, we talk about how the island country of Haiti has long inspired contemporary art, books and films and how the cultural complexity of immigrant communities is a creative force in South Florida. Come with us to the heart of Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood for a walk about with Carl Juste, a local cultural activist, photojournalist and artist whose family comes from Haiti and Cuba. Haitian-born writer Edwige Danticat introduces Foreigner's Home, a new film to premiere at the 35th Miami Film Festival. Miami-based curators Marie Vickles, Edouard Duval-Carrié and Tosha Grantham (with family ties to Greece and Africa, Haiti, Asia and America, respectively) talk about connecting cultural history to contemporary art in exhibitions at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex and share what sparked Visionary Aponte: Art & Black Freedom, the traveling exhibition that recently premiered in Miami. Cuban-born Lissette Mendez and Carl Juste share some of the stories behind the collective exhibition and book project Havana, Haiti and the annual Little Haiti Book Festival.

What does it mean to be a contemporary art curator in the 21st century? Perhaps subconsciously, it's about living up to the legacy of Harald Szeemann, a legendary art historian—acting on the impulse to experiment and introduce new ways of engaging with art. Follow us to Norway, where you'll meet a few of the curators gathering for the 2017 Congress of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, also known as IKT (Szeemann was a founding member in 1973). In conversations on how the environment, design technology, consumer culture and geopolitical histories inspire art, they reveal a shared interest in exposing artists’ site specific perspectives through collective exhibitions and publications.

Thale Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen, the two Norwegian artist curators of Locus Publishing in Oslo tell us about a collective artist book project that investigates how we relate to nature. They introduce their newest venture: “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” Freek Lomme, director of Onomatopee Projects explains why he stages public interventions in the shopping district of Eindhoven, in The Netherlands. The sonic thread that connects these voices is the sound art of Norwegian artist Margrethe Pettersen.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis | Special Audio: Margrethe Pettersen, Living Land—Below as Above 

Are we the last real humans? We consider this question in a conversation about art as a speculative science. Join us to ponder our uncertain future.   Laura Randall, scholar in residence at the Rubell Family Collection, shares the dark side of the exhibition Still Human, introducing artists who imagine a world where we never die and wonder if mayonnaise is alive. With curator Joey Orr (now at the Spencer Museum of Art), artist Andrew Yang contemplates our place in the cosmos and talks about how much sand it takes to build an homage to Carl Sagan inside the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Listen for the sound of your possible future in audio tracks from projects by artists Jon Rafman, Cécile B. Evans and Andrew Yang.   Related exhibitions: Post Human, 1992, Deitch Projects; In the Holocene, 2012, MIT List Center, What Absence Is Made Of, 2017-2018, Hirshhorn   Featured Sound: Jon Rafman, Poor Magic, courtesy the artist and the Rubell Family Collection; Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Andrew Yang, White Noise, courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago  

Come with us to explore Prospect New Orleans, the Crescent City’s triennial of contemporary art. Titled The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, the fourth iteration evokes the musical character of New Orleans and the surrounding natural environment—the bayous, lakes and wetlands near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Voices in this episode: Prospect.4’s artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker, former executive director Brooke Davis Anderson, artists Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Boyce, Rusty Lazer, Darryl Montana, Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters, and more!

 

Today, we take you to South Florida, for a conversation about public art with Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone. Miami Mountain is the latest in his iconic Mountain series. The North American Badlands inspire the towering stack of five brightly colored neon stones that he designed to hold sway over the palm trees in Collins Park on Miami Beach. The Bass Museum of Art’s 2016 public art acquisition arrived in pieces. The boulders came from a quarry in Nevada, making their way to the beachfront park on flatbed trucks. A professional installation crew was ready and waiting. With industrial lifts and cranes, they erected the stone monument in a carefully calculated process that took just over 13 hours.

On this live streaming radio program, we consider how artists, curators, architects and writers are responding to climate change in South Florida. King tides, flooding and eroding beaches are now part of everyday life. Our guests reveal how the rising sea has inspired two artist residency programs and an upcoming exhibition.

Natalia Zuluaga, Artistic Director at ArtCenter/South Florida, introduces the Center’s new Art in Public Life residency, a year-long opportunity for the selected artist to participate in shaping in the City of Miami Beach resiliency plan. She also talks about the exhibition Intertidal that imagines Miami's intertidal zone future, as a city above water at low tide, and flooded at high tide. 

 Also in studio, Ombretta Agro, Simon Faithfull, Will Rey, and Gustavo Oviedo share their roles in ARTSail, an ArtCenter residency exploring the Miami waterways, the South Florida coastline and the Keys. Our field recordings with recent ArtSail residents Blanca de la Torre and Mark Lee Koven to complete the picture of the floating residency's first year.

Special audio features: Archival Feedback, Stormtrack and Gustavo Oviedo, Boatski Tours

Artist Dara Friedman and curator Rene Morales talk about Perfect Stranger, Friedman's mid-career survey at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. The exhibition features seventeen major film and video works shot in Miami, New York, and Germany. Intertwined with our conversation, you’ll hear some of the sonic encounters that lie waiting behind thick velvet curtains in the multi-chambered show. It’s through these curtains that you enter Dara Friedman's Theater of the Mind.

Today we take you to the intersection of nature, art and technology to meet Amsterdam-based artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneka Gordjein of Studio Drift. They design their creative applications of new technology to make us question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. Presented during Miami Art Week 2017, Studio Drift's flying sculpture made of 300 lighted drones was especially provocative and poetic. The artists leave us believing in the unexpected potential for technology to feel natural.

Piano solo: Joep Beving

In our report from Miami Art Week 2017, Tanja Hollander, Nancy Davidson, Tania El Khoury, Sara Driver and Amy Sherald talk about the roles that social media art, inflatable sculpture, interactive performance, documentary film and figurative painting played during Miami Art Week and Art Basel 2017.

Tanja Hollander is an artist who lives and works in Auburn, Maine. No need for a ticket to an art fair or a museum to experience her social media project Are You Really My Friend? during Art Week. You could participate by visiting a small pavilion inside the Botanical Garden on Miami Beach. The vast archive of the project is currently on view in its entirety at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

For the multi-media installation Per Sway that she presents at Locust Projects in Miami, Nancy Davidson created inflatable symbols of power and control that mirror the bizarre and horrifying political climate in the world today. Based in New York, Davidson is an interdisciplinary artist known for anthropomorphic weather balloon sculptures that explore the architecture of the body.

Miami Dade College Live Arts program invited artist Tania El Khoury to share a dozen haunting stories from the Middle East. Based in London and Beirut, Tania choreographed two intimate interactive performances for venues on Miami Beach. As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a one-on-one encounter inside a small room at the New World Center. Gardens Speak is a theatrical experience for groups of ten at the Fillmore Theater.

New York based filmmaker Sara Driver takes us back to a seminal time in New York City history with her new documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sara was part of the independent film scene in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Besides making her own feature films, she’s recognized for producing early film projects by her partner Jim Jarmusch. After screenings at the 2017 Toronto and New York festivals, Magnolia Pictures plans the film's release in theaters for 2018.

Joining us Live on UNTITLED Radio, Baltimore based painter Amy Sherald talks about her work and the impact of recent art news. This year, her figurative paintings came to the world’s attention and doubled in value when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Sherald to paint the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Our conversation leads to Naima Green's writing on the subject in the New York Times.

With American-born artist Mary Mattingly, we delve into her collaborative environmental interventions over time. We remember the 2015 Havana Biennial when rainwater nourished Pull, a pair of geodesic dome eco-systems through which she engaged locals. We follow her rising interest in water to Swale, a co-created edible landscape on a barge that navigated New York City’s waterways, offering free fresh food to visitors when docked at public piers. And we contemplate the Year of Public Water that Mattingly launched with More Art in 2020. Emblematic of water issues that challenge public health the world over, the New York City story reminds us that clean water is a shared responsibility—a basic human right that we must invest in and protect. 

 

Related Episodes: The Awakening, Mary Mattingly on Human Relationships with Nature, Topical Playlist: Sustainability and the Environment 

 

Related Links: Mary Mattingly, Pull, Swale, Public Water, More Art

Mary Mattingly is a visual artist based in New York City. This episode explores three of her eco-sensitive projects. 

Pull was co-created for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, two spherical ecosystems that were pulled across Habana to Parque Central and the museum.

Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City, docked at public piers for public engagement. Following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigated New York's public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food. Swale instigated and co-created the "foodway" in Concrete Plant Park, the Bronx in 2017. The "foodway" is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. It's currently considered a pilot project.

Public Water (2020-2021) is a multiform project and installation that brings attention to New York City’s intricate drinking water system and the communities who steward upstate watersheds and drinking water sources. With this project Mattingly emphasizes the human care that goes into having access to clean water and calls for more reciprocal relationships among our neighboring communities and the planet. The project includes a digital campaign, education initiatives, and a large-scale, public sculpture installation taking place June 3 – September 7, 2021 at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. In addition, to keep this essential conversation going with park visitors into the future, the Prospect Park Alliance has commissioned Mattingly and More Art to produce a walking tour through the Park’s watershed, designed in connection with the launch of ecoWEIR, a natural filtration pilot project for the Park’s manmade watercourse. NYC-based More Art, a non-profit organization that generates socially engaged public art projects, commissioned Public Water.

Today, we take you to the Everglades, a region of South Florida once entirely covered in a shallow, slow-moving sheet of water. Established as a National park in 1947, the subtropical wilderness of endless marshes, dense mangroves and towering palms is a habitat for rare and endangered species—including manatees, the American crocodile, and the Florida panther. 

Since 2001, the wild world of the Everglades has been a temporary habitat for artists and writers who spend a month here as fellows in the program known as AIRIE, Artists in Residence in Everglades. New York based photographer Adam Nadel was a past resident. In this podcast episode, he introduces Getting the Water Right an expansive exhibition project he produced with Jessica Cattelino, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles. Together, they tell the human story of South Florida’s iconic eco-system.

Alba Triana, a Colombian-born composer and sound artist based in Miami, Florida, introduces three of her exquisite sound and light installations: Music on a Bound String questions whether or not the act of listening is indispensable to the musical experience. Microcosmos animates a cymbal to create an immersive vibrational experience. The interactive Electronic Gamelan invites visitors to perform one of the artist's compositions. Listen to discover her trans-disciplinary approach to the ever-evolving field of sound art.

How does Miami continue to expand on and elevate the international conversation about contemporary art that the world’s premiere art fair sparked in 2002 by launching Art Basel Miami Beach?

On this live streaming show broadcast from the Jolt Radio studio, Miami, Florida, meet artists and curators who are making this city a year round destination for art. We introduce exhibitions you can visit in renovated and new art spaces, the presentation of work by emerging artists in a historic building downtown and an art fair with no art for sale that will take place inside a luxury shopping center in the heart of the business district.

Field recordings: A conversation at Perez Art Museum with artist Dara Friedman and curator Rene Morales on Dara’s mid-career survey “Perfect Stranger” A site visit with curators Alex Gartenfeld and Stephanie Seidel before the opening of the new Institute of Contemporary Art Miami space

Studio guests: Curator Leilani Lynch talks about Mika Rottenberg‘s interventions at the Bass Museum Artist Lauren Shapiro introduces the ephemeral project she brings to RAW, a Young Artist Initiative pop-up experience in the Historic Post Office building Artist Nathalie Alfonso describes the live performance she presents at Fair., a free art fair where nothing’s for sale, featuring work by women artists at Brickell City Center

In this live streaming talk show on Jolt Radio, we explore the ways that Downtown Miami sparks creative interventions—how the city's cultural landscape inspires artists, curators and city developers based here.

In studio: Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Art + Design, Miami Dade College, on Living Together film and performance series and the Museum without Boundaries initiative, with sound tracks introducing upcoming performances by Carrie Mae Weems and Samora Pinderhughes.

Field Recordings: -Tour of the Cradle of Miami Civilization with artist writers Franky Cruz and Nathaniel Sandler, The Miami Rail Block By Block Initiative 2016 (with audio track excerpt from Dara Friedman's film Ishmael and the Well of Ancient Mysteries, 2014) -Conversation in Bayfront Park with Fabian De La Espriella, Miami Downtown Development Authority, and the creative team behind the January 2017 Biscayne Green Project

Listen in to hear the energy and creativity that our team and guests brought to our live streaming Breakfast and The Beat show on Jolt Radio this week. We thank you, our listeners and invite you to support our efforts to bring the voice of international contemporary art, design and film to our global community.

Click HERE to collect contemporary art by Miami artists and donate! www.freshartinternational.com/breakfast-…portunity/

Become a Member HERE! www.freshartinternational.com/supportus/

Today, we take you to Venice, Italy, to meet Hong Kong artist and composer Samson Young. He tells the stories behind Songs for Disaster Relief, his creation for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. Fake news, meta fiction, politics, pop music and philanthropy are all at play in the multi-part installation that begins in the courtyard. The pavilion’s inter-connected environments mock the music industry’s imperialist history of do-good songs while expressing appreciation for the effort and exposing the artist's drive to find real caring for the Other in today's xenophobic world.

This radio show about Architecture with a Sense of Place features conversations with artists and architects whose work responds to cultural, historical, sociopolitical and environmental influences on our built environment. Featured: Jack Sanders, Design Build Adventure, Austin; Jaya Kader, KZ Architecture, Miami; David Hartt at Graham Foundation, Chicago; Sarah Dunn, Urban Lab, Chicago; Bijoy Jain, Studio Mumbai, India; Marshall Brown, Marshall Brown Projects, Chicago; Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant, Bureau Spectacular, Los Angeles; and Gerard & Kelly at Farnsworth House.

Today, we take you to the Arsenale, a historic shipyard and main venue for the 57th Venice Art Biennale. In the New Zealand pavilion, we hear artist Lisa Reihana speak on reversing the colonial gaze in her work Emissaries. http://www.freshartinternational.com

Brought to you live from the studio at Jolt Radio, our latest program on South Florida’s film culture introduces Miami Film Festival’s GEMS 2017. Hear from MFF’s associate director Diana Cadavid and Miami-based screenwriter Joshua Jean-Baptiste (#GettheGreenlight winner) and Los Angeles based filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto (VR Escape, La Granja). Listen in on our conversations with filmmakers Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) and Antonio Mendez Esparza (Life and Nothing More). Experience film as you might never have before hearing this show: Through your ears!

Today, we take you to Germany, to experience the 2017 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster. The international public art exhibition that has taken place every ten years since 1977 activates historical, architectural, social and political sites across the city. The best way to experience this model of art in the public sphere is on foot and by bicycle.

Featuring temporary public art projects by Ei Arakawa, Aram Bartholl, Gerard Byrne, Jeremy Deller, Nicole Eisenman, Pierre Huyghe, Emeka Ogboh, Alexandra Pirici, Koki Tanaka, Benjamin de Burca/Barbara Bárbara Wagner, Cerith Wyn Evans and Hervé Youmbi.

Sound engineer: Guney Ozsan

Today’s story takes place at the intersection of art and the First Amendment. This vital element of the United States Constitution protects our right to freedom of expression, by prohibiting lawmakers from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. 

 

Artist Sheryl Oring took up this cause célèbre in 2004. In conversations across time, we trace her synthesis of art and free speech in a public performance project that quite naturally, has no end in sight. As long as there is democracy in the United States, there will be opportunities to voice opinions about the U.S. presidency, about social justice, the economy, public health, globalization, climate change, education, and more. 

 

What would YOU wish to say to the U.S. President?

Let us know on Instagram: @freshartintl #iwishtosay

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, 2004; Sheryl Oring at Washington and Lee University, 2018; I Wish to Say with University of Michigan and Wayne State University students, 2020; Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, 2020

 

Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Activism, Topical Playlist: Art and Politics, Charles Gaines on Philosophy and Politics in Conceptual Art, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens

 

Related Links: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, Activating Democracy (the book), The First Amendment Project, Oakland, CA, Creative Capital Foundation, W&L Quick Hit: Sheryl Oring Performs I Wish to Say, Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, I Wish to Say Archive, University of Michigan, Democracy & Debate Theme Semester, Stamps Gallery, Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, Mauer Broadcast with Lisa Bielawa, The Berlin Wall

On this radio program, we take you places where art intersects with cultural history. Listen to our encounters with artists Samson Young(Hong Kong) and Lisa Reihana (New Zealand) at the 57th Venice Art Biennale,. Then, join our tour of temporary public art projects designed for Münster, Germany’s Skulptur Projekte 2017.

Today, we take you to Paris for a studio visit with French artist ORLAN. Surrounded by her books, sculptures, paintings and photographs, we talk about her evolving relationship with technology.

 Sound Editor: Alyssa Moxley | Voice Over Translation: Emilia Garth | Special Audio Track: ORLAN

Today, we explore the sounds of the international contemporary art exhibition documenta 14, in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany. 

Featuring violinist Ali Moraly performing at opening ceremonies and projects by Nigerian Emeka Ogboh, Pakistani Rasheed Araeen, Norwegian Joar Nango, American Rick Lowe, Nigerian  Otobong Nkanga and American William Pope.L.