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The NewCrits Podcast

with Ajay Kurian

This is what critical care for the arts sounds like. Meaningful conversations on creative practice and the conditions shaping artistic life today. Tune in on the second Thursday of every month for SPENT with Ajay Kurian, our series on creative burnout and breakthrough, and on the fourth Thursday for The Forum, our recorded artist talks. Subscribe today at newcrits.substack.com or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also join our community for transcripts and archival access via the Substack app or watch on YouTube.

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Episodes 26

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  • October 27 · 1 hr 27 min

    The/Forum 26 | Kevin Beasley

    Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Kevin Beasley, the recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2026 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (congrats, Kevin!). Beasley's sculpture, sound, and drawing hold together histories that rarely share a room. At the Whitney Museum in 2018, Beasley’s A View of a Landscape had a cotton gin motor whirred silently inside a soundproof vitrine: its noise set loose and transformed by collaborators in the listening room next door.Through this conversation, Beasley separates the responsibility of a Black artist from the expectations placed on one by landing on the core values of community care. He explains why the gestures that matter most to him are the ones he can never replicate and how thirty years from now, he’d like to run a marathon. In a way, he’s already running one. 00:00 – Episode Preview 00:58 – Introduction to Kevin Beasley 03:39 – Sport Utility, Marshawn Lynch, and artistic vulnerability 07:33 – Playfulness and the pressures of the art world 10:40 – Football, violence, and material experimentation 15:10 – Automotive design and the origins of working with resin 18:54 – Crushing a Cadillac: Family, identity, and American history 25:43 – Childhood, drawing, and early artistic influences 31:58 – From automotive design to fine art 37:17 – Protecting yourself and finding mentorship as an artist 43:30 – A View of a Landscape and the Whitney exhibition 48:10 – The cotton gin motor, memory, and sound 55:46 – Storytelling, abstraction, and accessibility 58:09 – Multiple entry points into a work of art 01:03:53 – Identity, contradiction, and embracing complexity 01:05:47 – Kevin's hopes for the next thirty years 01:07:52 – Audience Q&A: Landscape and the act of drawing 01:12:55 – Responsibility versus expectation for Black artists 01:17:53 – Artistic freedom, core values, and social pressures 01:22:00 – Performance, choreography, and capturing moments in time Full transcript available soon on Substack 🎧 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #7
    October 8 · 1 hr 6 min

    SPENT Episode Seven | Stephanie Wambugu

    Ajay Kurian sits down with writer Stephanie Wambugu, whose debut novel Lonely Crowds arrived last year to considerable acclaim, for a conversation that begins with the anxiety of ambition and opens into questions of friendship, artistic survival, and what it costs to keep working in a world where someone else's book lands on the shelf every Tuesday.Wambugu, the youngest child of Kenyan immigrants, talks about the novel's two Black women artists coming up in the 1990s New York art world, and the friendship at its center: one woman who decides very early to make herself secondary to the other. She and Kurian trace how Ruth and Maria felt real enough to believe in, why Wambugu finds them more self-sabotaging the further she gets from the book, and why friendships can wound as lastingly as romances while having little language to describe the damage. She explains why she set the book in the 1990s: a friend's thesis on the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which aimed to put white artists in the minority for the first time, struck her as a moment of hope that never fully materialized.The conversation also turns to the habit of reading Black writers sociologically, whatever the work is actually about, and to what Wambugu calls the defanging of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin into totems of feel-good inspiration. Along the way, Kurian shares the story of a gifted artwork surfacing at an Ohio flea market, and Wambugu reflects on how watching books arrive and quietly disappear at a bookstore shaped her sense of ambition and impermanence, and taught her how rare staying power really is. 00:40 — Introduction to Stephanie Wambugu and Lonely Crowds 03:32 — Family, immigration, and choosing a creative life 07:22 — Altered states, experimentation, and transcending the self 11:40 — Dreams, the unconscious, and writing fiction 16:19 — Creating Ruth and Maria: believing in fictional characters 19:26 — Codependency, boundaries, and the psychology of Lonely Crowds 20:41 — The novel’s circular structure and ambiguous ending 23:43 — Turning real experiences into fiction 26:57 — Friendship, emotional wounds, and the influence of Sula 31:18 — Protecting one’s inner life and maintaining boundaries 35:47 — Ambition, responsibility, and knowing your limits 38:08 — The single-mindedness required to pursue art and writing 40:29 — Publishing, professional anxiety, and sustaining momentum 44:51 — Why Lonely Crowds takes place in the 1990s art world 46:08 — The 1993 Whitney Biennial, representation, and artistic opportunity 53:19 — Race, sociological readings, and the limitations of criticism 57:31 — Jazz, Thelonious Monk, and navigating white institutions 1:00:25 — Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and the simplification of literary figures 1:03:53 — Why contemporary criticism should match the quality of the work 1:05:24 — Closing rapid-fire questions Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #25
    September 22 · 1 hr 14 min

    The/Forum 25 | Alex Da Corte

    Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Alex Da Corte, whose recreations, personas and total immersion into figures from Marcel Duchamp to Eminem have made him one of the most distinct and prolific voices working today. So much so that he has been tasked with co-curating the Whitney Museum’s survey on Roy Lichtenstein with Meg Olni, opening on October 11th, 2026.The conversation begins with the sandwich as a transgressive object — central enough to his practice that the title of one show, As Is Wet Hoagie, is tattooed on his arm. It morphs into reflections on dressing up as Michael Myers to stalk his own parents, and lands with the strange intimacy of inhabiting someone else's body to better understand your own.Da Corte traces his practice back to his first video, made when he was thirty, living with his parents, and costuming himself out of grocery-store flour and coffee — a far cry from the eight to fifteen hours of prosthetics his work now demands. He describes the disorienting experience of being mistaken for Eminem by a stranger — and, for a jet-lagged moment, mistaking himself for Slim Shady too — an accident that led him down a decade-long road of playing the rapper. He and Kurian also discuss his recreation of a lost Paul Thek sculpture and his one-time-only performance as Duchamp at the Met.Throughout the conversation, Da Corte reflects on how objects and images shift as memory erodes and on what happens when you finally meet your own fantasy. Kurian, at the close, calls Da Corte a sort of “pop doula,” and the two end by giving thanks to not just one another, but also to the wind. 00:00 – Introduction to Alex Da Corte 04:00 – Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2 08:34 – Costuming, puppetry, and the body 11:17 – Illness, identity, and artistic practice 13:03 – The sandwich as a recurring motif 14:03 – As Is Wet Hoagie: Memory, fantasy, and fiction 19:19 – Religion, transformation, and memory 22:45 – Dementia and the architecture of memory 24:06 – Parade: Storefronts and nostalgia 28:40 – Letter writing, waiting, and time 30:06 – The Pink Panther and inhabiting characters 35:02 – Becoming Eminem 38:49 – Stalking his parents as Michael Myers 43:03 – Reconstruction as an act of love 45:55 – Recreating Paul Thek’s The Tomb 50:31 – Embodiment and becoming Marcel Duchamp 53:26 – Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney 56:54 – Art, friendship, and personal transformation 01:01:05 – Giving thanks to the wind 01:02:48 – Audience Q&A 01:03:18 – Easternsports: Collaboration and production 01:07:48 – Acting, improvisation, and embodiment 01:11:20 – Artistic confidence, permission, and ego 01:14:01 – Closing Full transcript available on Substack 🎧 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #6
    September 10 · 1 hr 11 min

    SPENT Episode Six | Vijay Masharani

    Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Vijay Masharani for a conversation that begins with a confession about hating the highway and expands into an exploration of cliché, mortality, and what it means to keep making work from inside an unresolved illness.Masharani, who showed in this year's MoMA PS1 Greater New York, talks about his approach to video and drawing — work that hits hard and fast, straight down the middle, refusing easy resolution — and traces how his practice shifted after being diagnosed with blood cancer twice, including a hospital stay where he was ordering drawing paper from Blick's website on bedrest. He and Kurian dig into cliché as a kind of sedimented truth, Drake's theory of what makes a pop hit work, and why Philip Guston's relationship to mortality and mass has become a constant reference point for him.Throughout the conversation, Masharani resists the idea that his illness is a resolved, past-tense event — describing himself instead as living in a kind of purgatory, mediated by a monthly blood test that's essentially binary — and reflects on impatience, discipline, and why, even at his lowest, he never stopped being an artist. Timestamps 00:00 — “I hate the highway”02:47 — Cliché and immediacy04:53 — The deer in the green tank10:55 — Greater New York at MoMA PS113:01 — Cancer and recurrence14:25 — Art after cancer21:42 — A game of taste24:16 — Art and politics32:26 — The “stove toucher” tendency36:29 — Making exhibitions41:03 — Exhibitions as albums46:32 — Drake and the imperfect pop hit49:01 — Returning to art after cancer53:23 — Why keep making art?57:32 — Philip Guston and mortality01:00:54 — Soutine, painting, and mass01:03:01 — Living in purgatory01:05:27 — Modernism and illness Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on the highway. Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this. Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on there. I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway. Ajay Kurian: Really? Vijay Masharani: I hate the highway, dude. I think the highway is wrong. I think it’s American thanatophilia, as an urban spatial form. I hate the highway. Ajay Kurian: Vijay Masharani is an artist, writer, and educator based in the Bay Area. He makes drawings, videos, and texts that are obsessed with the letter, the glyph, the geometry of meaning. Work that hits you hard and fast and then refuses to let you go. His videos open cold. His drawings span from the highly structured to the loose and associative, and the whole practice is organized around a single conviction: if the problems of language make you uncomfortable, you can’t flee to the body. And if the body makes you uncomfortable, you can’t just retreat above the neck. He’s currently showing at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, a survey of the New York art scene that happens once every five years, which is the most eyes he’s ever had on his work. I’ve known Vijay since he was in undergrad. My first visit with him was back in 2016 at MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since then, we’ve gotten closer, collaborated on projects, and even spent a summer together at Skowhegan, where I was faculty and he was a participant. Not long after, he was diagnosed with blood cancer. Then diagnosed again. He’s made three shows since. We talked about what it means to make art from purgatory — not after a near-death experience, but inside one, where the blood test every month is essentially binary and the book is not yet closed. We talked about cliché as a sedimented truth, about why Drake said there has to be something wrong with a pop hit, about what Philip Guston understood that most painters don’t. And we talked about what changed in the studio after cancer and what stayed the same, and about why, in the end, he couldn’t stop making things even when he had every reason to. This dude was literally ordering paper from Blick on his hospital bed. Here is my conversation with Vijay Masharani. Vijay Masharani: I like clichés. I like so many clichés and I like stuff that’s right down the middle. I think in art there’s a bias toward the oblique, and every now and then it can feel really good to go down the middle. To me, that’s what a cliché can do. I think if people have responded to the work, for example, — especially the video work from early on — it’s because there’s something about the standard for video art, the way it stands apart from, or at one point stood apart from, though maybe still does from the more oblique or highly mediated kind of thing. I think the work for me was, hopefully, pretty visually forward and kind of frontal, but then not immediately digestible. That combination. Ajay Kurian: So what you’re saying is the video form in early video art may come off as a little esoteric or oblique to people used to watching TV and films, but your work goes more down the middle — there’s something more immediately explosive, something that can just hit and grab. There’s a hook and then there’s something to unravel the hook. Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I like hitting ‘em… I know that sounds stupid, like sports. I actually listen to a lot of NBA podcasts and they’ve definitely changed my syntax a little bit — but I talk about art with it, which is very true. I like to hit them hard and fast, but not in a way where it’s over after that. Ajay Kurian: Right. It’s not like that provides resolution. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: It’s just one method among many. Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. It makes you turn your head, but then you kind of stick with it, like, “Oh wait, what?” Maybe it’d be good to put something concrete to it. In the second video I have on view in this trilogy at PS1 — the green tank with the deer in it — Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it’s very Twin Peaks. On a formal level, looking at a giant rectangle of neon green, and then noticing a deer somewhere in it, and realizing, okay, this is an aquarium. That piece is one of those moments that’s extremely satisfying to look at. It’s mesmerizing. You fall into a place that doesn’t feel resolved, but it also feels like it gives you enough to enjoy it. Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it’s the opening shot of the piece — we’re already in it,there’s no ramp-up to that. Now, I’m like, do I do this with water Pokémon now? Ajay Kurian: What? Vijay Masharani: Because the other one opens with a crab. Ajay Kurian: Oh, got you. A singing crab, yeah. Vijay Masharani: A singing crab. A deer that can breathe underwater, whatever. There’s something about starting with water, and to me — I think I’m using the term wrong, but mentally I call it a cold open, because a cold open is when you’re just dropped into something. So you can see how I’m using different terms to describe the same kind of deployment of immediacy. When I say “straight down the middle” or “frontal” or “drop in,” I’m referring to the same kind of move in art with different words. Ajay Kurian: And it always evolves. In terms of 3D animation and scoring, it seems like you’re a little more resistant to using pop music, or the quintessential rap song of the moment as a quick identifier — like, “oh shit, we’re here.” Vijay Masharani: Yeah, totally. It’s really tempting. Early on I think that was what felt interesting about video — the infinitely recombinable game of music and visual media. There’s still a fair amount of that in the workflow — for example, while I’m editing in Premiere, whatever’s on is just on. At least two of the songs in the new video, which is called O-----K — with five em dashes between the letters O and K, I can talk about the reason for that in a second — but two out of the three songs I kept as samples just happened to play while I was listening to NTS. One was a song I already knew, Young Thug’s “Love Me.” The other is by, I think, an indie rocker named Clarence Clarity has a song called “Cancer in the Water.” That’s another good way to demonstrate the straight-down-the-middle thing. I was trying to figure out what to put over the driving sequence with me and my dad, where I’m wearing the m… Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #24
    September 2 · 58 min

    The/Forum 24 | Ed Solomon

    Screenwriter Ed Solomon discusses The Christophers and reflects on his career and creative process. Solomon discusses mentorship, writing intuitively, working with actors, navigating criticism, and finding a way through creative blocks. Hosted by Ajay Kurian 00:00 — Welcome to The Forum 00:18 — Garry Shandling 02:34 — Writing The Christophers 04:05 — Trusting the writing process 06:37 — When success gets in the way 08:37 — Letting the project evolve 10:08 — The four stages of competence 12:24 — Letting characters surprise you 15:04 — Writing for great actors 17:35 — Rehearsing with Ian McKellen 18:47 — The power of silence 20:19 — How scenes change each other 23:10 — The terror of letting go 25:28 — Finding the flow state 26:17 — Inspiration is bullshit 28:51 — When Lori became his mirror 34:17 — Give your characters a history 35:48 — Cultural tension in storytelling 38:08 — The pain of criticism 40:16 — How to take notes 43:34 — Managing creative emotions 46:28 — His mother’s influence 49:55 — The importance of mentorship 52:41 — Audience Q&A 52:59 — Getting through the second act 54:17 — Getting unstuck 55:00 — Working backwards 56:00 — What would be the coolest thing to happen next? 58:38 — Closing Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • August 26 · 51 min

    The/Forum 23 | Inside The Studio Panel

    Three artists reflect on their experiences working as assistants to established artists. Ian Cheng, Darren Bader, and Jamian Juliano-Villani discuss apprenticeship, authorship, studio culture, and the lessons—both practical and personal—they carried into their own practices. 00:00 — Introduction02:36 — Becoming Assistants04:10 — The Studio as Education07:37 — Learning the Craft09:13 — Building the Impossible10:54 — Authorship14:54 — Power & Studio Culture18:37 — Learning Through Failure22:50 — Good & Bad Habits30:23 — Assistants as Teachers34:30 — Knowing When to Leave40:12 — Assistants & Authorship42:03 — Learning the Business45:28 — Art & Precarity47:42 — Why Do It? 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: Next to me here is Ian Chang. He’s an artist known for his live simulations, works that unfold over time using game engines and AI. His work has been shown at the Serpentine Galleries, MoMA PS1, Gladstone Gallery, and earlier in his career, he worked with Pierre Huyghe, which I think informs, uh, some of the ways that Ian had started to think about his work. But I’m curious to see what that relationship was. Pierre is an internationally renowned artist and has worked in massive ecosystems, taking over entire museum spaces and building things from bacteria to, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, going down the line. Next is Darren Bader. Darren is an artist whose work spans objects, language, and instructions, often questioning what an artwork even is or who it belongs to. He’s exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Uh, sorry, the Museum of Modern Art in Dallas and his practice consistently unsettles ideas of authorship, making him especially interesting voice here. And he worked for the artist Urs Fischer. Um, you mentioned another artist you worked. 00:01:11 Darren Bader: For, Donald Bachelor, whom, um, the late Donald Bachelor whose estate I work for now, but he’s um. Well, yeah. 00:01:19 Ajay Kurian: We’ll get there. 00:01:19 Darren Bader: I did, yes, I did my time with two artists, um, very, very educational. 00:01:25 Ajay Kurian: And last but not least, Jamie and Juliano-villani is a painter whose work moves quickly between images, cartoons, art history, and the internet, held together by a sharp, instinctive sense of composition. She’s shown with Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. And earlier in her career she worked for Dana Schutz as well as the painter Eric Parker. So, uh, that’s actually how me and Jamie met Eric. Studio and Banks’ studio were right next to each other, and we were both assisting these artists. And yeah, Damien was just like, yeah, she, she was just in a little room and we were all just working away. So everybody give it up for all these, all the artists here. All right. Who wants to go first? No. Um, what I’m curious about is, uh, in the studios that I mentioned that you all worked for, were those studios that you sought out yourself or was it just a job? Yeah. 00:02:36 Ian Cheng: Um, yeah, I was in grad school at the time at Columbia, and I was, um, had a terrible time there. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Um, I really just sat in my studio checking my email, getting no email and just, uh, just looking at the wall, waiting for the next crit to happen with nothing to say. And at the end of those two years of grad school, um, the one positive relationship I had was with, uh, Liam Gillick, who was like a kind of visiting professor. And I was like, what am I gonna do with my life? I’m gonna, I’m gonna apply as a UX designer to Google New York because I just need some totally no response rejection. And I thought, what else could I do? And I said, Liam, you know, can you hook me up with PR wigs, email? Like, I’d love to. I’ll be his dream printer. I literally pitched myself, I’ll be his dream. I can just like make anything. Um, and Liam was like, I’ll get back to you. And he gets back to me. He’s like, he used the words Pierre offers you his email, which was kind of interesting way to not like do the CC connection, but just to like, just take it from here, kid. Uh, email Pierre like pitched him like, you know, had a, had a quick meeting like, oh, I didn’t have no, had no credentials. Um, and simultaneously I thought, oh, fuck, like I need another job too. So I went to like Paul Chan’s website. Wow. Um, national philistine and just like emailed him like, hey, hi. I think like we have a lot in common. Like, can we meet? And so the next week, I met with both of them. And suddenly I had two artists kind of assistant jobs. Oh, wow. And yeah, it really kind of really began their shoot. 00:04:07 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really good taste too, you know? 00:04:09 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Those are great artists. 00:04:10 Ian Cheng: Well, how’s it go with people that you respect? I just thought like, oh, grad school is so bad. I didn’t respect anyone that came through. I should go to somewhere where I can speak a lot about this. Like, uh, it was the best school. Those two were like being effectively an apprentice and seeing how they lived life, like what they had for breakfast, what time they woke up, how they said no to people, how they protected their mornings was better school than school. 00:04:34 Ajay Kurian: Totally agree. Totally agree. Darren. Was it a job or was it a college? 00:04:39 Darren Bader: No no no no it was I mean, it was certainly a job insofar as you you lack the freedom that you, you um would prefer at many, many moment. But uh, no, it was a extraordinarily educational, especially with, with ers in particular. He is a real force of nature. Uh, and so, I mean, he’s just, he’s a presence. He, he’s. Always, he, he’s one of these people who, if you look at his work, you may say he’s phoning it in at times. There are also many, many, many times when he’s just creating very compelling work. But he’s he lives and breathes art every minute of the day. And, uh, it was just a very compelling environment to work in. Uh, it wasn’t always easy. I learned a ton. Um, much like what Ian said, you know, you learn about the routines, but it’s more about the relationships and how an artist can exercise power. I don’t mean that in any sort of, you know, um, manipulative or abusive way. Um, it’s just he, he was also very good at it. He if anyone I don’t Urs Fischer is physically also quite an imposing presence. He’s not Pierre um not or he’s he’s I mean he’s he’s he’s maybe five ten, but he’s very big. Uh, he’s very muscular. He’s covered in tattoos, deep voice, piercing gray eyes. Um, and so that’s a whole nother thing. And he makes these, this, this very fanciful at times and very tender art. So it’s a, but I learned so much just to just watching him operate. And then when he would let you in. 00:06:29 Ajay Kurian: Right. 00:06:30 Darren Bader: And he would say, hey, come over here. I want to talk about this work with you. What do you think of this? You’re like, okay, I’ll give my two cents. He’s like, oh, thank you. Fuck off. But he’s also but you know, he’s listening the entire time, right? He’s taking all this new account and he, he understands what it takes to make an artwork, which is not infrequently, uh, you know, no artwork in Ireland. It really does require a lot of hands on, you know, hands on deck and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t. 00:07:00 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, if anyone’s interested, there’s a good interview that Rick Rubin did with Urs Fischer. 00:07:06 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really? 00:07:07 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It’s long and sprawling, and, um. 00:07:12 Darren Bader: There’s some moments. 00:07:13 Ajay Kurian: Tetragrammaton. 00:07:14 Darren Bader: This is. 00:07:15 Ajay Kurian: A weird plug for another podcast. 00:07:17 Darren Bader: With Urs is also very, very bright. But he does he he’s not he. You wouldn’t know it until you meet him. And he’s extremely versatile. He’s able to jump around from topic to topic and we’ll get to that at some… Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #5
    August 4 · 1 hr 48 min

    SPENT: Episode Five | Marc Spiegler

    For nearly a decade, Marc Spiegler served as the Global Director of Art Basel, helping shape one of the world’s most influential institutions in contemporary art. Earlier this year, his New York Times opinion piece on the challenges facing commercial galleries sparked widespread conversation about the future of the art market and the pressures confronting artists, dealers, and collectors alike. In this episode, Marc reflects on his path from journalism to Art Basel, the evolution of the global art world, and the lessons he took from leading an institution at the center of it all. We discuss his recent writing, the expansion of the international market, the role of technology and AI, the economics of art fairs, and why he believes galleries need to rethink how they build relationships with collectors. Along the way, Marc shares his perspective on financialization, speculation, collecting, and what a healthier, more sustainable art ecosystem could look like. This is a conversation about leadership, markets, and how the art world can continue to evolve without losing sight of the artists at its center. Art Galleries Are Not OK, NYT Opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/art-basel-fairs-gallery-market.html?eafs_enabled=false Marc Spiegler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcspiegler/?hl=en Hosted by Ajay Kurian Produced and Edited by Peter Groppe 00:00 Introduction 04:23 Growing up around artists and becoming a journalist 08:12 The unlikely path to leading Art Basel 12:20 Leadership lessons and managing a global institution 14:08 Expanding Art Basel: Asia, digital strategy, and the future 17:05 AI, technology, and why change is inevitable 23:00 His New York Times essay and why galleries need to think differently 28:14 Financialization, speculation, and the art market 34:30 Collectors, gatekeeping, and the changing role of galleries 39:40 Resale contracts and protecting artists from speculation 44:55 Why art fairs cost so much 51:35 How galleries actually benefit from participating in fairs 52:15 Auctions, speculation, and the evolution of the secondary market 58:55 Have collectors become today’s tastemakers? 1:08:00 Museums, collectors, and building the next generation of patrons 1:15:00 Why galleries are struggling today 1:23:00 Advice for young galleries navigating the current market 1:30:00 What a healthier art ecosystem could look like 1:36:00 Closing thoughts 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: We’re living in an era of exhaustion, and artists and creators aren’t immune to this. We’re trying to figure it out, too. Welcome to spent from the new podcast. I’m your host, AJ Kurian, an artist, writer, and educator. I’ve been in the art world for nearly twenty years, shown all over the world, and taught at universities like Yale, Columbia, Parsons and Bard. The art world is a confusing and opaque place, but all of it tends to make a little more sense to me when I talk to one person at a time. Why do you think people blame you for this over financialization? 00:00:35 Marc Spiegler: I don’t know at all. I think it’s completely bogus. Like because. Because, I mean, first of all, like, like before I was running Art Basel and while I was running Art Basel, I was always against financialization. Like I’m literally was quoted in the New York Times talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach, the week of Art Basel, Miami Beach, and saying something like eighty percent of the art that’s sold next week will be worthless in twenty years. You know, and I wasn’t just talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach. I was talking about all of the twenty five fairs, but, you know, um, I was always very clear about the fact that people should buy art that they like, not buy art as an investment. You know, I mean, I had a funny thing, um, I wrote this article for the Business of Fashion column that I had last year. Um, and the title was something like we need to stop hyping art as an investment, you know, and, and, uh, Jamie Kenyon, your friend of mine wrote to me and said, I love this, this new mark unleashed. I’m like, dude, I’ve been saying this forever. You know, people are just noticing it now. But like, I was very clear about that. 00:01:39 Ajay Kurian: Mark Spiegler spent about a decade as the global director of Art Basel, which is to say for nearly ten years, he sat closer to the center of the art market’s money and power than most. He left that seat in twenty twenty two, and this past June did something he used to do in a prior life. He wrote an op ed for The New York Times, no less. Art galleries are not okay. The title alone got people talking. Many were infuriated that the man who’d spent the last ten years supposedly finalizing the art world was now saying it had gone too far. Around the same time, Pace Gallery let go of roughly fifty employees and fifty of their artists, and Marc Glimcher, the owner of pace, sat down with the times as well. Adam Lindemann, a collector and sometimes gallerist, responded with his own piece in Artnet, and journalist Barbara Pollock, among a handful of others, wrote a direct critique of Marc’s piece. We get into all of it. I first met Marc at a dinner in Basel in twenty sixteen, the year I did a solo booth with forty seven Canal. So I met him, in a sense as one of the artists inside the machine he was running. I’ll be honest about my expectations. I kind of assumed he’d be a bit of a douche. Instead, what I found was that Mark was quick and thoughtful and pretty fun to talk to, which is surprisingly rare at some of these fancy dinners. That wit can also function as a kind of armor. Mark has a beguiling matter of factness. He’ll answer you so plainly, so directly, that you can almost miss the moment he’s stepped neatly around the harder corners of a question. It’s disarming and it works. Going into this, I told myself I wouldn’t let him charm me away from pressing for an answer. I’ll let you be the judge, but I’d like to think I mostly held. We get into Mark’s past and where the art of it all started. Then we dip into the anxieties and inevitabilities of AI before getting to the meat of the conversation. Can you administer the market and still love the thing it sells for Mark? The answer is resoundingly yes. We cover his role in these machinations and how he sees things now, and what unquestioned truths need our critical scrutiny for the future, our worlds to thrive. This is spent. But Marc Spiegler isn’t. Marc, it’s great to have you. 00:04:22 Marc Spiegler: It’s great to be here. 00:04:23 Ajay Kurian: Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for sitting down with us. Um, there’s a big story to tell here, but I think I want to start out very local and very simple, which is starting with like, how did you even get into art? What I know you started as a journalist and I know that that’s like kind of maybe the. 00:04:43 Marc Spiegler: It goes further back. It does actually, it goes way back. In fact, it goes back to my birth because my mother was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the only, if not the only surrealist papercutting artist that I’ve ever heard of. Voila. See you. Look. That look was perfect. Okay, so she was trained by her grandmother in Alsace to do paper cuts, which was a very classic folkloric art form. Right? Using tiny scissors. Almost like sewing scissors. Um, so she learned those techniques. And then living in Paris in the sixties, she fell into surrealism. Um, and then she was part of a group of, of surrealists in Chicago where I grew up eventually. Um, and so she brought kind of the, the aesthetic and the thinking of surrealism into, in combination with the techniques that she had learned as a child. So. So my mother was an artist and then my best friend Ellen growing up went on to become an artist. And then my best friend in my teen years, Yoni, also went on to be an artist. So I was always surrounded by artists, you know, like I was I grew up in Chicago and then moved to upstate New York. My parents split up, and then I went to school … Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #22
    July 30 · 1 hr 1 min

    The/Forum 22 | Baseera Khan

    Baseera Khan joins Ajay Kurian for a conversation that begins with a Garfield drawing contest and expands into an exploration of storytelling, identity, and the politics of material. Khan reflects on finding her artistic voice through tracing comics, navigating graduate school as a search for self rather than an entry into the art world, and developing works that blend performance, sculpture, painting, and sound. Together, they discuss Braid Rage, acoustic blankets, museums, language, surveillance, and the hidden histories embedded in everyday materials. Throughout the conversation, Khan shares how dreams, humor, intuition, and personal experience shape a practice that resists fixed definitions while examining capitalism, representation, and belonging. About the Guest Baseera Khan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, labor, material culture, and systems of power through sculpture, painting, performance, installation, and sound. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Participant Inc., and they were the winner of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. https://baseerakhan.com/ 00:00 Intro 00:20 Garfield, Nermal & learning to draw through comics 05:20 Finding an artistic path through Cornell and self-discovery 12:20 Storytelling, language, and the influence of Michael Asher 18:50 Braid Rage, dreams, and making work without sketches 26:50 Fabric, family, and the materials of memory 29:50 The “I AM MUSLIMA” Nike project, identity, and capitalism 34:45 Performance, acoustic blankets, and surveillance 42:30 Petroleum, plastic, and giving museum objects a voice 50:50 Working with museum archives and historical collections 54:20 Reality television, identity, and staying grounded 1:00:30 Art, ambition, and closing thoughts 00:00:00 Ajay Kurian : Welcome to the forum from the new podcast. I’m your host, Ajay Kurian. The forum is a free monthly gathering in New York where artists and thinkers come together for a live conversation. Well, you’re about to hear was recorded in front of a live audience. For details on upcoming events, sign up for our newsletter at new dot studio. 00:00:19 Ajay Kurian : I was really tickled by this like, fact that I learned about Baseera literally just a few days ago, and just a few minutes ago, I had this idea. Um, so we’ll see how it goes. But basically we both got into art. Art meaning like drawing of any kind image making, um, through Garfield. And I didn’t know this until a few days ago. 00:00:47 Baseera Khan: So do you guys know who Garfield is? 00:00:50 Ajay Kurian : Yes. Okay. 00:00:52 Baseera Khan: Do you know who Nermal is? Of course you don’t. Because that was the femme cat behind Garfield. 00:01:02 Ajay Kurian : It’s true. What I wanted to see if Baseera would be down to do is if we did a little Garfield drawing contest right now. 00:01:12 Ajay Kurian : Do you guys. 00:01:13 Baseera Khan: Like that idea? 00:01:14 Ajay Kurian : Yes. 00:01:15 Baseera Khan: I haven’t thought about Garfield in a very long time. And I have to also tell you the reason why. The reason why I started drawing Garfield was not because I innately was interested in like, Garfield and drawing. It was that I was interested in the stories and the storytelling. And, um, my brother would always run to the library and rent all of the books. And he was in his phase where he didn’t want to share. I mean, he’s a very generous human. 00:01:49 Ajay Kurian : Is he older or younger? 00:01:50 Baseera Khan: Two years older. 00:01:51 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay. So it’s close. 00:01:53 Baseera Khan: He’s a generous human. You know, I know I’m being recorded. Love you. William. But at the time, he was going through a phase where he wanted everything to himself. So I would sneak the books out of his bag and I would trace them. I would trace the drawings and make my own books. And I think through tracing the books, I started creating my own version of the cat. So just my pardon. If the cat looks like other things. 00:02:24 Ajay Kurian : That’s totally fine. This is all in good fun. Um, and I also, it’s again, like, it’s just crazy to hear that that’s also how you came to it because weirdly, there’s ideas of familial surveillance. There’s ideas of like having to take a story and make it yours because it wasn’t being offered to you in the first place. There’s just like strange dynamics that feel like there’s parallels in the work itself. 00:02:52 Baseera Khan: One more thing before we start this drawing contest. Um. Garfield was a bully. 00:03:00 Ajay Kurian : This is true. 00:03:02 Baseera Khan: So I, I was interested in the narrative of how he kind of came into the room and took all his space. 00:03:10 Ajay Kurian : I never thought about it. 00:03:11 Baseera Khan: I was really interested in normal story, and I thought that I would fashion a career of what would normal do. 00:03:20 Ajay Kurian : Wow. 00:03:21 Baseera Khan: But that never happened because. 00:03:23 Ajay Kurian : My normal was the. It’s, I guess in the context of the comic, it’s like normal was the exhausting, annoying, um, cousin. I don’t know what what the relationship was, but it hearing it from like hearing it out. Like as an adult now I’m like, oh yeah. 00:03:43 Baseera Khan: Nermal was the intelligent, femme capable cat and she knew a lot and it intimidated the more rugged It kind of, you know, like boyish charm that Garfield kind of, like, took advantage of. It was patriarchy. 00:04:06 Ajay Kurian : For sure. I don’t think it was boyish. He had very much old man energy to me. 00:04:11 Baseera Khan: But sometimes I think that boys and old men are very similar. 00:04:16 Ajay Kurian : Okay, I can see that. 00:04:18 Baseera Khan: Anyway. 00:04:18 Ajay Kurian : Yeah, here we go. I can totally see that. All right. Um. No stopwatch. We’re just going to do this quick and see what comes out. All right, let’s go. I mean, I drew him like a, like a thousand times. I would say this is like a very psychedelic Cheshire I’m here for it, though. 00:05:00 Baseera Khan: I think that is the CIA. He was like, did you know? Did you really draw? Garfield, let’s do a contest. 00:05:09 Ajay Kurian : That’s that’s the. 00:05:10 Ajay Kurian : Rest of the interview. Is me just grilling you? 00:05:12 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. 00:05:15 Ajay Kurian : I want to start in all seriousness with. 00:05:19 Baseera Khan: I am an artist, I promise. 00:05:22 Ajay Kurian : She’s an amazing artist. So this is this is, I guess I’m I want to start here, but I also am curious about like this, this ten year lapse. Um, but this was your first major show in New York at participant Incorporated and, um. 00:05:37 Baseera Khan: It’s, it’s participant Inc you know, participant. I know that you like long words, but. 00:05:42 Ajay Kurian : I’m gonna get killed all night. So among other things, this is like when we first see the acoustic blankets, which we’ll talk about. This is the first time. Is this the first time where Brad Rage was performed? 00:05:56 Baseera Khan: Yes. 00:05:57 Ajay Kurian : Okay. 00:05:57 Baseera Khan: That was commissioned. Most of those works were commissioned by the by the gallery. 00:06:02 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay, cool. And how how did. I mean, how did that whole relationship start? 00:06:10 Baseera Khan: Actually was introduced to Leo through Jeffrey Gibson, who was. I was his teaching assistant at Cornell. Oh, cool. And he was doing his show, um, at that time with participant. He had just received a capital, a creative capital grant, and he was working on his solo show. And in a way, even he’s so big, you know, in our minds, but in a way, like that was one of his first shows. 00:06:37 Ajay Kurian : Right. 00:06:38 Baseera Khan: So he was like, you know, in due time, you know, I’ll introduce you to, you know, this magical person. And I was like, I’m going to jump the gun here and just go meet her. Um, so I went out to a show that she was doing. I saw Jeffrey show, introduce myself to her and brought her … Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #4
    July 16 · 1 hr 11 min

    SPENT Episode Four | Erin Jane Nelson

    Erin Jane Nelson joins Ajay Kurian to talk about the gap between artistic success and creative fulfillment. They discuss the reality of making a living as an artist, navigating burnout, and why reaching long-awaited career milestones can leave you questioning what comes next.The conversation explores Nelson's evolving practice—from clay pinhole cameras and photography to spirituality, caregiving, and family history—as well as the emotional and financial realities that shape life in the studio. Along the way, they reflect on ambition, artistic purpose, and the kinds of relationships that sustain a creative life long after the accolades fade.Hosted by Ajay Kurian Edited by Peter Groppe00:00 – Erin Jane Nelson on the Whitney Biennial and making cameras from clay09:38 – Success, creative block, and the unexpected reality of becoming a full-time artist17:52 – Burnout, financial anxiety, and redefining an artistic practice23:30 – October 7th, Jewish identity, spirituality, and family history31:04 – Photography, caregiving, and finding balance beyond the studio40:06 – The economics of being an artist and why most careers aren't what they seem46:39 – Almost leaving art for law school—and the opportunity that changed everything51:41 – Ajay on ambition, loss, and rediscovering purpose through art Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • #21
    June 29 · 57 min

    The/Forum 21 | Lucas Blalock

    Lucas Blalock’s photographs often look like they’re interrupting themselves. Objects bend out of place. Edits remain visible. Corrections become part of the image instead of disappearing behind it. Rather than using photography to create the illusion of clarity, Lucas uses it to expose the decisions, accidents, and contradictions that make images possible in the first place. In this NewCrits conversation, Lucas sits down with Ajay Kurian for a discussion about photography, discomfort, and what happens when the process becomes part of the final work. The conversation begins with a story Lucas has returned to in recent years: a childhood accident that resulted in reconstructive surgery using his own toe to replace his thumb—a collision of advanced medicine and old-world improvisation that he jokingly describes as “the first bad Photoshop.” Lucas reflects on discovering art through CD covers before museums, studying at Bard, and coming of age as digital tools began changing the medium itself. Instead of treating manipulation as something to conceal, he became interested in making it visible. Again and again, he returns to the same idea: images become more interesting when they stop trying to appear effortless. 00:00 — Intro 03:10 — The Disney Accident and “The First Bad Photoshop” 09:45 — Origin Stories and Discovering Photography 15:30 — Album Covers, Culture, and Looking Before Art 20:10 — Studying with Stephen Shore 26:00 — Photoshop as a New Problem for Photography 31:20 — Signature, Style, and Staying Strange 36:15 — Making the Worst Possible Image 41:00 — Working for Vik Muniz 46:10 — Labor, Accident, and Unfinishedness 50:20 — Pictures That Resist Digestion 54:15 — Photography, Bodies, and Sensation 58:40 — AI, Anxiety, and the Future of Images 1:03:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • S1 · E3
    June 18 · 56 min

    SPENT: Episode Three | Whitney Mallet

    SPENT: Episode Three | Whitney Mallet Whitney Mallet has spent years moving through magazines, galleries, performances, readings, and the shifting ecosystems that surround contemporary culture - not as an observer standing outside of it, but as someone committed to paying attention. In this conversation, Whitney sits down with Ajay Kurian to talk about criticism, instinct, and what it means to build a practice around curiosity. They discuss magazines as art projects, the lag between cultural change and cultural criticism, and why making connections between unlikely people, scenes, and ideas can create something more exciting than simply reinforcing what already exists. Whitney reflects on developing taste, not as something fixed or innate, but as something shaped through obsession, attention, and years of showing up. They talk about influence, authority, and the slow process of learning to trust your own perspective. Throughout the conversation, Whitney returns to a tension that runs through both criticism and creative work: the pull between analysis and instinct, busyness and reflection, skepticism and hope. What emerges isn’t a defense of optimism so much as a practice of remaining open. Believing that culture can still surprise you, that intensity is worth pursuing, and that staying curious might be one way of resisting disappointment. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits The Whitney Review of New Writing: https://www.whitneyreview.org/ 00:00 — Intro 04:50 — Running a Magazine by Instinct 09:20 — Taste, Influence, and Learning What You Like 15:10 — Building Unexpected Encounters 20:30 — Trusting Your Own Authority 27:15 — Information, Obsession, and Developing Taste 33:40 — Work as Practice 38:20 — Edging Burnout 43:45 — Busyness, Avoidance, and Personal Writing 49:30 — Disappointment, Intensity, and Staying Optimistic 55:15 — Criticism, Attention, and Cultural Delay 1:01:20 — The Internet, Institutions, and the Changing Role of Reviews 1:07:15 — Writing Without Permission 1:11:40 — Earnestness, Cynicism, and Seeing Through Things 1:16:20 — Breakthrough or Burnout 1:18:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • S1 · E2
    June 18 · 1 hr 17 min

    SPENT: Episode Two | Walter Price

    SPENT: Episode Two | Walter Price Walter Price’s paintings may present as loose, instinctive, and immediate, but behind them is a practice built on discipline, repetition, and consistency. In this conversation, Walter sits down with Ajay Kurian to talk about building a life around making work and what it means to remain committed to the process. Together they discuss ambition, routine, competition, and the challenge of continuing to evolve without becoming attached to outcomes. Walter reflects on making small paintings when everyone told him to scale up, embracing experimentation over certainty, and treating limitations as opportunities rather than obstacles. Again and again, he returns to the same idea: growth comes from pushing toward discomfort instead of away from it. Walter describes creativity as something active - a practice of showing up, staying curious, and refusing to get comfortable. At one point, Walter says he doesn’t want the cheers. He wants the boos. Not because he’s interested in proving people wrong, but because he understands what keeps him moving: there is always another level to reach. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits More about Walter Price: https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/walter-price 00:00 — Intro 04:15 — Growing Up 08:40 — Early Ideas About Becoming an Artist 13:25 — Consistency vs Inspiration 18:50 — Small Paintings and Ignoring Expectations 24:30 — Wanting the Boos, Not the Cheers 29:15 — Ambition, Restlessness, and Staying Hungry 34:10 — Experimentation as Practice 39:20 — Developing Taste and Trusting Instinct 44:45 — Limitations as Opportunity 49:30 — Growth Through Discomfort 55:10 — Routine, Repetition, and Showing Up 1:00:45 — Success, Satisfaction, and What Comes Next 1:06:20 — Curiosity as a Long-Term Practice 1:10:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • S1 · E1
    June 18 · 1 hr 13 min

    SPENT: Episode One | Yaya Bey

    SPENT: Episode One | Yaya Bey Yaya Bey has built one of the most singular voices in contemporary music not by chasing consensus, but by trusting her own sense of practice. Across albums that move through R&B, house, soul, poetry, and memory, their work resists easy categorization - and she’s increasingly uninterested in trying to make it legible to people who insist on misunderstanding it. In this conversation, recorded ahead of the release of her new album Fidelity, Yaya sits down with Ajay Kurian for a wide-ranging discussion about what it means to make work on your own terms while navigating an industry that often wants to flatten artists into narratives that are easier to sell. Yaya speaks candidly about the limits of criticism, who gets positioned as the authority to interpret Black art, and what happens when audiences project meaning onto work instead of listening to what the artist is actually saying. Devotion to making music. Devotion to curiosity. Devotion to continuing even when the systems around you are exploitative, unstable, or actively discouraging. Yaya Bey talks openly about the realities of being a working musician - record deals, touring economics, budgets, labels, expectations, and the invisible labor that exists behind an artist’s public life. What emerges isn’t cynicism, but a kind of grounded determination: a belief that creativity survives because people keep making things anyway. Yaya describes hope not as optimism but as discipline: if you want to be free, you have to believe freedom is possible even when it feels impossible. Otherwise you begin believing in your own defeat. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits Yaya’s New Album, Fidelity: https://yayabey.bandcamp.com/album/fidelity Yaya’s Substack: https://substack.com/@yayabeybay?utm_source=global-search Upcoming Show Dates: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/15521055-yaya-bey?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGn-QGJBp8sdAH4IFe4bEeCmP3lrQR-VKQfb8hkYbMxaEaXsUZ1vfEY29Xw4Yo_aem_swM1Nk76aGvpG-4j_ajAFQ 00:00 — Intro 05:00 — Misreading the Work 08:00 — Who Gets to Interpret Black Art 12:35 — Grief, Joy, and Refusing the Assigned Story 15:45 — Being Polarizing / Being Protected 19:00 — The Politics of Interpretation 23:40 — Grief Beyond the Self 27:35 — Refusing Other People’s Narratives 35:20 — The Industry, Capital, and Finding Your People 41:30 — Discomfort as a Teacher 48:40 — Community, Poetry, and Becoming an Artist 52:00 — Becoming a Working Musician 57:15 — Loss, Stability, and Living Through Contradiction 1:00:00 — Making a Life, Not Just a Career 1:09:35 — Curiosity as Practice 1:12:30 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • May 6 · 1 hr 2 min

    The/Forum 20 | Kamrooz Aram: Painting on the Edge of Ornament and Abstraction

    He works through form, perception, and the politics of display — Kamrooz Aram on ornament, abstraction, and the unstable ground of how we see. Kamrooz Aram moves between painting, sculpture, and collage, using material, structure, and exhibition design to question how images are read and how histories are constructed. His work often begins in the studio, through process and formal decision-making, and expands outward into larger systems of meaning: how value is assigned, how objects are categorized, and how cultural narratives are embedded within visual form. Across recent exhibitions, he continues to return to questions of ornament, modernism, and the conditions that shape perception without resolving them into fixed positions. He explains: * How openness, curiosity, and “young artist energy” remain essential to sustaining a long-term practice. * Why restraint, stepping away, and not overworking are as critical as mark-making in the studio. * What it means to work within a structure or “mode,” where improvisation can emerge without forcing novelty. * How ornament and abstraction are historically entangled, and why their separation reflects biased art histories. * Why viewers project cultural assumptions onto form, and how ideas of “the decorative” or “the exotic” are constructed. * How value shifts depending on context, authorship, and belief, from museum objects to replicas and everyday materials. * Why art can create moments of transcendence through form, rather than through narrative alone. (00:08) Welcome + Returning to the Studio(04:20) Reclaiming “Young Artist Energy”(10:00) The Nonlinear Life of a Painting(15:30) Disruption, Destruction, and Letting the Work Shift(25:56) Sculpture as an Extension of Painting(28:10) Ornament, Abstraction, and Historical Bias(33:40) Time, Fading, and Letting Go of Control(52:45) Authenticity, Replication, and Constructed Value Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube. Follow KamroozWeb: https://kamroozaram.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamroozegar/ Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978) has built his practice on dismantling the divide between ornament and fine art, renegotiating the art historical hierarchies that privilege Western forms of abstraction above others. His paintings and sculptures do not simply cross categories; they probe the structures that enforce them. Born in Shiraz, Iran, Aram emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, where he found himself forced to come to terms with a multitude of identities imposed upon him. These experiences left a lasting mark. Categories, he discovered, do not merely describe identity—they invent it. This recognition drives his work, which asserts that non-Western ornamental traditions carry the same intellectual weight and conceptual rigor Western art history has long reserved for itself. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio.— Full Transcript Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • April 10 · 38 min

    The/Forum 19 | Rachel Rose: Psychic States, Motherhood, and the Moving Image

    She works through feeling, perception, and narrative — Rachel Rose on interior weather, unstable perspectives, and art as a way to process what cannot be easily named. Rachel Rose moves between film, installation, and painting, using sound, light, and narrative structure to explore how experience is shaped from the inside out. Her work often begins with an emotional register and expands into systems of history, perception, and embodiment. In her recent film The Last Day, she turns inward, tracing the psychological and biological complexities of motherhood, identity, and crisis without resolving them into clear frameworks. She explains: * How personal feeling becomes a starting point for building larger perceptual and narrative systems. * Why motherhood, postpartum depression, and identity loss resist clean cultural narratives. * How sound and light can destabilize reality and reorient one’s relationship to the world. * What it means to make work that stays with ambiguity rather than resolving into message. * How falling in love with characters becomes a method for discovering structure, rather than imposing it. * Why occupying unlikeable or unstable perspectives creates more honest and generative work. * How art can act as a container for experiences that are culturally unspoken or difficult to locate. (00:08) Welcome + Intro(00:31) The Last Day and the Mrs. Dalloway Transposition (01:37) Motherhood, Identity, and the Book Read Twice (03:35) Lake Valley, Saturn Return, and the Invention of Childhood (07:19) Excerpt: Lake Valley (2016) (10:57) Art School, Painting, and the Crisis of Meaning (15:01) Editing as Voice, the First Video, and Finding the Medium (22:34) Transcendent Experiences and the Power of Art Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube. Follow RachelWeb: https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/ Rachel Rose (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. The work of Rachel Rose explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Recent solo exhibitions include: Science Gallery, London, UK (2024); GL STRAND, Copenhagen (2023); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2023); CC Strombeek, Strombeek (2022); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2020); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Geneva (2023); 3rd Jeju Biennale (2022); 9th Beijing Biennale (2022); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2022); Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, US (2021); Artspace, Sydney (2021); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021); A Tale of A Tub, Tlön Projects, Rotterdam (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Pittsburgh (2018); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 32nd São Paudalo Biennial (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2016); Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2016). She is the recipient of the Future Fields Award and the Frieze Artist Award. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Can you tell us a little bit about The Last Day? Rachel Rose: It’s a film that I wrote. Loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the book, but maybe I’ll just summarize the book briefly so that you understand what I did. The book takes place in a day, and it was written after World War I. It describes a bourgeois housewife, Clarissa Dalloway, going about her errands in her day at 50, about to throw a big party for her husband in the evening. She has an 18-year-old daughter that’s kind of separating and rejecting her. There’s a foil character, who’s equally important in the book, named Septimus Smith, who’s a World War I vet who Clarissa sort of passes by. It’s almost like sliding doors throughout the day. He’s suffering from severe PTSD from World War I. Clarissa throws a party and at the end of the day he kills himself. I had read the book in high school and not thought about it much again. I had always been into Virginia Woolf and that was that. And then one day, I have two kids and I was getting our Tesla fixed in Red Hook at the Tesla dealership, and I was texting my friend sitting there in the waiting room. She’s said oh, what a Mrs Dalloway day you’re having. And I was like, oh am I Mrs. Dalloway? Let me think about that. So I read it again and I was completely blown away. As a mother reading it, I now understood the book totally differently than I understood it as a 16-year-old because obviously the perspective and consciousness changes as that’s what Virginia Woolf does. But now I was sitting in Clarissa’s position, obviously I’m not 50 and my kids aren’t 18, but I was feeling her pain, her rudder, her sense of loss of identity, all the kind of acts of self-actualization she had reversed or given up in exchange for her motherhood. I was incredibly moved and so I decided to transpose it into a modern day New York story, and the Septimus character, I transposed into a labor and delivery nurse that was suffering from severe postpartum depression. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Rachel Rose: Which is something that I also suffered from. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Rachel Rose: So I kind of, in different ways, felt myself in the different characters. Ajay Kurian: So much of what I’ve understood about your work prior to this moment is like larger systems in which humans find themselves in. It feels like this movie is a shift to the internal weather, rather than the external weather. I know it's just a matter of what the focus is. They're all kind of an ouroboros of sorts, but did it feel like a shift? Did you feel like you were going into something more intimate with the film? Rachel Rose: Before making the film and also before having children, so much of my experience in making works was a combination of I’m feeling this thing. For example, I’m feeling really anxious. Could I attach it? Now of course there’s all kinds of internal reasons why I might be feeling anxiety, nothing to do with, let’s say the weather or something. Ajay Kurian: Sure. Rachel Rose: But can I attach it to something I’m spotting outside, and make the artwork the container for that connection. So the work was always coming from something that always began with a personal feeling, but the difference is, that you’re right to point out, in this film it doesn’t go beyond that. A guess if you’re talking about motherhood, but the film isn’t a political comment on motherhood structurally in society. It’s actually totally not that. Ajay Kurian: What you’re saying there, there was a moment in an interview, I can’t remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about the process that you go through to make anything. Which is almost like you’re a sensor that’s li… Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • March 5 · 59 min

    The/Forum 18 | Reginald Sylvester II: Discipline as Devotion

    Reginald Sylvester II approaches painting as a structure of discipline. What begins in daily rituals—routine, repetition, and care—extends into a larger philosophy about belief, responsibility, and endurance. Practice, for him, is not separate from life. It is shaped by it. Fatherhood, spiritual inquiry, and the demands of time become part of the architecture of the studio. Rather than protecting art from those pressures, Sylvester allows them to recalibrate how the work unfolds. The result is a practice grounded less in spectacle and more in sustained commitment. Abstraction emerges through this framework as an act of faith. To begin a painting without knowing its final form is to trust that meaning will surface through repetition and attention. At a certain moment, that commitment required stepping away from exhibition altogether, allowing the work to evolve privately before returning to public view. Rather than presenting artistic growth as clarity or mastery, Sylvester describes a practice built through persistence, where rigor, vulnerability, and belief remain inseparable. He explains: • Why daily rituals and discipline are foundational to sustaining a studio practice.• How fatherhood reshaped his relationship to time, responsibility, and ambition.• Why abstraction functions as an act of faith rather than a stylistic choice.• What it meant to withdraw from the exhibition to deepen the work in private.• How travel and research expanded the historical resonance of the work. Timestamps (0:00) Ritual and the Structure of Practice(5:00) Fatherhood and Responsibility(11:00) Abstraction and Faith(18:00) Stepping Away from Exhibition(26:00) Discipline and Repetition(34:00) Cutting into Surface: The Gates(41:00) Travel, History, and Material Memory(49:00) Persistence and Staying in the Work Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube. Follow Reginald Instagram: @reginaldsylvester2 Follow Maximillian William Web: https://www.maximillianwilliam.com Instagram: @maximillian_william Reginald Sylvester II (b. Jacksonville, NC, USA, 1987; lives and works in Jersey City, NJ) creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that trace the generative threshold between the two mediums. Working predominantly in abstraction, he expands the language of his painting practice by incorporating materials such as rubber, tarp, aluminium and steel. His singular approach lends his paintings a sculptural presence and imbues his sculptures with a painter’s sensibility. While grounded in traditional painting techniques, Sylvester II ventures beyond the conventions of stretched canvas, working on surfaces that both absorb and reject paint. His layered, often multi-partite works investigate the language of his chosen mediums: stretcher bars are left exposed, becoming part of his compositions, while oxidised and patinated metal surfaces evoke the histories of gestural painting. Sylvester II also transcends the surface, creating monumental sculptures that reference forms observed through painting and from his environment. The artist is drawn to materials that relate to his personal history, spirituality, or broader societal narratives. In his approach to assemblage, Sylvester II appropriates byproducts of his making process, physically attaching studio debris to works to enrich their tactile quality and textural narrative. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here. Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: I’m gonna start off with the big questions, things that are really important to people. You are 37 years old. What the fuck is your skincare routine man? Reginald Sylvester ll: 39. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Reginald Sylvester ll: Knocking on 40, bro. Ajay Kurian: Oh my God. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Cold water and shots out to mom Dukes. Ajay Kurian: That’s really Mom Dukes and cold water. I remember this very clearly when Pharrell was asked, he said cold water too. Reginald Sylvester ll: He’s right. Closes up your pores, but, yeah 39, about to be 40. Ajay Kurian: And you’re a new father. Reginald Sylvester ll: And I’m a new father. Ajay Kurian: Congratulations. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Ajay Kurian: What’s family life right now? How do you do studio, father, all of the things? Reginald Sylvester ll: To be honest, it’s not much studio. It is just really wifey, Noah, supporting her, you know. She’s still getting back to a hundred percent and so I’m just support right now. I’m the calvary. Keeping it down. I fit in drawing, some reading when I can, but for the most part, I’m waking up, and it’s, what do you need, what you need help with, what does Noah need, and you need a break. I’m just support, you know, at this point. Ajay Kurian: That’s good. Reginald Sylvester ll: But the time away is gonna help the practice. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I think it always fuels it. Even if you’re not in the studio, other things are happening and you just brought life into the world. Your lovely wife brought life into the world. So how could that not affect? I was thinking about you having a kid and what that means for the studio practice, but also what that means for how you share your spiritual practice with the next generation, with your kin, and how that’s meant a lot to you. Is church a part of your life or is it a different kind of spiritual practice? How are you gonna pass this on? Reginald Sylvester ll: I grew up with my grandma going to the church. You know, that was how I grew up. But obviously as we grow and become adults, you start seeking after things on your own. So I’m just in big research mode right now. I’m just doing a lot of reading, a lot of research, things that feel true, and things that I stray away from. But I’m in a big learning research, discovery mode, lots of conversations with my pops, my mom. Ajay Kurian: And they’re open to those kinds of conversations? Because I know for myself, my parents are from Kerala, and there’s a huge Christian population there. So I grew up Christian and they’re very religious. And I thought learning about theology and the history of Christianity and all that stuff would build a bridge. It did not. It was like it created more hostility in a way because it’s like, why do you have all these questions? Why are you inquiring? What are the bridges that you have with your folks? Reginald Sylvester ll: So my dad, he went to theology school to become a pastor at a certain point. He’s done a lot of research and reading and so forth in his own life. And so when I come to him with questions, he’s very open arms, answering those questions, and guiding me with the questions. Sometimes, parents can be very opinionated, you know, that’s not what you know, that’s what we should be looking at is this soul. But it’s great because I think in terms of spirituality, for me, I just wanna get to the truth. That’s what it’s really about. And I think, through becoming an artist. Art is a thing that deals with truth. So once I made the decision to actually become an artist, it made me question a lot of things about, where I am, who I am, where I come from, you know what I’m saying? What do I believe? So I started to become a student of history and really just started to do a lot of reading, and then again, going back to my folks asking questions, did you hear about this? What do you think about this? Ajay Kurian: That’s beautiful. It’s nice that you have that relationship with your family. I mean, it seems like they’re all kind of artists in their own way too. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah. My dad, I guess I call ‘em like an artist and graphic designer. Growing up, I seen him do a lot of things with typography. Not really painting, but more so graphics. He did t-shirts, which is what led me to falling into streetwear, watching him kind of having a brand and doing his thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, he had a brand logo? Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I mean, Pops made shirts. But just seeing him kind of move like that gave me the confidence to wanna be a graphic designer or want to learn about typography or wanna learn about silk screening t-shirts. He was a big part of that. Ajay Kurian: I wanna start with Limbo first. This is a quote that hit me really hard just ‘cause it’s a heavy thing to say. You said ‘making that connection between abstraction and faith grabbed hold of me. Suddenly for me to paint or find an image became symbolic of how one lives life, with hopes of dying to then enter into the kingdom of heaven’. That’s a heavy ass thing to say. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I guess I didn’t mean it to be so deep or sound so heavy. Ajay Kurian: What is the Kingdom of Heaven for you? What is that? Reginald Sylvester ll: Kingdom of Heaven is to be with God, to be with Christ, to make it to paradise or spiritual paradise and how I attested that to painting. When I first came to New York for my second business trip in my graphic design days, I wasn’t concerned about being an abstract painter at all. But I ended up going to the Met and went to the abstract expressionist wing. First time with De Kooning, Gilliam, you name it — the guys, right? And I immediately felt like this is something I want to do. But I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. When I did start to research and read, I learned about De Kooning and him talking about finding an image, and it very much sounded like a painterly way of faith. Or how one goes through life, living life. We all try and I don’t know if people are religious or believe in God or heaven or after life or whatever, but we all live life the best we can in order to make it to that next place where our soul will rest, you know? He talked about finding an image and it made that connection for me. So I said, if I’m gonna be any type of painter, it would be an abstract painter. Because it was like a painterly motif that defined faith, or how I sought and see faith. ‘Cause faith is believing in things unseen, right? Ajay Kurian: For sure. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so if you’re in the process of making a painting, but you don’t necessarily know what that finished image is, but you’re working your way through it, that’s what that thing is. And so, I don’t know what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like. It’s been described in a few ways, but I hope to get there, you know? So to get to that finished painting, I don’t wanna say perfect painting, but the act of making to find my way to new images is what made that connection for me. Ajay Kurian: I remember I had to write something about On Kawara back in the day. And weirdly, after spending more and more time with the work, it felt like it was a practice of prayer. That every painting was a small act of devotion towards something unnameable. It didn’t have a shape or a way of being described, but you put in the work. It felt similarly related to thinking about what all this means here for somewhere else. It feels like that’s kind of the starting point for these 12 gates that are in Accra right now. How did this all come about? First of all, this space is fucking stunning. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, shout out to Limbo, man. That’s Dominique and the homie Diallo. Diallo suggested me to Dominique, who runs the Limbo Museum. Very forward-thinking in terms of the vision. But it’s a museum that basically uses abandoned spaces in order to give artists an opportunity to put together shows. They’ve started a residency program and I was the first artist to do the residency. Initially, when I went to go visit for the first trip, I thought we were gonna use the space that they used for the prior presentation when they did the inaugural talk and show. And she was like, no, I’m just taking you here to just show you the initial space, but this is the idea that I have for you. So she went to the University of Ghana, and I was like, you are gonna let me do a show and this is what we’re doing? She was like, yeah, and it was great because it was my first time on the continent and I’ve always wanted to do a show on the continent. My father always talked about taking the family to the continent. Obviously I wanna touch roots. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Reginald Sylvester ll: But then it was also challenging ‘cause I’d never worked at this scale before. How are you gonna treat this space? How is the work gonna function in this space? How is it gonna reverberate in the space? Diallo and myself had a lot of conversations surrounding that and he challenged me on a lot of things in terms of these gates from their initial intent and how they were shown. How to move past that and to allow them to do other things. And so, this allowed me the space to do so. Ajay Kurian: The first time you showed them was in LA . I just wanna show images of that exhibition, which had a great title, T-1000. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yep, I’m sure everybody’s familiar with Terminator. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’m super big into sci-fi movies that got that post-apocalyptic punk undertone. You know, brutalist, kind of futurist. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it shows. The work is definitely in that vibe and I remember when I was researching you, that I saw this show. But I do remember when you were fabricating those gates and I was checking the progress on Instagram, and I was like, shit, this is different. This isn’t a new step. Reginald Sylvester ll: Finding my way through making new types of paintings led me to sculpture. I’m a fan of painting first and being interested as a maker, you’re always trying to figure out, how can I push the work? How can I find myself? If I’m interested in sculpture, how do I find my way there? Being introduced to a new material, which is rubber, led me to really changing the whole process and way I make work. That led me to a form that was found by way of the byproducts of the paintings, which gave way to the gates. And so that’s the cutting that you see in the rubber. Because at one point I was researching and reading a lot about ready-made sculptures. I started to think about my paintings in the sense of a ready-made and how I can show all parts or all aspects of the painting. Making this curvature incision, and the shape that I was left with when it was laid on the floor in my studio reminded me of the floor plans used for the boats that were used in the transatlantic slave trade. Ajay Kurian: That’s interesting to hear. I always thought it was the other way around. I thought that you had that shape in mind and then that curvature got cut and it became that act of violence in the surface. But it’s interesting to hear that it was first a formal decision. One where it was like, let’s get to the truth of the material. Reginald Sylvester ll: The thought of even showing the substrate. I think that’s why I wanna continue to put myself in new situations in the studio. Because for me, and every artist is different, but that’s the way that I grow. So if the aesthetic of a material interests me, it’s for me to not really ask too many questions. It’s just to respond to it. So I was using a lot of military tent shell halves, they’re called pup tents. You basically button two of the tent halves together to make a full tent. I was buttoning them together to stretch them over the substrate, but because they don’t make a complete closure, you get access to the substrate. I thought, oh, I can be more intentional about that. This is happening by way of accident. I made a series of paintings with the pup tents, but I said, how am I gonna be more intentional about this access to revealing the substrate and how it changes the form and the structure of my work. The reason why I called them Gates, because thinking about that history along that journey. I mean, we’ve seen Amistad films, so how do I take this history and reverberate it into something, I don’t wanna say beautiful, but speak further into it. Ajay Kurian: It feels like the history of black culture in so many ways where it’s like you take shitty situations that are beyond the pale, and then you consistently make joy out of it. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yes. I think some of the best work is made from the most mundane things. I think that’s black and brown folk in general. We take a lot of the waste and cook and repurpose it into something great. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so I said, all those bodies that were lost along that journey, where do those souls lie? Scripture say that all souls return to the father once they pass. But I just thought that, maybe I can take this shape and I can reform it as this gate-like sculpture in order to give way for those souls to pass through, to have rest. Ajay Kurian: So in that early version, that’s sheet metal welded together and it has a structure underneath, but then this becomes airy and light. What does that translation mean for you? What does it mean to take it to this place of pure structure? Reginald Sylvester ll: A big part of my work and how I continue to try and grow, is I’m just paying attention to what interests me. I used to have a studio out in Ridgewood and I would look at a lot of the debris. The junk by the trash cans, the back of semi-trucks and how they oxidize over time, the environment of the city, the outside. And using that as a language to bring into the studio. So I did the same thing when I went to Ghana. Ghana’s a very interesting place because it excited me, but it also made me really upset. Because you see wealth and poverty right next to each other. You go to a hotel that’s around the corner from people who don’t even have clean water. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: That feels like Mumbai too. I remember going there and there’s like Prada on one side, and then this dude with his hands disintegrating from leprosy. It is so stark. Where I’m from, in the south, it’s still communist, and the discrepancy in wealth is much less extreme. But there’s certain places in various parts of the world where the jump is so crazy that it really fucks with you. Reginald Sylvester ll: And just getting a grasp on, why is this happening? So from my understanding of what they were telling me, when new individuals were elected or coming into power, certain buildings that had paperwork and had the okay to go forward — build this hotel, build up this certain area, build up these certain advertisements — if that project wasn’t complete by the time that individual who gave way for it to happen, the next person that came into power can say yay or nay on whether it’s finished or not. Which initially gave Dominique the idea for Limbo, right? Because you’re seeing all these great infrastructures half built and then the people that are living there have to deal with it. Anyway, getting to the language within the gates here, it was by way of seeing the advertisement signs and the structures that were exposed. It’s funny, I see Eric Mack in the back, my bro, and I thought about ‘em a lot. I told Dominique to reach out to Eric, because you would see a lot of torn away signages breezing in the wind. I was just thinking about the structure of these gates and the call or need for tension. You know, not as this solid form, but as this form that your eyes can kind of pass through. And then thinking about the space that they’re about to be exhibited in. It’s a very raw skeletal space. So I want the works to have this presence, where they’re there, but they also evaporate. Even these sight lines were very important for us because I want your eye to rest on the sculpture, but I also want your eye to be able to pass through the structure and just enjoy the space as well too. You have sculpture after sculpture that reveals a painting in the distance. So that was another reason why I wanted to stick to this thing and also just thinking about radical black empowerment or thinking about Nkrumah. Thinking about his influence on W-B-W-E-B, du Bois, Malcolm X, all these individuals who I look up to, and have read about and thinking about. The writings, the fortitude and resilience they had, and how maybe these forms can give way for those teachings and those hopes for the continent or those from the diaspora. For those that kind of echo throughout these works as well. Ajay Kurian: I’m not familiar with, you said Nkrumah? Reginald Sylvester ll: He was a revolutionary that really wanted to unite all of Africa. While he was living and was active, he had a huge influence on a lot of American activists as well. Malcolm X was somebody he really influenced. Ajay Kurian: I gotta do some reading. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, so that first trip was very visual and the latter end was very like, I’m looking, I’m reading, I’m writing. Then the second trip was going to work. Ajay Kurian: It’s beautiful that you find the vernacular of the city, the tubing, and it sits in the space but it takes you somewhere else. It’s like it’s building on all these conversations that you’ve already been having. It really makes me think how far you’ve come in this crazy way where you started in graphic design, typology, and working in streetwear. To go from that to this. It’s not insane or anything, but it’s a pretty serious distance in terms of what that work looked like and where you are now. Your first show is In Search of a Wonderful Place. It’s very obviously condo inspired. Reginald Sylvester ll: Heavily. Ajay Kurian: Heavily. You’re bringing your own things to it, but it’s also within this space of what I’ve seen a few times over. Of people who are in streetwear and the artists that they’re interested in are all the same artists, which are Condo, KAWS, and Picasso Reginald Sylvester ll: Murakami. Ajay Kurian: Murakami. Also, let’s not forget Basquiat and Warhol. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yep. Ajay Kurian: Those are the names. And it’s an instance in which we get to see an artist process it live. You’re doing it in exhibitions, not in the studio. There are people that are figuring their shit out and they get their opportunities much later. But one thing that is a credit to you is you are always adept at what you were doing, and somebody saw some promise there and then you kept pushing it forward. So to go from this to deep gestural abstraction is already a huge jump. Why did you forsake this? Reginald Sylvester ll: This is when I moved to New York, but prior was that trip to the Met. I was aware of the Met, but I didn’t have the studio time, nor the hand and eye coordination to even make a pure gestural, abstract painting. But that’s why I named this show In Search of a Wonderful Place. I don’t know if I’m at the wonderful place now, but you know, this was me making the work that I was interested in at that time. And also titling the show in a way where I could have definitely stayed there, but I’m in search of something. Ajay Kurian: When did this place stop being wonderful? Reginald Sylvester ll: I mean, it was funny when we were talking the other day. I was going back on our conversation and the beautiful thing for me about art is that it’ll let you know if your intent is pure. My intention behind all the different bodies of work that I made, was always pure. It was to push as hard as I could at that particular time. But at the end of the day, art is gonna push you to truth if you’re really doing it for real. If your intent is to really make the purest work that you could possibly make, it’ll pull out all the lies. It’ll pull out all the fake shit. It’ll make you question. I’d make work, and then I’d ask myself, why is this work relevant to you and who you are? What aesthetic interest does it have to you? What more do you have to say? I would ask myself these questions, and then at the same time, I’m seeing retrospectives for the first time, I’m traveling, I’m buying books, I’m learning about this, that, and the third, there’s a cannon. I’m educating myself at the same time, but I never thought, not until after this show, I made the decision that I wanna just take two years off. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Reginald Sylvester ll: And just be in the studio and really push as hard as I can in order to make my first presentation of abstract paintings. But, you know, before that, it wasn’t a fear for me to be growing and developing in front of people. I just thought, you know, I’m making work. You saw the last show that I’m doing and I’m progressing. Also, I think a lot of my favorite shows were retrospective. So I would see an accumulation of an artist’s life within one exhibition, so I never really thought about it in a scary way. But after this show I said, yo, I really want my next presentation to be pure abstractions. Ajay Kurian: Interesting. I had never seen the show, so I had to do some digging. For one, it’s crazy that it’s at the Lever House. That’s no small thing. And two, was Richard Prince on your mind at all? Because it was really fascinating that I could see Matisse, Picasso, Basquiat, but also you pushing it into a different place. It did feel like, okay, I see a voice here. It doesn’t feel like it’s just pulling from these things and kind of chopping it up differently. So I was trying to find the show, and this felt really reminiscent, but this was a year later and he hadn’t made this work yet. It was an interesting thing to see that this gestural, sort of semi figurative abstraction was something that he returned to. But the difference to me is that with Richard Prince, there’s always this irony. There’s a built in sense of he believes it and he doesn’t at the same time. In a sense, there was a moment, when I was coming up, there was a moment in painting where everything about abstract expressionism was questioned. Is there such a thing as a pure mark? Is there such a thing as pure subjectivity? Or is it always filtered through ideology or economics or whatever it may be? There are artists that are thinking about that, like Cheyney Thompson trying to break down what the mark means. Wade Guyton taking the hand out of it altogether. Reginald Sylvester ll: I was watching Wade. Ajay Kurian: What’s your relationship to an artist like Wade Guyton? Reginald Sylvester ll: Aesthetically he speaks to stuff that I’m interested in. To me, this is futurist painting. But I come from graphic design, so the fact that he’s using the Epson printer, you know, I very much so understand Epson in printmaking in that way. His book practice is really incredible. I’ve learned from buying tons of books. I’m very interested in making my own books. I’ve been lucky enough to make a few, so I’m interested in him in that way. Prince, I’m also interested in, because he’s also an artist who has done different things. It’s funny that you say that work came a year after, but during Premonition I was heavily invested in that work. That’s where I was heavily invested at that time. Ajay Kurian: So we met in 2021. I feel like I started hearing your name and I started seeing the work and the thing that captured me the most was your presence, and the way that you are in the world. I was like, okay, that person has like an energy that radiates in a very specific way. And so I was like, I know they’re cooking, I know something’s happening there. What I’m curious about, in a moment like that, where you’re shifting so many things in yourself that you’re very clear about. What does that look like to other people? Like from where you come from to that particular moment? How does that environment start to change for you? Reginald Sylvester ll: I used to get all types of remarks from homies, from people that would meet me. I remember I mentioned to you when we were talking about what people are thinking about the work. I hope they think that my intentions are pure when I’m making this work. I hope nobody thinks I’m just trying to, oh, this might work. Nah, man. I’m gonna go back to that first thing and then continue to unpack the things that I’m seeing and reading about and watching in terms of art. I was motivated to and I want to have a rigorous studio practice. I want to continue to pay attention to the things that are working within the work that may not be working. Expand on those things and then continue to push. Just for myself, so I can sleep at night. At the end of the day I need to make the work that I’m the most happy about before anybody else has anything to say, and that’s why I made the decision to take two years off. I’m gonna dig deep. I’m gonna make the best abstract paintings that I can possibly make. You know? And that’s what I did. From that, I learned so much. I continue to do that in the studio today. If I’m making work, and there’s a small thing about the painting that I just finished. I’m expanding on it. What started to happen is, I was starting to reference myself in things that were working within the studio to expand on, opposed to maybe continuing to look outward or how am I gonna situate myself in the cannon? Or where do I fit? What do I contribute? And more so I just started thinking very insular about what my real interests are. That’s when the best work started to come or the work that I feel the most proud of. Ajay Kurian: And of course being able to sleep at night is a serious thing. That’s an important way to live your life. It keeps truth in you, but there’s also just economic realities too, if you had success with one particular body of work. Did you get pushback from people in that regard too? Like I see that you’re going this way, but this isn’t what we asked for? Reginald Sylvester ll: No, I didn’t really get pushback in that way. I think it was more, certain individuals or friends or whatnot would always kind of say that you are losing your previous audience. I would see on social media that I’d lose followers. Stuff like that, you know? But when you really sit with yourself, does that really mean anything? You know, again, art would beg the question of what’s true, what’s truth? Visually, what’s the closest to truth you can get for yourself. I mean, those things definitely in some way bother me. I’m not gonna say that they did not, but you know, I look back and I’m glad I kept continuing to have that kind of interest into pushing. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I’m glad too. But the other thing that comes to mind is the kind of racial dynamic here. Did people feel like, and did you feel like, you were moving from black space to white space? Reginald Sylvester ll: Nah, nah. I didn’t feel like that, but I probably got that from other people. Ajay Kurian: I’m not saying that abstraction is a white space. Of course, it goes back further in black and brown places. Reginald Sylvester ll: Than anywhere else, yeah. I think to an audience that raised me up and held me up. You know, coming from street wear, coming from culture in that way, I had a clothing brand, I had built an audience from that. Then my interests started to change and my, I call it maybe a calling, started to change and I really wanted to pursue art and try to make the strongest bodies of work that I could possibly make. I did lose people in that way. I remember, I had a homegirl tell me, she said something on the lines of, I don’t know what this work is about. I mean, from an aesthetic standpoint, you might not be understanding. But abstract painting and art history has layers to it. It’s not just the pictorial thing. But it’s funny now, a lot of those people are — Ajay Kurian: Coming around. Reginald Sylvester ll: Coming around, you know, because again, it’s a journey. Ajay Kurian: You’re very intentional about your movement. It’s not Ooh, let me jump on this, or, Ooh, let me do that. Reginald Sylvester ll: I mean, I could have stayed where I was at in 2021. I could have maybe stayed where I was in 2023. But it’s not what it’s about and there’s growing pains. For me, better things have gotten tougher. Ajay Kurian: I believe that. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’m just moved by evolving and growing and digging deeper and digging into what excites me in the studio. If there’s something that excites me in the studio, I’m going that way. You know, the show that I had in North Carolina at the Harvey B. Gantt Center was a great exhibition for me. I got that show, and I was making the refuge paintings. They were all basically gestural abstract paintings on the pup tents, and then came the offering paintings. And when I made that first offering, I said, the hell with those refuge paintings, I’m showing straight, offering paintings. To be in the middle of a situation where someone gives you a show, and you’re expected to make this thing, but you got this other thing. Luckily, I work with people that believe in what I’m doing and trust me. You know, had the real conversation, sat down, this is the work that I’m making. This is what I wanna do. Maybe I can find a way to bridge it, you know? And luckily, I was able to really think through and find a way to show and stitch together. That first image that you had up, that was the first time I was able to show those paintings. And you know, I’m always gonna make the shift, even with T-1000. I decided to use iridescent dark colors because I felt like, hey, I wanna be a stronger colorist. How am I gonna do that? Okay, instead of just working with colors that complement one another, you need to actually be able to work with a set few colors or one color. You need to be able to make paintings with the same amount of intensity that you would get from a saturated picture, but with a muted picture, how can you do that? So I said, okay, I’m gonna make these paintings and obviously there was an interest in sculpture and steel and the oxidization and all those things, and I made the decision to do it. You know, thinking on the other side of it with my first show in Los Angeles. Rob Bennett gave me this opportunity to have this exhibition and it’s very risky to go and do a show like that. But again, he was like, this is what you wanna do, okay, bet. There’s a Nina Simone clip that I see often and I reposted it. She’s saying that artists should be reflecting the times, you know? So I was like, yo, this is where I’m at in the studio and I’m seeing where things are going in our current and this is the way for me to tell truth. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. It feels like the way you’re talking about challenging yourself, it felt very mamba mentality. This is what I think I’m strong at. Let me see the weakest part of that, so I can figure out how to get strong there. That’s an ethic that’s not easy to put on yourself. I think when you’re in school or when you have people that are around you that are like, oh, you gotta push yourself, you gotta do these things. But when you’re alone and by yourself, and the temptations that are around you, where it’s oh, you’re getting all this praise and accolades and things for doing things in a certain way. You can get seduced by that and it stops being about the pursuit of what you find to be strong and true, but more so, all right, this works. Because there’s also very real world constraints where I could maybe put a down payment on a house if I stay on this course, versus who the fuck knows what it’s gonna be. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah. At a point I reached out to a few artists that I was lucky to be able to meet, who have been doing it longer than I have, that are a generation or two older than me. I actually was asking those questions like, I wanna do this, this is the work that I’m making, people like this stuff. Do both. If this is what’s working, pump that, and then that can support the other stuff. I was like, okay. I heard that a few times from a few people. But then it’s on you. You also have artists who don’t have the exposure at the age I’m at. I got an opportunity to meet William T. Williams, you know, a goat. And he’d been banging the boards way far longer than I have. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Reginald Sylvester ll: I got to go to him. Funny enough, the foundry that I used to make the gates at — I had been using that foundry for a year, not knowing that I was driving past his crib the whole time. Ajay Kurian: No way. Reginald Sylvester ll: So he was like, yeah, this is my address. I’m like, this is literally 10 minutes down the road from where I’m making these gates. Ajay Kurian: God damn. Wow. Reginald Sylvester ll: So I went to go see him and his studio. Met his lovely wife and we had sandwiches. It was great. It was fire. I just saw how dialed in he was at the age that he was, but then thinking again on how long he’s been doing it. So even for me to have opportunities since 2015 till now and to be able to continue to show work, whether it was considered valid or not. Still have opportunities to show work, have people that still wanna back you, believe in the work, help fight. When I get into those thoughts, what do I really got to complain about? There’s artists that have become stewards in a way, where they’re teachers and they support their practice by working. They’re doing that and then still dialed in on the practice. When I do get into those moments, I look at the peers that I really see who’s pushing and enjoy it, and I look at them and I’m like, dang, they doubling down. Fuck, I can’t not double down. I gotta double down. There’s great artists making within the same time that I’m making that I also am inspired by. I’m not gonna say it’s easy. I have my moments. The person that probably sees those moments a lot now is my wife. Of course. She’s like oh, you’re being on your Edgar Allen Poe, you is all mopey today. But that’s the journey though. Jack Whitten said it the best. They asked him, did he ever want to be one of the best artists, and he said, I just wanted to be one of the boys. And that was fucking legendary. I think for me, that’s if Jannis Kounellis, Gilliam, Hammonds, Ed Ruscha — If any of these guys were in the room, you know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: And they tipped their hat. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’d rather go out swinging than to just be like, you know what, this works and I’m gonna sell a hundred thousand of these. But then, what? Ajay Kurian: I mean, the punches are landing my friend. So I hope they keep landing. Reginald Sylvester ll: Lord willing. Ajay Kurian: I’m excited to see what transformations happen next. Thank you for this. Thanks for being honest. Thanks for opening up. Thanks for sharing everything. It means a lot to everybody here, so thank you. Reginald Sylvester ll: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E17
    January 9 · 53 min

    The/Forum 17 | Ebony L. Haynes: The Terms Of Autonomy

    When David Zwirner approached Ebony L. Haynes, the conversation didn’t begin with vision statements or prestige. It began with reality: exhaustion, uncertainty, and the question of whether staying in the art world was even possible. What followed was recalibration. If she was going to continue, it had to be on terms that reflected how she actually works—through care, risk, and sustained presence. That recalibration became 52 Walker. Drawing from her time at Martos Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster, Haynes speaks candidly about what it means to build exhibitions from the ground up: buying furniture on credit cards, drilling into gallery floors, maintaining impossible works by hand, and staying late because the work deserves it. For her, autonomy is not branding or independence for its own sake. It is the ability to stay present with artists, to hold risk without spectacle, and to let rigor coexist with joy. Rather than framing curatorial work as management or authorship, Haynes describes it as a practice shaped by trust, repetition, and care—one that resists burnout not by slowing ambition, but by rooting it in pleasure, responsibility, and belief. She explains: * How Foxy Production taught her to do every job herself, and why learning the whole system changed how she values labor. * Why belief in the work often comes before money, and what it costs to act on that belief anyway. * How maintenance, repetition, and care are not secondary tasks but central to exhibition-making. * What quarantine, racial reckoning, and institutional fatigue revealed about her limits—and her resolve. * How 52 Walker emerged not from a master plan, but from presence, honesty, and the willingness to say, “I have this idea.” Timestamps (0:00) First Encounter and the Permission to Care (4:00) Foxy Production and Learning by Doing(7:00) Installation as Commitment (16:00) Belief, Debt, and the Couch(18:00) Maintenance, Repetition, and Joy (21:00) Quarantine, Burnout, and Almost Leaving (25:00) Martos Gallery and the Small Fish Problem (27:00) Shoot the Lobster and Experimental Freedom (32:00) 52 Walker and Building a Program (41:00) Artists, Power, and Staying in the Work Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube. Follow Ebony Instagram: @ebotron Follow 52 Walker Web: https://www.52walker.comInstagram: @52walker Writer, curator, and phenom Ebony L. Haynes is on a mission to reconfigure the art world. Working her way up from her first New York City internship at contemporary gallery Foxy Production (then based in Chelsea), the Canadian-born Haynes would eventually become the director of Marts Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster. In early 2020, Haynes was approached by David Zwirner for a sales director position. She countered with a pitch for an exhibition model resembling a kunsthalle, wherein exhibitions would last 3 months and allow for visitors to spend more time truly considering the art before them. That idea led to the October 2021 opening of 52 Walker, David Zwirner Gallery's TriBeCa location, with Haynes at the helm as director. Unlike traditional commercial galleries, 52 Walker does not represent artists, and is instead dedicated to curating programming at a pace similar to that of a museum — giving artists more opportunity to challenge themselves and experiment freely. The recruitment of an all-Black staff at 52 Walker garnered disproportionate attention, but her two-pronged approach to catalyzing change in the art world is more far-sighted than mere identity politics. In challenging the ever-shrinking attention spans of a cultural milieu that increasingly consumes art through social media, Haynes aims to empower artists to take risks and dig deeper in their work. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here. Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio. Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: What does it feel like to watch this right now? Ebony L. Haynes: You know, I haven’t watched this in a while. It stands so clear in my mind. The first time I experienced this artwork of perfection… Ajay Kurian: This was what I read and gathered was the first art experience where you were really rocked to your core. Ebony L. Haynes: There was a small space run by this formidable woman, Ydessa Hendeles in Toronto, who at the time I knew nothing about. I stumbled into this space based on some kind of art map. I was emotional, I remember crying the first time. I went back at least a half dozen times and it made me feel like pursuing something in the art world could really mean something. It was the very first artwork I ever remember feeling like this shit hits and there are so many layers to it. The first time I walked in, I didn’t know who Shirin Neshat was, you know? And it’ll be one of my opuses. I already had one. I thought Gordon Mata Clark and Pope.L is a show I did, and I’m like, oh, I can’t top it. But working closely with this artist and something around this work would be the next major emotional insurmountable moment for me. You have to visualize this two-channel video, before I knew what two-channel really meant. You know, I don’t wanna pretend like I was encountering this work and I knew all of the ways to talk about it. I walked into the room, and there were two screens. This window was a screen and the wall facing each other. So these performers are essentially facing each other and you’re sitting in the center. It was a purple carpet, very well installed. I come from a music background, so immediately I was like, the sound design was impeccable. Somebody really thought about six channels of sound and knew how to put the subwoofers in the right place to make me feel it when it hits that note. I was like crying for this woman. And also feeling a little bit for the man and I mean, it was… Ajay Kurian: There’s layers. Ebony L. Haynes: There’s layers. It’ll be a chapter. Yeah, it was huge for me. Ajay Kurian: It’s also such a different experience. Because I was watching this on my laptop and I was like, this is crazy. Then hearing it here, the hair on the back of my neck went… Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah when you see it, it was floor to ceiling, so it was larger than life bodies belting in front of me. I almost felt like I could feel the air out of the speakers. I mean, I was also there alone every time I went. Ajay Kurian: Wow. So this clocks as one of the formative experiences a hundred percent. In your sort of art upbringing, I’m gonna fast forward a little bit to when you actually make it to New York. Is your first job in the art world interning at Foxy? Ebony L. Haynes: Intern at Foxy Production, yep. Whenever I’m about to talk about Michael and John, Michael, Gillespie, John Thompson. I make it sound like we are really good friends and I hope we are, but we don’t text and call each other. But they know how important they were and are to my story. Foxy production was one I wrote to because of their program. I felt somebody, who at the moment when I applied, had worked in music mostly and that was my only full-time experience and writing about music. They were really kind of schmutzy and unmastered is what I remember saying to John in my letter. It was like this underground basement, party of a gallery where they were doing a lot of new media before many galleries. Maybe not. You know, I don’t know, but from my perspective. Ajay Kurian: They have that reputation, yeah. Ebony L. Haynes: So I just wrote them a letter and I was like, do you want me, I’d love to come and work for you for free. And they were like, cool, come on down. I did, and it was life-changing. I really expected it to be an internship where I go back and get a job in Toronto and it turned into a job for them. Ajay Kurian: And that’s when we met. Ebony L. Haynes: That’s when we met, so many years ago. That was 2012, I think. Something like that. Ajay Kurian: With people that are in the gallery world or in the commercial art world — my gallerist for instance, Oliver, he worked for Alexander and Bonin. And he really credits them as being the ones who really gave him his grounding and his understanding of what it meant to be a gallerist. Do you feel similarly? You worked at Foxy, then you worked at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, then you worked at Martos. Of those three experiences, what has felt like the one that’s grounded you the most? Ebony L. Haynes: Grounded me, probably Martos. You know, Martos and Shoot The Lobster. I have to say both because I was tasked to program three galleries bicoastally at the same time with a staff of one. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Ebony L. Haynes: Sometimes an intern or assistant, eventually it grew, but it took years. Foxy though, made me really appreciate what it means to learn everything about my job. They taught me how to make an invoice, what a performer was for shipping, what the difference between national and international crates are, and how to hang an art fair booth. Registrars and production art handling are my complete IV lifeblood. If my registrar and my art handlers are not happy… I’m the queen of Donuts install morning or let’s get some pizza. When it was Martos time, I’d do some beer after hours, but not at David Zwirner. Because. I remember one story, this show at Martos, Invisible Man. Pope.L created a new work for me and it was a fountain that hung upside down. I’d hired an art handling and production company to help me build that plinth and figure out how to hang it safely and successfully from the beam. No shade, in case anybody is associated with that experience, and much love to the crew. But they bailed before it was hung. They claimed, and to their credit I think it was hard, but they just were not gonna be responsible for it. So I had to figure out how to rent scaffolding and enlist somebody, who I’m thankful is now a partner in all things in my life and at the time was just my art handler and production manager, and another friend who I knew was art handling for another gallery. One night I slept there. Just so many late nights for this show right before we opened. I have so much love and appreciation for people who say they come into 52 Walker and it feels like an installation and it’s always new. I have to be involved. I would never ask anybody installing a show for me to do it without my involvement. I’m really respectful and admire people who are willing to troubleshoot with me, and especially those who feel excited by it and not burdened by challenges because some people do. Some people have an attitude of, it’s not my job, this is not what I signed up for. But those who really get excited by problem solving and we’re in it together — I will vacuum up the floor while you are mopping. We have to do it ‘cause then it just looks so good. Ajay Kurian: I think also sometimes there’s a fear that the curator will get in the way and when you can actually fully collaborate that is a beautiful thing and it’s something that I think artists would want more if they could trust it. I’m wondering when you felt like artists started to trust you? Was this Martos? Was this Foxy? I think you always had artists on your side. You were always friends with artists. You were always in the mix of things. But when did you feel like, oh, I’ve earned this trust now? Ebony L. Haynes: I would say it happened early, but you know, there’s different levels of trust. I remember one time at Foxy production, this wonderful artist who I now call a friend, Sascha Braunig, had her second exhibition there. First of all, the gallery needed to be painted. Ajay Kurian: You painted the gallery? Ebony L. Haynes: With Sasha. Ajay Kurian: You’re kidding. Ebony L. Haynes: We texted in the morning and was like, can you bring an extra shirt, like painting clothes? I have to preface what we continue with our conversation to say I’ve never advocated for a kind of paradigm shift with 52 Walker. Of course, my practice is my own. Everybody is afforded the right to their own practice and opinions. But if you didn’t make art, and a lot of curators did. But I didn’t make art in the studio, I studied photography. I only worked primarily as a commercial photographer. So to really understand how the artist is working. I can’t imagine asking someone to move a painting one inch on blocks on the floor for me. Ajay Kurian: Really? Ebony L. Haynes: I hate it. I actually save a lot of money with art handlers because I don’t book anything until it’s really time to hang. I move the blocks, unless they’re really big and I need help, of course. But I feel weird and they’re always so generous. Art handlers are the blood of the industry. They don’t feel weird hanging back and waiting for me to take 10 minutes to look at a wall, but I feel intrusive and disrespectful of their time, just having them be around. So I do a lot of my installing after hours. I do a lot of facsimile printouts, even just 8 by 10 and tape them together to move things that are not worth $10,000 or a million dollars, and just move the paper. There’s something about feeling like I’m connecting with what I’m hanging that feels important. Ajay Kurian: Oh yeah. When I am hanging a show, I’ll move something and then I’ll walk out the gallery and I’ll walk in and then I’ll move something again and I’ll walk out of the gallery and I’ll walk in. Ebony L. Haynes: Me too. Ajay Kurian: And I just keep doing that over and over again because what is the choreography of this emotional experience? Testing it as many times as you can to see does it hold and does it do the things that I thought in my head? And trying to separate yourself from what was happening in the studio or what was happening in a different moment in time to what’s happening in this space right now. You’ve had so much experience putting together shows. This signaled to me what Ebony was gonna be about. This is the artist Peter Williams. I think we both agree, maybe an underappreciated artist Ebony L. Haynes: A hundred percent. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t know that many people talking about Peter Williams. I don’t remember if you were the one who told me about him, or there was some moment when I was looking at this work and I was like, holy shit, this guy is incredible. Here you were doing a show of the work and making sure that he was taken care of. He had his share of health issues and required some real care. It felt like this was a moment where you really gotta showcase an artist and show people a world that they hadn’t seen before, which I think we’ll start to see more and more. And then 52 Walker happens. Ebony L. Haynes: The show is heartwarming for me on so many levels. This is just gonna be an ode to Foxy production. Michael and John, to their credit, it was an artist who had been presented to them and in front of me. I was very privileged to be the only employee. The owners of the gallery really heard me. They really listened to my opinions about the work. We had engaging conversations about the work, and they said, why don’t you go to Delaware and meet with Peter? This was one year out of grad school. I mean, I’m sure there are many good bosses out there. Ajay Kurian: No, that’s special. Ebony L. Haynes: For these gentlemen to put me on a train, not a plane, but put me on the train. It was more than just a studio visit. It was an invitation to, not just a show, but representation. There were no titles at Foxy production. By any measure, I was a gallery assistant, but I was also their registrar, art handler, and did the fairs with them. This was my real first experience with an artist bringing in an archive that was on slides in binders and really bonding with Peter and helping with his New York show. Ajay Kurian: I feel like Martos was when you planted a couple of flags. Invisible Man being the first where you could start to make a stake curatorially. How do you create a relationship with a gallerist, specifically a white gallerist, where you’re like, this is what I want to do, these are the shows that I want to do, and get the support that you need? Because I’ve proposed shows that didn’t happen because there wasn’t the support that I needed, but you pulled these things off and made it work. Ebony L. Haynes: For better or worse. I was unaware of what anyone else thought. I probably should have taken note a little more and I try to learn from that now. I knew that this show had to happen. Many questions were put to me as to its financial viability, production, and installation. I didn’t have answers, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t all peachy, you know? I got in trouble a lot, not just with Jose. I mean, not in trouble, but I had to have many private conversations with people I worked with and for — here’s an example. In this picture, this couch, Kayode Ojo. I was such a believer in this complete installation that I bought this couch myself on two credit cards. It was only $600, which makes you understand what my credit card situation was like. I had to resell it on Craigslist at the end. For Kayode and I, the belief in this work and the conversation in the show was so much more important than me to think 10 steps ahead. I just thought two steps ahead. And so the blindness of that was rewarding for me as a curator. You know, how are we gonna get those Jessica Vaughn’s up? Let’s figure out how to do this large format printing for the seats. And you know, there was no Patreon then, but I did some sort of crowdfunding. Ajay Kurian: How did you maintain this steadiness and not just burn out after doing a show like this? How do you not just crash and be like, fuck it, I’m never doing a show like that again. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, it’s so fun. Look at it. Look at this floor for context. I went to Red Hook a year before the show even opened to look at flooring that is reclaimed oak. It was pretty expensive. And the first show I do, I tell my boss, I love this floor. I am gonna drill a hole through it that will leave a mark for the life of the gallery and it’s still there. If you go in, you see I kept the piece, but the line marks this hole. Ajay Kurian: Oh, this is like your own little Gordon Matta-Clark. Ebony L. Haynes: It is. I mean art is so fun, you know, even the challenges. I think when I stop having fun in the challenges of each show, maybe my career will change. But I love working with artists. I love the conversations. I really have a good time. I’m not begrudgingly approaching an install because I have to stay till midnight. For me it’s more what’s for dinner at the gallery? Let’s go guys. Maybe when that changes, it’ll feel different. For this, I didn’t know what people would think. I didn’t know if it would be successful. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was excited for people to come in and see it. This Fountain, Pope.L was like fuck you, you’re gonna have to get on a ladder twice a day. First fill it with newly filtered water, and at the end of the day, drain it. Every single day, reset the timer. This was for eight weeks. That’s a lot of draining and filling. I would just laugh every time and send him texts and be like, you motherfucker, fuck you. I love you, but this is crazy. You know, it’s fun. That’s the answer. Ajay Kurian: There’s joy. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, there’s joy for sure. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s a moment in museums and art culture at large, after George Floyd, where everybody’s scrambling to figure out how they can address, what to them seems like this explosion of a crisis. Where it’s just been there all the time and no one’s been looking at it. So I think a lot of black creatives, a lot of black artists, a lot of anybody in the field, was trying to figure out how to not fucking quit and how to keep moving forward. That was right when you left Martos. It was the in between period, right? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, it was in between, by default because we were quarantined. I mean, I can say a lot. Like many non-white bodies in the art world, I felt very angry. I felt sort of like this new moment of realization sociopolitically, where, oh, my neighbor’s racist. We knew that, you know, all these things were just bubbling to the top. And then having to deal with what I’ve always felt and then what became more apparent to others and making them feel comfortable. I reached a tipping point with this online programming — for those who remember the quarantine of online viewing rooms, experience in 3D, QR code this, and here’s a talk virtually. That was my first and only time so far where I was really literally almost out the door of the art world. I was really ready to go for my seventh life. I was like, this is it for me. I can’t do it anymore. Ajay Kurian: Is that before David? Ebony L. Haynes: It was really concurrent. Here comes my shout out to a friend in the room who gets a chapter in my memoir. You know, it’s about the people who are there at the right time. I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Mark, while we were quarantined. I remember just spewing my guts of frustration of just I just wanna do cool shit and make somebody realize that it’s cool and pay me to do it. I know it’s gonna be good. Don’t question me with your budget meetings and your bullshit and just just wanna fucking do it. Ajay Kurian: You sound like an artist. Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe I feel like an artist sometimes. It’s your practice. It does feel like I wanna create. I’m a little more like I wanna produce for my artists. And Mark said, what does that look like to you? In this moment, I don’t know, fucking I advising for Kanye. It was mostly really this moment of one person, not just Mark, but a few people very close to me hearing me spew this confession. I have imposter syndrome but maybe a little less in this moment when all these idiots around me are doing some bullshit posturing and I really wanna do something that means something and can we just get someone to pay for it? Then a few people encouraged it, whether they had the answer or not. Ajay Kurian: They didn’t slam the door. Ebony L. Haynes: No, they didn’t slam the door. And it was concurrent with David Zwirner, because before COVID is when I was approached by the gallery. But I was approached to work for them in a much more traditional way as a director which is what happens in the gallery world. There’s this kind of unspoken rule of three to four year life at any gallery and then you get poached, which is a problematic word, but I use it anyway. Or you have conversations about lifting or expanding your career. And at the time when I had my first conversation with somebody from Zwirner Gallery, I thought I couldn’t do any of this. I felt like a small fish and was kind of afraid to be honest about working with big fish. So I had the conversation to attempt to be professional and leverage myself as a business woman to go back to Martos and be like, make me a partner and big fish want me. I don’t know what it was. I don’t even know how to say it. Ajay Kurian: You were leveraging Ebony L. Haynes: I was trying and I thought I would, but I didn’t have to because of the way things played out. My second interview or what was to be a meeting with Zwirner Minds was the week they announced quarantine. And I got a text from somebody, who is now a colleague who I really appreciate, she’s really and truly the backbone to a lot of how 52 Walker came to be. It was a very casual text like, oh, when COVID and quarantine blows over. Remember there were news casts about clorox and wiping down your groceries. That was the week I was supposed to go in and I was like, yeah, let’s just see how it plays out. Months go by. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: Silence. I’m spiraling. I wanna buy a container and put it on a small piece of land. I was feeling very fiery in the way that I wanted other people to feel heard and seen. Then it was like, people are actually back at work and doing business. So it was almost like the interview that was meant to happen, in February or the second week of March, was happening six months later. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Did you have a vision of 52 Walker in that second interview, or was it something that was kind of iterated with them? Ebony L. Haynes: I had a vision largely through conversations throughout the pandemic that really solidified what my experience at Martos and Shoot The Lobster had affirmed for me in a way that I loved working. Shoot The lobster, for background, was sort of a project space of Martos. It was for sale, but we didn’t represent artists. I was the art handler, director, curator, programmer for New York and Los Angeles. I would install it after hours, I’d leave Martos and walk over to Shoot The Lobster. Ajay Kurian: It was at that moment, you were a restaurateur that opened their second restaurant and you were just scrambling between boats all the time. Ebony L. Haynes: Just all the time. I wanted to live in Chinatown because I spent every moment there. But there was something that happened for me as a curator where I could see the benefits of both worlds in that relationship where Shoot The Lobster felt free for artists. With me, it was like, no one’s paying attention. Let’s cut this ceiling open and break the pipe and nobody cares. Let’s put a video out on the street and it’s like Elger Street and nobody pays attention, but we tried it. We tried it out and it worked most of the time. Then I had Martos where we represented artists, we did art fairs, and a program that was representative of Jose and the history of the gallery with new artists that I was there to bring on. So it was four and a half years and the melding of both of those mines started forming 52 Walker. Ajay Kurian: That makes so much sense. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. If I could do Shoot The Lobster bigger. But I had nothing planned going into the interview. Ajay Kurian: When you look at 52 Walker now, it looks very planned. There’s a vision of the catalogs. It seems like they are inspired by many different things from Cy Twombly drawing catalogs to Octavia Butler to magazine culture. I think the magazine culture is actually one of my favorite things about the editorial note, because it reminded me of how I think about introductions. It’s an editor’s note. It’s something that is about changing how we can be hospitable in art spaces and what voice do we use? Is it a voice where we’re looking down like this, or is it a voice where we’re like this and we can talk to each other as if we’re all just horizontal? Ebony L. Haynes: Totally. Ajay Kurian: It feels like there’s an ethic, rigor, but empathy with 52 Walker. Did you know that you wanted catalogs? Did you know that you wanted all of it to look this way? Did you have a sense of the first artist and then kind of importantly, the way that you were thinking about risk and safety? Because this is commercial at a much larger scale and you already said feeling like a little fish next to big fish. This is one of the biggest fucking fishes there is. So how do you make that transformation? How do you meet that and say, all right, let me do my shit. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, I’m always gonna be honest and transparent. I really don’t know. I don’t encourage anyone to wait until this moment of fight or flight. But I truly felt like I had nothing to lose when I pitched 52 Walker. Which made me probably seem more confident than I am because if everyone said no, I had a container plan. You know, I studied art criticism. It was an art criticism and curatorial practice program. My through line from the beginning was criticism. I wanted to write, I wanted to be critically engaged with practice and the canon and publish. I wasn’t studying exhibition design in a way that maybe I would now. So I kind of was like, this is what I wanna do and if nobody wants to, I don’t know. I’m really good at growing cucumbers. I would hope that I could encourage anybody who feels any sort of inspiration not to wait for this dire moment, you know? Otherwise though, to be honest, I was in front of David Zwirner and I didn’t have my next interview with a partner or director. It was David Zwirner and Ebony Haynes in a room. We talked amicably and professionally about me coming in as a director. I’d never met him before either, full disclosure. I was just riding a vibe. That sounds so unplanned, but sometimes you feel people are listening. Or you could really have a conversation with somebody and it’s reciprocal. And I just sort of said, I have this idea. It’s real, that’s what I said. I have this idea. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: And the things that you’ve done during COVID and rethinking models and how to offer different kinds of support. Here’s my idea. Ajay Kurian: This is almost like an out-of-body experience. You’re saying things that are very matter of fact and I want to give commentary to the matter of factness. Do I have consent to do that? Ebony L. Haynes: I will share as much as I feel comfortable living online. Ajay Kurian: I think there’s a lot of situations where people walk into a situation and you might have preconceived ideas. You might come in with frustrations, angers, structural inequities, that you’re like, this is my fucking moment to speak truth to power. I am trying to decide whether that’s the angel or the devil on your shoulder. Because I think what Ebony did in that moment is that she met the situation in full presence, staying completely present in that situation, to say the thing that was on her heart and just seeing where it lands. I think that’s when people pick up what you put down because there’s no animosity. It’s simply stated, these are the things that are happening. These are the things that are happening in the world. This is the thing that I want to do. And I think it could change things and it doesn’t put that other person on the defense to say, I need to defend myself in A, B, and C ways, which in so many other contexts, maybe he should. But that’s not the context in which you’re gonna get something done and it’s not the context in which you can grow something that you’ve grown. To me, seeing the zen of that moment, I think is really important and a great lesson because it’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to maintain your presentness in thought and mind and spirit when you’re confronted with somebody that represents a lot of things, more so than just them as the person. When a person gets seen in that way, their defenses go down and you might be able to accomplish something different, which you’ve clearly done. Ebony L. Haynes: That is too generous. I mean, it’s so heartwarming for me to hear. I’m not trying to dismiss what you said, but it really feels generous. So maybe that is how it is landed outside of my experience. Ajay Kurian: I’m just trying to see it because in my head it’s coming from an honest place. I’m not trying to gas you anything. Ebony L. Haynes: No, I believe you. That’s why I’m really taken aback by it. It makes me feel joy to hear. Ajay Kurian: And to flip it, I think it also means that you’re okay in those moments of pushing those other concerns away momentarily. Even if you’re not thinking of it as the long-term vision, even if that’s not the goal in your head. I’m doing this because I want this in this many years. There is a presentness of mine to say, I’m gonna get this done and this is how it can happen. Otherwise it doesn’t happen and I’m just gonna move on and I’ll do something else and I’ll live number seven. But there’s a lot of complications and a lot of interesting things that happen there. I think for people trying to navigate this incredibly treacherous terrain, it’s good to hear shit like this. Because you also have a program that’s not easy either, you know. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: From Nikita Gill, who’s up on the screen right now. To Nora Turato, who is after that? Ebony L. Haynes: After Nora was Tiona McClodden. Then it was Tao, then it was Gordon Matta Clark and Pope.L. Ajay Kurian: That run of Nikita, Nora, and Tiona. Those are three shows about ruin, destruction, and failure. About the systems that have not served large swaths of the community, specifically people of color, specifically black people, and that these systems have failed and they’re fucked. They need to be torn down, burn, or they’re already in ruin. How do you find a way to talk to collectors that have benefited and continue to benefit from the maintenance of those systems? Ebony L. Haynes: Yikes. That is for a different talk, my friend. That is a deep talk. I’ll give you a little answer. Ajay Kurian: Give us PG-13. Ebony L. Haynes: PG-13 answer is… Ajay Kurian: Give us 2025 PG-13, which is like R from 1990. Ebony L. Haynes: In your in Ajay’s intro to me, you know, you mentioned eating shit, which is an analogy I personally use all the time. Because I had to early on find power in eating shit. I say early on as early as grad school, you know, I was the only black student in a cohort of 12. There were no black professors. I had to get two external black professors and I was the only one to do an extra semester. I mean, it just felt arduous and systemic in its bureaucracy. Realizing I could come out of that with something like foxy production and opportunity and then more opportunity. There’s always shit. As a non-white man, you have to eat and if you can work your muscle. No disrespect to the white men in the room, by the way. You know I have to say it because they’re near and dear to my heart. Ajay Kurian: I have plenty of white friends, but they can hear this. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, they can hear it. Because we’re talking about the general category, right? The general label. If you are not in that group and probably what feels more powerful to me than any space I open or program or show I curate: if you don’t feel like shit when you go home because of the amount of shit you’ve been given, you’re a fucking champ. For real, you’re a champ. And don’t think that you have lowered yourself to anyone’s expectations or lack of expectation. It’s like your petty funny bone. I’ll be like, okay, I see you, collector from eight years ago, who’s come in the gallery, who doesn’t remember what you said to me or how you spoke about me in French, because I’m fluent in French. And we were in Brussels and I had to storm out of the booth out of anger. I see you being respectful is fuel for me. It makes me feel a small amount of authority or power. Power doesn’t come from me in this space or these shows. These shows, for me, are only powerful because of my artists. Some of my staff, who are wonderful, they’ll be like, oh, I went to this bar and I was wearing my T-shirt — I gift them 52W merch every Christmas. And someone was like, oh, you work there? That’s so cool. And I was like, girl, nobody said that shit to you. You are totally clowning. She’s like no, they did. I was like, I was out at Art Basel and get introduced as Ebony of 52 Walker and get, oh, what’s that? I mean, there’s two sides of the coin. That happens to this day, and I don’t care. I embrace it all like that. That is power and it’s just part of the journey of the space. Power is that I’m still here. I am smiling. Shit tastes like cheesecake. I’m telling you, this is the one lesson you should all take away. Nobody can feed you shit unless you feel like it’s shit. You take it, you bring it home. Don’t get depressed ‘cause depression is our crypt like fuck depression. You are just as powerful as anyone else. And if you could just wait 10 to 15 years, you will show them that it tastes like cheesecake. Just give it time. Be kind to yourself. The world was not kind to me. The art world was not kind but I didn’t care. Ajay Kurian: That’s the part that’s so fascinating to me. That you didn’t care. Ebony L. Haynes: I think I’m just too stupid to have acknowledged it, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: If everybody believes that you’re too stupid, that’s not stupid. Ebony L. Haynes: Not stupid but oblivious. Ajay Kurian: Is this ‘cause you’re Canadian? Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe. You know, I won’t listen to this again, not because it’s not wonderful. I have a podcast and I’ve never re-listened to an episode. I don’t reread interviews that I give. It’s sort of like fight or flight always. I let it go and there it goes. You could hate it. You could love it. Both reactions are great. I’m already thinking about September 2027. Ajay Kurian: Exactly. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s all okay. I love criticism of what I do. And accolade, it’s all fine. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Canadian. It’s because I didn’t study art history, that’s why. Ajay Kurian: So I’m gonna end with what the future holds. Because I think in a way, even if you say you’re only planning a couple steps ahead, it somehow seems bigger than that. And you’ve just been appointed as… Ebony L. Haynes: It’s a word. Full is a mouthful. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, global… Oh, you’re gonna make me try to say it. Ebony L. Haynes: GHCP. It’s Global Head of Curatorial Programs. Ajay Kurian: What does that look like? Do you have a sense of what that looks like? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, I feel very present and purposeful in what I’ve achieved, but I do have to acknowledge the forces around me. Like Foxy production, like Lucy Mitchell-Innes who taught me all about secondary market, took me to my first auction, allowed me to work with Pope.L. Like Jose Martos, who trusted me. I feel really fortunate to have people in my life who I’ve worked for and with, where I’ve never felt stepped on. My current job is no different. You know, I felt the ability to pitch something to David Zwirner the first time and I felt supported in ideating this new potential of what the role could be. Ajay Kurian: So this is something again that you brought to them. Ebony L. Haynes: To full disclosure, it was definitely co cooked. I think without knowing we were cooking something, it just started, it just felt like I needed a change and I wasn’t sure why or what. David was trying to suggest a change and it was a long time. This wasn’t like one week. I feel lucky to have support and dissonance. You know, if you have somebody who tells you you’re the shit all the time, don’t, it’s your demise. Somebody who questions my intent, my proposal or my show, or makes me try to fight for something and I make them fight for their opinion too. It’s been really generous in my experience. I feel really lucky. Ajay Kurian: Especially when it comes from a place of care. No one’s trying to fuck you. Ebony L. Haynes: And it’s care on both sides really. I wanna figure out what growth means for me and the program. I’m not sure if growth means being in the same space for another five years if I’m being totally honest. And that’s kind of exciting as somebody who loves exhibition design and curating. We have to keep moving. We have to figure out what it means to challenge like an artist. I do think curatorial practice is truly a practice for me. I need to practice a bit more. What does it mean to do a show in Hong Kong? I don’t know, but I could know soon. That’s new, you know. I don’t know what it will bring really, but I’m excited for a new muscle. Ajay Kurian: I think even in the moments when you were like, I don’t know how to answer that, the way that you go about it, I think is so revealing about the state of mind that it took to keep doing these things and how you’re gonna keep doing even more. I’m excited to see it. Ebony L. Haynes: I love you and I wasn’t gonna say this, but Ajay had a show that was as inspiring for me, which I’ve mentioned also in interviews but he didn’t reference. His show at 47 Canal in 2013. I was like, who is this artist who’s making these motherfuckers build walls and put tanks inside with new wiring? I went there six times, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you live here and there’s lots of shows, it’s a lot. Ajay Kurian: That’s a lot. That’s more than I saw my show. Ebony L. Haynes: It was so good. I mean, talking about pushing things, stretching yourself, and what you’re comfortable with. Ajay Kurian: I really appreciate that. Thank you. Ebony L. Haynes: Remember that show. Top 10 New York shows. It’s true. He didn’t pay me to say it. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I’m gonna, that’s the end of this. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s in print. It was interviewed. Ajay Kurian: No, thank you. Everybody, a round of applause for Ebony Haynes. Ebony L. Haynes: Thank you. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • Dec 17, 2025 · 53 min

    The/Forum 16 | Banks Violette: Inside the Machinery of Ruin

    He built a career on dark stages, scorched metal, and fragile narratives. Banks Violette looks back at the neo-goth label, the toll of self-destruction, and what it means to walk away from the art world and return on his own terms. Working between sculpture, installation, and sound, Violette treats subcultures, violence, and fandom as unstable stories rather than fixed identities. From Slayer panic and satanic scare headlines to burned stages and Jägermeister firepieces, his work tracks how trauma gets turned into image, how labor disappears behind polished objects, and how an artist survives a system that rewards collapse as much as rigor. He explains: * Why “neo goth” was a convenient label that flattened a generation of young artists and obscured the real story of illness, addiction, and burnout. * How murder cases, satanic panic, and The Sorrows of Young Werther reveal a long history of fiction being blamed for real-world violence. * What it means to make work about calamity and Weegee’s photographs without treating trauma as raw material or spectacle. * How class, fabrication, and hidden labor structure the work, from doing everything by hand in Brooklyn to orchestrating 14 chandeliers for Celine across the globe. * Why drugs once felt like the only rational way to survive a tiny career window, and what it took to trade that pace for a decade of near silence, family, and fishing. * How fan-level enthusiasm for Void, Smithson, and Judd can coexist with critical rigor, and why reentering the conversation matters if art is to function as a real dialogue. (0:00) Welcome and the Weight of First Impressions(3:00) The Blowtorch Narrative(7:00) Noise, Sunn O))), and the Gravity of Sound(12:00) Polke, Richter, Danto, Judd(19:10) When Stories Justify Violence(22:00) The Accomplice Problem: Art, Trauma, and Ouija(26:00) Invisible Labor, Class, and Who Really Makes the Work(34:00) Drugs as a Work Tool and the Decision to Disappear(47:00) A Decade Offstage and What It Means to Come Back Follow Banks: Web: https://ropac.net/artists/85-banks-violette/#Read: https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-versionInstagram: @banks_violette_616 Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Banks Violette: I feel like I’m catching up on sleep still at age 52. All the sleep that I missed in my twenties and thirties, I still feel like I’m trying to balance the books. Ajay Kurian: That’s fair. You know, there’s a camel theory of sleep that you can kind of keep it and grow it in a hump, and deposit it when you need it. Banks Violette: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds absolutely accurate. Ajay Kurian: This was the project that I really did foresee, and this was the moment that the press was largely calling a neo goth moment. There were a handful of artists at that time that were really maybe engaged in a neo-goth visual culture. But I wonder, did it feel like the right way to talk about your work at the time? Banks Violette: No. It felt like a convenient way of talking about the work because it was a way to organize a group of disparate artists and make them legible in a way that was easy for people to encounter. Ideas that were potentially easy to dismiss unless there was some kind of lens attached to it. Whether or not I ever felt like I shared a lot of commonalities with the artists that I was grouped with — not necessarily. Ajay Kurian: Of that sort of generation, were there artists that you felt like were your peers or fellow travelers? Banks Violette: It was always presented as if there was much more closeness, or similarity in our practices, when there wasn’t necessarily in actuality. So the person I can point to that I think I had the most in common with when I was working actively, was probably somebody like Gardar. He had a preoccupation with a specific period in art history, a specific kind of discursive lens that he was attaching to things, and a certain kind of political bent. I think that there were a lot of ways that we dovetailed, but then there’s a lot of ways that we were totally different. The one thing that I did have in common with a lot of the artists that I was grouped with was that we were all young and pretty engaged with self-destructive behavior. And you know, the artwork kind of reflected that. So on one hand, there was this goth thing, which is an inaccurate way of organizing that work, and then there’s what was actually taking place. Which was, here’s a bunch of people who were all probably not well, and let’s lump them together. But you can’t really be like, oh look at this group of artists who are all drug addicts. So instead, you know, there’s an easier way of doing that and say oh they’re all goth. Ajay Kurian: So they almost said that though. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was implied. Ajay Kurian: I want to go back to that era where you started in New York in order to understand where you are now. The image that I feel like was paraded around the most was probably this one where you’re lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch. When you search the name Banks Violette, this was the image that used to come up. Now I think Vanity Fair has the rights to the image and they’re not putting that on Google. Banks Violette: I had this experience, and I know a lot of other people, my friends and my peers, all had this kind of experience with people coming to the studio to take photographs of you working. And it would somehow turn into the “hey, do this, hey, do that”. And yes, I did definitely light my cigarettes with map gas, a hundred percent, hand on the Bible. I use propane to light cigarettes all the time, but that was definitely somebody trying to elicit that. So on one hand, that’s accurate. On the other hand, it is a totally theatrical presentation of what that moment in time looked like. If I had been necessarily in my right mind, would I have chosen to reveal that part of myself publicly? Probably not. I think there was a lot of that. People weren’t necessarily in the greatest position to author the way they were being perceived by people. Ajay Kurian: It was a fascinating thing to watch in the studio. Because on the one hand you were really private and there were things that I think were just for you and your world. And then on the other hand, seeing how you were able to move. For instance, I think the first time that I met you, I was an intern at the Guggenheim and they were doing this young collectors thing and came to the studio and you had this giant Jagermeister piece that you were working on. It was an incredible performance. It was all the ideas that you were thinking about, but it was the first time that I was hearing it. So you’re stringing together Smithson, Hegel, satanism and all these things that I am hearing for the first time. And I was like, this dude’s a fucking genius. Not to say that you’re not, but — Banks Violette: If I’m stringing together Hegel, satanism, and Smithson, then yeah, I’m definitely not. Ajay Kurian: What was fascinating to see after that was that you’d have other studio visits and this performance, it would be the same speech. And I was like, oh right, there’s some preparation to this. For a young artist, it dialed me in because it made me think about how none of that was untruthful and none of that was coming from a dishonest place. But you’re asked to do this thing again and again, and how do you not think about what this looks like, feels like, and appears as. How much of that was on your mind in that, like period of time? Banks Violette: The things that I refer to, gravitate to, and cite within my practice are things that I care deeply about. But they’re not necessarily things that somebody has deep and intimate knowledge of. Smithson’s practice or satanism or whatever it happens to be. These are the things that I think about a lot and I don’t wanna misrepresent them. Part of doing these things is figuring out a way to translate what is potentially this kind … Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • Nov 7, 2025 · 54 min

    The/Forum 15 | Eric N. Mack: On Tender Assembly and the Politics of Display

    He builds with fabric, scaffolding, and light — Eric N. Mack on tenderness as structure and the unseen labor that makes art visible. Eric N. Mack works between painting, installation, and fashion, reimagining how material, care, and collaboration shape contemporary image-making. His large-scale assemblages drape and lean, collapsing distinctions between surface and structure, styling and architecture, autonomy and support. His practice reveals how beauty, fragility, and display coexist within shared spaces of labor and care. He explains: * How gestures of rupture, cutting, and collage become ways to think through care, not violence. * Why stylists, curators, and unseen collaborators form the hidden architectures of art. * How fabric behaves as both image and body — draped, suspended, and alive to air and time. * What scaffolding, transparency, and light teach about the precarity of presence. * How tenderness and structure coexist as the real politics of display. * Why every act of making is also an act of attention — a choreography of support between maker, viewer, and space. (0:00) Welcome + Intro(01:00) Rupture, Reflection, and the Studio as World(05:00) Grace Jones and the Clarified Aesthetic(10:00) The Unseen Hand and the Architect of the Image(15:00) Collaboration, Care, and the Space of Display(20:00) Fabric, Fragrance, and the Politics of Form(30:00) Craft, Styling, and the Education of Looking(33:00) Art School, Value, and the Work of Belief(40:00) Draping Architecture and Breathing Structures(47:00) Fragility, Care, and the Social Life of Objects Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube. Follow Raul Follow Eric:Web: https://www.artsandletters.org/exhibitions?slug=eric-n-mackInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ernatmack/?hl=en Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) is a painter who radically reconsiders the medium’s traditional conventions. By utilizing found materials, Mack creates richly textured compositions that investigate painting in an expanded field and formal concerns of the practice. In 2025, Mack presented a one-person exhibition and site-specific installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, as well as a solo exhibition of new works at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Mack attended The Cooper Union, NY (BFA) and Yale University, CT (MFA) and is the recipient of prestigious awards and residencies including the Chinati Foundation’s Artists in Residence Program (2023); the Rome Prize (2021-2022); the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017); the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island (2017); the Delfina Foundation Residency (2017) and the Studio Museum in Harlem Residency (2014-2015). One-person exhibitions include Eric N. Mack, Paula Cooper Gallery (2023); Scampolo!, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin (2022); Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FL (2021); and In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019). Major group exhibitions include Chronorama Redux, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2023); Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, NY (2015). Work by Mack is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Mack lives and works in New York. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio.— Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: When you’re putting together a show, I know you’ve talked about art being present for the world’s brutalities, but how do you conjugate that or stay present in the work with that? It’s not even saying that you have to, because it’s not your responsibility to do so. It’s more so, I see glimmers and I see the way that you think about how things come together and how they kind of fall apart. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. I have a lot of epiphanies that sit in the studio, that come from the studio that end up allowing me to think about the external world from the happenstances in the studio, and from coordinated or measured gestures of rupture. And those ruptures could have implications of or sit alongside what folks could regard as kind of a material violence, or violence to a material, or decomposition, or collage, or something for the work to feel chopped like the ingredients are chopped up. I love a good metaphor, like a good salad, it’s aromatic with all the ingredients. Nothing overpowers one another, but it’s transformative. It holds meaning, sustenance, and maybe a level of a counterpoint, maybe the sunflower seed gets stuck in your teeth or something like that, you know? Ajay Kurian: You gave us a lot to chew on, even in the press release. At the end of that, there’s literally seven hyperlinks to run through. We had The Clark Sisters, Nina Simone, a trailer for the Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, the Harlem Restaurant of which the show was named after, Sinners movie tickets. Eric N. Mack: Why not? Ajay Kurian: And Grace Jones on an Italian talk show or an Italian show. Eric N. Mack: A talk show, I think. It could have been Eurovision. Ajay Kurian: But that was serious. She was really in her pocket. Eric N. Mack: Yeah, it’s intense, ‘cause she’s in drag in a way. You know, she’s wearing this wig and I was like, the wig is architecture and the wig is like a hat. She’s architecture. If you’re watching the YouTube video or seeing the performance at the end, this camera pans out and she leans back and someone catches her as she falls and snatches her wig. Then she becomes this doll, this kind of copy of herself, this quotidian, you know the things that she would process with Jean Paul. She’s always around and I always think about her. She’s an interesting marker, because she’s such a clarified aesthetic. She’s a sound, she’s a voice and she also possesses her own tension. There’s incredible softness and vulnerability, but she’s also a tank, you know? The thing is, these images are also ones that she’s used herself. I just think that she will always be relevant. Ajay Kurian: There’s an ownership over the image too. There’s a way in which she’s self representing and it feels beautiful and antagonistic, but also really generous. To be both aggressive and generous at the same time isn’t an easy thing to do. Ajay Kurian: But I feel like, for her embodiment to be a black woman who is beautifully angular and masculine and feminine at the same time, it’s a lot to have to deal with, specifically in that moment of pop culture too. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. She’s an artwork. She’s her own artwork. There was an exhibition I did in London and I kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Misa Hylton. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was a stylist for Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. So she was a part of this kind of bad boy regime, but she was a part of their visual representation. She’s an iconic stylist. Everybody takes notes from her in New York. Ajay Kurian: Really? It’s so interesting ‘cause I think you’re the first artist that I’ve talked to that holds stylists in this regard. That the grooming of an image, the understanding of what it takes to put together a scene, an idea, a world building essentially, that it’s happening completely behind the scenes. You’re really picking out these people to be like, you’ve changed this whole scene. Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s what we do as artists. It’s just asking questions like, okay, what’s in the byline? Who did this? Who’s the architect? She called herself the architect, and I respect that. There was an awareness and a renewed understanding of her importance as… Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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  • Oct 10, 2025 · 1 hr 2 min

    The/Forum 14 | Raúl de Nieves: Saints, Stained Glass, and the Work of Belief

    He builds worlds from devotion, labor, and light. Raúl de Nieves on myth, death, and the joy of transformation. Raúl de Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, stained glass, and music. His work merges ancestral craft with queer exuberance, creating ecstatic spaces where life, death, and rebirth coexist. Known for his intricate beaded sculptures and radiant installations, de Nieves transforms discarded materials into devotional objects that question permanence, value, and faith. He reflects on: * Why failure and fear are essential teachers * How myth, labor, and ritual shape his understanding of transformation * The link between spirituality and psychedelia in his creative process * The politics of beauty, excess, and craft * How performance and collaboration sustain his practice * The tension between art and commerce—and what it means to say yes * Why joy, respect, and self-love remain his most radical tools (0:00) Welcome + Intro(1:00) The Origin of “St. George and the Dragon”(10:00) Death, Culture, and Safety(21:00) Excess, Labor, and the Ephemeral(31:00) The Whitney Window(35:00) The Carousel and the Brand(43:00) Pact with the Devil(47:00) Celebration and Decay(53:00) Belief and Legacy(56:00) Joy, Respect, and The Smashing Pumpkins Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube. Follow Raul https://companygallery.us/artists/raul-de-nieves @norauls Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’ visual symbolism draws on both classical Catholic and Mexican vernacular motifs to create his own unique mythology. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments.Recent solo institutional exhibitions include In Light of Innocence at Pioneer Works, Redhook, NY (2025), and imagine you are here, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2023); A Window to the See, a Spirit Star Chiming in the Wind of Wonder…, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2023); The Treasure House of Memory, ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2021); Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2021); and Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at Prospect New Orleans, Hauser & Wirth, The Highline, MoMA PS1, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, K11 Foundation, Documenta 14, Performa 13, ICA Philadelphia, The Watermill Center, The Kitchen, Artist’s Space, and numerous other venues. His work is included in public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. De Nieves was born in 1983, in Michoacán, Mexico, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody, thank you all for being here. Welcome to our NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves! I’m gonna give you some background as to what NewCrits is, I’m gonna give you a little introduction to Raúl, and then we’re gonna get into the conversation. NewCrits is a global platform rooted in aesthetic education. We’re committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship and courses that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions while honoring the intensity of their best methods. We have crits, but we don’t think about crits as a way to tear you down to build you up. That’s trauma we don’t need anymore. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique, rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention. These talks are an instantiation of that. The way that I think about art will be on display. This kind of conversation is the kind of conversations that we have in crits. It’s one where we’re building together. Now let’s get to the main event, which is Raúl here. Raúl de Nieves: Hello everyone. Ajay Kurian: All right, we’re gonna start with this image. I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. We were both also part of the five artists that were asked to collaborate with Tiffany and Company. So we were spending a lot of time together and it was really nice. Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist, that feels free of shame and free of hiding. You’ll see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown deaths as he does in his band Hairbone. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work. They are a faded coupling, archetypes, and fantasma characters emerge throughout his sculptures as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books, rituals, and beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There’s plenty of art that looks to religions, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up. Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened. The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He’s created new stained glass works for the windows of the entire building. They’re modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile. So when you see texts that might be darker, more bodily, even a little gross, you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing’s left out. Everything feels redeemed. After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the sense that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy as if he simply is a star. I think it’s easy for us to see someone like Raúl whose light shines brightly and think that’s just who he is, that it’s not the result of enormous amounts of work and discipline of the ability to bring death to an old self in order to birth a new one and find joy again and again. A person like that right now is worth talking to and hearing their stories. So please help me welcome Raúl. Raúl de Nieves: Thank you. That was very nice. Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Raúl de Nieves: I feel great. Today was a lovely day and being here is so nice. To be able to talk to you and share a moment of my life and just some of the things that mattered to me. So thank you for having me. Ajay Kurian: It’s really a pleasure. It’s an honor. I have loved your work, I’ve loved seeing it and I love learning more about it. This image was one that came up when I was reading about the work. I’ve seen this story told many times in your work, but this is from 2003 to 2005. This is a story of St. George and the Dragon, and I wanted to start here ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things that are formative in this particular image, the story itself and how you saw that story. Raúl de Nieves: I moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the CCA college. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take into the school because of the financial situation that I was in. So it’s really nice to know that you are providing mentorship to students, because there wasn’t anything like that in 2002. The internet was just starting and moving to San Francisco was such a dream of mine and… Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

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