What’s My Thesis?

Robert Gunderman, artist and former director of the Los Angeles gallery ACME, joins What’s My Thesis? for a conversation about his decades of experience working on both sides of the art world—as an artist and as someone running exhibition spaces. Gunderman reflects on art school, experimentation, the history of Los Angeles gallery culture, and the importance of building community around artists. T...

Victoria Delgadillo is a multidisciplinary Chicana artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, video, performance, and collaborative projects, including her involvement with the MexiCali Biennial. In this conversation, she reflects on growing up along the Tijuana–San Diego border, working within Los Angeles Chicano art communities, the resourcefulness of rasquache aesthetics, artist collect...

Oscar Eduardo De Paz joins Javier Proenza to discuss his socially conscious painting practice and his participation in a group exhibition at Charlie James Gallery. De Paz traces an unconventional path from Chicago and Philadelphia to environmental policy and eventually art, including his work around environmental justice and the Flint water crisis. The conversation considers social realism, murals...

Painter Kristin Calabrese joins Javier Proenza to discuss her development as an artist and her commitment to painting, from studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA to building a life and practice in Los Angeles. She reflects on growing up between Massachusetts and Arizona, running away as a teenager, the relationship between personal history and artistic practice, and her continuing s...

Azul Silverio is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, curator, and arts administrator currently working at the Hammer Museum. Drawing on their experience at LACE and on the board of the National Performance Network, Silverio discusses supporting artists through institutions, developing a curatorial and writing practice, and navigating the contemporary art world. The conversation traces Silverio’s b...

Lebanese weaver and performance artist Saba Sadr, an MFA student at Otis College of Art and Design, joins Javier Proenza to discuss returning to Los Angeles after more than two decades in Lebanon and how experiences of displacement, caregiving, and political conflict inform an evolving artistic practice. Although Sadr's work centers on weaving and performance, the conversation expands into broader...

Juan Gomez returns to What’s My Thesis? to discuss his evolving practice across sculpture, installation, and drawing, and the ways his Mexican American identity and family history have resurfaced through materials associated with physical labor. Working with wire, knots, cement, bricks, packing materials, and found objects, Gomez reflects on his family’s roots in Zacatecas, his father’s blue-colla...

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles painter and sign painter Alex Gonzalez about the relationship between place, labor, and artistic practice. Drawing from a lifetime spent in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, Gonzalez describes how its density, street life, and changing social landscape have become the foundation of a narrative painting practice built on observation, symbolism,...

Sterling Wells is a Los Angeles–based painter represented by Night Gallery whose practice combines plein air watercolor with ideas drawn from conceptual art, environmental systems, and site-specific observation. In this conversation, Wells reflects on growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, studying painting and sculpture, living in New York after the 2008 financial crisis, and developing an interd...

Moon is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, art handler, and co-founder of DMS Atelier, an artist-run space in Los Angeles dedicated to exhibitions, artist residencies, and community programming. Originally from Chicago and a graduate of Grambling State University, he discusses the experiences that shaped his path from athletics and hip-hop culture to contemporary art and arts education. The con...

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with South African interdisciplinary artist Azole Njengele, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, about the relationship between architecture, drawing, and photography in her evolving practice. Reflecting on her education and professional experience in South Africa before relocating to the United States, Azole discusses how architectural trainin...

Interdisciplinary artist Manny Valdez joins What's My Thesis? to discuss his participatory practice, recent projects, and experiences as an MFA graduate from Otis College of Art and Design. Drawing on performance, installation, screen printing, and artist participation, Valdez examines how artists construct identity, navigate institutional structures, and create opportunities within the contempora...

Javier Proenza speaks with Ioanna Sakellaraki, a Greek visual artist, photographer, and Fulbright Scholar currently conducting research with the Smithsonian, about the development of her interdisciplinary practice across photography, collage, embroidery, and archival work. The conversation examines Sakellaraki’s transition from a career in communications strategy with EU institutions into contempo...

For the 300th episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza is joined by Los Angeles-based artists and cultural workers Dakota Noot and Christopher Anthony Velasco for an informal conversation shaped by friendship, shared history, and long experience in contemporary art communities. The discussion reflects on public visibility, social media hostility, reputation, and the shifting dynamics of creati...

In this episode, Dave Young Kim, a Los Angeles–based muralist and curator, discusses his recent exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Developed around the theme of Asian mythical creatures, the project reframes historical material through the structure of the immigrant experience, pairing objects from the museum’s collection with contemporary artworks and newly commissioned pieces...

Snezana Petrovic, a Yugoslav-born painter, installation artist, and former production designer, joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss her early career across film and theater in Yugoslavia and her forced migration to California during the country’s collapse in the early 1990s. She reflects on the loss of a national identity, the experience of displacement, and the complexities of being categorized wi...

Joe Galarza is a Los Angeles-based muralist, musician, and community educator whose practice engages Indigenous identity, political resistance, and the social role of art. Introduced through the East L.A. punk scene, Galarza traces his early influences from heavy metal illustration to anarchist thought, and later to Indigenous-led movements shaped by land struggles, NAFTA-era organizing, and Zapat...

In this episode, photographer Josh Schaedel discusses his work founding and sustaining an artist-run exhibition space in Los Angeles, reflecting on a practice rooted in service, hospitality, and access for emerging artists. He addresses the material and economic realities of photography, including the costs of production and framing, and the structural challenges that limit broader institutional s...

Artist Donel Williams reflects on his unconventional path into art, from community college photography to his studies at UCLA, where he developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, and installation. Drawing on personal history and mentorship, he describes how early experiences shaped his engagement with labor, material, and image-making. The conversation centers on the ex...

Faris McReynolds is a painter and musician whose practice engages directly with the structures of the contemporary art world. In this conversation, he reflects on his early entry into the gallery system, the financial realities of sustaining a painting practice, and the conditions that led him to step away from commercial representation. The discussion addresses how wealth, collectors, and market...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles painter Jahn Baby Muller, a graduate of the USC Roski School of Art, joins host Javier Proenza to discuss his thesis work and the philosophical questions shaping his practice. Muller describes a body of still life paintings built from objects collected at estate sales—particularly toys and artifacts left behind by the Baby Boomer generation—which h...

Painter Katie Hector joins host Javier Proenza for a conversation on portrait painting, image culture, and the shifting cultural frameworks that shape how faces and bodies are represented in art. Hector reflects on her studio practice, discussing her return to figurative painting and the role of photographic source material in constructing contemporary portraits. The conversation also explores Hec...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, painter Estefania Ajcip joins host Javier Proenza to discuss the personal and cultural experiences that shape her work. Ajcip reflects on growing up between the United States and Guatemala, her Indigenous family background, and the circumstances that led her to return to the U.S. as a young adult. The conversation explores how family separation caused by immig...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles–based Chicano artist Raul Baltazar about the cultural and historical foundations of his practice. Baltazar reflects on the origins of his performance character “Seven the Aztec Bunny,” first developed through ceremonies at Self Help Graphics’ Aztec New Year celebration, and discusses how Indigenous traditions, Cathol...