Art Restart

Ja’ Malik is just wrapping up his fourth year as the artistic director of Madison Ballet in Madison, WI, but his path to leadership has been shaped by decades inside the field. A former professional dancer with a 25-year performing career, Malik danced with companies including Cleveland Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre, BalletX and Ballet Hispánico, performing a wide range of classical, neocla...

For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book...

For more than a decade, conceptual artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have collaborated on sharp, often darkly funny critiques of the art world’s economic and political machinery. One of their earliest projects together, a satirical telethon staged during the Great Recession, planted a seed they later returned to: What would happen if you ran an art fair where every work of art was free?...

For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater , she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and n...

For more than two decades, composer and educator Byron Au Yong has created music that bridges performance, ritual and activism. His highly collaborative works have been presented by such varied institutions as the Seattle Symphony, BAM, the Smithsonian, the American Conservatory Theater and Nashville Opera. Among his many large-scale projects is his long partnership with writer and rapper Aaron Ja...

Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploratio...

When artist Sherrill Roland returned to grad school at University of North Carolina at Greensboro after nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he found himself haunted by the invisible weight of his experience. Determined to confront how incarceration had reshaped his body, psyche and place in the world, he — with the encouragement of then-faculty member, artist Sheryl Oring — turned...

In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “ I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work,...

Wanda Dalla Costa, a proud member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, has built a groundbreaking career by weaving Indigenous knowledge systems into contemporary design. As the first First Nations woman to become a licensed architect in Canada, she is Principal and Founder of Tawaw Architecture Collective, which has offices in Calgary and Phoenix. Through her leadership, Tawaw has shaped cultural, civ...

Davian Robinson’s artistic journey has never followed a straight line. As a student at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC, he discovered ballet and tap, launching a lifelong relationship with dance even as his vision continued to fade. At the same time, he was excelling in competitive athletics, eventually earning medals on the national stage as a para-cyclist. Years later,...

Few artists have woven their creative practice so seamlessly into the fabric of their home place as Shanai Matteson. A visual artist, writer, community-based researcher and environmental-justice organizer, Shanai works in northern Minnesota’s rural Aitken County, where she was born and raised. Her projects — whether they take the form of printmaking, collaborative public art, documentary storytell...

Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated? With a practice that spans performance,...

At a time when theaters everywhere are competing with an ever-expanding array of at-home entertainment and struggling to fill seats, some artists are asking not what plays to produce but how to produce them differently. Graham Wetterhahn’s answer was to found his own company, After Hours Theatre Company in Los Angeles. With a background that spans traditional theater, theme parks and digital media...

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of th...

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, ins...

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, ins...

Even before his diagnosis of long COVID in 2020, cellist Joshua Roman had carved a unique niche in the classical music world. A former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony turned soloist and curator, Joshua built a career that combined artistic excellence with a passionate commitment to making music relevant and accessible. Whether premiering bold new works or improvising in unexpected settin...

Cyrus Moussavi has carved out a career that is as improbable as it is original. Raised in Iowa in a bicultural Iranian American household, Cyrus grew up spending summers in Iran and the rest of the year steeped in his father’s love of prog rock and his mother’s passion for traditional Iranian music. That early immersion in disparate sound worlds laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with mu...

It’s no secret that arts non-profits across the country are struggling to survive, but few closures have hit their communities as hard as the recent shuttering of Big Medium in Austin, TX. For more than 20 years, Big Medium was one of the most influential visual-arts organizations in the city. It produced the beloved and sprawling Austin Studio Tour, presented exhibitions that championed historica...

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright whose work across theater and television consistently challenges outdated narratives around disability, queerness and identity. He made a striking Off-Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories” at The Public Theater, which enjoyed a sold-out, extended run and earned him the Obie Award for Best New American Play. His autobiographical solo show...

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to direct his first full-length feature film, “Blindspotting.” That well-reviewed film landed him his first studio feature when Disney hired him to co-direct the animated film “Raya and the Last Dragon.” ...

Trained as a fiber and textile artist, Maria Amalia Wood has in recent years been working with paper, manipulating and dyeing wet wood pulp to build richly layered pieces. As important to Maria’s creativity as her raw materials, however, is the community of Latina immigrants like herself that she has fostered through a series of creative workshops in her hometown of Madison, WI. Her latest communa...

For the last two decades, architect and educator JP Reuer has been exploring how artists can become vital, integrated members of their communities rather than isolated figures working on the fringes of society. That ethos now fuels his most ambitious project to date: Small School, a Raleigh-based arts organization that reimagines advanced arts education as more accessible, collaborative and deeply...

In November of 2024, Counterpublic, a St. Louis-based arts and civics organization, and the Osage Nation made a historic announcement. After three years of negotiations, the entirety of historic Sugarloaf Mound, the oldest human-made structure within the City of St. Louis, was being rematriated to the Osage Nation, whose ancestors built this and other mounds in the region.  Counterpublic was not o...

What happens when best friends in different disciplines decide to formalize their creative relationship and then invite a third artist into their artmaking experiment? A vibrant, equitable and joyful collective by the name of Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is born. Art 25’s core artists are poet Lehua M. Taitano, visual artist Lisa Jarrett and multi-disciplinary artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng. Sep...