Art Restart

Architect Andrew Schachman and multidisciplinary artist and educator Faheem Majeed are two of the four artists who, along with poet avery r. young and sculptor Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, co-lead Chicago’s Floating Museum. As its name suggests, the Floating Museum does not have a brick-and-mortar fixed space; rather it creates inventive projects through which to explore and strengthen the relation...

Cellist Leo Eguchi has played all over the world in a variety of settings, from frequent appearances with the Boston Pops and the Portland Symphony to playing for some of pop music’s biggest stars, including Demi Lovato and Peter Gabriel. A career as a performer only, however, did not satisfy his itch to make music that would move an audience with its intimacy and immediacy, so he co-founded not o...

As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valuable? Can and should art be treated like widgets? Or like a new app?   To the second question, Frances Pollock and Keith Hamilton Cobb might answer, “If the artist is up for it, why not?” Frances, an...

The raw materials of Philippa Pham Hughes’ art are human bodies and minds. Since 2007, when she hosted her first gathering of strangers, Philippa has worked as a social sculptor and cultural strategist. What this means is that, through methods drawn from the arts and the humanities, she curates what she calls creative activations. These are carefully planned spaces and events to which groups of co...

In 2022, Steven Melendez was named artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet, becoming only the second person to lead the institution. In several ways, he was destined to become its next leader since his relationship with the company started when he was only 7 years old and founding artistic director Diana Byer recruited him to train at NYTB’s school through the company’s LIFT scholarship progr...

Precious Perez is a singer, songwriter, educator and disability activist who has recently been performing and recording under the moniker “La Reggaetonera Ciega,” the Blind Reggaeton Singer. A graduate of the Berklee School of Music, she has already released one album, 2 EPs, one cover and eight singles, with a ninth on the way. Her single “Sin Preguntar” won Best Latin Song just last month at the...

To describe Meow Wolf as an artistic juggernaut might not be entirely hyperbolic. Founded in 2008 by a group of Santa Fe-based artists looking to show their work outside of the traditional art ecosystem, the collective created its first permanent exhibition in Santa Fe 2016 when famed author George R.R. Martin pledged $2.7 million to purchase an abandoned bowling alley. Meow Wolf titled the instal...

When the Writers Guild of America strike began in early May of 2023, screenwriter, playwright and essayist Dorothy was in the middle of promoting an Apple TV+ mini-series titled “Extrapolations,” on which she’d worked as executive producer and writer. As a result, she had to cancel all appearances relating to the show, which was especially disappointing to her given that it was the first major scr...

Actor and educator Charles Andrew Gardner is starting his fourth term as president of the Chicago local branch of the union SAG-AFTRA. He grew up in Chicago and studied acting at Northern Illinois University. He is a company member with TimeLine Theater and has acted on several of Chicago’s important stages. He has appeared on the Chicago-filmed TV shows “The Chi” and “Chicago P.D.,” and his film...

Terri Lyne Carrington is one of the most respected jazz musicians in the world. Her drumming career started at the age of 10, which is when she officially got her musicians’ union card, and in the decades since, she’s earned countless accolades, including four Grammys, a Doris Duke Artist Award and an NEW Jazz Masters Fellowship. She has performed on over 100 recordings and has toured and recorded...

Woodworker, furniture-maker, artist and educator Aspen Golann trained at the renowned North Bennet Street School in Boston and specializes in building furniture with the techniques of 18 th and 19 th century American fine woodworking. Her pieces aren’t mere modern iterations of a centuries-old tradition, however. They also often exhibit very modern feminist touches that acknowledge and subvert the...

Barely four months into his tenure as the artistic director of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Adam W. McKinney is already implementing revolutionary ways to build on the company’s existing strengths with his gaze firmly set on its overall health a hundred years from now. Adam has a remarkable resume as a ballet dancer, a choreographer, a professor, an activist and an arts leader. He danced with some o...

Norma Baker-Flying Horse’s designs are the stuff of fashion runway dreams. They display the sophistication, impeccable tailoring and gorgeous lines of her fashion idols, including Chanel and McQueen, but what makes them exceptional is that they incorporate gorgeous details that bespeak her Native heritage. Norma Baker-Flying Horse, whose company, Red Berry Woman, bears her given Native name, is a...

Dancer/choreographer Michael Manson is an internationally recognized authority in Detroit Jit, a dance genre birthed in his hometown over 50 years ago. His talent earned him a national audience when he appeared on “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2015, and as a performer and teacher he has worked all over the States and as far away as Paris and La Paz. Once a student of famed dancer/choreography Re...

Early in her career, Maura video essayist and performance artist Maura Brewer explored the relationship between representations of women in Hollywood films and the structures of contemporary capitalism. Through several often-tongue-in-cheek video pieces, she focused on the actor Jessica Chastain, who at the time was being typecast in films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” as a steely go-getter who paid...

Robin Tran has been performing standup comedy for the past 11 years, but it is only in the last eight that she has been performing under the name Robin. Before her transition in 2015, she presented as male and used the name Robert. During the pandemic, she gained a sizeable and loyal following via TikTok, and in 2021 she was featured as one of the “New Faces” of the year by the influential Just fo...

Alexandria Wailes is an accomplished actor, choreographer and dancer who just this last season appeared on Broadway in the acclaimed revival of Ntozake Shange’s seminal play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The production, directed by UNCSA alum Camille A. Brown, held one notable surprise, the use of American Sign Language, since Alexandria, who is Deaf, pl...

Perhaps the hottest ticket on Broadway right now is to the starry revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. Should you be lucky enough to score that ticket, you will find an unusual credit in the Playbill: scenic design by dots. Barely two years old, dots is a collective of three talented international designers who deci...

Theater director Sean Daniels has outstanding credits to his name. He co-founded the company Dad’s Garage, which is now a cornerstone of Atlanta’s theatrical scene, and then went on to lead Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts. He also spent four years as associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville where he oversaw the sadly now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays...

J Chong was a well-respected chef in her community of Asheville, NC for years before she suddenly acquired a national profile thanks to her participation in HBO Max’s cooking-competition show, “The Big Brunch.” Suddenly J, who only recently had decided to strike out on her own by creating J Chong Eats, had a new platform on which to extol the flavors of her bedrock cuisine, traditional Cantonese....

Anthony Hudson might have earned the tongue-in-cheek title of “Portland OR’s premier drag clown” even if he were not Portland’s – and perhaps even the country’s -- only drag clown. He has delighted and terrified Portland audiences in equal measure as his alter-ego Carla Rossi for over 12 years, performing carefully honed satire in a variety of venues, including the Portland Institute of Contempora...

Last summer, bassoonist Brian Petkovich lost his job and then got a job that had never existed before. Not long after the San Antonio Symphony, with whom Brian played for 25 years, shut its doors, he became the inaugural president of the nascent San Antonio Philharmonic, which as of this writing is seven months old. For a brief moment in 2022, it seemed like San Antonio, the nation’s seventh-large...

For sound artist and ethnographer Brian Harnetty, listening is perhaps even more important than composing. He is passionate about capturing the essence of a place through his creations, and his work therefore involves venturing into towns and landscapes armed with his microphone and recording everything from ambient sounds to oral histories. It also involves in-depth research in archives and libra...

Sukanya Mani’s works seem light as air, intricate and mesmerizing paper sculptures that can move and twirl with the slightest breeze. What may not be immediately apparent, however, is that Sukanya has made each irreversible cut in her material with the intention of representing — albeit abstractly — a weighty story or theme she’s explored in depth. The way gravity affects light; the relationship b...

When the devastating floods of July 2022 tore through the mountain communities of Southeastern Kentucky, visual artist Lacy Hale lost her studio and a trove of works in progress. Since that tragic and deadly night, though, even as many of her neighbors in Whitesburg have been forced to move away, one thing she has not lost is her determination to remain in the mountains where she grew up. They are...