Art · The Creative Process: Artists, Curators, Museum Directors Talk Art, Life & Creativity

Artist Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. Sultan has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Using industrial materials such as roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum and enamel, Sultan layers, gouges, sands and constructs his paintings—sumptuous, richly textured compositions often made of the same materials as t...

“The figure in my work is me. The figure in my work is you. It's me placing objects. It’s me putting things together. It’s you standing near it. It’s you in proximity moving back and forth, moving around it. It’s  us . One of the reasons I make the things I do the way I make them is because I can't imagine them. I make things that I couldn't draw or even think about clearly. I can only look a...

John Powers was born in Chicago. He is a sculptor. After doing an apprenticeship on the West Coast with the sculptor Tom Jay, he moved to New York where he studied at Pratt and Hunter College. His artwork has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bruges Triennial, and PostMasters Gallery, among others. He was recently featured in the New York Times after injuring his...

“Certainly all Japanese architects have been trained in both the Japanese tradition and the Western tradition and we see a lot of very very well thought out designs in architecture that make use of features of Japanese traditional houses. Japanese buildings like many and other parts of East Asia and Europe before the modern period are held together with wooden joints and pegs and wedges and they c...

Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Just Enough, Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House , The Very Small Home, and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry . He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown...

“Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator. Gropius said the artist is an exalted craftsman. “In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art, but proficiency in his craft is essent...

Tony Walton was an award-winning director and production designer.  His work was vast and stretches from Broadway productions and operas to films and television.  Over the course of his long and coveted career Tony  was honored with 16 Tony Award Nominations for his Broadway sets and costumes.  Of those nominations he received awards for Pippin, House of Blue Leaves, and Guys a...

“I like the idea that your actions in the world can be motivated by both idealism and realism about how to achieve those ideals. I like the idea that morality is not simple. There is this idea that there are the heroes and there's the villains and you can easily tell who's who, and that's not so true as it used to be in comics and that's meaningful. One thing that is interesting about the Marvel s...

Douglas Wolk is the author of the NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels , and the Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics and the host of the podcast Voice of Latveria. A National Arts Journalism Program fellow, Wolk has written about comic books, graphic novels, pop music, and technology for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate , and Pitchfork...

“We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected. What would we like people to learn about Native Americans? I was an educator for over 21 years, so for me it's probably overcoming fear from the outside and fear from the inside to know the outside, so there needs to be...

The Shinnecock are a nation of Native Americans made up of 12 Algonquian-speaking tribes. This nation occupied the territory between Long Island and Connecticut, today their descendants live on a 400-acre reservation in Southampton and have over 1,200 enrolled members. Mia visited the Shinnecock reservation to do this interview with photographer and founder of Ma’s House BIPOC Art Studio Jeremy De...

“Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've...

Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts...

“The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that.” Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Moun...

Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and...

“I’m not just taking beautiful pictures. I’m collecting their voices, collecting their movement, collecting different aspects, and preserving this moment because they will not always be here. I don’t just see myself as a photographer, an artist. I also see myself as an archiver. Someone who is archiving as a researcher.” Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught documentary photographer and videographer bor...

Richard Flood serves on the International Leadership Council and Ideas City Initiative at the New Museum. For nine years, he was the museum’s Director of Special Projects and Curator at Large, and from 2005 to 2010, he served as Chief Curator. Prior to this, he was Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Walker Art Center. He has curated notable exhibitions of the work of Rivane Neuenschwander, S...

Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her books include What I Loved; Memories of the Future; Living, Thinking, Looking; and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles...

Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her books include What I Loved; Memories of the Future; Living, Thinking, Looking; and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles...

Richard Flood serves on the International Leadership Council and Ideas City Initiative at the New Museum. For nine years, he was the museum’s Director of Special Projects and Curator at Large, and from 2005 to 2010, he served as Chief Curator. Prior to this, he was Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Walker Art Center. He has curated notable exhibitions of the work of Rivane Neuenschwander, S...

Dr. George Maginis is the Academic Director of the Benaki Museum in Athens Greece. He holds a PhD in archaology and history of art. He has taught Byzantine, Islamic, and Chinese Art History at the University of London for SOAS and the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum. He has excavated in Greece, Cyprus, France and Egypt, and ha...

Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally organized more than 25 exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body, Gothic: Dark Glamour, A Queer History of Fashion, and Paris, Capital of Fashion. She is founder and editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, the first peer-reviewed,...

Dr. George Maginis is the Academic Director of the Benaki Museum in Athens Greece. He holds a PhD in archaology and history of art. He has taught Byzantine, Islamic, and Chinese Art History at the University of London for SOAS and the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum. He has excavated in Greece, Cyprus, France and Egypt, and ha...

Dimitrios Pandermalis is Professor Emeritus of Classical Archeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has served as President of the History and Archeology Department and Dean of the Philosophical School. He is the President of the Acropolis Museum, and Director of Aristotle University's archeological excavations at the ancient site of Dion on the foothills of Mount Olympus. Th...

Ian Wardropper is the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director of The Frick Collection and has organized more than twenty exhibitions in his specialties of European sculpture, earlier decorative arts, and twentieth-century design and decorative arts. Exhibitions he co-organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art include Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure for the Palaces of Europe in 200...