Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

Episode 49 features abstract painter Jared Owens. He was born in Queens and raised in Rockland County, New York. His art practice started inside federal prison, where he taught himself how to draw, paint, and sculpt using “found” or discarded materials. While imprisoned, he mentored others and taught multiple disciplines, including ceramics, painting, and drawing. Since his release, he has continu...

Episode 48 features Art Collector Frederick Hutson, the CEO and co-founder of Pigeonly, a platform that makes it easy for people to search, find, and communicate with an incarcerated loved one. A born entrepreneur, he launched and sold his first business at the age of 19 while on active duty in the Air Force. After an honorable discharge in 2005, he went on to build and sell his second business. T...

Episode 47 features Sherrill Roland, an artist who spent too many months in prison for a crime he did not commit. Sherrill Roland is an interdisciplinary artist who creates art that challenges ideas around controversial social and political constructs, and generates a safe space to process, question, and share. He was born in Asheville, NC, and received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of...

Episode Forty-Six features Wole Lagunju. He is a 1986 graduate of Fine arts and graphic design at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Lagunju’s hybrid paintings of traditional Gelede masks which are juxtaposed with images of the modern woman in the Western world redefine the forms and philosophies of Yoruba visual art and design. He reimagines and transforms cultural ic...

Episode Forty-Five features Alina Perez, an artist from Miami, Florida who works with charcoal and pastel to create large-scale drawings on paper. Perez received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. From 2018-2019, Perez was a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Pe...

Episode Forty-Four features Stan Squirewell. He was born and raised in Washington, DC and currently lives and works in New York, NY. His artistic training began at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Since graduating he has continued his tutelage under many of DC’s legends including artists Michael Platt and Lou Stovall. Mr. Squirewell, is a painter, photographer, installation and performance a...

Episode Forty-Three features gallerist Monique Meloche. She founded her eponymous gallery in Chicago’s West Loop in 2001 with an international roster of emerging artists working in all media. Her programming has been diverse and inclusive since its inception, and the gallery continues to be a bellwether for artistic talents early or under-recognized in their careers like Rashid Johnson, Amy Sheral...

Episode Forty-Two features figurative painter Margaret Bowland. She creates work that confronts contemporary issues of identity through probing and deeply personal pictures that question Western societal expectations of gender, race, power, and beauty. She has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York for more than 25 years, creating spellbinding and psychologically charged paintings and pastels that...

Episode Forty-one features painter Dominic Chambers. He is an African-American artist from St. Louis, MO. Chambers received his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art. Chambers creates large scale paintings and drawings that reference literary narratives cited in books he’s read, various mythologies, and African-American histo...

Episode Forty features Peg Alston. For nearly four decades since establishing Peg Alston Fine Arts, she has emerged as this country’s foremost private dealer specializing in works by African American artists and other artists of African descent, as well as select pieces of traditional African sculpture. In addition to handling art created by gifted emerging and mid-career artists, Peg Alston has s...

Episode Thirty-Nine features artist Jules Arthur. Born in St. Louis, Missouri and based in New York City, his artistic focus is rooted in the discoveries of triumphant moments within the African and African American experience. Classically trained in sculpture and the study and representation of the human form, Arthur received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts. His work has been amongst many...

Episode Thirty-Eight features Paris-born, internationally acclaimed artist and author Lilianne Milgrom. She holds two degrees from Melbourne University and an associate degree from the Academy of Art in San Francisco. She exhibits her artwork around the world and is the recipient of multiple awards and artist residencies. In 2011, she became the first authorized copyist of Gustave Courbet’s contro...

Episode Thirty-Seven features Bianca Nemelc, a figurative painter whose work explores the connection between the female form and the natural world. Born and raised in New York City, Bianca’s work is inspired by her own investigative journey into her identity, paying homage to her heritage through the use of many hues of brown that make up the figures in her work. The world within her paintings are...

Episode Thirty-Six features Francks Francois Deceus. He was born in Cap-Haitian, Haiti 1966. He currently resides and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, NY. Deceus received a B.A. in Sociology from Long Island University, NY in 1992 and studied Printmaking at Atlantis Arts Atelier, Gentily, France in 2007. His solo exhibitions include the Pounder-Kone Art Space, Los Angeles; Tilford Art Group, Los An...

Episode Thirty-Five features Lisa Corinne Davis, an abstract painter exploring themes of racial, social and psychological identity. Born in Baltimore, MD, currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY, Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1980, and her MFA from Hunter College in 1983. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at J...

Episode Thirty-Four features Amalia Mesa-Bains. She is an educator, artist and cultural critic. Her works, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, resonate both in contemporary formal terms and in their ties to her Chicano community and history. As an author of scholarly articles and a nationally known lecturer on Chicano art, she has enhanced understanding of multi-culturalism an...

Episode Thirty-Three features Derrick Adams. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970. He received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. Adams has been the subject of numerous solo shows, including exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, the California African American Museum, LA, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Adams’...

Episode Thirty-Two features Barbara T. Hoffman. She is principal, and pre-eminent arts, cultural heritage and cultural institution lawyer in New York City providing transactional advice and litigation services to the domestic and international arts and cultural community. Her more than thirty-five years in the field of art law, representing artists, museums, collectors, artist and other charitable...

Episode Thirty-One features Grace Lynne Haynes. She is a California born visual artist currently based in New Jersey. She creates lusciously composed paintings containing bright textures and patterns. Intricate moments are juxtaposed against flat, black swaths of paint shaped to represent black female bodies. The artist’s painterly devices lead the viewer to question the very nature of color and h...

Episode Thirty features Nicole Awai. She earned her Master’s Degree in Multimedia Art from the University of South Florida in 1996. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 1997 and was artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000. Awai was a featured artist in the 2005 Initial Public Offerings series at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was award...

Episode Twenty-Nine features contemporary artist, painter Ferrari Sheppard. He spends his time working on contemplative, timeless paintings. A sense of movement can often be found in his work, allowing the viewer to feel immersed in an active moment. Stylistically, the artist brings forth a sense of meditative stillness. The paintings organically blur the line between figuration and abstraction. S...

Episode Twenty-Eight features Nigel Freeman. He is the director of the African-American Fine Art department at Swann Auction Galleries. He founded the department in the fall of 2006, and since then has set numerous auction records for important African-American artists, including John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Sargent Johnson, Hughie Lee-Smith, Faith Ringgold and Carrie Mae Wee...

Episode Twenty-Seven features narrative painter Philemona Williamson. She’s exhibited her work for over 25 years at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC and recently, at her mid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in NJ. Her narrative paintings deal with gender, race and adolescence. Philemona is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock...

Episode Twenty-Six features Mexican-French emerging artist Alexis de Chaunac. He was born in New York City and raised in Mexico City and Paris. As a child living in Mexico, he grew up surrounded by his mother’s family and his grandparent’s friends which included Mexican artists, intellectuals, historians, poets, diplomats, and writers. These brilliant minds had a profound impact on Alexis at an ea...

Episode Twenty-Five features Jasmine Wahi, the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum, an Activist, TEDx Speaker, and a Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space. Her practice predominantly focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multipositional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional fem...