Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

EP.249 Onay Gutierrez is a multifaceted artist, collector, and preservationist with a rich background that spans education, ceramics, and historic preservation. Born in Veracruz, Mexico in 1977, Gutierrez began his career as an early elementary school teacher in marginalized communities in his home state. After immigrating to the United States, honed his skills as a ceramic artist. Gutierrez has a...

Ep. 248 Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, published by Yale University Press. She is currently co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest...

Ep.247 Jas was born in Hartford CT. His talent for drawing was recognized at an early age. He sold his first painting at age seven and had his first one-man show at the age of eight. He went on to receive numerous awards and later went to study at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Jas currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC. Photo Credit: Damian Griffiths ~ Fugue 21,2022-2023 Oil on l...

Ep.246 Kelly Sinnapah Mary (b. 1981, Saint-François, Guadeloupe) creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that draw upon the complex interrelationships between folklore, literature, inheritance, history, and the natural world. Sinnapah Mary’s work is rooted both materially and narratively in the artist’s immediate environment of the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas de...

Ep.245 Natia Lemay (b. 1985 in Toronto, Ontario) was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her Interdisciplinary autoethnographic practice reflects her lived experience. Through personal stories, she interrogates the intersections between the mind, the body, and space to understand how these experiences relate to a broader cultural context. Natia Lemay has...

Tomokazu Matsuyama. Born in 1976 in Gifu, Japan, Matsuyama is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. His work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, organically blending and reimagining diverse elements–such as ancient and modern, figurative and abstract, Eastern and Western. His art reflects both his cross-cultural experiences and the evolving nature of contemporary society in our informati...

Jose Duran (b. 1979, Moca, Dominican Republic) is a painter, designer, and sculptor creating fantastical worlds of cosmopolitan opulence and sumptuous, even dangerous foliage. Duran’s practice is anchored in extensive research of practices of survival, celebration, vengeance, sabotage, and aspirational desires in Black communities. He draws from baroque and rococo interiors to create scenes of arc...

Ep.242 Shaunté Gates (b. 1979) lives and works in Washington, D.C. He studied at Duke Ellington School of the Arts and Bowie State University. Early in his career, Gates trained in oil painting and portraiture. His past experience as a tattoo artist and television motion graphics editor caused a profound shift in his artistic practice. His recent work employs a multidisciplinary approach, layering...

Ep.241 Dora Jeridi's work is characterized by a dynamic, expressive approach to painting, blending intense emotion with powerful physicality. She continuously adds to her compositions until they take on a spirit of their own, like painterly symphonies where fragmented forms emerge from a sea of expressive brushstrokes. Jeridi conceals and unveils her forms through the careful layering of various m...

Ep.240 Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her current project at the Whitney is Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Other projects include Inheritance (2023), 2 Lizards (2022), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), Julie Mehretu (2021), Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) an...

Tyler Ballon (b. 1996, Jersey City, NJ) creates monumental works inspired by the lives of people in his community. His artistic journey was shaped early on by his grandmother, a community activist and school lunch lady who embodied service and compassion. Tyler’s grandmother recognized his talent and instilled in him a respect for others, regardless of their circumstances. Though initially torn be...

Dr. Monique Y. Wells, A native of Houston, Texas and a 32-year resident of Paris, France. Through her entrepreneurial work as a veterinary pathologist and toxicologist, travel professional, writer, speaker, and mentor, she embraces and harnesses the power of education to change lives. While working in Paris she began researching the history of African Americans there and offered self-guided tours...

Ep.237 Amanda Coulson has worked for three decades as a scholar, critic, curator and cultural producer, having collaborated with artists and institutions, private and corporate colleagues, in the US, Europe, and various sites in the Caribbean. A dual-national (Bahamas/US), she grew up between London, Nassau, and New York, where she studied for her Master’s Degree at the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU...

Ep.236 Ebony L. Haynes is a writer and curator from Toronto, Canada. She is presently based in New York where she is senior director at David Zwirner and leads the gallery’s 52 Walker space in Tribeca. Haynes sits on the boards of Artists Space (New York) and the New Art Dealers Alliance. She also runs Black Art Sessions, an online “school” that offers free professional practice classes to Black s...

Ep.235 Alicia Knock Head curator for the Contemporary Creation and Prospective Department at Centre Pompidou. Alicia Knock seeks to develop a transnational history of art. Her acquisitions and exhibitions – Ernest Mancoba, 2019; Chine-Afrique, Crossing the World Color Line, 2020; Global(e) Resistance, 2020 – focus specifically on post-colonial practices (Modern and contemporary African art and Cen...

Ep.234 In a wide-ranging practice that encompasses photography, sculpture and painting, Diana Sinclair (b.2004) probes the material, spiritual and social resonance of water. As a former competitive swimmer, Sinclair experienced the way that pools can become fraught with racial tension; Researching global communities of black surfers, she was inspired to travel to Costa Rica, Santa Cruz and Senegal...

Ep.233 Mario Joyce’s work is rooted in his genealogical research of his family, going back to the 1600s. Incorporating imagery, memories, and stories from his familial research, Joyce incorporates vintage collage materials and soil from the farm he grew up on into his sumptuously textured paintings, weaving together a rich tapestry of his origins. A self-taught artist, Joyce mines his ancestral li...

Ep.232 Will Maxen (b. Waterbury, CT) is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Houston, Texas, who works primarily in the language of painting. His work blends personal and historical imagery into partially abstracted scenes that explore themes of memory and belonging, navigating both literal and metaphorical spaces. The work delves into the dislocation of identity within these spaces, representing...

Ep.231 Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian- artist who lives and works in Italy. Influenced by architecture, archaeology, West African sculptural traditions, ancient Egyptian iconography, classical astronomy and European portraiture, her paintings, sculptures, performances, photography and water-gilding with 24-carat gold produce a charged materiality that address philosophical ideas of the finite and...

Ep.230 Carl E. Hazlewood (b. 1951) was born in Guyana, South America. Parallel to his studio practice, Hazlewood co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ in 1983. Steeped in modest materials, such as polyester, push pins, map pins and metallic string, form is foregrounded and the slippage between drawing, painting and sculpture places his work in a space that challenges the c...

Ep.229 Na Kim b.1986 Seoul, South Korea Na Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Known for her mimetic portraits set against polychromatic backgrounds, Na Kim’s paintings depict figures but are conceptually abstract. Her imagined subjects, derivative yet unique, evoke both confrontational and intimate encounters. Kim’s practice centers neither accuracy nor narrative, but rather reflects a dee...

Ep.228 ELLIOTT BARNES A Los Angeles native, Elliott Barnes graduated from Cornell University in New York State in 1985 with a Bachelors and a Masters in Architecture and Urban Planning. In 1984 the AIA member architect began his career with Arthur Erickson Architects in Los Angeles. In 1987, he joined the Paris office of renowned designer Andrée Putman, who in 1997 handed over the design managemen...

Ep.227 Zohra Opoku examines the politics of personal identity formation through historical, cultural, and socio-economic influences, particularly in the context of contemporary Ghana. Opoku's explorations have primarily been expressed through her photography, which she translates into screen printing. This process has led to a collage art practice that combines hand-stitched embroidery on various...

Ep.226 Edra Soto (b. 1971) is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Soto has presented recent solo exhibitions at Comfort Station, Chicago, IL (2024); Hyde Park Art Cente...

Ep.225 Mario Moore, a Detroit native, received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI in 2009 and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2013. He is a recent Kresge Arts Fellow (2023) and a recipient of the prestigious Princeton Hodder Fellowship (2018-2019). He also has been awarded residencies at Duke University, Josef and Annie Albers Foundation, Foun...