Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

Ep.199 Luke Agada is a Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. His practice examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world, as he reflects on the African diaspora and its impact on neo-cultural evolution. He obtained an MFA in Painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. In recent years, Agada...

Ep.198 Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984 in Kentucky, raised in Florida) has exhibited widely across the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and Atlanta Contemporary, as well as a commissioned solo project with Creative Time. Her sculpture, Love is l...

Ep.197 Peter Uka (b. 1975,Nigeria; lives and works in Cologne, Germany) devises figurative paintings which draw from his childhood memories of Nigeria. With a classical training in realistic figuration Uka combines various image references of time specific objects with images from his memory to convey innate and timeless human emotion.  Scenes of growing up in Nigeria, including elements like afro...

Ep.196 Jacob Mason-Macklin lives and works in Queens, New York. Mason-Macklin graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 2017. He is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2021-2022, Mason-Macklin was an Artist-in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, New York, USA. Recent exhibitions...

Ep.195 Connie Butler is the Director of MoMA PS1 in New York. Prior to her arrival in September 2023, since 2013, she was Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where she organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in LA (2014); Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015); Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017); Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independe...

Ep.194 Tiana Webb Evans is the Founder ESP Group LLC, a brand strategy and communications consultancy supporting international clients across art, design, and hospitality industries. She is also the founder and creative director of Yard Concept, a cultural platform comprised of a digital journal, gallery, and ‘happenings’ dedicated to fostering consciousness through the engagement of art, design,...

Ep.193 Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, creating overlooked narratives that amplify BIPOC/femme bodies. Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Paintin...

Ep.192 Allison Glenn is a New York-based curator and writer focusing on the intersection of art and public space, through public art and special projects, biennials and major new commissions by a wide range of contemporary artists. She is a Visiting Curator in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Tulsa, organizing the Sovereign Futures convening, and Artistic Director of The Shepher...

Ep.191 Christine Berry earned her Bachelors of Art in Art History from Baylor University and her Masters in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of North Texas. She began her career at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and continued on to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Twenty years ago, she shifted from the non-profit sector to the commercial art world. In 2013, Christine Berr...

Ep.190 Uman’s dazzling visual vocabulary reflects her life and expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she migrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York NY as a young adult. Now, with a home and studio in Upstate New York, Uman paints richly-hued worlds replete with gesture, geometry and the sublime. An intuitive artist, her influences abound from memor...

Ep. 189 Cierra Britton (b.1996, Baltimore, MD) is a curator and art dealer living and working in New York City. As the director of the Cierra Britton Gallery, her mission is to make space for artists who are creating exploratory work across all mediums. Founded in 2021, the Cierra Britton Gallery is the first NYC-based gallery dedicated to representing BIPOC womxn artists whose work contributes to...

Ep.188 Demetrio "Dee" Kerrison. Born in Harlem, NY, he now resides in Los Angeles. In 2001 after a visit to the Studio Museum of Harlem to view an exhibition titled “Freestyle” and curated by Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim, he decided to begin building an art collection with a particular focus on African Diasporic artists. Since then, Dee and his wife Gianna Drake Kerrison have built an eclect...

Ep.187 February James currently lives and works in Washington, D.C., where she was born, after living in Los Angeles for fifteen years. She received her BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. James has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Berlin and Turin, Italy. Her work is currently included in Singular Views: 25 Artists at the Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C...

Ep.186 Loie Hollowell was born in 1983 and raised in Woodland, California. She currently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA at University of California Santa Barbara in 2005 and an MFA inpainting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide including Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of Cal...

Ep.185 features Tariku Shiferaw, a New York based artist who explores mark-making through painting and installation art, addressing issues around space-making within art and societal structures. Select museum exhibitions include The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at Baltimore Museum of Art (2023); You’d Think By Now at Smack Mellon (2022); Men of Change, organized by The...

Ep.184 Courtney Willis Blair the US Senior Director in White Cube’s first public gallery in New York City. She joined in 2023. Courtney will be responsible for shaping the gallery’s curatorial programme and brand both in the region and across the US. A member of the White Cube’s Global Board of Directors, she will play a key role in shaping the strategy for the gallery internationally. She was for...

Ep.183 features Leasho Johnson. Born in 1984, he is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, gay, and male to explore concepts around identity within the post-colonial condition. Working at the conjunction of paintin...

Ep.182 features MICHAELA YEARWOOD-DAN. Throughout paintings, works on paper, ceramics, and site-specific mural and sound installations, Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b. 1994; London, UK) endeavors to build spaces of queer community, abundance, and joy. Yearwood-Dan’s singular visual language draws on a diverse range of influences, including Blackness, queerness, femininity, healing rituals, and carnival...

Ep.181 features Lily Wong, a figurative painter whose nuanced narratives invoke a sense of complex yearning and curiosity around the conditions that inscribe and complicate memory. Often engaged in acts of close looking and intimate contact, the subjects of her work move through dreamlike space and disoriented time. Wong’s paintings probe at the way that literal and metaphorical fracturings influe...

Ep.180 features KAVERI RAINA (b.1990, New Delhi, India). She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Select solo and group exhibitions include: The Big Picture (2023) Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; A soft place to land (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; Deep! Down! Inside! (2023) Hales Gallery, New...

Ep.179 features Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, Missouri) an American artist who honors and evolves traditional practices through quilting, collaging, photography, installation and performance. Implementing materials vested with emotional and memorial content, Kincaid allows these mediums to function as spiritual technology that forward various wisdoms born from Kincaid's greatest values: famil...

Ep.178 features Deborah Roberts (American, b. 1962) a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe. Roberts' work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles, Calif...

Ep.177 features gallerist Kendra Jayne Patrick. Her art gallery operates between Switzerland and the USA. Its programming is focused on the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in sculpture, painting, digital, and photography from a post-conceptual and post-internet posture. The program operates from a brick-and-mortar location in Bern, Switzerland and then spare spaces within establishe...

Ep.176 Gisela McDaniel is a diasporic, Indigenous Chamorro artist who explores the effects of trauma, displacement and colonisation through portraiture and oral histories. Interweaving audio interviews, assemblage and oil painting, she intentionally incorporates the portrait sitters' voices in order to subvert the traditional power relations of artist and sitter. Working primarily with women and n...

Ep 175~ The paintings of Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, DE; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating her subjects in dynamic spaces, her recent work employs water as a vital, organic, multifaceted material, and historically charged space. Ranging from buoyant and ebullient to submerged and mysterious, Black bodies float in exquisitely rendered...