Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

Ep.174 Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. Mayorga holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayorga’s first solo museum exhibition W...

Ep.173 features Austrian-born and based in Los Angeles where she relocated in 2017, Katherina Olschbaur (b. 1983) was emboldened by her move to push the boundaries in the tenuous relationship between representation and abstraction, creating the distinct viewpoint in her painting practice for which she is recognized. She graduated from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. Recent exhibit...

Ep.172 features Leslie Smith. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. | He was a 2022 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow and earned a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA at the Yale School of Art. | Smith’s interests lie in our conscious effort to alter personal perception. | Recent works explore Abstraction’s inherent personal and political properties as they relate to broadeni...

Ep.171 features Demetrius Wilson. His work stems from a place of personal biography and collectively shared experience. Finding both moments of stillness and activity, his work constantly adapts while it moves through pockets of the whole. Flirting with the idea of location, there is a feeling of impermanence and abstraction in Wilson’s paintings, while the colors tell stories of figures and lands...

Ep.170 MAREN HASSINGER (b. 1947) has built an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subject of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling it to resemble a mono...

Ep.169 features Alexis McGrigg, a contemporary artist who examines themes of Blackness, space, spirituality, identity, and collective consciousness. Her artwork utilizes the mediums of painting, drawing, and interdisciplinary media to explore the multiplicity of Blackness through figurative abstraction and conceptual narratives. She integrates poetry, sound, and performance in her arts practice an...

Ep. 168 features Chase Hall’s (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota). His paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Responding to a variety of social and visual systems, each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their com...

Ep.167 features Ayana V. Jackson, (b. 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey; lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Johannesburg, South Africa) she uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography.  By using her  lens  to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially rele...

Ep.166 features Lari Pittman. Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and...

Ep.165 features Harmonia Rosales. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she is an Afro-Cuban American artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her exquisite canvases navigate, and question received narratives from ancient myths, Biblical stories, classical antiquity, and AfroCuban culture, while challenging Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Her work has been shown in various group and solo exhibit...

Ep.164 features Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998 Enugu), a visual artist working primarily with painting. Her practice contemplates the importance of a single subject’s embodied experience(s), often overlaying the past unto the present while insisting on the emotional link between body and space in conflict with self and a background mostly saturated with religion and gendered obligations. Growing up withi...

Ep. 163 features Jammie Holmes. Born and raised in Thibodaux, Louisiana, Jammies Holmes (b. 1984) is known for his paintings that portray intimate and poignant scenes of distinctly American communities, families, and traditions. Holmes draws heavily on his own recollections to depict the stories and experiences of Black life in the deep American South, capturing moments of celebration and struggle...

Ep.162 features Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976 Plainfield, NJ). He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong...

Ep.161 features Charles Gaines. A pivotal figure in the field of Conceptual Art, Charles Gaines’ body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent gener...

Ep.160 features Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992, London, United Kingdom), an artist living and working in New York, NY. Adeniyi-Jones received a BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, in 2014, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Deep Dive, White Cube, Hong Kong, China (2023); Tranquil Dive, Mo...

Ep.159 features Oscar yi Hou, an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He was born and raised in Liverpool, England. He received his BA from Columbia University, New York. He has also studied at The Sorbonne Art School (École des arts de la Sorbonne). Alongside his solo exhibition East of sun, west of moon at the Brooklyn Museum, yi Hou was recipient of the third annual UOVO Prize in 2022. Prev...

Ep.158 features Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art. T. is a writer and curator specializing in Black art and performance. They recently prepared the exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present (2022) with Lilia Rocio Taboada in collaboration with JAM’s founder, Linda Goode Bryant. Their other collaboratively organized exhibitions a...

Ep.157 Karen Navarro is an Argentinian-born multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Houston. Navarro works on a diverse array of mediums that include photography, collage, the use of text and sculpture. Her image-based work and multimedia practice investigate the intersections of identity, representation, race, and belonging in reference to her migrant experience, her Indigenous i...

Ep.156 features Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, New Castle, PA), a Pittsburgh-based artist whose monumental sculptures are crafted with the felled trees of Pittsburgh’s urban canopy, via the city’s Forestry Division. Using only a mallet and chisel, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into biomorphic forms. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo,...

Ep.155 features Shannon T. Lewis (b. 1981 in Toronto, Canada; lives and works in Berlin, Germany). She is an artist of Caribbean descent who reconfigures human forms and the spaces they inhabit within her complex and vivid paintings. Lewis begins with assemblage — the forefront of her practice — utilizing fragments of form and space. Particularly inspired by social cues of ethnicity, whimsical asp...

Ep. 154 features Eto Otitigbe. He recovers buried narratives and gives form to the unseen. He is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art. His public art intersects history, community, and biophilic design by using parametric modeling and generative design to transform historical and cultural references into biomorphic forms....

Ep.153 features Sadaf Padder, a Brooklyn-based independent curator and creative coach. After 8 years in the public school system as a teacher and administrator, Sadaf left her job to found Alpha Arts Alliance (A3), a hyperlocal arts collective. Sadaf has curated exhibitions across the country including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Martha's Vineyard and Philadelphia. She amplifies art...

Maia Cruz Palileo by Phyllis Hollis

Ep.151 features Layo Bright. Mining personal archives and collective experiences, her sculptural practice interrogates how materials shape perception, culture, and politics. Bright’s work explores specific themes of migration, inheritance, legacy and identity through hybrid portraits, textiles, and mixed media that call on natural forms and ancestral memory. Employing a range of materials such as...

Ep.150 features Melissa Joseph (b. 1980, Saint Marys PA), a New York based artist and independent curator. Her work addresses themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. She intentionally alludes to the labors of women as well as her experiences as a second generation American and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. Her work has been shown at the Delaware C...