Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

Episode 99 features NICOLA VASSELL. She is the founder of Nicola Vassell Gallery, a contemporary art gallery committed to discourse that widens the lens of the history and future of art. Its focus is on developing an inter-generational, cross-disciplinary program of international artists and thinkers. Prior to the gallery, Nicola was Principal at Concept NV, an art consultancy, established in 2013...

Ep.98 features Dr. Nicole Fleetwood. She is an art historian and curator exploring how the art of incarcerated people is essential to our understandings of contemporary art, the carceral state, and the humanity it contains. Fleetwood’s earlier work focused on representations of Blackness in art, performance, and popular culture, particularly how assumptions within American culture about Blackness...

Ep. 97 features Claire Oliver. She founded her first gallery thirty years ago in Florida before moving to Philadelphia and then in 2000, moving to the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and finally establishing her flagship in Harlem in 2019. Claire has honed a unique place in the international art ecosystem with a focus on showcasing and celebrating artwork by women and people of color, which transce...

Ep.96 features Barbara Earl Thomas. She is a visual artist with numerous national exhibits to her credit. She is a maker who builds tension-filled narratives through papercuts and prints, placing silhouetted figures in social and political landscapes. Thomas is known for her large-scale installations that use light as the animating force and invites her viewers to step inside her illuminated sceno...

Episode 95 features Kent Kelley. His interest in the arts was formed from fond memories observing his mother, an artist who died when he was 14. A decade later he acquired his first works of art and in 2015 began building an art collection with the express goal of documenting and preserving the culture of the African diaspora. His support for the arts includes increasing the awareness of artists o...

Ep.94 features Delita Martin, an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and a MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Primarily working from oral traditions, alon...

Ep.93 features Sculptor, Printer, Conceptual and Visual Artist Willie Cole. He lives and works in New Jersey. “Willie Cole: On-Site” opened at the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland and traveled to the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire, and Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia in 2016. The following year, Cole had solo exhibitions at the Snite Museum of Art at the Univers...

Episode 92 features vanessa german. vanessa was born in Milwaukee, WI and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing...

Ep.91 features Ivy N. Jones. She founded the Welancora Gallery, based in Brooklyn, New York in 2002. Ivy holds a B.A. in political science from Hampton University and a M.A. in public administration from Clark Atlanta University. She is a native of Brooklyn, New York. The gallery name is an amalgam of the names of Ivy's parents and older brother. In 2014, the gallery mission and programming were u...

Ep.90 features Writer, curator, lecturer, artist, NFT evangelist Kenny Schachter. He has been curating contemporary art exhibits in museums and galleries and teaching (art history and economics) for more than thirty years; presently in the graduate department of the University of Zurich (appointed to advisory board January 2021) professorships at the School of Visual Arts (NY) and New York Univers...

Episode 89 features Antwaun Sargent. He is a writer, curator, art critic and director at Gagosian Gallery in New York City. He is the author of “The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion” (Aperture 2019) and the editor of “Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists” (DAP 2020). Mr. Sargent was the guest editor of “Art In America” magazine’s, New Talent Issue, May/June 2...

Episode 88 features Kate Fowle, the Director of MoMA PS1. From 2013-2019 she was the inaugural chief curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and director-at-large of Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, where she was the executive director from 2009-13. Prior to this she was the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (20...

Episode 87 features Allana Clarke (b. 1987) is a Trinidadian-American artist whose practice is built upon a foundation of uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through photography, sculptural and text-based works, video and performance, her research-based practice incorporates socio-political and art historical texts, to contend with ideas of Blackn...

Episode 86 features Coady Brown. She is a painter from Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2012 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Her recent solo exhibitions include Only In The Darkness Can You See The Stars at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles and Electric Bloom at Taymour Grahne in London. She has exhibited both nationally and internationall...

Episode 85 features Pat Phillips. He was born in Lakenheath, England in 1987. His work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Solo exhibitions include ROOTS (Antenna Gallery, New Orleans), Told You Not to Bring That Ball (Masur Museum of Art, Monroe), SubSuperior (Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York) and Summer Madness (M+B, Los Angeles). In 201...

Episode 84 features sculptor and painter Leonardo Benzant, a Dominican-American artist with Haitian heritage born and raised in Brooklyn. His practice is informed by his studies of the Kongo, Yoruba and his spiritual beliefs shaped by research into African and Caribbean religion, art, history, culture, rituals and informed by modern and contemporary art. He deploys a wide variety of media and foun...

Ep.83 features Lilian Garcia-Roig, a Cuba born, Texas raised artist living in Tallahassee, Florida whose works landscape-themed works have always explored the complex propositions of sense of place and belonging which so influence the construction of personal identity While she is most known for her perceptually-based, large-scale, “all-day” cumulative paintings that underscores the complex nature...

Episode 82 features Khalif Tahir Thompson. He is best recognized for his powerful work concentrated in portraiture and figuration. Incorporating painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and paper-making into his practice, he explores notions of self through varied subjectivity concerning identity, race, iconography, as well as family, and relationships. Recently he graduated from Purchase College...

Episode 81 features Delphine Desane. She is a Brooklyn-based artist born and raised in Paris, France by Haitian parents. She began her career as a stylist in the fashion industry. After becoming a mother, she began to paint during her maternity leave. Delphine was soon discovered and commissioned to create the cover image for Vogue Italia January 2020 Sustainability Issue. In April 2021, Vogue US...

Episode 80 features Suzanne McFayden. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she is a writer, and leading collector of contemporary art. Ms. McFayden holds a BA in French Literature from Cornell University and an MFA in Writing from Mills College. Her philanthropic investments beyond the art world address food insecurity. Ms. McFayden is the current Board Chair of The Blanton Museum of Art at The U...

Episode 79 features painter Ronald Jackson. Growing up in the rural South of the Arkansas Delta, Jackson was the youngest of eleven kids born to a farmer and a community organizer. His Mother and Father left a legacy of challenging and reshaping the norms of the racial status quo in their surrounding home communities. Jackson came from a lineage of black landowners farming in the South. In the mid...

Episode 78 features Alina Zamanova Her paintings are centered around the representation of modern reality, where women’s bodies are embraced in all shapes and focused to portray their distortions without societal norms labeled on them. Being inspired by muses around the world, Zamanova recently draws from her own experience on a psychological level of upbringing to expose both physical and mental...

Episode 77 features Adrienne Elise Tarver, an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and administrator with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of the black female identity in the Western landscape--from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress. She has exhibited nationa...

Episode 76 features New York based David Shrobe. He creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies, and especially from around his familial home. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production his...

Episode 75 features New York-based artist Wardell Milan. He works in mixed media, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. Milan’s practice is conceptually grounded in photography, often using photographs as initial inspiration behind composition of drawings and collages. Referencing artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Andres Serrano, Alec Soth, and Eugene R...