Fresh Art International

How do healthy creative economies open the door for artists and innovators? To answer this question, we take you to Nashville, Tennessee. Music City, U.S.A., aims to become the nation’s start up capital, too. Every year since 2012, Launch Tennessee hosts the 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival to encourage new business endeavors. In 2019, Festival organizers invited Fresh Art International to curate a...

The Commuter Biennial aims to activate unseen margins of metro Miami. Local curators Laura Randall and Courtney Levine have organized a set of art experiences for those who spend hours navigating the city in cars, busses and trains. Over the span of four months, ten public art projects will pop up around this suburban landscape. Two of the participating artists join Randall and Levine to introduce...

Conversations with contributors to the book: Artist as Culture Producer  Today’s conversations expand on the definition of the word ‘artist.’’ During Miami Art Week, artist and educator Sharon Louden, with her frequent collaborator Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic, introduce the second book in Louden’s trilogy dedicated to Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Inside New York’s Strand Bookstore, we...

This episode is part of our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to share favorites from the archive. Based in Lisbon, German born artist Regina Frank has shown her work in New York, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, among other cities globally. In recent projects, she explored environmental issues in performative installati...

Today, we introduce you to five artists whose primary medium is sound. The diverse techniques and concepts they explore demonstrate the versatility and power of sonic art. Working with music and song, noise and movement, in natural and urban settings, they are among thousands of artists drawn to this highly diverse art form. American sound artist Stephen Vitiello is based in New York City. In 2013...

New York-based artist Allison Zuckerman explains what drives her desire to distort conventions of female beauty and push art appropriation to a new high. In bright, bold collages, she mixes paint with pixels to create absurd and exaggerated hybrids—women claiming their presence and power in the world. We meet during her 2018 exhibition at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection. The paintings on view are...

In August 2019, we head to Nashville, Tennessee, where leaders of the seventh annual 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival invited us to stage a live podcast event. We’re here to talk about the Creative Economy. At the heart of our conversation is a startup that aims to have a big cultural impact in this state: the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art. The major art exhibition premieres in 2021, joi...

Jamaican-born artist Nadine Hall introduces Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, a personally significant episode from her Fresh Art playlist. First published on July 26, 2017, this segment reveals the complex and diverse influence of the Caribbean on contemporary art. Franklin Sirmans, director of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, talks about the pivotal role of art from the Global South in the tr...

Today, we take you back to the month of April, in the year 2012. That’s when we set out on a road trip from Austin, Texas. We’re aiming to find out how remote wide open spaces of the American Southwest inform and inspire art and design, curating and filmmaking.   Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of musician songwriter Buddy Holly, is our first stop. In a warehouse at the edge of town, we meet architectu...

How do contemporary art and film illuminate the Black Imagination? This segment from our archive explores some of the issues and ideas behind creative practices that re-imagine the Black experience. To begin, we share a conversation recorded with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver from 2013, while she was working at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Cassel Oliver is now Curator of Modern and Contem...

American artist Charles Gaines has been delving into philosophy, abstraction and mathematics to address politics and race since the 1970s. In August 2019, Gaines receives the 60th Annual Edward MacDowell Medal, an award celebrating his high achievements in visual art, musical composition and performance, and his influence as a teacher, writer and curator. An artist whose work is described as formu...

  This July, NASA invites us to celebrate the historic 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission. Looking up to the sun, moon and stars, we revisit a radio show designed to revolve around the 2017 total solar eclipse. Listeners will learn that the weather threw our program slightly off course. That's because the first time we streamed The Art of the Eclipse on Jolt Radio was September 6, 2017...

To honor the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this July, we introduce you to Studio Drift, two artists whose poetic work points to the moon and stars. During NASA festivities, a special edition of their airborne art will lift off from the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center.  Amsterdam-based Lonneka Gordijn and Ralph Nauta work at the intersection of nature, art and technology....

Today, we take you to Miami Beach, Florida, for a conversation with British-born artist Ellen Harvey. In 2002, the art fair known as Art Basel traveled here from Switzerland, to set up a winter home. While the South Florida metropolis has grown into an international contemporary art mecca, this coast has also become recognized as ground zero for sea level rise.  Despite increased flooding from hig...

Where do you go to hear the voice of architecture? At midnight, on the eve of the 14th Istanbul Biennial exhibition opening in 2015, we meet British sound artist Oliver Beer inside a 400-year old Turkish bath for an immersive acoustic experience. With microphone and recorder in hand, we follow him into the bath’s hot, steamy inner chamber, where young local opera singers are rehearsing for a one-n...

In this episode, we revisit one of our live studio sessions from 2018: The Art of Obsolete Media. Web streaming on Jolt Radio, we introduce four Miami-based artists passionate about bygone technology: Barron Sherer, Kevin Arrow, Martha Raoli and Terence Price. The initial spark for this conversation was Obsolete Media Miami (O.M.M.), a shared studio space and repository for all kinds of old media...

What does "creative resilience" mean for curators in the year 2019?  One evening, we decide to find out. Setting up a temporary recording studio in a poolside cabana, at a Miami Beach hotel, we sit down with a dozen curators and cultural producers to document their stories. In this marathon recording session, you’ll hear curatorial strategies for engaging new communities, increasing the visibility...

Venice is proven as a top destination for international contemporary art. The 58th Venice Art Biennale opened on May 11, 2019, and will be on view for the next six months. Thank you to Philadelphia-based art historian Deborah Barkun for contributing views from Venice on Instagram. Follow her encounters @freshartintl. Today, we revisit a selection of sonic encounters at the 57th Venice Art Biennial...

Today’s episode is part of our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to share episodes from their Fresh Art International playlists. Born and based in Miami, Eddie Arroyo is a landscape painter who documents residential and commercial structures that urban development will soon erase. He chronicles the loss of a community'...

In Miami, Florida, we take you to meet cultural producers leading the way in local collaborative place making. Five Miami-based artists and an art archivist have come together to energize Dimensions Variable (DV), a new contemporary art space they're animating with artist studios, exhibitions, events and special projects. In this gathering place for art and culture, they aim to spark a dialogue ab...

Today’s conversation continues our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, writers, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to introduce episodes from our archive. Based in the United States, art historian and curator Deborah Barkun is Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Ursinus College, outside Philadelphia. Her resear...

Today’s conversation is the first in our new Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, writers, filmmakers and cultural producers to introduce their favorite episodes from our archive. From the Netherlands, curator, writer and arts producer Sasha Dees works internationally. An advisor to numerous festivals and arts venues, she’s known for encouraging artists to experiment with...

Public art meets poetry in the month-long festival known as O, Miami. We sit down with visual artists Najja Moon and Michelle Lisa Polissaint and O, Miami's managing director Melody Santiago Cummings to talk about their work and introduce the spectrum of site-specific projects that bring poetry to communities. Who’s The Fool? How To Patch A Leaky Roof: Moon and Polissaint create a Little Haiti Cul...

Today, we take you to meet the creative hive that's transforming the cultural landscape of Tampa, Florida. While the coastal city may still be best known for its cigar-making history and vulnerability to rising sea levels, we discover an animated art scene. This is where new and established studios, public art projects, dynamic DIY galleries, avant-garde festivals, and networked community hubs are...

Globally engaged curators introduce IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, and talk about themes we'll explore during the 2019 IKT Congress in Miami. Ground zero for sea level rise, Miami is the ideal context for our conversation on how art and visual culture are changing public perception of today's climate crisis. On April 10, 2019, we recorded this one-hour episode...