Interviews by Brainard Carey

Portrait of Shaun Leonardo, 2024. Photo by Argenis Apolinario. Shaun Leonardo  (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute a...

Izzy Barber (b. 1990) is originally from Gowanus, Brooklyn, and lives and works in Queens, New York. Barber paints from life: immediacy and physical presence are at the heart of her practice. Working on-site, in public, often at sunset and into the last light of day and night, her highly impressionistic, at times three-dimensional brushwork charges her paintings with the physical and temporal prox...

Nick Fusaro (b. 1989) is based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College in 2022 and his BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. His sculptural practice combines humble materials, collections, and iteration to emphasize the effects of memory on lived experience. Fusaro also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2011 and is the founder of Three Four Three Fou...

photo by Karla Del Orbe. Adelisa Selimbašić (b. 1996) is an Italian-Bosnian artist living and working in New York. In 2021, she graduated from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s in Painting. Her pictorial research aims to imagine a world in which the sense of inadequacy does not exist, opening to a nonconventional perception of the body. Through scenes drawn from everyday life and an...

Giulio Noccesi by Ethan James Green Giulio Noccesi (b. 1996, Florence, Italy) is a painter based in Turin, Italy. He has participated in group exhibitions at Minor Gallery, Copenhagen, DK (2025); Monti8, Rome, IT (2024); Candysnake Gallery, Milan, IT (2024); and D Contemporary Gallery, London, UK (2023). He received a degree in Printmaking from Fine Arts Academy, Florence in 2018. “In Maurilia, th...

Johanna Calle was born in 1965 in Bogotá , where she lives and works. Following her studies in the visual arts at the Talleres Artísticos of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá from 1984 to 1989, Calle received a British Council scholarship in 1992 to earn a master’s degree at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her work draws on a range of archival and deciphering techniques, ofte...

Anna Johnso n studied English, Australian literature and Fine Arts at the University of Sydney graduating with a bachelor of arts in 1987. The following year she was appointed Art Editor of Interior Design magazine. Since then, Johnson has been a professional art writer and author contributing to Vogue (UK and Aus), Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveller, The Sydney Morning Herald and as a senior arts...

Bat-Ami Rivlin is a New York-based sculptor working primarily in found and surplus objects. Notable exhibitions include  Boat, Plastic, Tire , L21, Spain (2023-24);  Simple Sabotage , Kunsthal NORD, Denmark (2023-24);  The Socrates Annual , Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2023-24);  COLAPSO , Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain (2022);  EN-SITIO , Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico (2022);  whe...

Jesse Egner is a queer artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Often taking the form of playful and absurd photographic portraiture of himself and other individuals, his work explores themes such as queerness, body image, relationships, collaboration, and humor. He received his BA from Millersville University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2020. His w...

Nicola Tyson was born in 1960 in London, England. She attended Chelsea School of Art, St. Martins School of Art and Central/St. Martins School of Art in London, and currently lives and works in New York. Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked with photography, film, performance and the written word, in addition to running Trial BALLOON, an NYC project space in the early 90s. In 2023, ...

Christina Kruse, the New York-based artist whose practice navigates the shifting terrain of value, perception, and collective meaning, opens her latest solo exhibition  Field Agents  this April 2nd, 2026 at New Discretions. Curated by Tamar Dresdner, the exhibition unfolds as a study in instability – where systems of belief are unsettled and reassembled in response to a world in flux. Working acro...

In this new body of work, Giordanne Salley constructs shifting tableaus that attempt to visualize not time itself, but the feeling of the passage of time. Our experiences of life can often feel like we are riding along on time’s arrow. Days repeat and build like the rhythm of waves lapping at the shore. Each tide brings forth trash and treasures, bits of flora and fauna, before the lunar cycle pul...

Splat Daisies , is a solo exhibition of dreamlike paintings and sculpture by Sarah Alice Moran. Splat is a cartoon word and the spaces in these paintings draw on that system of suspended rationale. By loosening the rules of scale, gravity, and time, Moran creates dreamy pastoral scenes where humans, animals, and nature coexist without hierarchy. The show explores the quiet, almost mystical bonds b...

De Mont’s practice emerges from her work as an intuitive guide, leading immersive experiences in which participants are invited into states of openness and release. It was within these rituals that she began making photographs — images conceived not as portraits but as reflections, offering back to each subject a picture of themselves liberated from the hierarchies of identity and status. Th...

Michalik has exhibited internationally in art institutions, fairs, univers ity galleries, communi ty spaces, and commercial galleries the current show of this interview at Kathryn Markel. Her paintings have been published internationally in Architectural Digest, Michalik’s newspaper,  “Devour,” was published in collaboration with Brooklyn based Raw Meat Collective , and was recently acquired by th...

David Smalling portrait © Stefen Pompee Born in 1987 in Kingston, Jamaica, David Smalling lives and works in New York City. He studied Mathematics at Yale University, where he also trained at the Yale School of Art, and holds a Ph. D. from Harvard University. Drawing from the tradition of Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age, Smalling’s paintings examine how contemporary social codes and gender norm...

Catherine Birk (b. 1994, she/her) is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. Her interdisciplinary practice brings transgender studies, queer theory, and critical theory into the expanded field of painting. Catherine earned her MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024), and BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). Solo exhibiti...

dean erdmann lives and works between San Diego, CA and Brooklyn, NY. dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist in moving and still images, sculpture, and installation. Their sculptural practice evolved from their image-making practice. They live and work between Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. Their work has been exhibited at ONE Archives, Mexicali Biennial, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, 21st Century M...

Rochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist whose works explore the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and found images, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found image...

Sebastiaan Bremer and son Tobias Bremer turns photographs—found or snapped—of himself, his family, and appropriated imagery into trippy, dust-laden memories that, through his layered pointillist technique, reveal the subconscious and the real world in the blink of an eye. By laboriously painting his poetic braille over fast snapshots, he slows down time to render hauntingly beautiful interior land...

Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging. Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wass...

Photo: Emma Jenkinson Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photograph...

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city l...

Rob Davis was born in 1970 in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 with a degree in painting. His work has been exhibited both internationally and, in the U.S., It has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporar...

Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woods...