Peachy Keen

Leia Genis on her process: The first half of the process— the cyanotypes—is really about building up that information. I think of it like a riverbed depositing silt where it’s like this constant kind of flow of information, and that leaves these small deposits that build up on the bed. And then the second half of the process where I’m dying it—It really feels like archeological, where I’m kind of...

Peachy Keen is back! Brushing the dust off our mics after a few years’ hiatus, we visited fellow Athens, Georgia artist Victoria Dugger in her studio at the Lyndon House Arts Center. We talked about our shared ties to Columbus, Georgia, flowers that eat bugs/horror/the “monstrous feminine,” the Atlanta art scene, self-imposed vs. societal expectations, and how she came to show at Sargent’s Daughte...

Peachy Keen and guest co-host Stephanie Raines, artist advocate and arts administrator, visited Nashville-based artist Chalet Comellas-Baker in her artist-run exhibition space (Unrequited Leisure) just as all of us pandemic mole people were beginning to peep our little heads out of our burrows. Fittingly, after a year of not being with other humans, we talked about wildlife— particularly bird soun...

Peachy Keen masked-up and joined artist Alice Stone-Collins in her home studio in Atlanta, GA, for our first (and so far, only) pandemic interview. She contemplates the lasting impact that her rural Madison County upbringing has had on her work, which utilizes a combination of painting and collage techniques to depict a slightly askew, surreal version of the everyday mundane. We commiserate about...

Peachy Keen met up with artist Jessica R. Smith at her home studio in Savannah, where she is a professor of fibers at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Smith is the is the co-author with Susan Falls of the recently released book Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond . We talked about her childhood spent between Alaska and Pennsylvania, he...

Peachy Keen met up with artist Sonya Yong James on the occasion of her massive installation “Phantom Threads” as part of the PROJECT exhibition curated by Scott Ingram at the Temporary Art Center in Atlanta. (Thanks to our podcasting friends from Brainfuzz Podcast for lending us the use of their swank dedicated podcasting room on site!) We talked about our shared position as women/artists growing...

Peachy Keen met up with artist Colleen Merrill on day three of SECAC 2019 and got into the nitty gritty of the psychology behind her conference presentation titled Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic —discussing both Rozsika Parker and Donald Winnicott’s theories. We note the lack of men at parenting-related SECAC sessions and the importance of having men in the room when...

Peachy Keen met up with artist Naomi Falk in a boardroom at the Chattanoogan Hotel during the recent SECAC conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After briefly discussing some of the points that Falk made in her conference session on limits in the studio art classroom, we continued to talk about some of the challenges and joys of pushing students in our own classrooms, the long slog to a permanent...

Peachy Keen visited the home studio of Nashville artist Virginia Griswold on a Sunday morning to chat about her life and work. Starting with the shocking revelation that Griswold was once sent away to an all-girls Catholic school for disciplinary issues and a little family history focusing on women artists, we quickly get into tackling her broad-based postsecondary education. We discuss Griswold’s...

Brittainy Lauback on vacation cruises: We're always trying to vacation from ourselves and we never can. You know? What I think is so kind of disturbing about the cruise in general is that you have this—you know, you're really stuck with all these people. You really do kind of start to have like a little bit of an existential crisis. Like, you know, like hell is other peopleand you're stuck on the...

Peachy Keen spent the morning at home talking art over coffee and pound cake with visiting curator, Rachel Reese. The kind of person that graduates from college ahead of schedule (3 ½ years, y’all!), Reese amassed an impressive resume of arts-related positions before landing in her current gig as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums in Savannah. An Atlanta native, she shares s...

Peachy Keen met with artist and writer Donna Mintz in the back room of her exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta during the recent blackberry winter to talk about her current body of work. We discussed her use of materials to express ideas on memory and place: kaolin gathered from Georgia’s fall line recalls an ancient sea, elementary school milk cartons become a practical casting contai...

Peachy Keen met up with Christina Renfer Vogel in her Chattanooga studio to talk shop about her painting, teaching and curatorial projects. Originally from Pennsylvania, Vogel has been in Chattanooga for the past 6 years. We discussed her interim time in Nebraska working at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, how she turned her office into an alternative exhibition space and the lingering bene...

Katie Hargrave is an artist and educator in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Meredith Lynn is an artist and curator based in Tallahassee, Florida. Peachy Keen caught up with them in Chattanooga, where they were meeting up for the weekend to collaborate on a body of work for an upcoming exhibition at the Wiregrass Museum of Art that they first began exploring while at a Signal Fire residency in Oregon.

Artist Corrina Sephora moved to Atlanta in the mid 90s after receiving her BFA in Sculpture and Metalsmithing from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and has stayed on to become an integral player in the Atlanta arts community, establishing a prosperous artistic practice in metal and other media.  She tells Peachy Keen how she created her own apprenticeship program (looking up blacksmiths...

Haylee Anne and Angela Bortone took a Twitter friendship to the next level, eventually joining forces with Jessica Caldas, Angela Davis Johnson, and Danielle Deadwyler to become the Living Melody Collective. This group of Atlanta-based, female-identifying artists is all about participating in and uplifting their community through creative projects. Peachy Keen chatted with Haylee Anne and Angela B...

Artist Tommye Scanlin sat down with Peachy Keen at her loom in her Dahlonega, Georgia, studio to discuss teaching, learning, and tapestry on the eve of her second retirement from teaching. We got deep into the history of the University of North Georgia art department, where she taught for 28 years and was appointed Professor Emerita in 2002. Raised by a single mother, Scanlin attended college on s...

Peachy Keen met up with artist Jenny Fine in the upstairs classroom of the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama on a hot Friday afternoon in early October. We discussed the influence that many strong creative women have had on her career—most notably that of her grandmothers (who both play an important role in her work) and of Ann Hamilton (a world-renowned installation artist who Fine studied unde...

Courtney Sanborn on medieval art and the iconography in her work: Sanborn: Like I said, I love Medieval art. And I love the iconography. I love that in that period of art …there’s no words to describe evil. How do you describe something that’s evil or negative? There’s no words, but there are pictures. And so, the artists of that time made their demons out of—like there are these weird conglomerat...

Peachy Keen began the school year with a visit to downtown Atlanta and the campus of Georgia State University to talk with artist Shanequa Gay in her studio. We discussed vulnerability and the importance of sharing the highs and the lows of life to pave the way for fledgling creatives. She accuses the women in her family of lying (not owning up to the fact that they were artists!), and admits to h...

Peachy Keen met up with Atlanta artist Hannah Tarr on a sunny Saturday morning in July to talk shop. After RISD and stints in Oakland, Chicago and Ox-Bow, she explains how the film industry lured her back to her hometown with its tempting day jobs—where else can you be a “stand by” painter on set and go to Def Leppard shows with Dave Bautista? We talk about why men should wear yoga pants, the zen...

For this episode, Peachy Keen stayed close to home to talk to Athens, Georgia artist, Yvonne Studevan. Having gained some local fame for painting the proprietor of Vic’s Vintage shop downtown as “Black Jesus”, Yvonne explains how deeply that portrait— commissioned by St. Philip Monumental AME Church in Savannah—is related to her own history and desires to increase the representation of black peopl...

Peachy Keen headed down to Orlando, Florida for Spring Break and met up with local artist and educator Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. Bronx-born to Puerto Rican parents, Raimundi-Ortiz talks us through her teenage years attending the fabled “Fame” school (LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and creating her Wepa Woman superheroine. She explains how she got schooled at Skowhegan and Ru...

Peachy Keen spent a rainy, coffee-fueled morning talking with Atlanta artist Karen Tauches about her fine art practice in her East Point studio. This is the perfect episode to listen to on your Spring Break road trip. Look out your window at what Tauches refers to as "the greatest hits" of our landscape (the Florida beaches and the Georgia mountains, for example)—how do they compare to the billboa...

Peachy Keen met up with Atlanta visual artist and sculptor Zipporah Camille Thompson on the week of the rare super blue blood moon eclipse—notable in the context of Zipporah's work, which often deals with lunar activity as a subject. What would happen if the moon decided to up and leave us?  We chat about this and other pressing questions amongst looms, a kiln, shelves of thread and various contai...