Strand, the Story of an Artist

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode in Portland, Oregon during a weeklong trip through the Pacific Northwest, opening a new series of conversations with six regional artists and beginning with sculptor Ivan McLean. Ivan took an unconventional road into art, from studying farm management at Cal Poly to the Peace Corps, a sheep station in Australia, and a furniture business run with his brother. He...

Kevin Kirkwood recently sat down with Savannah-based artist and designer Nikole Nelson. Nikole Nelson is the founder of BLKCORAL, an interdisciplinary studio renowned for crafting immersive, thought-provoking environments that bridge fine art, interior architecture, and set design. A SCAD graduate, she has collaborated with premier global brands including Tory Burch, Kate Spade, Coach, and NBC Uni...

Kevin Kirkwood recently visited Basil's studio to discuss his journey from Jamaica to the international stage, the development of his artistic voice, and the responsibility of creating public monuments that preserve collective memory. Over the course of his career, Basil Watson has created public sculptures that explore history, identity, culture, and the human experience. His work can be found th...

Kevin Kirkwood recently visited Navin's studio to talk about the objects, places, and histories that have shaped his art and practice. Norling's work spans painting, assemblage, reclaimed windows, salvaged signage, and found objects: materials pulled from the edges of American life and reassembled into layered visual narratives. His practice draws on family history, folk traditions, quilting, and...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jeffry Loy, an Atlanta-based sculptor, public artist, and metalworker whose work explores the intersection of nature, fire, steel, and public space. Active in the Atlanta art scene for more than 30 years, Loy is known for creating hand-forged botanical sculptures, immersive installations, and large-scale public artworks that blend traditional blacksmithing with modern t...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Yu-Kai Lin, founder and director of Kai Lin Art, a gallery that has played a major role in shaping Atlanta’s contemporary art scene for nearly two decades. Over the years, Lin has worked with curators, developers, architects, and designers to build collections and curate exhibitions for organizations including High Museum of Art, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Atlanta Hawks, and...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined with Esteban Patino, an Atlanta-based artist whose work explores language, symbolism, and the construction of meaning through painting, sculpture, and collage. Born in Medellín, Colombia, Patino builds visual systems that resemble language while resisting direct translation, moving between abstraction and representation. His current solo exhibition, Shapeshifter, on view a...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Josh Aronson, a Miami-based artist and photographer whose work explores masculinity, vulnerability, and the shifting landscape of the American South. Born in Toronto and raised in Florida, Aronson’s perspective is shaped by a deep familiarity with the region’s contradictions, something that becomes a central thread throughout the conversation. His photographs, which oft...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Savannah-based artist Rick Petrea, whose work spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, and collage. For over 30 years, Rick has explored figurative, expressionistic art, occasionally venturing into abstraction. His influences range from Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, and the CoBrA Group to comic books and outsider art, particularly by artists with schizophrenia. In thi...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jason Hoelscher, a painter, writer, and professor whose work explores the dynamics of attention, perception, and visual information. Hoelscher’s practice sits at the intersection of art, philosophy, and information. His book Art as Information Ecology (Duke University Press, 2021) draws on aesthetic philosophy and information theory to reframe art as a living, complex s...

Kevin Kirkwood visits the Savannah, Georgia studio of painter Christopher Moss, a space Christopher built by hand alongside his father, and the setting for an afternoon conversation about memory, place, and the quiet work of building a creative life. Together, they trace his path from a childhood in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, through earning his MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College, to the practice he ha...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Erin Dunn, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia. Since 2014, Erin has organized exhibitions including Watershed: Contemporary Landscape Photography, Feels Like Freedom: Phillip J. Hampton, and Frank Stewart's Nexus: An American Photographer's Journey. She also leads the #art912 initiative, a program dedicated to supporting artis...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Ivy Laurel Anderson, a fiber artist and sculptor based in Savannah, Georgia. Using a knitting machine as her primary tool, Ivy wraps discarded everyday objects in elastic knitted membranes that stretch, sag, and conform to whatever lies beneath. Her ongoing series, Somethings, transforms castaway materials into forms that are by turns humorous, unsettling, and oddly mov...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Italian American figurative painter and writer Melinda Borysevicz, whose work recently moved from the hilltop villages of southern Italy to the marshes of Savannah, Georgia. After years immersed in Savannah's vibrant creative community, Melinda traveled in 2015 to a small village near her ancestral home in southern Italy. What began as a short stay became several year...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Ben Tollefson, a painter and curator based in Savannah whose studio practice examines performance, identity, and the illusions we construct around the self. Working primarily in figurative oil painting, Ben explores artifice and the social constructions of masculinity and femininity. His boldly hued, psychologically charged compositions inject a camp sensibility into...

Kevin Kirkwood shared a conversation with lé dieguê, a Venezuelan-born artist now living and working in Savannah, Georgia. His work is layered with rhythm, symbolism, and bold chromatic intensity, drawing from migration, cultural memory, and personal resilience. Through color and pattern, he builds visual worlds that speak to identity, displacement, and transformation. In this conversation, they d...

Kevin Kirkwood travels to Orlando, Florida to reconnect with Benoit Glazer; musician, designer, and founder of the Timucua Arts Foundation. Benoit is also renowned for his work as musical director for Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba, bringing a world-class performance perspective to his own creative projects. Timucua is a multi-disciplinary arts and education nonprofit, blending music, visual art, fes...

Kevin Kirkwood travels to Decatur, Georgia, to sit down with artist Tori Tinsley for a conversation about process and vulnerability. Born in 1980, Tori Tinsley is an Atlanta-based artist whose practice navigates memory, labor, and lived experience. She earned her BFA from the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design, a Master of Arts in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Inst...

Kevin Kirkwood shared a conversation with Anila Quayyum Agha. She is an internationally recognized artist born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently based in the US. Anila creates immersive installations that explore global and environmental issues, culture, and social and gender roles. Using Islamic geometric patterns, light, shadow, and steel cut with delicate designs, her work transforms spaces, in...

Kevin Kirkwood traveled to Willow Pond in San Luis Obispo to visit the bright, light-filled studio of contemporary artist Carol Paquet. A South African–American visual artist, Carol works across photography, oil painting, and mixed media, blending analog and digital techniques to create fictional botanical landscapes shaped by memory, place, and imagination. After studying at the College of Art in...

Kevin Kirkwood visits the vibrant, detail-packed studio of illustrator and muralist Nigel Sussman in the heart of Berkeley, California. Known for his bold isometric worlds and large-scale murals that transform city walls into playful architectural maps, Nigel has developed a visual style that is instantly recognizable and endlessly explorable. Kevin and Nigel dive into the creative engine behind h...

In today’s episode, Kevin Kirkwood brings listeners to the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, recording inside the studio of contemporary artist Wanxin Zhang. Widely regarded as a leading voice in the new generation of the Bay Area clay movement, Wanxin is celebrated for his monumental ceramic figures, his experimental formless structures, and his striking bronze works. His sculptures explore...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with celebrated artist, critic, and museum professional Hal Fischer for an intimate conversation recorded at Fischer’s home in San Francisco. Known for his groundbreaking Gay Semiotics series and influential writing on photography in the 1970s, Fischer reflects on a career that spans more than four decades and continues to shape contemporary understandings of visual cultur...

Kevin Kirkwood spent time with artist Andy Diaz Hope in his San Francisco studio, where Andy reflected on his upbringing on the Bay Area’s peninsula, his academic path through Stanford University, and the moment the Catharine Clark Gallery took interest in his work.   Andy Diaz Hope holds both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Engineering from Stanford’s renowned joint program in De...

Episode 087: Badri Valian بدری ولیان Kevin Kirkwood sat down with artist Badri Valian in her San Francisco studio in the Design District, where they talked about her upbringing in Iran, the ways those early experiences continue to shape her creative life, and the possibilities she envisions for her future practice. Badri Valian is a San Francisco–based interdisciplinary and social practice artist...