Art Practical Audio

episode 30: Edgar Arceneaux In this episode I talk with Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux about his recent projects Until, Until, Until and Library of Black Lies; Milli Vanilli and the Roots Christmas special; understanding black masculinity growing up as a geeky kid; and learning from moments of failure. Follow Edgar's work at studioedgararceneaux.com and on Instagram at @edgar_three.

Constance Hockaday on what it means to take risks in public art practice and how our desires can dictate the world's infrastructure.

We close out the third season of the podcast with a conversation with Maya Stovall, a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose work deploys choreography, long term site research, experimental ethnography, and moving and still images to unpack the complexities of community survival, institutional disinvestment, and urban planning. Her layered approach comes through in the multimodal ways she speaks about her work, shifting between dense theory as almost poetic language, to a direct revelation of the pain and frustration in seeing how her family’s neighborhood has been rendered as a food desert with only liquor stores to serve them. Stovall is perhaps best known for her ongoing project, Liquor Store Theatre, an ongoing and long term exploration of her Detroit community. In video documentation of her artistic and anthropological dialogues with residents, we see her both performing in front of the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores and interviewing patrons and passersby, a juxtaposition of footage that manages to be revelatory while still withholding some things only for the people in the city who happen to be there to witness the live events. In her process, Stovall simultaneously interrogates ethnographic traditions and the expectations of artists in public practice. In our conversation, we talk about the roots of her practice, vulnerability, and resisting having her work being pinned down to any one reading of it. Stovall’s Under New Ownership, a solo exhibition jointly presented by Fort Mason Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, is on view through May 5, 2019. She will be enacting Theorem, no.1 a public performance winding through the streets of San Francisco on May 3rd. Click here for more information. Maya Stovall is a conceptual artist and an anthropologist, and she has exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2017–18 F-Series. Her book, Liquor Store Theatre, arrives from Duke University Press in spring 2020. Her second book on the imprint, Writing Through Walls, co-authored with her brother Josef Cadwell, is forthcoming. She has published peer-reviewed academic articles on her anthropological field research and her contemporary art practices in Transforming Anthropology and Journal of the Anthropology of North America, as well as in publications including Detroit Research Journal and The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Anthropology News. She lives and works in Detroit where she grew up, as well as in Los Angeles County, where she is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona. ________ Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

episode 29: In this episode, I talk with New Orleans-based artist, writer, and cultural organizer Imani Jacqueline Brown. Imani manifests her work in many forms: as a core member of Occupy Museums, co-founder of Blights Out in New Orleans, Director of Programs with Antenna, co-producer of Fossil Free Fest, and as a board member of the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a community land trust that built New Orleans's first permanently affordable housing. Throughout her work she consistently interrogates the underlying mechanisms of exploitation and inequity in capitalism while organizing intentional communities of resistance and mutual aid. In our conversation, Imani explains the themes that link her many projects. She also challenges our communities to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate and resist extractive industries, whether real estate speculation or oil. We also discuss her ambivalence toward identifying as an artist and whether that identification is useful in the work that she does.

Notes From MoAD: Episode 4 with Tamara Porras, Emily Kuhlmann, & Soleil Summer by Art Practical