FUSE: A BOMB Podcast

Simone Leigh is an artist working with sculpture, installation, video, and social practice. In 2018, Leigh was awarded the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize. Her sixteen-foot-tall sculpture, Brick House, is currently installed on New York City’s High Line. A solo exhibition of new sculptures is on view at David Kordansky gallery through June 11, 2020.

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich is an artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor in film and television production at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Rema Hort Mann Award and a UnionDocs fellowship.

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Ja’Tovia Gary is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker. Her films include Giverny I and most recently An Ecstatic Experience. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and other renowned cultural institutions.

For this episode, we asked her who she’d most like to speak with. She chose writer Kaitlyn Greenidge.

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and American Short Fiction.

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David Byrne is a musician, composer, and producer, and the cofounder of the band Talking Heads. His recent acclaimed rock spectacle, American Utopia, toured the world and was adapted into a Broadway play as well as a concert film directed by Spike Lee. Byrne has received Academy, Grammy, and Golden Globe Awards, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Open Mike Eagle has over a dozen solo and collaborative projects to his name. He is the founder of Auto Reverse Records and co-founder of The New Negroes, a standup-meets-music variety show that explores perceptions of Blackness. Eagle’s most recent album, Anime, Trauma, and Divorce, was released last year.

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David Harrington is the artistic director, founder and violinist of the Kronos Quartet. For over 45 years, San Francisco’s Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet and its nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association have reimagined and redefined the string quartet experience through thousands of concerts, over 60 recordings, collaborations with composers and performers from around the globe, more than 1,000 commissioned works, and education programs for emerging musicians.

Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma but since 2014 has been performing her solo project, A Body in Places. In 2017, she launched a multi-year Duet Project, a series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-generational experiments with a diverse range of artists both living and dead.

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For this episode, we asked writer Maggie Nelson which artist she would most wish to speak with and she chose painter and animation artist Tala Madani. In the course of their conversation, Maggie reflects on the process of writing On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. The pair discuss how to capture magic in adult life, balancing doubt and trust, and Maggie’s first experience writing about art.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her latest work of nonfiction, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

Tala Madani is a Los Angeles based artist who makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Madani has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, and in 2022, she will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective at MOCA, Los Angeles.

FUSE is overseen and produced by Libby Flores, Associate Publisher at BOMB. It is edited and engineered by Will Smith with production assistance by Isis Pinheiro. Narration provided by Chantal McStay, Associate Editor at BOMB magazine. Our theme music is “Black Origami” by Jlin.

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