The Open Call Podcast

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work. This week, The Open Call Podcast has the pleasure of sharing with you part of our conversation with Zoë Charlton. Zoë is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, sculpture, and installation. She lives in Baltimore, MD and maintains studios there and in Washington, DC where she is on the faculty at American University.
Zoe’s work centers around the figure, however these depictions move beyond representation and serve as signifiers of black identity. Her figures are frequently partially obscured by a dense envelopment of collaged elements like trees, birds, houses, or masks that functionally reference the idea of place. While her figures reference specific individuals, these additional elements have an ubiquitous quality to them. She mines this imagery from sources like magazines, books, packs of decorative stickers, and the internet. Zoë refers to herself as a storyteller and she weaves together familiar and unique elements as an invitation to question how mythologies are born and consider who the depicted individual might be and what their relationship is to the culturally loaded objects and landscapes that surround them.
Zoë’s work draws from rich memories of her grandmother, her upbringing in the panhandle of Florida, her experience moving from place to place as a military dependent, and other noteworthy aspects of her personal history. The lived experiences that she folds into her drawings and installations are the foundation upon which she explores topics like race, gender, history, and mythology.
We enjoyed a delightful conversation with Zoë that hit on her research, studio practice, and balancing her practice with family and an academic career . We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of Zoë's artwork.
We typically release new episodes every 2 weeks, however this episode closes our 3rd Season and we will take some time off before launching Season 4. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Instagram so you will know when we are back with new episodes. Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants: Ally Price, Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller who provide production support, web, and social media design.

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
This week, The Open Call Podcast is happy to host Jodi Hays. Jodi is a Southern-identifying artist whose abstract paintings bring together new and reclaimed materials that she dyes, paints and assembles into works ranging from small to mural sized paintings. Her work pulls from a Southern vernacular and she pulls some of her imagery from care-worn and dilapidated aspects of the Southern landscape. She deftly layers formal, emotive, and conceptual elements as she explores ideas of gender, history, identity, and place.
Hays’ materials are often drawn from her environment, sometimes suffused with family history and sometimes chosen for their formal qualities like stripes or grids. She manipulates these materials and mines them for their inherent content, informing her interest in abstraction. Her paintings draw on her research into regional history, family, and land use. In this episode we caught up with Jodi in Nashville, Tennessee where she lives and works. Listen as she shares about her studio, working process, and the ideas that inform her work.
We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of our guest's artwork. We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks. Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants: Ally Price, Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller who provide production support, web, and social media design.

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
This week, The Open Call Podcast is happy to host Lisa Corinne Davis, an internationally known, Brooklyn based artist whose complex paintings contain coded narratives that layer warped grids, invented geometries, and map elements overtop of one another. Davis’ works are informed by her own lived experiences as a light-skinned African American woman and her desire to avoid categorization. Her paintings investigate the “complex relationship between 'race, culture and history”’ Using a visual language that is moreso felt than overtly political she explores ideas about “classification and contingency, the rational and irrational, chaos and order” in relation to identity.
Davis is interested in the multiplicity of perception and how our varied histories inform our interactions. She seamlessly combines contrasting elements like geometric and organic forms, and analytical and emotional color schemes in ways that create visually engaging juxtapositions and open up new space for interpretation. The titles of her paintings, containing two seemingly disparate words like Quizzical Quantum, are yet another tool she uses to prolong interpretation and avoid clear definition. Lisa maintains studios in both NYC and in the Hudson Valley. When we spoke with Lisa she was in Hudson. We discussed her process and got a glimpse into how she juggles multiple roles as artist, professor, and mother. We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of Lisa's artwork.
We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks. Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants: Ally Price, Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller who provide production support, web, and social media design.

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
In this episode of The Open Call Podcast, we talk with Conrad Bakker who lives and works in Illinois where he is a Professor of Art at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Conrad makes carved and painted sculptures of ordinary objects and inserts them into existing economies as a way to challenge value, perception and our relationship with the objects around us. His works range from everyday things like doorstops and electrical cords to generation defining icons like his large scale crumpled blockbuster sign. He places these objects in consumer contexts and galleries that are often transformed into a provisional marketplace. Many of Conrad’s projects are participatory. His immersive installations harness the power of nostalgia to encourage conversations about the many political economies associated with a single item.
Check out this episode to learn more about the concepts and processes that frame his work. Also be sure to visit out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast. New episodes of The Open Call are released every 2 weeks so be sure to check back to discover new artists and learn more about their practice.
Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for our new music version as well as sound engineering, and to all of our wonderful research assistants: Erin Miller, Ally Price, and Nikki Cohen who provide production support, web, and social media design.

The Open Call Podcast hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
In this episode of The Open Call Podcast, we talked with Maria Lux who lives and works in Walla Walla, Washington. Maria is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes like animal behavior, extinction, and the optimism of science through immersive installations comprised of multiple parts. Her work often employs humor to probe serious subjects. Check out this episode to learn more about her art, working process, and inspirations.
Also check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast. This episode kicks off Season 3 of The Open Call. Check back every 2 weeks to learn about future guests.
Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, and to our wonderful research assistants: Erin Miller, Ally Price, Judah Bachmann, and Nikki Cohen who provide production support, web, and social media design.