Interviews by Brainard Carey

Catherine Birk (b. 1994, she/her) is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL.

Her interdisciplinary practice brings transgender studies, queer theory, and critical theory into the expanded field of painting. Catherine earned her MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024), and BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). Solo exhibitions include My mother is a horse., at the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI).

She has exhibited in group shows nationally, including at Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston, SC), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), Arts + Li...

dean erdmann lives and works between San Diego, CA and Brooklyn, NY. dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist in moving and still images, sculpture, and installation. Their sculptural practice evolved from their image-making practice. They live and work between Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. Their work has been exhibited at ONE Archives, Mexicali Biennial, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Spiral Hall, Tokyo, Kavi GuptaBerlin, the Sheila Johnson Design Center, Torrance Art Museum, and Public Fiction,

Rochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist whose works explore the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and found images, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found images in order to decontextualize her experience of reality and decipher our collective relationship to photographs.

She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2012. She is an upcoming resident of the Wassaic Project, and was a resident at The Peter Bu...

Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging. Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2014). Solo shows include Sisyphus Altered at Strobe, New York, NY (2023) and Can’t Forget, Dying to Know at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023). His installation Letters to Home was selected for CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM (2022), and a reformatted excerpt of Le...

Photo: Emma Jenkinson

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world pho...

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language.

In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, natu...

Rob Davis was born in 1970 in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 with a degree in painting. His work has been exhibited both internationally and, in the U.S., It has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Luce Gallery, Turin; Rental Gallery, Long Island; and Untitled Gallery, New York. Davis currently lives and works in New York.

Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue.

He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle, WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Painting by Caroline von Grone, Omar the Prophet

Omar Kholeif is an artist, author, curator, cultural historian and professor of global art theory and practice at the Glasgow School of Art and Program Leader of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice with the University of Glasgow.

A note: On the interview concerning the 3 channel video “Same as me” from 2002 shows an abbreviated day in the life of a total of 18 different versions of the artist. Only viewed three at a time, the possible variations are synchronized across time and space or arise in daydreams of elsewhere or other than. For Campbell, the process of making the video revealed the thesis of the work. “It was very challenging to learn how to reenact my self…. it was hard to keep up with myself.”

Beth Campbell, (USA, born in Illinois), demonstrates the inextricable entanglements of past, pres...

Clementine Keith Roach, 2020 Courtesy P·P·O·W, New York. Photo: Teddy Park

Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) received a BA in Art History from University of Bristol, Bristol, UK and now lives and works in Dorset, UK.

She has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Blue Projects, London, UK; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), Sète, France; The Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; Open Space Contemporary, London, UK; Pervilion, Palermo, Italy and London, UK; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Wellcome C...

Based in Brooklyn, NY (b. 1986, Taishan, China), Ye Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist focused on painting, public art, and social practice. He has presented solo exhibitions at DIMIN (2023) and Harkawik (2022) in New York, NY; at Moskowitz Bayse (2021) in Los Angeles, CA; and at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, NY (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, NY (2022–23), Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles (2023), Galerie Marguo in Paris, Harper’s (2023, 2021), and James Fuentes (2021) in New York. Over the past year (2024–25), he completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC...

Ron Norsworthy is an interdisciplinary artist whose broad practice engages the fields of art, architecture, filmmaking and design. Informing his work is a foundational belief that the rooms, spaces and environments we inhabit and interact with speak volumes not only about who we are now, but also about our dreams, aspirations and our struggles as well. Through the creation of collaged reliefs, decorative objects, textiles and installations, his work carries the viewer through a non-linear, layered story of his life, one shaped by his lived experience as a queer person of the global majority.

Norsworthy was born in South...

Xanthe Burdett

Xanthe Burdett (b. 1995) is an artist from Devon currently living and working in London. Her practice is led by painting but also encompasses drawing and installation. She graduated from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024, and received her BA in Education, English and Drama at Cambridge University. Her work explores the relationship between the body and nature, questioning the notion of the body as nature itself. Through a personal mythology deeply rooted in place, Xanthe weaves bodies and stories into layered works where the boundary between the human and non-human shifts and stretches. Her...

Katie Simmons is an artist, educator, and wildlife biologist from the Appalachian mountains in east Tennessee. She holds baccalaureate degrees in art history, visual art, and wildlife biology and her MA in education and MFA in drawing and fiber art. Katie is an instructor of drawing and fiber art at Colorado State University and Front Range Community College. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally in numerous group and solo shows in the United States, western Europe and South America. Her research on feminist aesthetics, the uncanny, and the commodification of bodies through sex trafficking has also been published and...

Paul Scott in print studio with cut Wild Rose detail

Paul Scott (b. 1953, United Kingdom) is a UK-based artist, living and working in Cumbria, with a diverse practice and an international reputation. Creating individual pieces that blur the boundaries between fine art, craft, and design, he is well known for his research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue-and-white artworks in glazed ceramic.

Scott’s artworks can be found in public collections around the globe, including the National Museum, Norway; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; National Museums Liverpool; the Carnegie Museum of Ar...

Aglaé Bassens, Photo: Jenny Gorman

Aglaé Bassens (b. 1986, Belgium) has a BA in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University (2007) and an MFA in Fine Art Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2011). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; HESSE FLATOW, New York; 12.26, Dallas; Nars Foundation, Brooklyn; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; and Cabin Gallery, London; as well as group exhibitions at Gowen Contemporary, Geneva

Janet Echelman is an artist known for sculpting at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unconventional materials—from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel—blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Her monumental works anchor public spaces across five continents, in cities including New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, and Singapore.

Permanent installations in locations such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Porto continually evolve with shifting light and...

Isaac Lythgoe is a sculptor, painter and writer based In Paris, FR. His practice is world-building; reimagining narrative traditions and modes of storytelling, he creates interconnected works that probe power structures, contemporary ethics, and shifting social norms. Within this constructed universe, arcs of romance and mortality intersect, inviting viewers to consider how collective memory is formed—and what future societies might resemble. This temporal drift between past and future is mirrored in Lythgoe’s aesthetic language, where tensions between the natural and the synthetic unfold through form, material, and gesture.

Recent and forthcoming shows include Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Scul...

Samuel Guy (b.1991) is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Through prolonged observational paintings he explores the multifaceted nature of the self, its murkiness, its chance quality and its socially buttressed construction. Through costuming and a deep relationship to the history of portrait painting he re-presents himself in various forms. The chameleon nature of these self portraits positions the artist as both real and potential, blurring those distinctions and positioning the image of the individual as within a larger cultural context. Often reflections on manhood, these paintings interrogate how it is performed, engaging with the imagery in...

photo by Janna Tew

Sophie Haulman is a Brooklyn-based ceramicist and sculptor from Wilmington, North Carolina. She received her BFA (2019) from Virginia Commonwealth University’s department of Sculpture + Extended Media. While maintaining her practice, she is also a ceramics teacher and works in ceramic production and fabrication. Her evolving work explores the sensuality of space, the body and the unknown through material-based experimentation, contemplation on process, investigation of tactile form, and a constant surrender to fate. 

 “every month grass came” is a contemplation on mortality and the temporary nature of all that we possess – our bodies, relationships, experience...

Elijah Gowin uses photography to speak about ritual, landscape and memory.  He was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1967 and received his BA in Art History from Davidson College in 1990 and MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His photographs are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, among others.   His awards include the John S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 as well as grants from the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Puffin Foundation.  He founded Tin Roof Press to publish his books on art and...

James Horner is a queer chronicler who educates the public and diverts discrimination from his community. Horner focuses on ordinary queer folk, their issues, and LGBTQ+ icons like Marsha P. Johnson, a rights activist. The artist focuses on painting, but also experiments with drawings, sculptures, and zines. Using a simple color palette, Horner starts his figurative works with a line drawing and develops them to be muscular, abstract, and sometimes humorous.

A native New Yorker, Horner has an M.F.A. in painting from Lehman College and is an artist and board member at the Amos Eno...

Jeanine Brito (b. 1993, Germany) is a painter living and working in Montréal, Canada. Layered in theatrical and fairy tale imagery, she uses her likeness to play with ideas of gender and desire. Her paintings have permeated the cultural consciousness, appearing in Harris Reed’s debut runway collection for Nina Ricci, on an album cover by Clara Luciani, on the cover of the highly reviewed debut novel by Sophie Kemp, and many other crossover collaborations. Recent exhibitions include All the Better to Eat You With, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2025), The Amber of This Moment, Nicodim, Bucharest (2025), The Grumpy Girls, Nicodim, New Yor...

Ryan Crotty earned his BFA in painting from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his MFA in painting from Syracuse University. His work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo shows include a solo presentation at Untitled Art with High Noon, Miami, FL; Ever So Slightly Off, Rutger Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam, NL; and Underlying Issues, Galerie Robertson Ares, Montreal, QC. Recent group exhibitions include The Stage is Yours! curated by Eric Gauthier, Exo Gallery, Stuttgart, DE; Spectrum, Galerie Bessaud, Paris, FR; and Tone Poem, The Hole, Los Angeles, CA. His work has been featured in publications such as...

Sigrid Sandström  earned a BFA at Academie Minerva, Groningen, The Netherlands (1997); attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2000); and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2001).

Maureen McQuillan (photo credit: Etienne Fossard)
Pictured in front of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” her permanent public art installation, completed 2018, which spans three sides of the 36th Avenue N/W station in Astoria, Queens, and was commissioned by Metropolitan Transit Authority/Arts & Design.

Maureen McQuillan creates process-focused, system-based paintings from multiple layers of ink and acrylic polymers that convey a deep but elusive sense of space. Vibrantly hued, she uses rippling, wave-like linear elements and undulating rounded forms to suggest shapes in nature as well as the human body. Her systematic approach to color results in a luminous and comp...

Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Parlance, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai’i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Th...

photo by Colin Outridge.

The exhibition Change of Scenery,  marks the painter’s third solo show with the gallery. It is the culmination of a year’s worth of travel across the U.S., as Brennan Hinton spent extended time in residency in Corsicana, TX, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and Fishers Island, NY. Brennan Hinton’s practice focuses on the sustained act of observation, the plein-air discipline, and painting’s ability to capture the essence of a place. The time spent in three distinctive towns, each in its own ways divergent from Brennan Hinton’s familiar Ontario, required the artist to mee...

Leslie Smith III (b. 1985) was born in Silver Spring, MD and lives and works in Madison, WI.  Smith’s interests lie in our conscious effort to alter personal perception. Recent works explore Abstraction’s inherent personal and political properties as they relate to broadening notions of Black representation and expression. Smith creates paintings with a mindset that it’s possible to present a new interpretation of contemporary abstraction. One with expectations of a different sensibility than that offered by the 1950’s and 60’s, he offers an alternative worldview; one of inclusion and acceptance. 

Leslie Smith III earned a BFA at the...

Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, her work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance.

Weston often integrates glass into her work due to its inherent nature. Whether it be through photographs, fragments incorporated into a canvas, or an element within a sculpture, the duality of the material speaks to Weston’s understanding of Black resistance. Both fragile and susceptible to shatter at the hand of an act of vi...

Katy Stone is best known for her large-scale installations and wall sculptures. Working primarily in aluminum, Dura-Lar and plexiglass, her artworks are a proposition to reconsider landscape painting as an environmental, immersive dynamic. Suspended, or set in relief, the artist’s drawn, cutout, painted, and stitched-together elements possess a vibrancy, a spirited energy and effect. Echoing fleeting clouds, falling leaves, moving water, and scattered light, they spill, climb and spread across the wall. This mimesis of nature locates the work in an earthly sphere but in a palpably conjured world created via the distinctive visual language she has developed ove...

Lamar Peterson (b. 1974, St. Petersburg, Florida) is a painter whose work explores the psychological and social space between refuge and exposure. For more than two decades, he has rendered the everyday experiences of Black life with a language that merges stylized figuration, domestic ritual, and surreal distortion. Across both painting and collage, Peterson creates scenes where tranquility and unease coexist: suburban gardens bloom into uncanny environments, rooms soften and dissolve into landscape, and figures pursue moments of rest and care even as the outside world presses near.

Peterson’s visual vocabulary ranges from cartoon inflections and bold col...

Amiko Li (b. 1993, Shanghai) is an interdisciplinary artist who translates everyday stories and encounters into film, installation, and photography, to explore and contextualize the underlying complexities and themes, such as intimacy, waiting, and value. Li’s recent Exhibition and performance include Center for Art, Research, and Alliance, New York; The Shed, New York; Asia Art Archive, New York; Ulster Museum, Ireland; Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Switzerland; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, China; Power Station of Art, China. Li’s work has been supported through fellowships and residencies at Delfina Foundation, London; Triangle Arts Association, New York; and Kunstlerhaus Dortmund, Germa...

My Pet Ram is pleased to present Towards the Sun, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Heather Drayzen, on view through November 9, 2025. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday–Sunday, 12–6 PM, and by appointment. Heather Drayzen (b. 1985, San Antonio, Texas) is a painter known for her intimate, small-scale depictions of quiet domestic life, often featuring herself and her loved ones. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Drayzen received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New Yor...

Linda Daniels creates vibrant abstract paintings.Linda Daniels (b. 1954) spent her formative years in California. She earned her B.F.A. in General Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts.  

In 1984, she moved to New York City, where her first solo show debuted at fiction/nonfiction gallery in 1988. Over the following decades, her art was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Palm Beach.

Linda’s artwork has been reviewed in major publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum International, Art in...

Mark Barrow (b. 1982) and Sarah Parke (b. 1981) met while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. They began collaborating in 2008, when Parke first started weaving fabric on which Barrow would paint. As weaving became the primary conceptual structure through which they approached all subjects, they adopted a joint artistic moniker to more accurately reflect how ideas are generated and spread. Their work focuses on the intersection of weaving (as a spatial and mathematical system) with other visual systems. It also focuses on its intersection with textiles more generally, a tradition that has had an outsized imprint...

Marisa Adesman (b. 1991, Roslyn, NY) received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2018 and her BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO in 2013. Adesman had her first museum solo exhibition, The Birth of Flowers, at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY in 2023. She has exhibited work widely including at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), St. Louis, MO; Black Mountain College Museum, Ashville, NC; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College; Amherst, MA; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; and Mrs. Gallery, Queens, NY. Adesman’s work is in public collections including Museum of Contemporary Ar...

Amy Winstanley, Photo by Alan Dimmick.

Amy Winstanley (b. 1983, Dumfries, UK) is based in Scotland. She received a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art (2005) and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2019).

Recent solo exhibitions include: Life Hum, Margot Samel, NY (2025); Focus, Workplace Gallery, London, UK (2025); Homing, Ginsberg Galeria, Lima, Peru (2024); Soft Spot, A_Place gallery, Glasgow (2024); Lost Hap, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2023); Slim Glimpses, Cample Line, Thornhill, UK (2023); Moral Limb, Stallan-Brand, Glasgow, UK (2021); Grief Bruise, Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2021); Inscapes, AndCollective Gallery, Bridge of Allen, UK (2016); Interconnections, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries...

portrait by Catherine Talese

Melanie Vote holds a BFA from Iowa State University and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art. Having grown up on a functional farm before living and working in NYC for over 25 years, her practice straddles these two worlds. Her work investigates the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of life, and the impossibility of permanence.

Vote was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2007) and was awarded residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center (2002), Jentel, WY (2009), AHAD, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2013), the Grand Canyon (2016), the Weir Farm, CT (2022...