Few have had such an impact on contemporary art as American photographer Catherine Opie. Her decades of work have helped redefine our conception of American identity, landscape, and culture. In this episode of Image Culture, William Jess Laird talks with the artist about her recent work photographing the sites of Confederate monuments throughout th…

This week I’m sharing a conversation with Dan Thawley, Editor in Chief of A Magazine Curated By. The magazine is unique in the landscape of fashion publications. The project was started in 2004 with the concept that each issue would be guest curated by a fashion designer, who would be given free rein over the content of the magazine. “Each issue ce…

On the show today I’m sharing a conversation with fashion designer Scott Sternberg, who founded the cult classic label Band of Outsiders in 2004, and, most recently, a new brand called Entireworld in 2018. We go back through the origins of Band of Outsiders, looking at Scott's idiosyncratic way of creating clothes, to see how this hugely influentia…

Artist, choreographer, and dancer Madeline Hollander has a unique way of looking at the world. While creating her performances she never invents new movements. Instead, she’s always pulling from what she observes in the world. She has the amazing ability to isolate the ways we move our bodies in very specific contexts and use these movements as the…

This week I’m talking to the artist Sara Cwynar, whose work, in both photographs and films, examines capitalism and the aesthetics of desire. Sara’s new show Marilyn is currently on view at The Approach in London. Due to Covid-19, all works in the show, including Sara’s newest film Red Film, are currently available to be viewed online at theapproac…

On the show today is the artist Serban Ionescu whose work blurs the line between sculpture and design. His newest work, the large scale “Chapel for an Apple” will debut this summer. You can see more of Serban’s work at www.serbanionescu.com .By Image Culture

This week I’m talking with the furniture, object, and interior designer F Taylor Colantonio. F Taylor’s current project, The Primavera Playlists, is a music-sharing project through the global lockdowns of Spring 2020. You can find the playlists, along with more of F Taylor’s work at https://ftaylor.co/pages/primavera as well as on Instagram @ftaylo…

On the show today I’m talking with writer, curator and critic Jarrett Earnest, whose 2018 book What it Means to Write About Art assembles his conversations with thirty of the most influential American art writers. Jarrett’s interviews with figures ranging from Rosalind Krauss to Dave Hickey, Roberta Smith to Kellie Jones, and Jerry Saltz to Hal Fos…

My guest today is the painter Israel Lund. Israel is interested in images, the way they are reproduced, transmitted and passed through digital and analog systems. His early experiences as a teenager making zines and posters for local punk shows introduced him to a visual culture that thrived on the copy, and motivated him to introduce CMYK screen p…

My guest is Virginia Lee Montgomery, whose new solo show Pony Cocoon is up now at False Flag in Long Island City though March 24th. The show is titled after her new film, following the birth of a Luna moth from a disembodied blonde ponytail, a frequently used symbol in Virginia’s practice. Her films are diffused with these repeated visual motifs. D…

My guest is Adam Charlap Hyman, principle at the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, which he cofounded in 2014. Adam’s work is grounded in a deeply considered approach to all aspects of the built environment, creating spaces imbued with a rich sense of history and narrative. His work ranges from residential interiors to art galle…

On the show today is the photographer Michael Halsband, whose work I first saw in Surf Book, a collaborative project with legendary surfer Joel Tudor examining surf culture through the people who built it. From there I began exploring his extensive body of portraits of artists and musicians from Klaus Nomi & Bernice Abbott to David Byrne & James Br…

My guest is the iconic writer and editor Wendy Goodman, whose new book May I Come In? is out now with Abrams Press. Having spent her career at publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine, House & Garden, and most recently New York Magazine, where she has served as Design Editor since 1997, Wendy has profiled a most interesting…

My guest is the artist Camille Hoffman. In her work Camille rethinks the narratives embedded in traditional American landscape painting. She points out the political motivations of the romantic landscape, it’s enforcement of ideas of Manifest Destiny and Western Exceptionalism, and, in doing so, she begins a conversation about the monolithic histor…

Today on the show I’m talking with photographer and sculptor Vicente Muñoz, whose work I’ve found uniquely resonant in its engagement with architecture and optical phenomena. He has a new book out now entitled Virtual Transparency, which gathers a body of work originally started in 2015. The book focuses on the glass curtain architecture that defin…

My guest is Randall Poster. If you don’t know the name, I guarantee you’ve heard his work. Randall is a music supervisor. He’s responsible for creating the soundtracks and overseeing the scores of some truly iconic films. Among his many credits is a 20 year collaboration with director Wes Anderson, crafting the musical profile of all his films dati…

Those of you that listen to the show regularly probably know that my partner and I frequently travel down to Marfa, Texas. If you’ve never been, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s my opinion that seeing Donald Judd’s work permanently installed at the Chinati Foundation is one of the most pure experiences you can have seeing a work of a…

In this bonus episode of Image Culture, Fernando Mastrangelo gives a walkthrough of In Good Company 2018, co-curated with senior design writer at Architectural Digest, Hannah Martin. You can follow along with images of all the works in the show at www.fernandomastrangelo.com/collections/in-good-company Find Fernando on Instagram @iamfm Find Hannah …

Sculptor and designer Fernando Mastrangelo was raised in Monterrey, Mexico and received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Upon arriving in New York he landed a job working in the studio of the artist Matthew Barney, whose work would prove a lasting influence. An early sculptural work using sugar as a primary material was a major step f…

Today I’m talking with the artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, whose paintings address the ancient history of West Africa and its associated mythology. Born and raised in England to Nigerian parents, Tunji studied art at Oxford University before moving to the United States to pursue his MFA at Yale, an experience that he describes as a culture shock and wh…

My guest is William Middleton, author of the new biography Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John De Menil, out now through Knopf. The book follows the lives of the celebrated art collectors, who over the course of the 20th century forever changed the cultural landscape of their adopted home, Houston, TX. William sp…

My guest is author Dan Riley, whose debut novel Fly Me was recently released to critical acclaim. Fly Me, set in a fictionalized Manhattan Beach, California in 1972, follows the story of Suzy Whitman, a young stewardess at Grand Pacific Airlines who soon finds herself in the midst of a drug trafficking scheme taking place in the skies. It’s a real …

In 2008 Robert Beck became Robert Buck. He did this in response to an idea that in a state of hypermodernity the status of the Name-of-the-Father had been fundamentally shaken. In its absence as a universal, he says, each of us must invent our own, be it knowingly, explicitly or intuitively. Robert changed his by the exchange of a single vowel. It …

My guest is Eileen Myles, whose works of poetry, fiction and criticism have profoundly impacted a generation of writers thinking about narrative, sexuality, and feminism. Eileen came to New York in the early 70’s and became associated with the St. Marks Poetry Project, of which they would eventually be named director. Their iconic 1994 novel Chelse…

My guest is Gideon Jacobs. In 2016 Gideon staged a social media performance piece in which he went on a month long virtual road trip from New York to California. Using other people’s photographs geotagged to his corresponding itinerary and writing fictitious captions that recounted his days spent on the road, he built an extended narrative capturin…

On the show is the artist Juan Antonio Olivares. Juan’s highly interdisciplinary work resists traditional object-oriented art production. Instead, his work often manifests itself as video. He first studied art at Columbia University, before moving to Germany to study at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under acclaimed conceptual photographer Christophe…

My guest is Timothy Morton. Timothy’s work spans the fields of ecology, Romantic literature, and ontology, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential living philosophers. In his book Ecology without Nature he calls for us to cease considering nature and humanity as separate entities, and instead foster a kind of ecological awareness, …

On EP 009 I speak with Dung Ngo. A prolific editor, publisher, and curator, Dung began his career studying architecture at Rice University, going on to curate exhibitions on architecture and design for the School of Architecture at Rice. It was during this time that Dung began consulting on titles for a range of publishers, as well as releasing his…

Iman Raad’s painted works, often made directly on the wall, draw on influences such as Persian miniature painting, truck ornamentation in South Asia, and the imagery of digital glitches. Rejecting traditional representation, Raad instead populates his works with anthropomorphized objects, animals, and plants, building complex narratives with a coll…

On the show I talk with photographer Matthew Leifheit. Matthew approaches photography as both an artist and a curator. In addition to his own work he has published Matte Magazine, a journal for new ideas in photography, since 2010. Matthew also spent three years serving as the photo editor of Vice, in addition to writing for other platforms includi…

On the show today is the artist Sam Stewart. Sam’s sculptural work resembles household furniture and domestic objects. Drawing on his observations of everyday design ranging from subway seating to exercise equipment, he creates works that play with the condition of design itself, often subverting the intended use of the items the work references. F…

On the show today is the photographer and film director, Jerry Schatzberg. Jerry started his career in the late 50’s, shooting fashion photographs for magazines such as Vogue, McCall’s, and Esquire. Many of his most iconic photographs were made during this time, perhaps most famously his portrait of Bob Dylan for the cover of Blonde on Blonde. In 1…

Each year, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey through the American landscape. Using a large format 5x7 camera she searches for the intersection between the natural and the manmade. In her own words she has “an unrelenting curiosity to understand the American landscape and our place within it.” Her work has brought…

Image Culture in conversation with artists and curators Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat. Together Liz and Lina operate Elijah Wheat Showroom. In their own words, “Voices embodied at Elijah Wheat Showroom are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions outside the status-quo. T…

“Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Woodland, California) earned a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Originating in autobiography, her paintings explore themes of sexuality, often through abstractions of the human body and an emphasis on female forms. With strong colors, varied texture, an…

York's site-sensitive installations of graphite forms, both sculpted and drawn, engage the existing architecture of a chosen site: a room, a wall, or a piece of paper. Her studies in graphite are a reverent homage to subtlety, with irregularities interrupting otherwise austere geometric forms and producing results that are perhaps more felt than se…