SFAI Faculty Interviews
with Curator Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción
Part of SFAI’s faculty exhibition More Than 700 Years, this podcast series features talks with SFAI artists, makers, and risk-takers.
Stay tuned for more!
Podcast production by Cranium Corporation.
Interview with artist Mark Brest van Kempen
Mark Brest van Kempen’s sculpture and performances use the landscape itself as artistic medium. From the Free Speech Monument at UC Berkeley to Land Exchange at the National Academy of Art in China, his work explores our complex relationship to the environment.
Interview with artist Leila Weefur
Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is an artist, writer, and curator who lives and works in Oakland, CA, and received an MFA from Mills College. Weefurs practice considers the complexities of phenomenological Blackness through video, installation, printmaking, and lecture-performances. Using materials and visual gestures to access the tactile memory, Weefur explores the abject, the sensual and the nuances found in the social interactions and language with which our bodies have to negotiate space.
Interview with artist Wanxin Zhang
Wanxin Zhang spent his formative childhood years under Mao’s regime during the 1960’s in China. Zhang is an award-winning sculptor who has over 25 years of teaching experience in both China and the United States. In 2010, the exhibition “Wanxin Zhang: A Ten Year Survey” opened at ASU Art Museum, and traveled to Idaho, Florida, Washington, Montana, and California. Zhang also exhibited in the 22nd UBC Sculpture Biennial in Japan in 2007, the Taipei Ceramics Biennial in Taiwan in 2008, and the International Sculpture Biennial in China in 2013. Zhang’s current research interests include multicultural influences, politics, and globalization.
Interview with artist Meredith Tromble
Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer working at the intersections of art, science, and technology. The most recent works in her wide-ranging ouvre are performative interventions revealing psychological aspects of sustainability. Her writing practice began as a regular artist commentator for KQED-FM; she has since published in journals ranging fromFoundations of Chemistry and Leonardo to Artweek and Aspect, co-created and edited five art magazines, and edited a book on Lynn Hershman Leeson published by the University of California Press. Her many public lectures include appearances at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Tate Britain, and the University of Caldas in Colombia.
Interview with artist Chris Bell
Chris Bell is a site-specific installation artist and sculptor. His experimental researches are concerned with systems common to western culture: electricity, architectural space, perception, and natural phenomena. He has received support from the Australian Council of the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, (1999, 2009). He won Melbourne’s Fundere Sculpture Prize in 2003 and a major public commission for Melbourne’s new civic square. The Exploratorium commissioned a kinetic installation for their new location in 2013. He has worked as a resident artist at Belfast’s Flax Art Studios, California’s Headlands Center for the Arts, LKV studios Trondheim, Norway and Kunstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany.
Interview with artist Kal Spelletich
Kal Spelletich builds interactive machines and robots. He scours the city for industrial items whose technology can be reapplied and has collaborated with artists all over the world. Kal’s work involves, bio-morphic sensors, (sometimes uncontrollable) that trigger his robots providing viewers with a real-life experience. He is interested in the gap between what robots can’t do and what humans can do and the other way around. Recent exhibits have been in Namibia, Lubjianna, Berlin, Vienna, New York, India, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He curates, is an activist and has been featured in the NY Times, PBS, and in movies.
Interview with artist Linda Connor
Since the late 1960s, Linda Connor has been teaching in the Photography department at SFAI and exhibiting, publishing, and teaching nationally and internationally. In 2002, she founded PhotoAlliance, a Bay Area non-profit organization dedicated to the understanding, appreciation and creation of contemporary photography, and currently serves as its president. Connor’s peripatetic practice demonstrates a longstanding interest in the relationship between systems of belief and the natural world, and has seen her photographing wide-ranging subjects, from sacred sites and intricately jagged cliff faces, to antique plate-glass negatives from San Jose’s Lick Observatory and petrified bodies from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Pompeii. She has recently begun printing some of her most iconic images as shimmering sublimation prints on aluminum plates, lending an ethereal quality to already exquisite prints.
Interview with artist James Claussen
James Claussen’s surreal images combine elements of the natural world, machinery, his life and imagination. Using the absence and presence of color, shapes, forms and texture, Claussen's lithographs seek to explore space and spark imagination. Claussen's work is collected by corporations, private collectors and renowned art institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; Pratt Institute in New York, and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, among others.
Interview with artist J. John Priola
J. John Priola’s photography and video work reveals subtle details of mediated and natural landscapes, depicting what presence and absence look like, while vibrating in the space between art and idea. His work has been published and exhibited widely; selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SFMOMA; The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco; Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla; and Weston Gallery, Carmel.
Interview with artist Brad Brown
Brad Brown is an artist working primarily on drawings and works on paper. His drawing projects tend to be large, open-ended series that can remain unfinished for years. His largest project to date, The Look Stains, began in 1987 and consists of tens of thousands of works on paper that are continually worked on, torn up, re-drawn, and re-contextualized.
About Cranium Corporation
Cranium Corporation is an agency for fostering a deeper understanding of exhibitions, contemporary artists, and education. For more information, visit: www.craniumcorporation.org.
