Author Website for Brainard and Delia Carey
Craig Santos Perez is a Pacific islander poet originally from Guam.
Edgar Oliver is a writer and performer who has lived and worked in New York for many years. He started out reading his poems and performing monologues at the Pyramid night club in the early 1980’s.
From 1988 to 2001 he wrote and staged a series of autobiographical plays – premiering a new play almost every year in the Club at LaMama on east 4th Street.
Titles include The Seven Year Vacation, The Ghost of Brooklyn, Mosquito Succulence, Motel Blue 19, and The Drowning Pages.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
-Winston Churchill
We have arrived at a new threshold. The year stretching out before us is perhaps no less certain than any other, although it feels rife with the unknown. Gingerly we step, careful to keep our expectations managed, exhausted from a year of isolation, of fear, of loss. We allow ourselves moments of cautious optimism, we think we see a light, distant but growing, at the end of the tunnel. Waking up every day is a feat of courage. We face a world over which we have absolutely no control, meet each new day with the resolve to step forward, again and again, never allowing discomfort to knock us from the path entirely.
Tamy Ben-Tor lives and works in Brooklyn. When we spoke in early December during what, at the time, was the peak of the pandemic, she was working on videos while performance is on hiatus. She is also working on a collaborative artist book to be published soon. In fact, this strange time when things are on pause has been beneficial for the continued creation of this project. There will ultimately be two books, one titled Archive which will be a collection of projects over the last 12 years between Tamy, who is a performance artist, and her collaborator who is a painter. To hear more about this project, as well as the role of the publisher in this project which is quite a bit more in-depth than just publishing, and to hear more about Tamy’s videos and find links to view them, listen to the complete interview.
Jenny Roesel Ustick is a muralist in Cincinnati. She explained that while 2019 was a banner year for her work, 2020 has been rather a different story. She was able to complete a mural project in July at a festival called Walls for Women celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage, but otherwise, her work as a muralist has largely been on hold. In the absence of active projects, she has poured a great deal of energy into planning future work. Her work for the festival honored women who have been marginalized and erased throughout history. This was a challenge within her medium which typically depicts uplifting material. To hear more about this project and more, including insights about Confederate monuments, listen to the complete interview.
Few Words to Keep in your Pocket:
Go boldly into this new year.
Interviews are available on iTunes as podcasts, and for Android please click here. All weekly essay pieces in a shareable format are here. The full archive of interviews here.
Books to Read
What are you reading? Add your titles to our reading list here. Tamy Ben-Tor is reading The Secret Teachings of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner. Jenny Roesel Ustick is reading Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks.
Deadlines
The Apeture Portfolio Prize seeks to identify trends in contemporary photography as well as highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. First prize winner receives $3,000 cash and an exhibition in New York. The winner as well as four runners up receive a digital feature at Apeture.org that will be featured across social media channels. Additionally, the winner, the four shortlisted artists and 20 runners up will benefit from a one-on-one session with Apeture’s editor. For more information, visit the website. Deadline is January 8.
Brainard Carey is an author, artist and educator. He is the director of Praxis Center for Aesthetics. He has written six books for artists; Making it in the Art World, New Markets for Artists, The Art World Demystified, Fund Your Dreams Like a Creative Genius, Sell Online Like a Creative Genius, and Succeed with Social Media Like a Creative Genius.
A new year means fresh opportunities. As we look toward 2021 with guarded optimism, there are plenty of chances to advance your career no matter what the future holds. We leave behind a year that has been challenging in ways no one could have foreseen, and while the new year does not make promises to be a fast fix for all we have faced, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon that by the end of it we will achieve some semblance of normalcy once again. Now is the time to line up what’s next, to approach the new year boldly and stride ahead to bigger, better opportunities.
The Apeture Portfolio Prize seeks to identify trends in contemporary photography as well as highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. First prize winner receives $3,000 cash and an exhibition in New York. The winner as well as four runners up receive a digital feature at Apeture.org that will be featured across social media channels. Additionally, the winner, the four shortlisted artists and 20 runners up will benefit from a one-on-one session with Apeture’s editor. For more information, visit the website. Deadline is January 8.
World Press Photo invites professional photographers to submit their non-manipulated photographic work to their annual photo contest. There are multiple categories in which to enter. Entrants must meet certain professional criteria to be found under the rules category. For this and other information, visit the website. Deadline is January 12.
Sony World Photography Awards is accepting submissions for two prizes at present. The professional competition celebrates and showcases the world’s most outstanding bodies of work while the open competition focuses on single images. For more information about each, visit the website. Deadline for the open category is January 7. Deadline for the professional category is January 14.
Praxis Center strives to equip artists with the tools and skills they need to reach their full professional potential. You have the drive to create – that’s why you’re here – now let us show you the way to turn that drive into a fulfilling career. Our team of experts covers every aspect of the professional artistic journey. Make this new year the one where you choose to move your artistic career forward.
Brainard Carey is an author, artist and educator. He is the director of Praxis Center for Aesthetics. He has written six books for artists; Making it in the Art World, New Markets for Artists, The Art World Demystified, Fund Your Dreams Like a Creative Genius, Sell Online Like a Creative Genius, and Succeed with Social Media Like a Creative Genius.
Photo credit: Wikicommons
Slaven Kosanovic, better known as Lunar, is a Croatian graphic and street artist, philosopher and interdisciplinary person; coming to both music and art as a child, Lunar entered what would become a career as an artist in 1989 when he first picked up a spray paint can. Thirty years later, he is a unique living witness and participant in graffiti’s evolution since then as both a subculture and an art form, and the transformations of graffiti, hip hop, and electronic music subcultures in supporting one another towards their current mainstream popularity.
Lunar has always been pushed by curiosity, discovery, and creativity. Around the time he realized he probably couldn’t make it as a paleontologist or natural scientist, a la David Attenborough — his childhood dream — Lunar was also fascinated by graffiti, hip hop culture, and discovering and collecting every possible form of music that he could find. Entering the world of graffiti was a way for Lunar to assert the other, non-scientific side, of his identity as an interdisciplinary artist, to make sense of the world and find a place in it. As he began painting and establishing his network throughout Croatia, he was inspired by painters and musicians from other cities and countries who were building their lives in pursuit of the most idealistic dreams; by the early 1990’s Lunar was painting with them and friends throughout Europe, while offering them insider knowledge of where and how to paint in Croatia, and places to stay when others came to Eastern Europe.
Lunar describes street cats as confident, cheeky, independent, and symbolic of the streets; he also pulled his first artistic inspiration from his cat, Jinx. His artistic career, built largely around continual reinvention of his Catso character, has also been much like that of a street cat: charting his own path, making his own rules, and constantly pushing his boundaries of creativity. Thus, by the mid-1990’s, in seeking to expand beyond graffiti and nomadism, and to push the limits of his own creativity, Lunar entered a career in graphic design (while continuing graffiti); recently, he has also started hosting his own national-level radio show in Zagreb and DJing, both as a way of sharing his passion and excitement for hip hop and electronic music that has always inspired and propelled him as an artist.
Lunar’s constant search to discover and learn from other peoples’ experience, perspectives, and creative methodologies has led him to create art on every continent, and to be included in global graffiti publications including Graffiti world-Street art from 5 continents, 100 European graffiti writers,World Piecebook, Street art & Graffiti Europe, Street Art Graffiti Guide Paris, Graffiti Planet, Style is a Message, Painted Walls Havana, Munich Walls, Street Art Amsterdam, Street Art Zagreb, 400ml, The Book of Tags, and Cinco — 5 Years of Calle Libre. Beyond the world of graffiti, Lunar’s work and ability to independently turn creativity into a successful career have also earned him features in Playboy, Forbes, Backspin, DJ Mag, Stylefile, Graphotism, Xplicit Grafx, Bomber, Urban Roots, and Code Red, and invitations to speak at TEDx Zagreb 2015 and CreArt Encounter 2019 in Aveiro, Portugal.
Lunar’s new book “From Zagreb with Love” is hotly anticipated as one of the first histories written of graffiti as a clandestine, global, multidisciplinary art movement in Eastern Europe, which also maps its parallel development with rap and electronic music, written from the inside by one of its first practitioners. “From Zagreb with Love” will be launched at QRU in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in collaboration with Street Art Museum Amsterdam, on 16 August 2019.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22244921-tesla