Interview

Featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, crowned “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” by the New York Daily News, Bob Holman has performed his poems with a punk band in Kiev, a griot in Timbuktu, a ballet company in San Francisco. As the original Slam Master of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world’s first spoken word record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word and slam poetry movements of the last several decades.

He is the author of 17 poetry collections, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, a collaboration with Chuck Close), and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. A co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman’s study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages.

He is the producer/host of films including “The United States of Poetry” and “Language Matters with Bob Holman,” both nationally broadcast on PBS.

Mary Dinaburg has over 30 years of art industry experience, with extensive knowledge of the Asian art market. She is the founder of DinaburgArts LLC, providing curatorial advice and consultation for galleries, museums, institutions, and corporations, with a focus on business development and cultural branding. Her expertise also includes acquisition and de-accession of Post-Impressionist and Modern masters as well as established and emerging international Contemporary artists.

Having recently returned to New York, Mary is now involved in a variety of projects both in the United States and abroad.

During the 1980s, Mary served as the director of Jack Shainman Gallery. In 1993, she founded the art agency, DinaburgArts, where she not only continued her work in exhibitions and sales but also deepened her involvement in acquisitions and de-accessions.

DinaburgArts was one of the first agencies to bring fine art to the fashion industry. This started with Saks Fifth Avenue when Mary developed the “Saks Project Art” program, making contemporary art an integral part of the corporation’s identity and branding. Since then, DinaburgArts has worked with other brands like Hermès, and Firmenich. Additionally, Mary has consulted the Kirov Theatre in St Petersburg Russia on their cultural marketing; worked with CEC-Artslink on marketing strategies for nonprofit organizations; instituted a corporate art collection at 14 Wall Street; provided management consulting to Maison Gerard; and for three years curated Gallery W52. Mary also served as advisor and curator to the international law firm, Clifford Chance; establishing a comprehensive curatorial program intended to motivate both employees and clients, as well as broaden the firm’s cultural branding. This was achieved through revolving exhibitions, an acquisitions program, educational lectures, tours, events, and the law firm’s three-year sponsorship of The Armory Show.

From 2000 onwards, Mary expanded her services into the Asian art market. Focusing her attention in South Korea and China (Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, and Hong Kong), Mary connected major international art galleries and artists – including Michael Werner, Sperone Westwater, Julian Schnabel, Sigmar Polke and William Wegman – with key collectors in Asia.

From 2006 to 2016, Mary partnered with Howard Rutkowski to create Fortune Cookie Projects. The company played two cross-cultural roles: introducing major international artists – spanning from Impressionism and Modernism through Contemporary practitioners – to the Asian market and to bringing established and emerging artists from the Asiatic region to the West. Fortune Cookie Projects also worked with the Royal Academy of Arts (London) to establish the Encounter exhibitions in Asia and the Middle East.

DinaburgArts continues to have an active presence in Asia and Europe, and having recently relocated to New York, Mary is currently working on a number of US based projects.

Ya Levy-La’ford is an artist, educator and foremost a transporter working between the visual and our community  through a wide range of mediums including paint, sculpture, installation, video and sound. La’ford is known for her  site-specific installations of her bold, geometric paintings to  explore themes of transformation and transcendence. She builds each work with a unique vocabulary of intersecting lines and gestural repetition that create distinctive visual impact. Her labyrinth patterns are both an exploration of self and place, as well as a reflection of her Jamaican background. Complex yet minimal, La’ford’s work emphasizes contrasts between light and dark,  positive and negative space and draw connections between interconnectivity  and human neutrality.

font-size: large;”>Interdisciplinary artist who operates at the crossroads of visual, education and living arts. She has spent most of her life in Bogotá, where art can be found in a hole in the asphalt.

She lives and works in Barcelona since 2015, and she speaks from migrant body on the borders of multiply body, overturning technology to imaginative and micro-political ways of learning. Her work is about listening time: how perception of time operates within a people and the city and how we can change the function of everyday objects, monuments and also, institutions. With her video, sound and radio performances, she has been recently exploring the disruption of language and the social meaning of using ‘our voice’. Listen to that project here.

She is Radio Cava-ret, with Samuel Céspedes, since 2016, a living arts and radia collective. Recently, she made a ‘solo exhibition’ in Alalimón Galería (2019), called ‘So happy together & altres covers’, where she has invited Radio Cava-ret to the gallery space. In Barcelona, she has co-founded Radioactius Poble-sec with Pla Comunitari (2017), an online radio community. She works with several projects in Jiser Reflexions Mediterrànies, like the radio program Taula, and she has been also collaborating with Ràdio Web MACBA.

During her career she has been awarded the Otto de Greiff Award (2010), New Names of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia (2011), National University Postgraduate Scholarship (2011 – 2013), Master in Theater and Living Arts and ICETEX (Young Talents) Scholarship to study sound art at the University of Barcelona (2014- 2015). She has made some grants in Barcelona with collective projects like Beca de creación La Escocesa in 2018 and Sala d’Art Jove in 2019, with Radio Cava-ret.

The book mentioned in the interview was Listening in Dreams : A Compendium of Sound Dreams, Meditations And Rituals for Deep Dreamers.