Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian Scottish writer inspired by other voices, ranging from live Caribbean connexions and an Indian diaspora background to the landscapes where Capildeo travels and lives. Their poetry (seven books and four pamphlets) includes Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016. Following a DPhil in Old Norse literature, Capildeo has worked in academia; in culture for development, with Commonwealth Writers; and as an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer. Capildeo held the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship and Harper-Wood Studentship at Cambridge, and more recently a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellowship at the University of Leeds.
Interview
Allen Frame
Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he has had solo exhibitions of photography in 2005, 2009, and 2013, and will have another in June, 2019. He had a solo exhibition called Innamorato at Pratt Institute in 2018. He has been invited by CECArtslink to do a residency in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, Russia, in 2019. He received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize in Photography from the American Academy in Rome in 2017/2018. His 2013 Gitterman exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of Art of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014. Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001.
In the 1980’s he adapted and directed the writing of artist David Wojnarowicz, which was presented in three venues, in New York and Berlin. He also performed in two Gary Indiana plays with Taylor Mead, Bill Rice, John Heys, and Cookie Mueller. In London in 1987 he co-wrote the play Call Grandad with Bertie Marshall and directed it at the Old Red Lion Theater. Recently he has written a full-length play called Dogs Barking in the Deep South. In 2012, he co-produced the feature film Four, starring Wendell Pierce and directed by Joshua Sanchez.
He has been the recipient of grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the Peter Reed Foundation, Creative Time, Art Matters, CECArtslink and others. He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis at Art in General; Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery; Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: Experimental 70’s Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro and Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series at the Camera Club of New York, and Illusione Persistente and Fuggenti Figure at ACTA International in Rome. He has been a contributing editor for Bomb and written feature articles for The New York Times and other publications.
He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has taught workshops in photography extensively in Mexico and Russia. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.
The author mentioned in the interview is Édouard Louis.
Amanda Browder
Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She works primarily with the community, and sources all of her material from donations. She has shown nationally, and internationally including at the New Museum, Ideas City Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, FAB Fest in New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; University of Alabama at Birmingham AAHD, Birmingham, AL; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, NYC; No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. She has been published in books such as Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. This year she will create a large-scale work as part of Art Prize: Project 1 and was named a Transformation Fellow at UNLV. In 2016, she received her first National Endowment for the Arts grant and worked with the Albright Knox Art Gallery to drape three buildings in Buffalo, NY. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fibers Magazine and she is a founder of the art podcast, badatsports.com.
Lynne Thompson
Sandra Lapage
Sandra Lapage got her MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2013. Sandra has participated in collective and solo exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the United States, notedly at the Brazilian Embassy in Brussels (2007), at the Ribeirão Preto Art Museum for the 2006 exhibition program, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo in 2012, at the Gowanus Loft (NYC) in 2014 and 2015, at the Blumenau Art Museum and Aura Arte Contemporânea (Sao Paulo) in 2018.
Sandra has resided at various institutions such as the Fondation Château Mercier (Switzerland) and NARS Foundation (NYC) for 6 months in 2014, Elefante Centro Cultural (Brasilia) in 2015, Camac Art Center (France) and Paul Artspace (USA) in 2016, and Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017. She will be in residence at Monson Arts in September.
Sandra was a visiting artist at the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) and Maine College of Art (Portland), United States.
In addition to her solo work, she develops a collaborative work in the collective Eclusa and runs, with ten other artists and designers, the independent art space Vão: a workspace, with classes and experimental exhibitions, in São Paulo, Brazil.
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The books mentioned during the interview are for her work in the collective duo Eclusa, they’ve been departing from Cyrano de Bergerac’s original 1657’s “Comical History by Mr de Cyrano Bergerac including The States & Empires of the Moon”, Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play “Cyrano de Bergerac”, Carlo Rovelli’s “7 brief lessons on Physics” and “The order of time”. And also not mentioned was Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics”
She’s also been reading the Documents of Contemporary Art books by the MIT Press (Failure, Nature, Materiality, Sexuality), and rereading Borges’ “Book of imaginary beings” where she find titles for her assemblage pieces.