Interview

Dan Paz is a Latinx visual artist and scholar. Dan’s research into histories and processes of image-making explores queerness, racialized identities, the complications of nationality, and the impact of migration in the Global South.

Paz’s research encompasses image technology, the performance of representation, and the relationships inspired by the pursuit of making art. Their overall creative practice is invested in curatorial, educational, and community-building practices, working towards a more equitable future.

Dan completed a BFA in Video with minors in Photography and Art History at The Atlanta College of Art (Atlanta, GA), and an MFA from The University of Chicago (Chicago, IL).

Nissa Nishikawa works with performance, ceramics, painting, glass, and film. Her practice interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate the current crisis in ecology and community. She engages with alchemical and animistic practices through the use of elemental base materials, forging processes of transformation that are intuitively informed by a close observation of the intelligence of nature and the non-human as systems of navigation. This ongoing fascination extends to the embodied principles of movement while bringing together many disciplines in one space.

She studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Stage Arts at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and holds an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths College. Experiences stemming from time with Min Tanaka, Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin and dervish turning of the Mevlevi tradition are paramount to her practice. Recent workshops have been held at the Architectural Association (London), Camden Arts Centre (London) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

Sheila Pepe is a cross-disciplinary artist employing conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Her most recent solo exhibition, Hot Mess Formalism, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, traveled 2017 – 2019 to the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. A book with essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elizabeth Dunbar, Lia Gangitano, and curator Gilbert Vicario accompanied the exhibition. Three more books, released 2019, that feature her work are Vitamin T: Threads, and Textiles in Contemporary Art, the revised Art and Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, (both published by Phaidon) and  Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft: Shadows of Affect by John Corso Esquivel  (Routledge). Pepe’s  work has also been included in many group exhibitions—from the first Greater New York at PS1/ MoMA; The 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale; Fiber:Sculpture 1960- Present, organized by the ICA/Boston, to the current Queer Abstraction at the DesMoines Art Center.

Born in 1942 into an intellectual family with Western influence. Teacher of literature in high school since 1965. Journalist since 1973. Imprisoned for 39 months (1982-1985) for keeping poems in manuscript considered “anti-revolutionary”. After the “Renewal Policy” of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1986-1987), resumed journalist job and publishing poetry & translation, poems of prison experience excepted. Poems translated into French, English, Swedish and published in France, the US and Sweden. Western poems translated and published by Hoang Hung include Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, Harry Martinson, Nelly Sach.

In 2014, Hoang Hung and colleagues found the “underground” Independent Union of Vietnamese Writers & its website vanviet.info

Hoang Hung divide his time between Saigon (Hochiminh City) Vietnam and Plano TX, USA where lives his son.