Interview
Philemona Williamson
Philemona Williamson is a narrative painter who has shown widely in the United States and abroad. Her work explores the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment.
The lush color palette and dreamlike positioning of the figures ensures that their vulnerability – of age, of race, of sexual identity – is seen as strength and not as weakness. “My figures navigate a world of uncertainty as they search for understanding—both internally and in ever-shifting environments. I see the figures as vehicles to explore the existence of the most vulnerable adolescents, those evolving people of color, grappling with what will define and identify them. My paintings give voice and space to invisibility.”
Williamson has exhibited her work for over 25 years at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC and recently, at her mid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in NJ. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner, National Endowment For The Arts, New York Foundation For The Arts and Millay Colony as well as serving on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education. Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions such as The Queens Museum of Art, Wisconsin’s Kohler Art Center, The Sheldon Museum in Nebraska, The Bass Museum in Miami, The Mint Museum in North Carolina, The Forum of Contemporary Art in St. Louis, The International Bienal of Painting in Cuenca, Ecuador and most recently at the Anna Zorina Gallery in NYC.
She is represented in numerous private and public collections, including The Montclair Art Museum; The Kalamazoo Art Institute; The Mint Museum of Art; Smith College Museum of Art; Hampton University Museum; Sheldon Art Museum; Mott-Warsh Art Collection, and AT&T. Her public works includes fusedglass murals created for the MTA Arts in Transit Program at the Livonia Avenue Subway Station in Brooklyn, a poster for the MTA Poetry In Motion and — for the NYC School Authority — a mosaic mural in the Glenwood Campus School. She currently teaches painting at Pratt Institute and Hunter College in NYC.
For Philemona’s latest project, she created a series of paintings for the children’s book Lubaya’s Quiet Roar, just out from Penguin Random House.
Ali LeRoi
Ann McCoy
Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail.
She was awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She lectured on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.
She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, Nalini Malini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Ann McCoy and Kentridge did a conversation at the American Academy in Rome for his Tiber project, “Triumphs and Laments”, which was published in the Brooklyn Rail.
Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Ann McCoy has exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Annual, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. She is known primarily known for her large format drawings, work with projection, installation, and bronze sculpture.
Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library. Most of her work is based on her dreams, and their relationship to alchemical texts, and Christian alchemy in particular. For McCoy, alchemy is a symbolic language of processes dealing with spiritual transformation. Incarnation of spirit into matter is the key concept of the alchemical practice. The imagination is the gateway to the gods.
Robin Pogrebin
Robin Pogrebin is a reporter on the Culture Desk of The New York Times, where she covers cultural institutions, the art world, architecture and other topics.
She is also the author, with Kate Kelly of the book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” published in September 2019. At the Times, she has also covered the media industry for the Business Desk and city news for the Metro Desk. Prior to joining the Times in 1995, she was an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News and, before that, a staff reporter at The New York Observer.
Her freelance work has been featured in magazines like Vogue, Town & Country and Departures, along with several book anthologies. Pogrebin, who also teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts, is a frequent moderator, radio guest and speaker. She lives in New York City.