Fresh Art International Cathy Byrd

In this episode, we consider the role that teaching artists play in shaping the art school experience. How does an artist in academia cultivate expressive opportunities for students while making time to deepen their own creative practice? 
New Orleans based artist Cristina Molina invites us to consider this challenging dynamic at the art school where she teaches—Southeastern Louisiana University's Department of Visual Art and Design. Research and observation, architecture and the environment, memory and motherhood, music and movies, intuition and uncertainty are a few of the forces that drive the artmaking we discover at the edge of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Voices, in Order of Appearance: Garima Thakur, Kate Baczeski, Luisa Hernández, Vanessa Centeno, Dale Newkirk, Tom Walton, Ben Diller, Eric Huckabee, Lily Brooks, Rachel Harmeyer, Cristina Molina
Sound Design: Patrick Davis, with Anamnesis Audio
Special Audio: Garima Thakur, Bioscope, 2022; Luisa Hernández, What Matters Now, 2023; Chad Serhal, The Great American Motion Picture Rotoscope Animation, 2021; Ken Haskett, Morse Code message, 2021; Lily Brooks, We Have to Count the Clouds, 2012; NASA, recorded sounds of the sun, via Cristina Molina, 2022.
Related Episodes: Student Edition
Related Links: Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery, FreshArt.Education, Fresh Art International Research Guides

Where in the world can you express yourself freely, share cultural knowledge, test inventive art practices, and build a transnational creative community in only 10 days time?
During an intensive CEC ArtsLink program in Kazakhstan, 23 artists and curators from across the region and the U.S. seize the moment to think deeply about their socially engaged projects. Our home base for talks, workshops, field expeditions, and performances is the bULt Collective rave space.
 
Paying attention to inclusion and access, issues and ideas, concept and creation, they begin to imagine new possible futures for collective art practices in Central Asia and beyond.
 
Acknowledgement: In Fall 2023, Cathy Byrd recorded voices and sounds for this episode during her CEC ArtsLink residency in Central Asia.
 
Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio
 
Featured Voices: bULt Collective, Lydia Matthews, Nara Bikinna, Zilïa Khansura, Laura Nova, Will Owen, Kristine Diekman
 
Special Audio: Bandistan Ensemble, DJ Nemezida; DJs inspired by traditional Kazakh music/Almaty, Kazakhstan; Nara Bikinna recording of a Tatar gathering/Tyumen, Siberia; recording of felting workshop with Zilïa Khansura/Oak Gallery, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Collective Soundwalk Mixdown/Almaty
 
Related Episodes: Poetic Interventions Point to Pollution in Kyrgyzstan, When Art Sparks Social Engagement
 
Related Research Guide (downloadable hyperlinked pdf for learning and teaching): Creating Connections/Sparking Engagement—Research Guide Issue 4
 
Download ALL Free Research Guides HERE
Related Links: CEC ArtsLink, bULt Collective

Today, we introduce a few of the artists and activists energizing the 2023 Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival in Kyrgyzstan. They give voice to the issues, ideas, and intentions that shape their truly creative approaches to mitigate pollution. Their projects illuminate the potential for artists everywhere to build community and drive sustainable solutions to our global environmental crisis. 
From the city of Bishkek to the settlement of Altyn Kazyk, we discover myriad ways that socially engaged artists encourage awareness and action. They bring us together from around the world to experience, understand, and create true moments of beauty and meaning—giving us hope for a future that holds clean air, land, and water.
Acknowledgement: In Fall 2023, Cathy Byrd recorded the voices in this episode during her residency with CEC ArtsLink in Central Asia.
Sound Design and Engineering: Anamnesis Audio
Featured Voices: Sto Len, Ronja Roemmelt, Mishiko Solakauri, Begimai Zhunusova, Ellen Harvey, Bermet Borubaeva, Aimeerim Tursalieva
Special Thanks to the Bishkek Sanitary Landfill—Director Nurlan Djumaliev, Head of Municipal Enterprise Section Arzykulov Almaz Toktomukhanmedovich, Landfill Museum Co-Curator Samat Marso
Special Audio: Live musicians performance at the People’s Landfill Museum and the Bandistan Ensemble
Related Episodes: Public Water—with Mary Mattingly, Topical Playlist—Sustainability and the Environment 
Related Links: CEC ArtsLink, Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival 2023, Tazar, EU Compliant Landfill to Open in Bishkek

Today, we take you to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States of America. Home of the Gateway Arch, an Emblem of Manifest Destiny, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Emblem of Manifest Destiny. St. Louis is nicknamed “‘Mound City”’ because of the number of earthworks built by Indigenous peoples there, before the westward expansion of colonizers conspired to flatten them. Where caves beneath the city sheltered freedom seekers traversing the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s. Where, from 1959 to 1972—in the span of less than 20 years—residents of the historically Black neighborhoods Mill Creek Valley and Pruitt-Igoe Homes were displaced in the name of urban development and public safety. 
Where, in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement coalesced. Nearly a decade later, in the year 2023, current events reveal that in this city and this state, the sanctity of civil and human rights remains tenuous on every level. 
What role can a public art triennial play in such a troubled context? 
A microcosm of the disruptive forces at play in cities across the United States today, St. Louis offers fertile ground for creative interventions that are healing—restorative in nature.
The civic exhibition Counterpublic takes on the challenge. To prepare for the 2023 event, the triennial’s home team committed to a year of listening sessions with a range of public constituents. A report integrated into the exhibition catalogue outlines local interest in holistic engagement with public memory, commemoration, and acknowledgement; the rematriation of Indigenous land; and reparative futures. In response, for three months, thirty projects animate the urban landscape along six miles of Jefferson Avenue. 
In this episode, we follow that throughway from south to north to share healing elixirs healing we discover at the heart of seven Counterpublic projects along the way. Listen to the ways they honor and amplify strength, beauty, and hope at the core of reemergent cultural histories in St Louis.
 
Story: Cathy Byrd
Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio
Special Audio courtesy Nokosee Fields, X, Raven Chacon, Stefani Jemison, Griot Museum of African American History, Torkwase Dyson, Mendi and Keith Obadike, SlowDrag audio "Joy and Everything," remixed by K Kudda, and Counterpublic, Mood Unit by  by Blue Dot Sessions
Related Episodes: Model Behavior—New Orleans Art Triennial Inspires Other Cities, Where Art Meets Activism, Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe
Related Links: Counterpublic, Fresh VUE: Counterpublic St. Louis 2023

In February 2023, we travel to the United Arab Emirates for the first time. We’re here to witness and celebrate Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Four years in the making, the exhibition is ambitious and expansive. More than 100 artists from 70 countries are presenting projects in 19 venues across the emirate. 
 
One afternoon, we wander through Sharjah’s heritage area to Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, the personal residence of a local pearl merchant and his family from the mid-19th century until the 1970s. In a small courtyard outside his multi chambered installation, we meet artist Shiraz Bayjoo to talk about how his project engages history—a pervasive theme in this Biennial.
 
The artist shares the storied past of the Indian Ocean and the island archipelagos of Mauritius and Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Keep listening to hear the orientalist tropes that he disrupts in Searching for Libertalia, a project that recovers the history of a purported pirate colony founded in the late 17th century.
 
Our conversation with Shiraz Bayjoo reveals one artist’s approach to Thinking Historically in the Present. Searching for Liberatalia materializes a cultural narrative that might come closer than real history to showing us the way through rupture, dislocation, and uncertainty to a place of growth and renewal.

Story: Cathay Byrd
Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio
Special Audio: Searching for Libertalia, Sharjah Biennial 15
 
Related Episodes: Sharjah Biennial 15—with Hoor Al Qasimi
 
Related Links: Shiraz Bayjoo, Sharjah Biennial 15, Searching for Libertalia

In February 2023, we travel to the Arab Emirates for the first time. We’re here to witness and celebrate Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Four years in the making, the exhibition is ambitious and expansive. More than 100 artists from 70 countries are presenting projects in 19 venues across the emirate. Seventy of those projects are new commissions.
 
The memory and influence of Nigerian born art historian, author, educator, and curator Okwui Enwezor is deeply felt, despite his physical absence. The Sharjah Art Foundation had invited Enwezor to curate this iteration of the biennial. He envisioned the exhibition title before his death in 2019.
 
Sharjah Art Foundation Director Hoor Al Qasimi was 22 years old when she met Okwui Enwezor and experienced his non-western curatorial model at documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany. Enwezor’s impactful perspective on postnational hybridity and global modern identity inspired Al Qasimi to lead the Foundation and the Biennial in new directions. 
 
On the 30th anniversary of the Biennial, we sit down with Al Qasimi to talk about the inclusive ethos that we find in the art experience of Thinking Historically in the Present.
 
Story: Cathy Byrd | Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio
 
Special Audio: Hassan Hajjaj with Mestre Pastel, Open Capoeira Session, Arts Square, Sharjah 
 
Related Episode: New Point of View at Venice Biennale
 
Related Links: Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah Art Foundation, documenta 11, 2nd Johannesburg Biennial