Art Insiders New York Podcast hosted by Anders Holst

JB Miller is the visionary leader and CEO of Empire Entertainment and Emmy Awards-winning executive producer. He is a legend in the events industry for creating completely immersive experiences on a global scale. In this interview, JB talks about what signifies the “experiential events industry”, seen as a merger between the events and meeting industry and the entertainment industry, that opens wide opportunities for a producer to create cutting edge events for clients to fulfill thoughtful, creative, and strategic goals What are the key resources necessary to create events that will attract people’s attention, change the mindset and behavior of a key audiences, help launch new products, create new markets, and move the needle on an objective, in a major way? He tells us about various projects where the producer is likened to an alchemist at work. The producer, or perhaps rather the “experiencer”, is a person who is “genre agnostic”, and can move swiftly between various types of gatherings, clients, and locales. One project, in particular, illustrates how producing a multimillion-dollar project in front of a global audience, can become a scary high-wire act. JB Miller was recognized as “Producer of the Year” by BizBash’s Reader’s Choice Awards and has been regularly identified as one of the “Top People in the U.S. Event Industry”. In 2023 Miller was awarded the “Collaborate America” award for outstanding achievement as a collaborator, convener, and connector. Photo credit: Caroline Dorn.

In this episode, Linnea Larsdotter Mikkelä, creative director and president of NIFF, Nordic International Film Festival, takes us on an inspiring walk-through of this year’s festival program. We talk about the identity of Nordic filmmaking, and why the 2022 Cannes Film Festival was the busiest festival ever for Nordic filmmakers, among them Ruben Östlund, who won his second Palme d’Or with Triangle of Sadness, Tarik Saleh with Cairo-set Boy From Heaven, and Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, the story of an Iranian serial killer. The vision behind NIFF, is to build bridges between filmmakers in the Nordic region and the international film community, by finding diverse independent films with strong characters and storylines, that encourage all filmmakers to submit their films, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or worldviews. Linnea is a much-acclaimed actress and film producer in her own right. Till We Meet Again is a romantic adventure drama film directed by Thai filmmaker Bank Tangjaitrong and starring Johan Matton, Linnea Larsdotter, Emrhys Cooper and Vithaya Pansringarm. The film was written and produced by Johan Matton - who also co-founded NIFF with Linnea in 2014 - and won awards at several film festivals, including the Audience and Jury prizes at the Long Beach International Film Festival, and Linnea won best actress at NYLAIFF, New York Los Angeles International Film Festival. Photo by Sean Turi

Since its inception in 1977, Public Art Fund has presented more than 500 artists' exhibitions and projects at sites throughout New York City. In this episode, Susan K. Freedman, the president of Public Art Fund, presents current exhibitions including Nicholas Galanin’s impressive new sculpture “In Every Language There Is Land/En cada lengua hay una Tierra” at Brooklyn Bridge Park, art installations at La Guardia Airport Terminal B by Jeppe Hein. Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens and Sarah Sze, at Newark Liberty International Airport Terminal A by Karyn Oliver and Layqa Nuna Yawar, as well as art installations at the Moynihan Train Hall by Stan Douglas, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Kehinde Wiley. Public Art Fund is also behind the late Phyllida Barlow’s final series of large-scale sculptures, PRANK, in City Hall Park, that opened in the beginning of June. Public Art Fund believes in free access to great contemporary art for all, that artists are an essential part of our civic dialogue, and that art has the power to ignite conversation among different people, to open hearts and minds, and to help shape our collective future. Freedman currently serves on the board of the Municipal Art Society, and as vice chair of the board for the City Parks Foundation. She is a recipient of the 1999 Associates of the Art Commission Annual Award and was honored with the 2005 Municipal Art Society's Evangeline Blashfield Award for her contributions to New York City’s urban landscape. Photo by Kelly Taub

Greg Kwiat, whose “thinking is as clear as the diamonds he’s selling” is the CEO of Kwiat, a four-generation family company founded in 1907. In this interview we talk about what it was like growing up in a diamond family, the history of the diamond industry, De Beers dominating role, and the legendary advertising campaign “A Diamond is Forever” to stimulate demand in the 1950s and how Miuccia Prada, Nicole Kidman and Fred Leighton became pioneers in displaying beautiful vintage jewelry on the red carpet at the Oscars. Greg also gives us an insightful guide about the basic knowledge you need to make more educated choices, when buying diamonds, based on the four Cs; carat weight, color, clarity and cut. In 2018 Kwiat and Fred Leighton opened their combined flagship stores on Madison Avenue and at the Wynn Las Vegas, bringing two iconic brands under one roof.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is an award-winning American geographer and writer. In his latest book “Names of New York”, he traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants, have left their marks on the city’s map. In this interview, we talk about how several places in New York got their names: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bowery, Greenwich Village, Spuyten Duyvil, Lackawanna, Boerum Hill, Gramercy Park, Rockaway, to mention a few. We talk about how place matters to us as human beings and how it shapes our believes about who we are. We also discuss more complex issue relating to place naming, for example, 70 streets in Brooklyn are named after slave owners. Should these names be erased from the city scape, or should they remain as a historic marker? Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a regular contributor to “The New York Review of Books”. He lives in New York and is a scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches. Photographer credit: Mirissa Neff.

Award-winning photographer Mark Seliger was Rolling Stone’s Chief Photographer from 1992-2002, where he shot over 175 covers. From 2002-2012, he was on contract with Condé Nast where he shot regularly for Vanity Fair and GQ. We talk about Mark’s latest book “The City That Finally Sleeps", where during the pandemic, “he took to the desolate streets, camera in hand and often in the quietest hours … these hauntingly beautiful portraits of New York’s streets and cityscapes grip the viewer in varying balances of beauty, sorrow, wonder and quiet concern.” All the proceeds from the sale of the book goes to New York Cares in their covid-19 relief efforts. We also talk about Mark’s creative process as a photographer, as well as a singer and songwriter. The song "1,000 Kisses" in the interview is performed by Mark Seliger’s country and western band Rusty Truck. Mark Seliger is the recipient of such esteemed awards as the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award. The Lucie Award, The Clio Grand Prix, Cannes Lions Grand Prix to mention a few.

Kyle Bergman is the founder and director of ADFF, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, which is the world’s largest film festival devoted to the creative spirit of architecture and design. With a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington DC, Vancouver and on-line, ADFF creates an opportunity to entertain, engage and educate everyone who are excited about architecture and design In this interview Kyle talks about architecture as storytelling, the striking resemblance between the art of making film and the art of making architecture. We talk about how important it is to use the film medium to expand the conversation about the role of architecture and design today. We discuss “knowledge of design”, a separated kind of knowledge, that tells us when something is well designed or not, and this fall’s major event when ADFF and MoMA will showcase the documentary about the genius of Bruce Mau. Kyle also gives us some great recommendations of films we must watch and reflects on the fact that the films, that make it to the festival, often have an emotional and engaging human dimension in them

Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal at the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging, and publications for a wide range of clients. Today, we find Paula in her studio among her paintings and a collector’s item Porsche that she has hand-painted with an artistic rendering of a map of the Unites States for a special exhibition. In this interview, Paula explains her metaphor for coming up with new ideas as a “slot machine”, talks about typography as it relates to spirit and meaning, and tells inspiring stories from her design collaborations with the Public Theater, Shake Shack, MoMA, Citibank, The High Line, and Rockaway Beach. Paula has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors including the National Design Award and the AIGA medal. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. A documentary on Paula and her work can be seen in the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.”

George Smart is the founder and executive director of USModernist, which is an award-winning nonprofit educational archive for the documentation, preservation, and promotion of residential Modernist architecture. In this free floating, fun, and inspiring conversation, we cover the philosophy and art form of Modernism, how a house “can live back at you”, the geniuses of Bjarke Ingels and Santiago Calatrava, the history of the butterfly chair and the intricate relationship between Modernism and jazz. With 8,000 houses and nearly 3.1 million pages of 20th-century architecture magazines, USModernist is America's largest open digital archive of Modernist houses and their architects. The organization has won 16 local, state, and national awards, including the 2016 AIA Institute Honors for Collaborative and Professional Achievement, the AIA's highest award for non-architects. Photo by Elizabeth Galecke

Philip Williams is the prolific collector and director of Philip Williams Posters, founded in 1973. His Tribeca gallery, located on Chambers Street, is the largest vintage poster gallery in the world with over 100,000 unique posters dating from 1870 to the present. The Tribeca brick-and-mortar storefront is supplemented with an online platform, PosterMuseum.com, which contains some 26,000 posters. In this episode, Philip Williams tells fascinating stories cultivated from over 40 years of collecting vintage posters and details how it all started, after finding letters from aviation pioneer Orville Wright in an abandoned suitcase. We also learn about the poster as cultural artifact: From the first golden age of the vintage poster in the late 19th century driven by innovative printing techniques and emerging mass markets; to the second golden age in the mid 1960s, where posters were repurposed as countercultural protest; to its use today, as a staple in contemporary interior design

Roselee Goldberg is a renowned art historian, critic and Founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa, a “museum without walls”, a non–profit arts organization which - since its inception in 2005 – has quickly become one of the most anticipated bi-annual contemporary art events in the country and abroad. Performa has reached an international audience of over 250,000 people and features more than 700 artists at 216 venues throughout New York City. Roselee Goldberg pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, now in its third edition and translated to thirteen languages. It serves as a key text for teaching performance in universities throughout the world. Photo by Paula Court.

Susan Lacy is a master of the biographical documentary genre. She has created, directed and served as executive producer of the Emmy-award winning PBS series AMERICAN MASTERS -- by many considered to be the gold standard of documentary filmmaking. In this fascinating interview Susan talks about the origins of American Masters, she also shares stories and reflects on the essence of documentaries she produced at HBO about Jane Fonda and Steven Spielberg and her latest documentary called “Very Ralph”, about the iconic American fashion designer Ralph Lauren. Photography by Lorella Zanetti

Clodagh is an Irish-born New York-based designer who are among Architectural Digest Top 100 Interior Designers and a member of the Interior Design Hall of Fame. Clodagh just release her most recent book Clodagh: Life-Enhancing Design published by GArts. In this fascinating conversation, sprinkled with good humor and smart tips for re-inventing your space, Clodagh reflects on a deeper level about great design coming from within and the role of design as a healing art. Clodagh talks about the spiritual side of her work influenced by her childhood’s healers and mystics in Ireland and her early adoption of Feng Shui and her innovative approach by integrating concepts like Chromotheraphy and Biophilia and sustainable material. This contributes to her unique look, structure and flow that appeal to all human senses, that go beyond the physical to things you can feel but not see. Clodagh received the Platinum Circle Humanitarian Award from Hospitality Design Magazine in 2016 and won the 2018 Global Wellness Awards for spearheading wellness design at the Global Wellness Summit. She has an honorary doctorate from the New York School of Interior Design and the San Francisco Academy of Art. Photo by Jonathan Beckerman.