Art Restart

For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book by photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke, directly challenges that legacy, not by rejecting photography’s past but by radically re-centering who controls the archive, who tells the story and who the work is for.Adams, an Iñupiaq photographer based in Anchorage, and Stacke, a Brooklyn-based photographer, writer and archival researcher, approach photography less as image-making than as long-term relationship-building and storytelling. Their collaboration grew out of “The 400 Years Project,” an expansive initiative marking the anniversary of the Mayflower by foregrounding Indigenous photographers across generations, geographies and the full range of photographic practice — from 19th-century studio portraits to contemporary conceptual work.In this interview, Adams and Stacke discuss the ethical and logistical choices behind “In Light and Shadow,” the politics of archives and representation and what it means to be storytellers accountable to the people whose lives and histories they photograph.https://brianadams.photoshelter.com/indexhttps://sarahstacke.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater, she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and neighborhood groups to spark dialogue and move people toward collective action.Out of Hand’s work is now studied and replicated across the country, in part because it offers an alternative path at a moment when many arts organizations are searching for new models. Instead of focusing on season planning or ticket sales, Ariel and her team design programs that integrate theater with data, storytelling with civic participation and performance with tangible next steps for audiences who want to make change in their communities.In this interview, Ariel reflects on how this approach emerged, how her own leadership evolved alongside it, and why she believes artists are uniquely equipped to work on the most urgent social issues of our time. She also gives a glimpse into Out of Hand’s next chapter — including a major 2026 national initiative — and shares what she’s learned about building trust, building partnerships and sustaining purpose-driven work over the long haul.https://www.outofhandtheater.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society.Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process.In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines.https://damianstamer.com/home.htmlHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work, to give back, to support the community, to hold the weight of healing or justice when most of us aren’t even resourced to pay our bills, let alone afford health care or rest.” She also lamented that nonprofits were, in a time of admittedly frightening fiscal precarity, leaning on underfunded artists for financial support. Esther clearly hit a nerve with artists everywhere, and her rants amassed thousands of views and messages of commiseration and support. She can also rant with some authority because not only is she an artist, but she has also worked in the arts nonprofits sector. A self-taught maker of stop-motion animation and movable or mechanized sculptures and zoetropes, she is currently Chief Curator at Union Hall, a six-year-old nonprofit in Denver, CO that provides support and professional development to emerging artists as well as curators.In this interview, Esther reflects on the inequities that drove her to speak out and on how her posts sparked broader conversations about the invisible labor of artists. She also shares how her dual perspective as both artist and curator informs her ideas for more sustainable funding models and healthier creative practices.https://www.instagram.com/esther.hz/https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxcWHfyhpb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxdIksyoRh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Davian Robinson’s artistic journey has never followed a straight line. As a student at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC, he discovered ballet and tap, launching a lifelong relationship with dance even as his vision continued to fade. At the same time, he was excelling in competitive athletics, eventually earning medals on the national stage as a para-cyclist. Years later, he returned to dance at UNC Charlotte, where he recommitted to the artform that had first taught him how to express his strength and resilience through movement.Since then, Robinson has emerged as both a powerful performer and an advocate for more inclusive ways of teaching and experiencing dance. His “Sensory Beyond Sight” workshop encourages participants — whether artists, athletes or professionals far outside the arts — to move beyond vision and tap into the body’s other senses. He also continues to expand his creative reach through collaboration, most recently with celebrated multimedia artist Janet Biggs in “Misregistration,” on view through September 22, 2025, at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte.In this interview, Davian reflects on how he developed his methodology as a dance student, the breakthroughs that shaped his teaching and choreography philosophy and how the world of dance can make itself more welcoming to visually impaired dancers and audiences alike.https://www.empower23.net/aboutHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated?With a practice that spans performance, social engagement, video games and film, Angela has spent more than a decade doing just that. Her work doesn’t just critique digital culture from the outside; it embeds itself within it, creating space for dialogue in places not usually known for nuance. Whether she’s convening feminist councils in the fantasy worlds of online gaming or crafting interactive experiences from the textures of real life, her projects ask how we behave when no one — or everyone — is watching. In 2012 she launched The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an in-game social practice project that sparked multi-hour dialogues between initially hostile players. Later she created The Game: The Game, an RPG in which a player could try to negotiate a bar packed full of male pickup artists following the same seduction playbook. And just last year, fascinated by the allure and promises of reality television, she directed her first documentary, “Workhorse Queen,” about a few members of the tightknit drag community in Rochester, NY and their complicated relationship with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the commerce of 21st century drag celebrity.In this interview, Angela, now a full professor and the MFA Program Director at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, reflects on how she found her voice as an artist inside a male-dominated gaming culture, why she continues to work in and not against the media she critiques and how becoming a mother during a global crisis reshaped her ideas of creativity, care and time.https://angelawashko.com/home.htmlHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of the 25 largest American orchestras has a female music director — but she is also Latina and lesbian. When Jessica Bejarano steps onto the podium, therefore, she doesn’t just conduct; sporting visible tattoos — her favorite conductor Tchaikovsky is prominently featured on her right forearm — and projecting a down-to-earth warmth and grit she learned from her immigrant mother in working class East L.A., she redefines what leadership can look like in the orchestral world.By 2019, Jessica was already building a solid resume, leading community orchestras in the Bay Area as well as accepting freelance directing gigs around the world. Continually faced with the glacial pace of change in the classical music world, however, she took a leap of faith and founded her own ensemble, the San Francisco Philharmonic. The SF Phil’s mission is to center diversity, equity and inclusion not just as a tagline but as a lived experience for musicians and audiences alike. In the last six years, under her leadership, the SF Phil has collaborated with everyone from Grammy-winning composers to local rap icons, while also offering masterclasses for emerging conductors and commissioning new works by underrepresented composers. In this interview, Jessica shares the winding, impassioned path that led her from East L.A. trumpet player to visionary conductor and founder. She discusses how she built the SF Phil from scratch — including funding its first concert out of her own savings — and how she continues to push the boundaries of what a 21st century orchestra can be.https://www.sfphil.org/aboutHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Even before his diagnosis of long COVID in 2020, cellist Joshua Roman had carved a unique niche in the classical music world. A former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony turned soloist and curator, Joshua built a career that combined artistic excellence with a passionate commitment to making music relevant and accessible. Whether premiering bold new works or improvising in unexpected settings, he was—and remains—a restless innovator with an unshakable belief in music’s power to heal, connect, and transform.Long COVID has altered nearly every aspect of Joshua’s life, from his physical stamina to how he plans his days to the way he relates to his instrument. Yet instead of sidelining him, the illness has led Joshua to reevaluate the very foundations of his artistry. The result is a new clarity and focus—not only about which projects deserve his limited energy but also what kind of artistic legacy he wants to build. His latest initiative, “The Immunity Project,” exemplifies this shift: a collection of performances and reflections that foreground music’s emotional and restorative capacity, drawn directly from his personal experience of illness and recovery. The project now also includes a recently released album titled “Immunity.”In this interview, Joshua opens up about the physical and existential recalibrations he’s made in order to keep performing, why he now only practices when he truly wants to and how chronic illness has deepened his artistic mission. He also shares his hopes for a classical-music ecosystem that makes space for artists to be fully, honestly human — onstage and off.https://www.joshuaroman.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

It’s no secret that arts non-profits across the country are struggling to survive, but few closures have hit their communities as hard as the recent shuttering of Big Medium in Austin, TX. For more than 20 years, Big Medium was one of the most influential visual-arts organizations in the city. It produced the beloved and sprawling Austin Studio Tour, presented exhibitions that championed historically marginalized artists and served as an essential convener for the city’s creative community. At the heart of its work for many years was curator and, more recently, artistic director Coka Treviño, whose passion for equity and for platforming emerging artists helped shape the organization’s inclusive mission.In this conversation, Coka, who continues her own curatorial work via her company The Projecto, reflects on her tenure at Big Medium and the complex web of challenges that led to its sudden closure. From shifts in city grantmaking priorities to the skyrocketing cost of living that made staffing nearly impossible, the interview offers a candid window into just how difficult it has become for arts organizations—even in culturally rich, economically booming cities like Austin—to maintain operations. https://www.theprojecto.org/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to direct his first full-length feature film, “Blindspotting.” That well-reviewed film landed him his first studio feature when Disney hired him to co-direct the animated film “Raya and the Last Dragon.” He is nonetheless the first to point out that a number of elements, including a film-school education and supportive parents, made his path to success easier than what awaited most of his cohort of up-and-coming filmmakers. He therefore focused on a new kind of creative endeavor: Antigravity Academy. Founded by Carlos in 2023, Antigravity is a hybrid business. It offers a range of educational initiatives designed to provide young, aspiring filmmakers — particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds — with the tools, mentorship and opportunities to develop their voices and tell their own stories. It also has a producing arm devoted to developing and bringing to life projects that would otherwise have difficulty finding funding. Antigravity’s first produced film, “Dìdi,” a glowingly reviewed coming-of-age story by Sean Wang, proved that Carlos’ mentoring and producing instincts are spot-on. “Dìdi” recently won two awards at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.In this interview, Carlos describes how his experiences in Hollywood shaped Antigravity Academy’s mission and programs and explains why empowering new voices is not only helping to bring surprising stories to the screen but also making him a better artist.https://antigravityacademy.co/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For the last two decades, architect and educator JP Reuer has been exploring how artists can become vital, integrated members of their communities rather than isolated figures working on the fringes of society. That ethos now fuels his most ambitious project to date: Small School, a Raleigh-based arts organization that reimagines advanced arts education as more accessible, collaborative and deeply embedded in local culture.Through Small School, JP has rejected the traditional MFA model in favor of a nimbler, community-driven approach. The organization brings renowned visiting artists to the Triangle area to engage with local artists through workshops, public events and one-on-one studio visits, an exchange that empowers both emerging and established artists while fostering a richer creative ecosystem.In this episode, JP traces his journey from academia to founding Small School, sharing what he’s learned about the evolving role of artists in society. He discusses the power of bringing artists out of ivory towers and into the heart of their communities and why rethinking arts education is essential to supporting a more inclusive and dynamic creative landscape.https://smallschool.org/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

What happens when best friends in different disciplines decide to formalize their creative relationship and then invite a third artist into their artmaking experiment? A vibrant, equitable and joyful collective by the name of Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is born.Art 25’s core artists are poet Lehua M. Taitano, visual artist Lisa Jarrett and multi-disciplinary artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng. Separately, Lehua, who is CHamoru; Lisa, who is Black; and Jocelyn, who has Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese roots had been exploring similar themes of identity and diaspora in their artistic practice. Fusing their talents and perspectives, however, allowed them access to an even deeper well of experience and imagination from which to draw inspiration.Since Art 25’s founding, the collective’s work has been seen at several institutions, including the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and in February of 2025 it will be exhibited at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum in Long Beach, CA.In this interview, Lehua, Lisa and Jocelyn describe how they joined their creative forces and explain the core anti-capitalistic values of Art 25 that not only place it firmly outside the artistic mainstream but continue to bring them joy.https://www.lehuamtaitano.com/art-25Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.