Fresh Art International

Today, we share with you the finale of the Fresh Art International podcast, ending more than a decade of storytelling from art scenes around the world. Coming full circle, we’ve returned to Baltimore, Maryland. The Magic City is where we released our very first episode in October 2011. Our guest was MacArthur Genius, artist Joyce J. Scott. In October 2025, we sit down with another long time friend of Fresh Art International: artist Amy Sherald. Inside the Baltimore Museum of Art, she takes us on a tour of American Sublime, her traveling mid-career retrospective exhibition. This isn’t our first story with Amy. Nine years ago, in July 2016, we recorded an episode live with an audience, in a Chicago, Illinois, gallery. Surrounded by Amy Sherald’s paintings, we acknowledged acute racial tensions in the United States at that moment. Incidents of police violence against black citizens were sparking countrywide public protests. A hopeful counterpoint, Amy’s exhibition A Wonderful Dream met viewers with luminous positive depictions of Black life in America. A year and a half later, in December 2017, Amy joined us on our Fresh Art International radio show during Miami Art Week, in Florida. Again, she voiced her commitment to the work. Recording conversations with this artist along her path to greatness has been a privilege and an honor. Fresh Art International holds an archive of many such stories—all with enduring value. Over time, we have documented critically important voices from the evolving world of contemporary art. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Locust Projects and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and most important, Listeners Like You, have made Fresh Art International possible. Thank You, for Listening! Production: Cathy Byrd | Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio | Featured: Amy Sherald Related Episodes: Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Report from Miami Art Week 2017 Related Links: Obama Portrait Unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, 2018, Artist Amy Sherald: The 60 Minutes Interview *Amy Sherald: American Sublime is touring these venues in the United States: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/San Francisco, Whitney Museum of American Art/New York, Baltimore Museum of Art/Baltimore, High Museum of Art/Atlanta

In this episode, we explore an emerging microgenre in contemporary performance art. Some of today’s artists create liminal spaces, construct original expressive forms, and make powerful statements in a range of inventive video performances. The 2025 exhibition (Im)Posibilidades: Performance Art for Video at Ogden Contemporary Arts in Ogden, Utah, reveals the microgenre’s potential. Featured projects from the United States and Mexico envision ways to correct historical distortions and construct new possible futures. They show us a world where everyone’s stories can thrive through performance and reimagination. Production: Cathy Byrd | Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Featured Voices: Stephanie Garcia and Peter Hay of PROArtes Mexico, Adam Forrester, Lilly McElroy, Cannupa Hanska Luger Feature Soundtracks, Courtesy the Artists and Ogden Contemporary Arts: María Eugenia Chellet/La Dolorosa, Lilly McElroy/A Woman Runs Through a Pastoral Setting, Naomi Rincón Gallardo/Eclipse, Cannupa Hanska Luger/Midéegaadi, Ileana Moreno/Kowatl y el Mejor Amigo del Sol, Kameron Neal and Jarrett Key/CARGO!, Yoshie Sakai/ Grandma NightClub Music Video, José Villalobos/El Peso Del Rio/The Weight of the River Additional music:Caspertron by Blue Dot SessionsMergeron by Blue Dot Sessions Related Episodes: Joan Jonas, William Pope.L, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carolee Schneeman, Cheryl Pope, Regina Frank About the Exhibition: Ogden Contemporary Arts

To introduce the new Reflecting Zemstvei podcast produced by local creatives in Chișinău, Moldova, Cathy Byrd and Olga Raileanu take listeners inside an intensive workshop experience that spanned three days in March 2025. In this episode, you’ll meet the young Moldovans who learned to master recording equipment, script stories, and collect sounds and voices to shape stories from their hometown’s independent art scene. Our story from Eastern Europe takes Fresh Art International's Student Edition outside the English speaking world. Since 2013, artists and independent initiatives have rented spaces in a center-city building complex known as “Zemstvei,” a state-owned architectural monument that dates from the mid-19th century. They call their improvisational community “Casa Zemstvei.” Creators and curators, animators and activists, visitors and regulars embrace the crumbling architecture, arctic cold, echoey acoustics, and primitive grandeur of this historic space. Recorded on location, episodes in this limited edition audio program are inspired by the surrounding sonic landscape and the creative characters that energize Chișinău’s “House of Wonders.” Note: The original version of this episode premiered on YouTube as #1/ Reflectând Zemstvei / How We Made the Podcast. Production: Cathy Byrd, with Olga Raileanu | Sound Design: Marian Lupu, Olga Raileanu, and Anamnesis Audio Voices: Daniel Boldurat - student and volunteer at Oberliht Association, Franz Cocarcea - producer of the video podcast Omul face locul, Bogdan Glavan - high school student, with experience in sound design, Alex Hanganu - student, activist and cultural manager, Olga Raileanu - graphic designer with journalism experience, Marina Scalețchi - communicator, Vladimir Us - curator, president of Oberliht Association Related Links: Fresh Art International Student Edition, FreshArt.Education, Reflecting Zemstvei Podcast on SoundCloud, Reflecting Zemstvei Podcast on YouTube, with Subtitles

Today, we take you to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, for our first experience of the yearly gathering known as March Meeting. The Sharjah Art Foundation designs these programs to resonate with issues and events of the moment. March Meeting 2024 is no exception. Across three days, artists, curators, educators and writers from near and far converge to consider the power and purpose of collective creativity. Here, we bear witness to diverse artistic energies behind grass roots initiatives in the Global South. Finding strength in numbers, creative activists collaborate on initiatives that bring positive change to the vulnerable communities where they live and work. All embrace multiple voices. None are unafraid of messy entanglement. They give us hope, they show us the way— to a more inclusive, sustainable, and livable future. Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Special Audio: Alex Pierce and Zoe Annesley, “Beneath a Tent, a Performance for Strings and Voice”; Bint Mbareh, “Lentil Soup as an Antidote to Rampant Wildfires”; dhaqan collective “Camel Song” and “House of Weaving Song”; La Revuelta YouTube channel; Episodio 7 - El podcast de Anamá Rojas, June 2021; Vela Vela; Stanza for Lumi Related Episodes: Sharjah Biennial 15—with Hoor Al Qasimi, Searching for Libertalia—with Shiraz Bayjoo, Creating Community in Kazakhstan—with CEC ArtsLink, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity Related Links: Sharjah Art Foundation, Topsoil, Sakiya, dhaqan collective, La Revuelta

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 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 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

In 2022, members and guests of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art make their way to Kentucky, in the United States. Our first days are packed with urban experiences — museum, gallery, private collection, and studio visits, a symposium — and sunset tours of two outdoor sculpture collections. A small group continues the adventure on a road trip that takes us to the far eastern edge of Kentucky. As we cross the state, we learn firsthand the challenges of growing up and producing culture in the region. We bear witness to creative resilience and community in remote spaces and places in Appalachia. We bear witness to creative resilience and community in remote spaces and places where rich stories are told through art, film, music, and theater. Voices: Orlando Maiike Gouwenberg, Jessica Bennett Kincaid, Carolina Rubens, Jeff Chapman Crane, Sharman Crane, Kate Handslik Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Music: Danver County by Blue Dot Sessions Earl Gilmore - This Little Light of Mine, on “From the Depths of my Soul,” 1977, June Appal Recordings Nimrod Workman & Phyllis Boyens - I am a Travelin' Creature, on “Passing Through the Garden," 1974, June Appal Recordings Pigmeat Jarret – Look at the People (Little Girl), on “Look at the People,” 1979, June Appal Recordings Ralph Stanley – I am a Man of Constant Sorrow Sarah Kate Morgan - Goodbye My Honey I'm Gone, on “Old Tunes & Sad Songs," 2022, self-released Sparky Rucker – Come on in my Kitchen, on “Cold & Lonesome on a Train,” 1977, June Appal Recordings Special Sound: Stranger with a Camera, Elizabeth Barrett, 2000 Appalshop; Shift Change, Higher Ground Theater, 2021 Related Episodes: Sounds of Berlin, Cultural Complexity in Miami’s Little Haiti, Key West: Creativity at the End of the Road, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies Related Links: Association of International Curators of Contemporary Art, Great Meadows Foundation, Appalshop, June Appal Recordings, Higher Ground Theater, Valley of the Winds Gallery, Mine Portal 31

“This Persian Garden Project will be providing visitors with a private, yet public environment in which to engage important social and cultural issues by gathering and gardening through conversations, screenings, readings, and communal performances. I’m imagining it as a hub for activism and healing—a home for all marginalized, mediated, untold, and less celebrated stories.” Bahar Behbahani, 2021 The art of Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahani responds to the history and character of the complex landscapes that surround her—reflecting on her cultural origins and immigrant experience. Conversations with the artist across time reveal how she has immersed herself in the form, poetry, and politics of the Persian garden. Now, her vision extends to designing and programming a public environment for activism and healing where she aims to engender a communal sense of hospitality, resistance, and resilience. When Behbahani reaches her goal, a new Persian garden will flourish in Manhattan—cultivated by the hands and minds of artists and historians, thinkers and doers from cultures around the world that call New York City home. Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Bahar Behbahani, Suspended (2007) and All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2019), courtesy the artist Related Episodes: The Awakening, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens Related Links: Bahar Behbahani, Ispahan Flowers Only Once (2019-ongoing), All Water Has a Perfect Memory/Wave Hill Public Garden, 9/11 Memorial

Emblematic of water issues that challenge public health the world over, the New York City story Mattingly explores, reminds us that clean water is a shared responsibility—a basic human right that we must invest in and protect.

Jillian Hernandez gives voice to girls and women of color in her 2020 book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment. In this episode, you’ll hear how she has been delving into the “aesthetic hierarchies” of femme culture for more than a decade. Research, critical writing, and personal experience come together to enrich this vividly illustrated book. Hernandez shares a few stories of her own fraught adolescence, along with those of Women on the Rise!, a community of teenage girls for whom she and local artists created opportunities to collide with art, through the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Chonga Girls, “Chongalicious,” Crystal Pearl Molinary, “Off the Chain” Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Resisting Paradise, The Awakening, Topical Playlist—Art and Feminism Related Links, Jillian Hernandez, University of Florida, Duke University Press, Women on the Rise!, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami Jillian Hernandez, a Miami native, is currently Assistant Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida. She is a transdisciplinary scholar interested in the stakes of embodiment, aesthetics, and performance for Black and Latinx women and girls, gender-nonconformists, and queers. In 2020, Hernandez completed her first book, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, through Duke University Press. She is developing other book-length projects on the radical politics of femme of color art and performance and Latinx creative erotics, ontologies, and relationalities. Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and teaches courses on racialized girlhoods, Latinx sexualities, theories of the body, social justice praxis, and cultural studies. Her scholarship is based on and inspired by over a decade of community arts work with Black and Latinx girls in Miami, Florida, through the Women on the Rise! program she established at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, in addition to her practice as an artist and curator. via University of Florida Aesthetics of Excess: Heavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying "excessive" styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship. via Duke University Press

Now, more than ever, culture transcends geographic boundaries. In this episode, we explore the impact of that global phenomenon on the visibility of contemporary diaspora art. From Jamaica, Rosie Gordon-Wallace is a globally recognized curator, arts advocate, and community leader based in Miami, Florida, since the 1970s. In 1996, Gordon-Wallace launched a transformative enterprise, now known as Diaspora Vibe Culture Arts Incubator. DVCAI is a creative laboratory—promoting, nurturing, and cultivating the vision and diverse talents of artists from the Caribbean Diaspora, artists of color, and immigrant artists through public programs, residencies, exhibitions and more. In 2021, the organization will be 25 years old. We sit down with Gordon-Wallace to contemplate the significance of this moment. Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound from The Philosopher's Stone, with permission of artist Asser Saint-Val Related Episodes: Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, New Caribbean Cinema, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix Related Links: Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inter|Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City, Donette Francis, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Evelyn Politzer, Chantal James, Asser Saint-Val, Michael Elliott, The Windrush Generation, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Miami Design District A traveling exhibition that celebrates DVCAI’s 25th year, Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City is a multidisciplinary curatorial collaboration and exploration of the emergence of the “Creole City” as a local, regional and global phenomenon. Internationally recognized curators Sanjit Sethi, President, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and former director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder and curator of Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), designed this collaboration to provide a lens through which communities and community leaders internationally can begin to better understand themselves, their diversity and their unlimited possibilities. In 2019, Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City was presented in our nation’s capital at a time when diaspora artists and voices were challenging social justice, celebrating identities—reactivating and bridging communities through contemporary art and scholarship. The complexities and diversities represented in this exhibition are emergent and, in many cases, ascendant across the world. In 2020, the exhibition travelled to the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2021, Inter | Sectionality came home to the Design District, in Miami, Florida.

In 2018, two years after Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Croix, Art in America published an exposé by San Juan born and based curator Marina Reyes Franco. Journalists were “comparing Puerto Rico to Greece, Detroit, and New York of the 1970s,” she wrote, “prompting myriad articles about its economic woes and the population’s resilience.” Central to many of these stories were inspiring narratives about artists and entrepreneurs responding to the crisis. In 2019, we journey to the island to record voices from the cultural scene. The artists we meet in San Juan convey the promise and pathos of this Caribbean island. In this segment of our Puerto Rico Rising series, four Puerto Rican creatives offer insight into how art can join forces with the strength of community to contemplate beauty and the paradoxes of everyday life. Voices in the episode: Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio in Order of Appearance: Fabián Wilkins Vélez, Listening Session, 2019; Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Celaje (2020); Florian Dombois, Triple Instrument, 2019; Llaima Sanfiorenzo, Let the Beast Breathe, 2020 and 1 sq foot of freedom, 2007 Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Resisting Paradise, Puerto Rico Rising—Radical Leaders, The Awakening, Juan Botta Makes One-Minute Movies in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto on the Architecture of Connecting Communities, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies Related Links: Beta-Local, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo/Self Portrait Factory, Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Marina Reyes Franco, ATLAS SAN JUAN: TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Art in America, Oct 1, 2018.