What’s My Thesis?

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles painter and sign painter Alex Gonzalez about the relationship between place, labor, and artistic practice. Drawing from a lifetime spent in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, Gonzalez describes how its density, street life, and changing social landscape have become the foundation of a narrative painting practice built on observation, symbolism, and allegory.

The conversation explores the value of professional sign painting as both a craft and a sustainable career, the realities of maintaining an independent studio practice outside the gallery system, and the challenges of balancing artistic ambition with financial stability and family responsibility. Throughout, Gonzalez reflects on the ways everyday experience can be transformed into contemporary painting without losing sight of the community from which it emerges.

Sterling Wells is a Los Angeles–based painter represented by Night Gallery whose practice combines plein air watercolor with ideas drawn from conceptual art, environmental systems, and site-specific observation. In this conversation, Wells reflects on growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, studying painting and sculpture, living in New York after the 2008 financial crisis, and developing an interdisciplinary approach through graduate study at ArtCenter College of Design.

The discussion examines the role of water as both material and metaphor, the relationship between documentation and painting, and the evolution of Wells' practice from sculptural installations to large-scale outdoor watercolor works. Wells also speaks candidly about gallery representation, artistic community, financial uncertainty, and the practical realities of sustaining a contemporary painting practice while remaining committed to a slow, labor-intensive process.

Moon is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, art handler, and co-founder of DMS Atelier, an artist-run space in Los Angeles dedicated to exhibitions, artist residencies, and community programming. Originally from Chicago and a graduate of Grambling State University, he discusses the experiences that shaped his path from athletics and hip-hop culture to contemporary art and arts education.

The conversation explores artistic practice, teaching, community-building, and the development of DMS Atelier's residency program and community feed initiative. Along the way, Moon reflects on regional identity, the cultural differences between Chicago, Louisiana, and California, and the importance of creating spaces that foster sustained artistic practice, accessibility, and meaningful relationships within contemporary art.

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with South African interdisciplinary artist Azole Njengele, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, about the relationship between architecture, drawing, and photography in her evolving practice. Reflecting on her education and professional experience in South Africa before relocating to the United States, Azole discusses how architectural training continues to shape her understanding of space, image-making, and artistic process.

Their conversation explores contemporary photography, portraiture, consent and ethics, South Africa's art communities, and the differences between artistic life in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles. They also consider the practical realities of sustaining a creative practice, the opportunities afforded by graduate study, and the role of observation, collaboration, and interdisciplinary thinking in contemporary art.

Interdisciplinary artist Manny Valdez joins What's My Thesis? to discuss his participatory practice, recent projects, and experiences as an MFA graduate from Otis College of Art and Design. Drawing on performance, installation, screen printing, and artist participation, Valdez examines how artists construct identity, navigate institutional structures, and create opportunities within the contemporary Los Angeles art world.

The conversation explores the realities of art education, grant applications, rejection, networking, retail labor, and teaching, alongside broader questions about artistic ambition, community, and sustaining a practice outside conventional career pathways. Throughout, Valdez reflects on the value of collaboration, resilience, and creating work that invites dialogue rather than certainty.

Javier Proenza speaks with Ioanna Sakellaraki, a Greek visual artist, photographer, and Fulbright Scholar currently conducting research with the Smithsonian, about the development of her interdisciplinary practice across photography, collage, embroidery, and archival work.

The conversation examines Sakellaraki’s transition from a career in communications strategy with EU institutions into contemporary art, the influence of personal grief and the discovery of her late father’s archive on her work, and her engagement with Greek mourning traditions, Orthodox ritual, memory, and the unstable boundary between documentary and conceptual image-making.

For the 300th episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza is joined by Los Angeles-based artists and cultural workers Dakota Noot and Christopher Anthony Velasco for an informal conversation shaped by friendship, shared history, and long experience in contemporary art communities. The discussion reflects on public visibility, social media hostility, reputation, and the shifting dynamics of creative life in increasingly online cultural spaces.

The episode also examines practical questions of artistic survival, including teaching, freelance writing, collaborative creative work, and the limitations of traditional institutional pathways. Moving between humor and critical reflection, the conversation offers a grounded portrait of how artists build careers, relationships, and parallel forms of legitimacy outside conventional gallery structures.

In this episode, Dave Young Kim, a Los Angeles–based muralist and curator, discusses his recent exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Developed around the theme of Asian mythical creatures, the project reframes historical material through the structure of the immigrant experience, pairing objects from the museum’s collection with contemporary artworks and newly commissioned pieces.

Kim reflects on the research process behind the exhibition, including the cultural specificity of pan-Asian mythologies and their evolution across regions. The conversation also addresses Korean American identity, family migration histories, and the challenges of curating within institutional frameworks, alongside the practical considerations of maintaining a sustainable art practice beyond traditional gallery systems.

Snezana Petrovic, a Yugoslav-born painter, installation artist, and former production designer, joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss her early career across film and theater in Yugoslavia and her forced migration to California during the country’s collapse in the early 1990s. She reflects on the loss of a national identity, the experience of displacement, and the complexities of being categorized within new cultural and political frameworks in the United States.

The conversation traces the evolution of her artistic practice from painting and production design to concept-driven installation work shaped by ecological concerns, environmental damage, and global interdependence. Petrovic also discusses the influence of performance art, her time in India and engagement with spiritual frameworks, and how these experiences informed her shift toward art as a space for awareness, reflection, and dialogue around shared human conditions.

 

 

 

Joe Galarza is a Los Angeles-based muralist, musician, and community educator whose practice engages Indigenous identity, political resistance, and the social role of art. Introduced through the East L.A. punk scene, Galarza traces his early influences from heavy metal illustration to anarchist thought, and later to Indigenous-led movements shaped by land struggles, NAFTA-era organizing, and Zapatista philosophy.

The conversation examines art as a tool for education and collective questioning, with Galarza reflecting on his work with incarcerated youth, mural practices that preserve oral histories, and the persistence of colonial structures in contemporary life. Throughout, he situates his work within a broader commitment to community, emphasizing the responsibility of artists to engage with systemic injustice while remaining accountable to the histories and territories they inhabit.

 

 

In this episode, photographer Josh Schaedel discusses his work founding and sustaining an artist-run exhibition space in Los Angeles, reflecting on a practice rooted in service, hospitality, and access for emerging artists. He addresses the material and economic realities of photography, including the costs of production and framing, and the structural challenges that limit broader institutional support for the medium.

The conversation also considers the impact of digital tools and AI on photographic practice, alongside Schaedel's approach to teaching, which emphasizes tactile engagement through prints and photobooks. Throughout, he situates photography as a medium shaped by constraint and grounded in reality, while advocating for independent spaces and publishing as critical frameworks for sustaining artistic communities.

 

 

 

Artist Donel Williams reflects on his unconventional path into art, from community college photography to his studies at UCLA, where he developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, and installation. Drawing on personal history and mentorship, he describes how early experiences shaped his engagement with labor, material, and image-making.

The conversation centers on the expectations placed on Black artists within contemporary art, particularly the pressure toward figuration, and Williams’ turn toward abstraction as both a formal and political strategy. Through work informed by redacted government documents and performative gestures that critique authorship and visibility, he examines the tensions between identity, audience legibility, and artistic autonomy.

 

 

 

Faris McReynolds is a painter and musician whose practice engages directly with the structures of the contemporary art world. In this conversation, he reflects on his early entry into the gallery system, the financial realities of sustaining a painting practice, and the conditions that led him to step away from commercial representation.

The discussion addresses how wealth, collectors, and market forces shape artistic visibility and value, alongside a critique of galleries, art fairs, and institutional power. McReynolds also considers the distinction between underground and unsuccessful practices, the influence of social media on artistic production, and the possibility of maintaining an independent, long-term commitment to making work outside dominant systems.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles painter Jahn Baby Muller, a graduate of the USC Roski School of Art, joins host Javier Proenza to discuss his thesis work and the philosophical questions shaping his practice. Muller describes a body of still life paintings built from objects collected at estate sales—particularly toys and artifacts left behind by the Baby Boomer generation—which he stages as emotional narratives about generational inheritance and cultural memory.

The conversation expands into a broader reflection on how art is defined and experienced. Muller proposes that art is not determined solely by the artist’s intention but emerges through the experience of the viewer and the cultural context surrounding it. Alongside discussions of art education and institutional hierarchies, he explains how his work combines painting, large-format photography, video-game color palettes, and extended poetic titles to explore nostalgia, generational power, and the material remnants of previous generations.

Painter Katie Hector joins host Javier Proenza for a conversation on portrait painting, image culture, and the shifting cultural frameworks that shape how faces and bodies are represented in art. Hector reflects on her studio practice, discussing her return to figurative painting and the role of photographic source material in constructing contemporary portraits.

The conversation also explores Hector’s concept of a “shadow practice,” including her quilting work made from repurposed painting materials, alongside a broader discussion of portraiture’s historical associations with power, representation, and beauty standards. Together, they consider how contemporary artists engage with the legacy of portrait painting while navigating the visual language of digital and internet-based imagery.

 

 

 

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, painter Estefania Ajcip joins host Javier Proenza to discuss the personal and cultural experiences that shape her work. Ajcip reflects on growing up between the United States and Guatemala, her Indigenous family background, and the circumstances that led her to return to the U.S. as a young adult.

The conversation explores how family separation caused by immigration informs her paintings about absence and memory, as well as her path through art school at Pasadena City College and California State University, Long Beach. Ajcip also discusses developing a mixed media painting practice, navigating critiques in art school, and translating personal history into contemporary art.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles–based Chicano artist Raul Baltazar about the cultural and historical foundations of his practice. Baltazar reflects on the origins of his performance character “Seven the Aztec Bunny,” first developed through ceremonies at Self Help Graphics’ Aztec New Year celebration, and discusses how Indigenous traditions, Catholic symbolism, and community ritual inform his approach to art.

The conversation explores Mexican and Mexican American identity through migration, colonial history, and cultural syncretism, including reflections on La Malinche, the blending of Indigenous and Catholic cosmologies, and the preservation of ceremonial knowledge. Baltazar also addresses the generational lineage of Chicano artists in Los Angeles, the tension between community-based practices and art institutions, and the role of devotion, memory, and cultural continuity within contemporary artistic work.

Kristine Shomaker is a Los Angeles–based conceptual painter and arts organizer, and the founder of Shoebox Arts and Art and Cake at the Brewery Art Complex. In this conversation, she reflects on building artist support systems outside traditional commercial models, restructuring a nonprofit to sustain mentorship, and expanding art journalism focused on marginalized communities.

Shomaker also discusses her studio practice, including cutting paintings off their stretcher bars and reconfiguring them into sculptural installations, as well as her long-term collaborative projects Perceive Me and Color Response. The episode examines experimentation, adaptability, and the role of collaboration in sustaining artists locally and internationally.

In this episode, Haitian painter and muralist Olivier Arsène Ganthier, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, reflects on his artistic formation in Haiti and his current practice in Los Angeles. Raised in his father’s studio and trained at the National School of Arts in Haiti, Ganthier discusses the technical foundations of his education, the development of Haiti’s graffiti and mural culture, and the practical realities of building an art career across geographies.

The conversation addresses the Haitian Revolution and its economic aftermath, Western media narratives about Haiti, and the role of spiritual syncretism between Vodou and Catholic imagery in shaping visual culture. Ganthier describes his figurative painting as a form of Black representation that draws from archetype, animation, African masks, and diasporic experience, while also emphasizing the importance of business literacy, contract awareness, and public space as critical dimensions of contemporary art practice.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, ceramic sculptor and installation artist Liz Stringer joins the podcast for an in-depth conversation about sculpture, scale, and the body. Working primarily with ceramics, metal armatures, and welded structures, Stringer discusses how her practice emerged from a background shaped by medicine, illness, and early encounters with Roman, Gothic, and Baroque architecture.

The conversation explores monumental ceramics, biopolitics, and public space, including Stringer’s engagement with civic spectacle, parade structures, and collective ritual. Drawing on Enlightenment history, architecture, and lived experience, Stringer reflects on her recent MFA thesis work, which centers the viewer’s body within installations addressing armor, metamorphosis, vulnerability, and systems of power.

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Frannie Hemmelgarn, director and co-founder of DMST Atelier, an artist-run space in Los Angeles developed in collaboration with affordable housing providers. Hemmelgarn reflects on the space’s origins during the pandemic, its community feeds and public programming, and the responsibilities of artist-run initiatives within gentrifying neighborhoods.

The conversation also turns to Hemmelgarn’s studio practice, which centers on handmade papermaking using upcycled materials. She discusses how the work emerged from transitions between painting and cyanotype, and how incorporating her late father’s papers shaped a process focused on grief, repair, and reconstruction.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Stephanie Sherwood, an artist and Exhibition Coordinator at the Brand Library in Glendale. Sherwood reflects on her dual role as a practicing artist and arts administrator, drawing on her experience working within municipal institutions such as libraries, city galleries, and public exhibition spaces.

The conversation explores Sherwood’s painting practice, including her long-term engagement with found materials, discarded objects, and containers, as well as earlier work focused on the body, still life, and abstraction. She discusses artist collectives, alternative pathways outside the MFA system, institutional labor, and the ways public art spaces shape access, experimentation, and community within the Los Angeles art landscape.

 

 

 

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza speaks with Ever Velasquez, Director of Charlie James Gallery, about her path from collage and community organizing to gallery leadership, and the values guiding the gallery’s long-term commitment to artists in Los Angeles.

Velasquez discusses curatorial pacing, group exhibitions as frameworks for career development, and the labor behind gallery work, alongside reflections on collage as a lifelong practice and Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions as discipline rather than aesthetic. The conversation centers self-advocacy, boundaries, and responsibility as essential to sustaining artistic and curatorial practice.

Artist Joaquin Stacey joins Javier Proenza for a conversation on art, identity, and cultural formation shaped by migration. Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami before relocating to Los Angeles for his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, Stacey reflects on how geography, language, and institutional training inform his practice.

The discussion moves through painting, performance, and installation, with particular attention to Catholic iconography, mestizaje, diaspora, and the contradictions of living in the United States while remaining connected to Ecuador. Stacey also describes his use of fermentation and sourdough as both material and conceptual frameworks, challenging linear notions of time, labor, and artistic process.

 

 

 

Artist Flora Kao joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss the evolution of her practice from painting to large-scale installation, and how Taiwanese mourning rituals, Buddhist symbolism, and diasporic memory shape her approach to space. Trained at Otis and later UC Irvine, Kao describes discovering installation as a way to create experiences that “elicit a sense of wonder,” pairing conceptual clarity with meditative, labor-intensive processes.

The conversation traces her early years moving between Houston, Wisconsin, Taipei, and Boston; her family’s history under Taiwan’s martial-law era; and her transition from environmental science and strategy consulting into art school. Kao explains the cultural and personal significance behind folding 108 origami lotus forms each week for seven weeks—a ritual she adapted into a suspended installation of 756 hand-folded lotus at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Kao also speaks about using archival photographs, bamboo prayer-leaf structures, and cyanotype processes to explore grief, family history, and the shifting landscapes of Taiwan and Los Angeles. She offers rare insight into sustaining an installation-based practice through grants, community networks, and long-term professional relationships, while navigating motherhood and the realities of working outside commercial gallery systems.

Artist Manuel Vdah Bracamonte joins What’s My Thesis? for a grounded conversation on graffiti, identity, and the lived conditions that shaped Los Angeles street culture in the 1980s and 90s. Born in El Salvador and raised in downtown LA, Bracamonte traces his earliest memories of tagging, the shift into “tag banging,” and how the social and political pressures of that era intersected with his development as an artist.

A pivotal high-school teacher introduced him to portfolio building and ultimately to the CalArts CAP program—a transformational moment that opened a different pathway into art, community, and education. Throughout the episode, Bracamonte reflects on moving from name-based graffiti to narrative, community-oriented mural work; researching Mayan hieroglyphs; and developing a hybrid visual language that holds both ancestral history and futurist possibility.

The discussion expands outward into questions of Latinx identity, diaspora, public art, youth mentorship, and the politics of presence—what it means to show up in spaces that often assume you don’t belong. Bracamonte’s reflections move between personal history and broader frameworks of street culture, muralism, pedagogy, and the ongoing transformation of LA’s art landscape.

This episode offers a direct, unfiltered look at how artistic practices emerge from lived experience, community ties, and the need to create meaning beyond institutional boundaries.

Artist Kelly Witmer joins host Javier Proenza to talk about material process, experimentation, and what it means to sustain an art practice in the desert. Based between Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, Witmer works across glass, ceramics, and painting, transforming the unpredictability of the kiln into a meditation on control, failure, and transformation.

In this episode, she traces her trajectory from photography and printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to her later exploration of sculpture and abstraction. The conversation moves through her early life in Pennsylvania’s Mennonite community, her relocation to Los Angeles in the 1990s, and the gradual evolution of her visual language — from figurative painting to material-driven forms that balance fragility and chance.

Witmer also reflects on the changing realities of the art world: the economics of desert living, the value of art school, and the rise of Instagram as both tool and trap for visibility and survival. Along the way, she discusses her fascination with prehistoric art, Utah pictographs, and the enduring human impulse to leave marks in stone and clay.

A grounded, candid conversation about process, persistence, and the quiet negotiations between art, livelihood, and place.

René Camarillo is a Mexican-American craftsperson from East Los Angeles whose practice resists the hierarchies of the art world. Trained in apparel design at LA Trade Tech, fiber and material studies at Cal State LA, and textiles at RISD, Camarillo positions weaving and garment-making as acts of cultural inheritance, labor, and community survival rather than commodities of privilege.

In this conversation, Camarillo reflects on rejecting the label of “artist,” his experience with exploitation in fashion and sweatshops, and the deep political stakes of textiles in shaping both history and everyday life. The dialogue explores craft versus fine art, sustainability, gentrification in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and the importance of teaching weaving, dyeing, and self-reliance through Grow Lincoln Heights and his brand Dust of Course.

With a Fulbright in Japan to study indigo farming, Camarillo embodies a practice that is at once monastic, technical, and communal—insisting on fundamentals in a moment dominated by spectacle and commodification.

Artist Sheng Lor reflects on her journey from a Thai refugee camp to a studio practice in Los Angeles. Born to Hmong parents displaced by the Secret War in Laos, Lor discusses culture shock, grief, and the intergenerational legacies that shape her art.

Her loom-wrapping series transforms discarded weaving tools into sculptural memorials, addressing the histories of labor, invisibility of craft, and Hmong spiritual traditions. This conversation explores how weaving, diaspora, and ritual intersect in contemporary art and the Los Angeles art scene.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles–based painter Elmer Guevara returns to the podcast ahead of his upcoming exhibition at Charlie James Gallery. Known for his densely layered figurative paintings, Guevara reflects on how memory, history, and inherited trauma shape his visual language.

The conversation traces his evolution from graffiti to oil painting, his deep engagement with South Central Los Angeles, and the ways he reconstructs the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings through scenes of everyday life. Blending autobiography with collective history, Guevara explores how painting can act as both a historical record and emotional archive, layering his family’s Salvadoran experience with the city’s shifting social landscape.

Host Javier Proenza and Guevara discuss the aesthetics of the working-class home, the ethics of representing trauma, and the enduring influence of Caravaggio, Bay Area Figuration, and documentary photography on his approach to storytelling. What emerges is a portrait of an artist using realism and symbolism to reimagine how communities remember themselves.

Listen for insights on painting, social history, and the emotional terrain of Los Angeles—then see Guevara’s new work on view at Charlie James Gallery, opening October 25.

Artist David Lloyd joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on a career that spans CalArts in the early 1980s, formative years at Margot Levin Gallery, and decades of navigating the shifting landscape of the Los Angeles art world. Known for his commitment to formalist abstraction, Lloyd discusses what it means to sustain a painting practice over forty years while adapting to the changing priorities of galleries, art fairs, and collectors.

The conversation delves into his most recent body of work, where Lloyd integrates his own archive of paintings, drawings, and ceramics into AI image generation. By transforming these digital hallucinations into trompe l’oeil abstractions through resin, collage, and material experimentation, he considers how technology can challenge conventional definitions of painting while remaining rooted in physical process.

Other topics include the legacy of CalArts conceptualism, the burdens of postmodern theory and art education, the precarity of mid-level galleries, and the paradox of elitism within the contemporary art market. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the importance of generosity, resilience, and longevity in sustaining a life in art.

Listen for insights on:

• Abstract painting and formalist traditions in Los Angeles
  
• The role of AI in contemporary art practices
  
• The realities of the gallery system and art fairs
  
• Postmodernism, art education, and theory fatigue
• Building a career across decades in the art world

Artist Kristen Huizar joins What’s My Thesis? to reflect on drawing, printmaking, and the act of documenting Los Angeles. Born and raised in Commerce, CA, she traces her path from community college to Cal State Long Beach, where persistence and community shaped her practice.

Working with wax pastels on plastic vinyl, hand stitching, and large lino cuts, Huizar explores repetition, process, and the archival impulse. Her drawings function as reportage—capturing overlooked city views, everyday details, and the rapid changes of East L.A.

The conversation considers Chicana identity, community studios, and the politics of representation, offering insight into how artists both preserve and reimagine the city.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Emma Christ, editor at Artillery magazine and gallerist working between Portland and Los Angeles. Christ reflects on her beginnings in photography, formative years at Bard and Reed, and her transition from artistic practice into gallery management, editing, and writing.

The conversation traces her early influences—from Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston to mentorship under No Wave photographer Barbara Ess—before moving into immersive installation work and a graduate thesis on trans-corporeality and the porous body. Christ discusses her experiences in institutions such as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, her role in supporting artists within commercial gallery structures, and the gendered dynamics that continue to shape the field.

Throughout the episode, Christ shares candid insights into navigating the hierarchies of the art world, balancing writing and curating, and the importance of advocating for emerging voices across both editorial and exhibition platforms.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles printmaker Israel Campos shares how his work bridges Mesoamerican codices, Mexican revolutionary art, and the mural traditions of his South Central upbringing. Known for his meticulous intaglio prints, Campos reclaims visual histories disrupted by colonization—collapsing linear perspective, weaving ancient mythologies, and drawing on the political legacies of artists like José Clemente Orozco.

From growing up in a garment factory household to exhibiting at Charlie James Gallery, Campos has shaped a practice that circulates both within galleries and directly to his community, merging economic sustainability with political intent.

🎧 Listen now to hear how Campos’ art collapses past and present into a single visual language of resistance.

#IsraelCampos #LatinxArt #Printmaking #MesoamericanArt #MexicanMuralists #PoliticalArt #LosAngelesArt #ContemporaryArt #WhatsMyThesisPodcast #CharlieJamesGallery #JavierProenza

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles–based artist Jackie Castillo, whose practice transforms the overlooked landscapes of Southern California into sculptural, spatial interventions that challenge how we see, inhabit, and remember place.

Born and raised in working-class neighborhoods of Orange County, Castillo’s perspective is deeply rooted in the lived realities of the region—its immigrant histories, economic divides, and the architectural patchwork that defines its suburbs. Trained as a film-based photographer, she has evolved her practice to merge photography, sculpture, and installation, creating works that slow the act of looking and demand sustained engagement. Her use of reclaimed materials and references to site-specific histories reframes the photographic image as an object in dialogue with its environment.

Castillo traces her influences to classic cinema, the New Topographics photographers, and the conceptual rigor she developed in community college and at UCLA. Through these intersecting frameworks, she examines the formal language of geometry, light, and tonality while embedding questions of class, labor, and urban change. From photographing the quiet interventions of working-class residents in limited outdoor spaces, to producing large-scale installations that reference architecture, demolition, and construction, Castillo captures the poetics of transition—whether in a falling roof shingle or the shifting demographics of a neighborhood.

The conversation traverses the sensory memory of California light, the politics of housing and displacement, and the role of critique in art education. Castillo speaks candidly about her commitment to making the work she wants without bending to external pressures, and the importance of artist-to-artist support networks in sustaining a creative practice.

Her current exhibition, The Return, is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through August 31, with additional work featured in the group show Back to the Earth at Roberts Projects.

Discover how Jackie Castillo transforms the overlooked corners of Southern California into a visual language of place, memory, and resistance.

 

Listen now on:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Follow the artist:
Instagram: [@jackiecastillo]
More at: ICA LA

Keywords for SEO: Jackie Castillo artist, Jackie Castillo ICA LA, Southern California photography, working class art, Los Angeles artist interview, New Topographics influence, site-specific installation, contemporary sculpture, California light in art, art and gentrification, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Roberts Projects.

This week on What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by Ann Shi, a nomadic curator and founder of a poco art collective, whose deeply intuitive curatorial practice bridges Chinese literati aesthetics, feminist mysticism, and contemporary Asian diasporic identity. With roots in China, academic training in Oxford and at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and early career experience on Wall Street, Ann’s nonlinear path defies institutional expectations, illuminating how curating can become both an embodied ritual and an act of cultural translation.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Ann reflects on growing up as the daughter of a classical inkwash painter and an opera singer, both devoted Buddhist practitioners who observed the Five Precepts, embodying compassion and discipline in daily life—a grounding that continues to shape how calligraphy, voice, and ritual manifest in her exhibitions. Drawing on her time as Associate Curator at Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies, she reflects on how oral histories and immigrant archives shaped her curatorial voice and informed her efforts to platform Asian art beyond the Western gaze.

Together, Ann and Javier unpack the tension between authenticity and market sustainability, the legacy of the literati tradition in Chinese art, and the complicated dynamics of Asian representation within museum and gallery systems. They also explore Ann’s use of feng shui, the five elements, and feminine archetypes—like the goddess Nüwa—as curatorial frameworks that honor the unseen and elevate spiritual intuition over spectacle.

The episode closes with a discussion of “Nüwa’s Garden: A Summer Offering in Clay, Fire, and Water,” Ann’s recent show at Charles Arnoldi Studio in Venice Beach, and its irreverent, ritual-infused closing celebration featuring live performances and feminist mythologies.

Topics Discussed:

• Asian art history beyond Western institutional frameworks
• Literati aesthetics and connoisseurship in Chinese painting
• Feminist mysticism, feng shui, and the unseen in exhibition design
• Spiritual embodiment and curating as a ritual practice
• Challenges of art market sustainability and cultural authenticity
• The evolution of ink-on-paper and gendered aesthetics in East Asian art
• Intersections of performance, memory, and oral history
• a poco art collective’s programming and community

Follow Ann Shi:
a poco art collective – @a.poco.art.collective
Personal account – @annonymous_cynist

🎧 Listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

In this resonant episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist and educator Kim Garcia joins host Javier Proenza for a layered conversation about memory, community, and the personal and political frameworks that shape diasporic identity. Garcia, whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, and community-based collaboration, reflects on her evolving relationship to artmaking—from early experiments in artist-run residencies to recent work that channels intergenerational trauma, familial mythology, and the slow grief of dementia.

Raised in San Diego and based in Los Angeles, Garcia traces her trajectory through California’s UC system, from UCSD to a transformative MFA at UC Irvine. Her sculptural installations—once flamboyant and cartoonish in scale—have given way to more introspective, materially restrained works, driven by the shifting health of her aging parents. A recent series based on her mother’s ever-changing retellings of ancestral folklore evolves into a meditation on storytelling as a haze: unstable, affective, and resistant to conquest. In new work, she confronts her father's long-term cognitive decline following a near-death experience, positioning art as a form of both documentation and private processing.

The conversation moves fluidly through Garcia’s participation in Gallery After Hours (a collaborative curatorial experiment with Amy MacKay), reflections on her return to the Philippines after 24 years, and the psychic legacies of Spanish and American imperialism embedded in Filipino identity. Garcia speaks candidly about her family’s pursuit of Spanish ancestry as a means of aspirational assimilation and the radical shift in consciousness that comes from recontextualizing that lineage within histories of violence and extraction.

With poetic clarity and humility, Garcia frames her work as a refusal of mastery—an intuitive archive that honors contradiction, transformation, and the limits of language. This is an episode about the power of not knowing, and about what it means to hold grief, resistance, and joy in the same gesture.

Topics Covered:

• Intergenerational storytelling and trauma
• Dementia, caregiving, and creative mourning
• Artist-run initiatives and sustainable curation
• Colonial identity in the Filipino diaspora
• Sculpture as performance and interdependency
• The political stakes of abstraction and refusal

Featured Projects and Mentions:

• Gallery After Hours, co-run with Amy MacKay
• Current group exhibition, The Endless Forever at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
• Upcoming two-person show at DMST Atelier with artist Frannie Hemmelgarn (October 4)
• Ten-year anniversary celebration with Amy MacKay (July 19)

 

Follow Kim Garcia:
📸 Instagram: @kimwantscoffee

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#KimGarcia #FilipinoArtists #DiasporaArt #IntergenerationalTrauma #DementiaCare #ArtistRunSpace #Sculpture #IntuitiveArchive #WhatsMyThesisPodcast #JavierProenza

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by artist Lauren Goldenberg Longoria for a conversation that traverses personal memory, studio practice, and the tender labor of transformation. Known for her materially rich works that fuse paper, performance, and poetic intuition, Goldenberg Longoria speaks candidly about the healing logic of her process—and the quiet revolutions that can occur through repetition, care, and tactility.

Trained in traditional printmaking and now immersed in the world of handmade paper, Goldenberg Longoria discusses how she builds meaning through destruction—tearing and pulping paper from past works, using the remnants to seed new ones. Her practice becomes a kind of emotional composting: nothing is discarded, everything is metabolized. Whether she’s embedding hair into a fresh sheet of paper or excavating the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, her work investigates how memory and material collapse into one another.

Throughout the episode, Goldenberg Longoria shares stories of childhood, loss, and creative perseverance, always returning to the primacy of the hand. From squishing “gross things” as a kid to the meditative choreography of the studio, she makes a compelling case for process as a form of knowing—and for art as a space where grief can be held, rather than solved.

This episode offers a rare look at how artists turn vulnerability into methodology, and how even the most fragile materials can carry a resilient kind of weight.

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🔗 Follow Lauren Goldenberg Longoria: @laurengoldenberglongoria
🎧 Listen on all platforms: whatsmythesis.com
🎥 Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@whatsmythesis
❤️ Support on Patreon: patreon.com/whatsmythesis

#HandmadePaper #ContemporaryArt #LaurenGoldenbergLongoria #WhatsMyThesis #MaterialityInArt #ArtAndGrief #PaperArt #ProcessBasedArt #EmotionalLabor #TactileArt

In this candid and moving conversation, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles-based artist Dena Novak, whose sculptural paintings and ceramics challenge the rigid codes of minimalism through what she calls “aggressive feminism.” Drawing from a rich personal archive of experience—one shaped by Orthodox Judaism, motherhood, neurodivergence, and trauma—Novak’s work reimagines historically male-dominated art historical tropes with unapologetic sensuality and material intensity.

A recent recipient of the Simon Gad Foundation Award and an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, Novak shares how a life-altering diagnosis of autism at age 50 reshaped her understanding of herself, her past, and her artistic practice. Her tactile impasto paintings, often described as “candy-colored” and “irresistibly edible,” subvert the pristine aesthetic of artists like John McCracken, replacing “fetish finish” with riotous layers of piped oil paint. As she explains, “The first response people say when they see my work is, ‘I want to touch it. I want to smell it. I want to eat it.’”

The conversation traces Novak’s evolution from a punk activist in Chicago to a ceramicist “boxing with Pollock,” and unpacks her years spent in Orthodox communities in Israel and Los Angeles, where gendered restrictions collided with a creative urgency that could not be contained. Today, her practice is a full-throated reclamation of space—for herself, for disabled artists, and for queer, neurodivergent joy.

Upcoming exhibitions include her MFA thesis show at Otis College (September 2025) and a group exhibition will support the Simon Gad Foundation’s work with disabled artists.

Explore more:
🖼 Shrine NYC – @shrine.nyc
🎓 Otis College of Art and Design – www.otis.edu

Diana Taylor: A practice where research and materiality meet.
Presented by What's My Thesis? in partnership with DON’T LOOK Projects

In this illuminating live conversation recorded at DON’T LOOK Projects, UK-based artist Diana Taylor joins host Javier Proenza (What’s My Thesis?) for a deeply textured discussion around her first solo show in the United States, Flotsam and Jetsam. Organized by DON’T LOOK Projects in association with SLQS Gallery in London, the exhibition draws on Taylor’s research-intensive practice, exploring time through the fusion of research and materiality. Her work employs a remix logic, echoing Sigmar Polke's 1980s period.

Currently in a short-term fellowship at The Huntington, Taylor speaks about her practice-based research. Her PhD was in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, where she focused on how historical craft, screen-printing, and reproducibility inform her contemporary approach to painting. With roots in both rural Wiltshire and Cyprus, Taylor's early exposure to English landscape painting, tapestry, and devotional patternwork creates a foundation for her ongoing material inquiries into time, collapse, and visual culture.

The conversation explores:

• Taylor’s use of screenprinting on raw and repurposed canvas as a method of layering digital and analog imagery
• The influence of William Morris, The Divine Comedy by Gustav Doré, Sigmar Polke and 1970s suburban interiors on her visual lexicon
• A meditation on contemporaneity—the feeling of living amidst overlapping temporalities in the age of the internet
• The metaphor of Flotsam and Jetsam as a conceptual frame for image overload, cultural debris, and the residue of civilization
• Her experimental use of digital tools—zooming, pixelation, low-res 3D scanning—not to perfect, but to fail productively.
• Collapsing binaries: nature and culture, craft and tech, chaos and control, digital noise and sacred relic

Also discussed is Taylor’s current work at The Huntington, where she’s engaging with historical plant taxonomies, rare botanical prints, and Morris’s medieval utopian socialism to produce a new body of work and a forthcoming article in The Journal of William Morris Studies.

Flotsam and Jetsam is on view at DON’T LOOK Projects through August 30, 2025. Please email gallery@dontlookprojects.com to schedule a private viewing.

Listen to this episode to uncover:

• Why Taylor considers pixelation and printed crochet as relics of maternal labor and digital memory
• How screenprinting becomes a form of archaeological gesture
• The relationship between digital overstimulation and visual stillness
• Why artists might choose ruin, repetition, or failure as aesthetic strategies in a culture obsessed with optimization

Featured Institutions & Collaborators:
The Huntington Library, William Morris Gallery, DON’T LOOK Projects, SLQS Gallery, What’s My Thesis?

Episode Credits:
Hosted by Javier Proenza
Guest: Diana Taylor
Presented by DON’T LOOK Projects
Podcast: What’s My Thesis?

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🎧 Listen now and step into the layered, fragmented, hyper-contemporary world of Diana Taylor.
📍 Flotsam and Jetsam runs through August 30 at DON’T LOOK Projects, Los Angeles in association with SLQS Gallery in London.
🔗 Follow Diana on Instagram and learn more at dontlookprojects.com

#DianaTaylor #WhatsMyThesis #DontLookProjects #ContemporaryPainting #WilliamMorris #DigitalCollage #ScreenprintArt #LAArtScene #SLQSGallery #TheHuntington #ArtistResidency #Multitemporality #ArtPodcast #unpainting