Conversation with Artist Monica Canilao

In the heart of Oakland, California, Monica Canilao spends her days stitching, painting, printing, and breathing life into the refuse that dominates our time and place. Moving across media, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone, Canilao makes a delicate visual record of the personal and communal. She received a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and has shown in galleries, community spaces, abandoned places and … worldwide. 

"Art is a way to communicate and engage with others transcending distance, time, or place. My images and installations, like the communities and experiences they draw upon, become symbiotic. My life and art are modes of intentional living borrowing from native traditions and contemporary subcultures. You take care of one another. You draw strength and nourishment from your roots. You use and appreciate what you have. "- Monica Canilao

Here is the conversation with the Monica Canilao:

Subscribe to Art Beat Conversations on iTunes HERE and download this episode

Music on this episode selected from the band D Numbers album III

More from the artist: 

"The only constant in my life has been that I've always wanted to be creating, building, drawing, altering.  My art practice is a way to generate a personal and living history. My community and collaborators, my roots and their nearly lost traditions, my neighborhood and its trash piles are all integral, necessary parts of my life and art. The way I go through the world, the beauty of people’s effort throughout time, and their subsequent decay end up in my pieces. I look as much to the loving meticulousness of handicrafts as to the techniques of high art. Taking something as ordinary as wood pulp or cloth and passing thread through it can make common things beautiful and useful." - Monica Canilao

Monica Canilao and her collaborative works with artist SWOON

Monica Canilao and her work with The Painted Desert Project

Monica Canilao, Siren, 2014, for Mimicry. Mixed media, tea bags, lace, collaged paper and thread on found file folder and vintage pin up

Sedna of the North. A Collaborative work featured in Monica Canilao's Born From Ruins exhibition

Connect further with Monica Canilao and her work through her WEBSITE, TUMBLR or INTSTAGRAM

Making the Film: This Is A Stereotype

Art Beat Conversations 20th Episode!!!!

Thank you to all the participating artists and listeners for your continued support for this project! 

The format get's shifted a bit for this celebratory episode marking Art Beat Conversations 20th Episode! Listen in on a conversation from the creators of This Is A Stereotype, an artistic narrative film project about possible causes and effects surrounding Indigenous identity. And as a special bonus for this episode, After the conversation, the podcast will feature the audio from the film. 

One of a kind prints were made by BAD ART printing in South Dakota for This Is A Stereotype project. 

Here is the conversation with the creators of This Is A Stereotype:

Subscribe to Art Beat Conversations on iTunes HERE and download this episode

More about the project This Is A Stereotype:

This Is A Stereotype is a film motivated from an exhibition by artistCannupa Hanska Luger and further inspired by the filmmaker Dylan McLaughlin and creative collaborator Ginger Dunnill.

Luger's body of work, Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in 2013. This exhibition used sculpture and sound to address several preconceived notions of Native Americans supported by popular culture. At the end of his exhibition, Luger 'let go' of the ceramic boom-box vessels which embodied various Native American stereotypes, destroying them as a form of performance activism.

Luger felt it would be interesting to allow further dialogue through the medium of film, and began to work with McLaughlin and Dunnill on forming an additional body of work that would socially engage the public in an artistic narrative about possible causes and effects surrounding Indigenous identity. After receiving full funding for the project through Kickstarter, This Is A Stereotype has graduated into it's own unique body of work created collectively by Luger, McLaughlin and Dunnill.

The project is compiled of historical footage sourced from the Archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts "Native American Video Tape Archive, 1976" juxtaposed with imagery and interviews from contemporary artists, scholars and activists from across the United States. This Is A Stereotype invites the viewer to become an active participant in society, thinking critically when making decisions regarding culture and appropriation.

The idea behind the film is to invite the audience to ask their own questions, not to simply understand the information they view about Native identity and stereotypes in this film, but to utilize that information and become active participants in society, thinking critically when making decisions regarding culture and appropriation. We hope to inspire people to seek out their own answers.

Watch the film HERE:

This Is A Stereotype is an artistic narrative about the possible causes and effects surrounding Indigenous identity with the intention to socially engage the public. The project is compiled of historical footage sourced from the Archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ "Native American Video Tape Archive, 1976” juxtaposed with imagery and interviews from contemporary artists, scholars, and activists from across the United States. This Is A Stereotype invites the viewer to become an active participant in society, thinking critically when making decisions regarding culture and appropriation. Learn more about the project at: www.thisisastereotype.com This film is not for profit. Free to stream and download for all uses. Click the download link below for options.

Learn more about the project at: www.thisisastereotype.com

Join the conversation on the This Is A Stereotype FACEBOOK PAGE

a Special thanks to BAD ART printing who created the limited edition print work for This Is A Stereotype!

Conversation with Artist Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star is a visual artist who has worked within and between the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, performance and design. Red Star’s work layers influences drawn from her tribal background (Crow), daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined.

Indian Summer. Four Seasons. Wendy Red Star 2006

Here is the conversation with Wendy Red Star:

Subscribe to Art Beat Conversations on iTunes HERE and download this episode

Music in this episode from Novelle Vague

More about the Artist:

Through Red Star's photographs and sculpture new universes are built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low with their own language of symbols created from such seemingly disparate sites as HUD houses, rez cars, three legged dogs, powwow culture, proliferative indigenous commoditization, and Red Star's personal collection of memories growing up as a half-breed on the Crow Indian reservation. 

The work represents an insider/outsider view that is wrath with complexity and contradiction, its most salient attributes. Red Star's unruly approach examines a cross section of American cultures and their very consumption while also being a meditation on her own identity. Exploring the intersection between life on the reservation and the world outside of that environment. Red Star thinks of herself as a cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.

find out more about the work of Wendy Red Star on her WEBSITE.

White Squaw series. Wendy Red Star 2014

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Medicine Crow Ledger Drawing Zoo Softies 2014

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1880 Crow Peace Delegation Individual Portraits

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Circling the camp series. Wend Red Star

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Conversation with Artist and Athlete Kimi Werner

Kimi Werner is not only an accomplished water-woman, but she is also a successful artist and chef and is currently traveling the world as an Ambassador for Patagonia. 

"Going diving feels like going home, and I hope to cherish it for the rest of my life." -Kimi Werner

Kimi is currently on a quest to learn as much as possible from the simplicity and beauty of the ocean and the people who respect it throughout the world. In this episode we hear Kimi's journey, her challenges and inspirations, and her incredible work and activism through simplicity, community building and care for the environment. 

Here is the conversation with Kimi Werner:

Subscribe to Art Beat Conversations on iTunes HERE and download this episode

More about the artist:

Kimi grew up on Maui, Hawaii where her father was a dedicated free-diver. With a craving for the simple life, Kimi followed in her dad’s footsteps, training to become one of the top divers in the nation and winning a U.S. National Spearfishing Championship in 2008.

• Below is a short film titled Variables, where Patagonia ambassador Kimi Werner strives to find her place in the ecosystem. She treads the line between predator and prey - eventually discovering balance in an unlikely place.

In Variables, Patagonia ambassador Kimi Werner strives to find her place in the ecosystem. She treads the line between predator and prey - eventually discovering balance in an unlikely place. For more from Kimi and our other Patagonia ambassadors, see patagonia.com/surfblog.

Patagonia Ambassador

Kimi Werner Art

Photo Credits: Allen Carrasco & Courtesy of Jake Marote, Chris Wade, Justin Turkowski

Music featured in this episode by: David Kahiapo, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, Three Houses Down, Sonny Chillingworth, Hapa, Keola Beamer and Justin Young.

Conversation with Artist and Writer Miyuki Baker

"One of the main reasons why I make art is because I seek to create new perspectives and ways of looking at the world. My work is predominantly centered on my various identities—queer, Japanese, Hapa, environmentalist, feminist, etc.—each of which suggests specific imagery and narratives to turn mundane everyday objects into unexpected and beautiful art.  I hope my art will invite intellectual, emotional and physical participation from the viewer." -Miyuki Baker

Miyuki Baker is a freelance artist, journalist, yoga and meditation teacher, barber, translator, seamstress, lecturer and performer.  

Cover Image from one of Miyuki Baker’s zines. Available on queerscribe.com 

Here is the conversation with Miyuki Baker:

Subscribe to Art Beat Conversations on iTunes HERE and download this episode

More about the artist:

Miyuki Baker is a resident of the place where circles overlap. As a queer, multi-racial/lingual female mixed-media artist, she is happiest when working with people who embrace intersectionality. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 2012, where she was involved in queer Asian activism and making art, she received the Watson Fellowship to travel the world in search of queer artists and activists and made 8 zines highlighting what she learned under her publishing house Queer Scribe Productions. 

Get Miyuki's most recent Zine 'Life Right Now' HERE

Connect further with Miyuki: 

www.estellamiyukibaker.com

www.heymiyuki.wordpress.com

www.queerscribe.com 

www.etsy.com/shop/QueerScribe

www.asiangayandproud.wordpress.com