Art Lovers Forum Podcast

This is the first Art Lovers Forum I am doing extemporaneously. I usually have a prepared introduction with a list of questions. I guess my free spirited, number 13 episode, is appropriate for the art explorer I am about to interview. Avi Ivan has traveled to 69.1 per cent of the earth studying art. The list of places he has traveled to will be published in my blog: www.digidame.com. I met Avi in South Africa. It was happenstance. He joined a group, Fountainhead Arts, that Eliot and I were touring with. Everyone in the group was fascinated by Avi’s travels so I wanted him to tell us more on this podcast. Welcome Avi.
 
 
 

Marla Rice founded the Rice Polak Gallery in 1992 and holds a prominent place in Provincetown, Massachusetts as one of the primary venues for contemporary art. The gallery represents a select group of emerging and established artists whose work is both contemporary and contemplative. 
 
The philosophy of the Rice Polak Gallery is marked by a spirit of collaboration and exploration. The diverse media in the gallery’s program are united by the consistent presentation of challenging and thoughtful work. These works are often motivated by an interest in questioning established boundaries.
 
Marla is challenged and excited by her artists, whose works are ever changing, often humorous, sometimes political and always stimulating. Her desire to share that challenge and excitement is what keeps Marla committed to her artists and to the public.
 
Rice Polak Gallery
430 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA 02657 
ricepolakgallery.com
508-487-1052  
Marla Rice Director, Cell: 508-237-5499

Raymond Elman is an American artist, publisher, editor, and writer. While he has had a very successful career as an artist, we are talking to him today about why he created an online video art publication platform which has already featured (500) video conversations with some of the most interesting and accomplished people from the art world. The videos are produced in short segments so that you immediately get right to the point of the conversation. The production will captivate you.
First called Inspicio in 2014, its name was changed to ArtSpeak last year. It was easier to pronounce and remember. 
ArtSpeak is sponsored by the Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media in The College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University in Miami.
Ray earned two degrees, a BS (1967) and an MBA (1968) from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.  While attending UPenn, Ray took all of the studio art courses he could schedule. After graduating from Penn, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where he took studio art courses at New York University (NYU) and met his mentor Knox Martin (1923-2022).  Martin motivated Ray to “give up his day job” and move to the Provincetown art colony.
When Ray was living in the Provincetown area on the northern tip of Cape Cod from 1970 to 2012, he co-founded Provincetown Arts magazine with Christopher Busa in 1985.  The magazine is still being published today.

Jayda Knight (Aka Flying Knight) is a visual & street artist known for her idiosyncratic Neo-Deco Symbolist art. Jayda received a BFA & BArch from Rhode Island School of Design. She worked with Eugene Lee in set design for Saturday Night Live and off-Broadway shows in New York which influenced her creative approach.
 
Jayda explores pattern both as a metaphor as well as a visual to create narratives inspired by contemporary topics. Jayda draws from quotidien, societal, sexual and personal subject matter to create a descriptive storytelling delivered in the form of symbolic patterns. 
 
An underlying darker sub-text inherently lingers-this psychology in her work is often only accessible to the careful viewer, but playfully veiled behind a Decorative Arts approach. The intentional contrast between the surface and the deep are part of what makes her work both accessible and challenging. This combined narrative in her work juxtaposed with a nostalgic flair, is often described as a visual form of the Historic-present.
 
Jayda has collaborated with several institutions including the Miami City Ballet, Oolite Arts, Lincoln Road Improvement District and Timeout and is a grant recipient from The Gottlieb Foundation.
 

I met Yasue Maetake about three months ago when gallerist Nina Johnson of Miami exhibited Yasue stunning and very unique tabletop sculptures. I walked into the exhibit and immediately thought I must own one of these amazing objects because they represented findings from the earth. I did buy one and I love looking at this piece called—-Avian— it’s made up of hand-blown glass, stained found tree branches, casters aluminum seashells, animal bones, fossils, and epoxy resin.Yasue is a Tokyo-born artist living and working in New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad including at Puerto Rico, The Netherlands, Taiwan, and the United States.Yasue’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, FlashArt, and others. She was recently named as one of “20 international women advancing the field of sculpture” by Artsy. Yasue’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine. She was also a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Sculpture and an artist residency in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana with a research grant from the Agency for Japanese Cultural Affairs. Yasue earned her MFA from Columbia University in New York.

Born and raised in Miami, Alex Nuñez is a Cuban-American mixed-media painter. She is not only a friend of mine, but Eliot and I collect her work. We met her at the Perez Museum 15 years ago when she gave an impromptu speech about an artist a group of us were examining. She was so articulate and so thorough that we all fell in love with her. She received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, and was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship. Solo shows include Marianne Boesky, New York, and Club Gallery, Miami. Her works have been exhibited in Museo del Barrio New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.
Nuñez is the host and producer of the “Sunday Painter” (https://alexnunez.net/Sunday-Painter) podcast on Jolt Radio, now in its seventh year of production, and a recipient of The Warhol Foundation’s Wavemaker Grant. She has been reviewed and published in The New York Times, Artforum, CNN, Art Nexus, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, W Magazine, and The Observer.

Lucia Giudice is the founder of New York City based Puccio Fine Art. She is also a dear friend of mine. We lived in the same upper East side coop for many years, and she was the first gallerist I became close to. I used to visit her gallery on East 63rd all the time. Now she sells exclusively online.
She has an educational background in Political Science and Art History, and several decade’s worth of experience in the art world.   Most importantly as the daughter of Italian Immigrants and niece of sculptor Paul Puccio; she has always been involved with art, artists, galleries, art shows, foundries, studios and workshops.  Puccio Fine Art was established in 2003 out of a love for art collecting and need for space to showcase works. Her focus is in the secondary market, by masters such as Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Lichtenstein, Stella, Rosenquist and Matisse. She has been a member of the International Fine Art Appraisers, the Association of Women Art Dealers and previously served on the Board of the Italian Welfare League.

 
Welcome to Art lovers Forum.  Today we are going to talk about the popularity of erotic art. My girlfriend, Gladys Garrote has been working in this area for art for quite a while. She is a curator, and art historian, originally from Havana, Cuba, currently based in Miami. From 2014 to 2022, she worked as a professor at Havana University, where she taught courses on Art Appreciation, Contemporary Art Market, and Art History. Holding a master's degree in art history with a focus on the Contemporary art market.  
 
Garrote delves into topics such as feminism, cultural memory, the rewriting of history, eroticism, and sexuality, exploring their interconnections with technology, culture, history, and politics.
 
During 2020-2022, Gladys led the NFT Art Movement in Havana, Cuba, helping to onboard more than 100 artists, contributing to creating a new economic model for the arts in the country. 
 
She is the co-founder of ClitSplash, an all-female curatorial collective aimed at balancing gender representation in the cryptoart realm while bringing sound curatorship and intellectual thinking to it. With a focus on inclusive representation, Garrote has integrated her expertise in erotic art into ClitSplash's endeavors. She is the co-curator and co-founder of The Erotika Biennale, a decentralized erotic experience that integrates visual arts and cultural practices. The first edition will take place throughout Miami during the month of February in partnership with The Museum of Sex and the World Erotic Art Museum.
 
 

Gabrielle Vitollo, better known as Gabo, takes us on the adventures of being an up-and-coming artist. She talks about her everyday life and what it takes creating art that an artist can be proud of. At the present time Gabo is most famous for her tabletop sculptures. Art collectors love them because they are completely different from anything they have ever owned. 
The sculptures make a very daring statement every-time you see them. They also reflect the collector’s confidence to own something that is very different than everyone else. Gabo says the three-dimensional metal sculptures question the viewer's conventional definitions of space, architecture, and form to challenge the status quo.  Gabo also focuses on abstract painting, sculpture, printmaking, and collage to “create a multi-dimensional experience that resists categorization and breaks boundaries.”
She received her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2012) and her MFA in Studio Art from New York University Steinhardt (2017) where Gabo studied multi-disciplinary techniques that hybridized traditional and digital media. In 2018, Gabo relocated to Berlin, Germany on a Fulbright Research Grant for Painting & Printmaking to research Albrecht Dürer’s dynamic printmaking compositions for their paintings. In 2022, Gabo returned to Brooklyn, NY.
Gabo’s recent awards also include a DAAD Scholarship, a Martin Wong Scholarship, two YoungArts Microgrants, and two Elizabeth Greenshields Grants. Vitollo’s work has been exhibited at Fredericks & Freiser, Friedhof Museum Berlin, the Knockdown Center, 80WSE Gallery, Miami’s Margulies Collection, Kunstpunkt Berlin, and Iceland’s Listasafn Arnesinga Art Museum. Public works include a sculpture which was installed at Walt M. Shammel Community Garden in Brooklyn, NY and made possible through NYC Parks. Vitollo was an artist in residence at Yaddo, Baccarat Crystal Factory, Fountainhead, and the YoungARTS Olafur Eliasson Workshop filmed by HBO. 
Gabo is also an adjunct painting and drawing faculty member at Montclair State University and Pratt Institute.

Welcome to Art Lovers Forum.  If you want to start collecting art, or you want to know what collectors have learned over the years, put aside one hour to listen to the advice of Jane Wesman. You will not find a better master class anywhere that will give you the ins and outs of collecting. I was very fortunate to secure this interview.
 
Jane has been successfully collecting art since the 1980s when New York’s East Village art world was in full swing.  Artists like Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, and many others were making waves and launching their careers. And Jane was part of the scene.
 
Today, Jane and her husband, Donald Savelson, continue to be deeply engaged in the world of contemporary art. 
 
They are supporters of many non-profit art organizations and avid collectors of work by new and emerging artists. They believe there is much more to art than its monetary value. Art is an immersive experience. As Jane says, “Art is about everything. It opens up new ways of thinking about the human condition and what is meaningful in life.” 
 
In addition to underwriting a program at Simmons University for students seeking careers in arts management as well as helping to fund various museum exhibitions and the Miami-based artists residency Fountainhead Arts, Jane is passionate about introducing people to the world of collecting new and emerging artists. 
 
Aside from her enthusiasm for art, Jane is an expert in public relations and marketing. She is the president of the New York-based PR agency that bears her name, Jane Wesman Public Relations, Inc. a leader in book promotion. She is a determined, career-focused woman who has served as president of the New York City chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and as program director of ArtTable. She is currently an active Board member of the Women’s Media Group, overseeing the organization’s programming.  She and her husband divide their time between New York and Miami.