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 touring 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

Today, we introduce Cannupa Hanska Luger, an American artist born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, who now lives and works outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Our conversation reveals a few of the ways Cannupa acts on his deep respect for heritage and community, belief in ritual and remembrance, and fascination with science fiction and mythology. The artist shares the stories behind his mystical re-creation of Midéegaadi, a traditional buffalo dance he filmed against a green screen to show in exhibition spaces, on digital billboards, and even in a virtual reality app.  The dance is one strand of Future Ancestral Technologies, a new myth that Cannupa has been weaving since 2015. His interrelated projects reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population. As Cannupa builds a framework for understanding, respecting and sharing indigeneity in the 21st century, he holds out hope for our collective future. Production

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

Today’s episode is a poetic epilogue to the nine Student Edition stories we produced in 2020 with university students from the United States and Canada. The students who produced this fresh story are from Chișinău, capital city of the Republic of Moldova. The tiny Eastern European country declared its independence from the Soviet Union not so long ago, in 1991.    In spring 2025, Fresh Art International’s Cathy Byrd introduced podcasting to locals during a 3-day program. They recorded voices and sounds for stories about the independent art scene inside the state-owned architectural monument they call home.   At the time of our workshop, the venue was hosting a collection of displays and public conversations exploring the impact of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Emerging podcasters Olga Raileanu, Bogdan Glavan, and Daniel Boldurat sat down with local photographer Mihail Calarașan, Ukrainian artist KAR, and sociologist Vitalie Sprînceană to talk about the role of art in times of war.   Note: The original

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.   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 energiz

How does your art engage the world? How do you speak to the issues and ideas of our time? What do you hope others will remember about your life, your beliefs, your work? The exhibition Teresita Fernandez / Robert Smithson, SITE Santa Fe opens a portal for us to consider our place in the landscape and explore the legacy of two significant artists. Their vibrant visual exchange feels both time sensitive and timeless. This dialogue with artist Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, deepens our appreciation of resonant and divergent perspectives. Embracing change, they show us the way to and through a few of the entanglements that come with being an artist and being human.  Host: Cathy Byrd Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Special Audio featured with permission, as follows: Recordings on site at Spiral Jetty, Salt Lake, Utah, 2013, courtesy Anamnesis Audio.  Extracts from Teresita Fernández, Cuajaní (2024), directed by Teresita Fernández and Juan Carlos Alom; 16mm

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 R

In this episode, we consider the role that teaching artists play in shaping the art school experience. How does an artist in academia cultivate expressive opportunities for students while making time to deepen their own creative practice?  New Orleans based artist Cristina Molina invites us to consider this challenging dynamic at the art school where she teaches—Southeastern Louisiana University's Department of Visual Art and Design. Research and observation, architecture and the environment, memory and motherhood, music and movies, intuition and uncertainty are a few of the forces that drive the artmaking we discover at the edge of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Voices, in Order of Appearance: Garima Thakur, Kate Baczeski, Luisa Hernández, Vanessa Centeno, Dale Newkirk, Tom Walton, Ben Diller, Eric Huckabee, Lily Brooks, Rachel Harmeyer, Cristina Molina Sound Design: Patrick Davis, with Anamnesis Audio Special Audio: Garima Thakur, Bioscope, 2022; Luisa Hernández, What Matters Now, 2023; Chad Serhal, The Great Amer

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

Today, we introduce a few of the artists and activists energizing the 2023 Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival in Kyrgyzstan. They give voice to the issues, ideas, and intentions that shape their truly creative approaches to mitigate pollution. Their projects illuminate the potential for artists everywhere to build community and drive sustainable solutions to our global environmental crisis.  From the city of Bishkek to the settlement of Altyn Kazyk, we discover myriad ways that socially engaged artists encourage awareness and action. They bring us together from around the world to experience, understand, and create true moments of beauty and meaning—giving us hope for a future that holds clean air, land, and water. Acknowledgement: In Fall 2023, Cathy Byrd recorded the voices in this episode during her residency with CEC ArtsLink in Central Asia. Sound Design and Engineering: Anamnesis Audio Featured Voices: Sto Len, Ronja Roemmelt, Mishiko Solakauri, Begimai Zhunusova, Ellen Harvey, Bermet Borubaeva, Aimeer

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? 

In February 2023, we travel to the United 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.    One afternoon, we wander through Sharjah’s heritage area to Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, the personal residence of a local pearl merchant and his family from the mid-19th century until the 1970s. In a small courtyard outside his multi chambered installation, we meet artist Shiraz Bayjoo to talk about how his project engages history—a pervasive theme in this Biennial.   The artist shares the storied past of the Indian Ocean and the island archipelagos of Mauritius and Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Keep listening to hear the orientalist tropes that he disrupts in Searching for Libertalia, a project that recovers the history of a purported pirate colony founded in the

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

In 2022, members and guests of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) travel from around the world to Kentucky, in the Appalachian region of the United States. The uninitiated might consider this a remote context for conversations around international contemporary art. Instead, we find Appalachia a nuanced cultural and geographic space.   The third episode in our IKT Kentucky series explores the evolving and inclusive concept of “Global Appalachia” presented during IKT’s 2022 gathering. Generations of curators, poets, and artists from a world of cultures have found their way across time and space to build communities in this region. Here and now, Global Appalachia is where their 21st century contemporaries continue to shape a boundless future, with a diverse array of perspectives on the meaning of home and tradition.   Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Music:  Delving the Deep by BlueDot Sessions,  Gettie's Wash by Blue Dot Sessions, Tan Mountain by Blue Dot Sessions   Voices, in orde

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 “Fro

With six independent curators, we explore a growing trend in the field of contemporary art. We discover that the covid epidemic and a global economic recession have not weakened their resolve to navigate the field on their own terms. Viewing challenges as opportunities, these women are channeling their creative freedom into projects that maximize resources and engage new communities. What sparked this story: In September 2022, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art welcomed more than 40 new members during IKT’s annual Congress in Kentucky. Most are independent curators. Listen to find out what motivated this shift. Featuring: Monique Long, Juste Kostikovaite, Lindsey Cummins, Amethyst Rey Beaver, Sarah Burney, Claire Schneider Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio Music: Danver County by Blue Dot Sessions   Related Episodes: International Curators Champion Creative Resilience, Curators Consider Climate Change, Curating in a Time of Global Change Related Links: International Association of Curat

“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

“In a way, I've always been working on the edge of both a larger dominant society engagement and a deep engagement with my communities. My focus is really digging deep into blackness.” Andrea Fatona, 2021   Toronto-based curator and scholar Andrea Fatona has been addressing institutionalized racism on her own terms since the 1990s. Our conversations across time reveal the depth of her commitment to making visible the full spectrum of Black culture in Canada. Engaging with Black communities to build an online repository while addressing algorithmic injustice, she and her collaborators are illuminating the work of Black Canadian cultural producers on the global stage.   Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio  Special Audio: Hogan’s Alley (1994), courtesy Vivo Media Arts, Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden and Whitewash (2016), Nadine Valcin, courtesy the artist   Related Episodes: The Awakening, New Point of View at the Venice Art Biennale   Related Links: The State of Blackness, Andrea Fatona/OCADU, Vivo M

With American-born artist Mary Mattingly, we delve into her collaborative environmental interventions over time. We remember the 2015 Havana Biennial when rainwater nourished Pull, a pair of geodesic dome eco-systems through which she engaged locals. We follow her rising interest in water to Swale, a co-created edible landscape on a barge that navigated New York City’s waterways, offering free fresh food to visitors when docked at public piers. And we contemplate the Year of Public Water that Mattingly launched with More Art in 2020. Emblematic of water issues that challenge public health the world over, the New York City story reminds us that clean water is a shared responsibility—a basic human right that we must invest in and protect.    Related Episodes: The Awakening, Mary Mattingly on Human Relationships with Nature, Topical Playlist: Sustainability and the Environment    Related Links: Mary Mattingly, Pull, Swale, Public Water, More Art Mary Mattingly is a visual artist based in New York City.

Today’s story takes place at the intersection of art and the First Amendment. This vital element of the United States Constitution protects our right to freedom of expression, by prohibiting lawmakers from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.    Artist Sheryl Oring took up this cause célèbre in 2004. In conversations across time, we trace her synthesis of art and free speech in a public performance project that quite naturally, has no end in sight. As long as there is democracy in the United States, there will be opportunities to voice opinions about the U.S. presidency, about social justice, the economy, public health, globalization, climate change, education, and more.    What would YOU wish to say to the U.S. President? Let us know on Instagram: @freshartintl #iwishtosay   Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, 2004; Sheryl Oring at Washington and Lee University, 2018; I Wish to Say with University of Michigan and Wayne S