Art Restart

The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts
  • 5.0 (14)
  • PERFORMING ARTS
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

Host Pier Carlo Talenti interviews artists who – whatever they make, wherever they work – are shaking up the status quo in their fields and their communities. Art Restart is produced by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

  1. JAN 22

    Indigenous Americas, Indigenous Lens: Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke

    For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book by photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke, directly challenges that legacy, not by rejecting photography’s past but by radically re-centering who controls the archive, who tells the story and who the work is for. Adams, an Iñupiaq photographer based in Anchorage, and Stacke, a Brooklyn-based photographer, writer and archival researcher, approach photography less as image-making than as long-term relationship-building and storytelling. Their collaboration grew out of “The 400 Years Project,” an expansive initiative marking the anniversary of the Mayflower by foregrounding Indigenous photographers across generations, geographies and the full range of photographic practice — from 19th-century studio portraits to contemporary conceptual work. In this interview, Adams and Stacke discuss the ethical and logistical choices behind “In Light and Shadow,” the politics of archives and representation and what it means to be storytellers accountable to the people whose lives and histories they photograph. https://brianadams.photoshelter.com/index https://sarahstacke.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    30 min

  2. JAN 7

    Free Art, Real Value: The Zero Art Fair Story

    For more than a decade, conceptual artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have collaborated on sharp, often darkly funny critiques of the art world’s economic and political machinery. One of their earliest projects together, a satirical telethon staged during the Great Recession, planted a seed they later returned to: What would happen if you ran an art fair where every work of art was free? That question eventually evolved into Zero Art Fair, a real, fully functioning event that uses a radically different contract to redistribute both artworks and power within the art market. Zero Art Fair invites participating artists to place selected works into a five-year “store-to-own” agreement with collectors who take the work home at no cost. During those five years, ownership vests gradually; if a collector later decides to sell the work, the artist receives half of the sale price as well as a 10 percent resale royalty. The result is a system that clears storage, builds new relationships across class lines, and asserts one of the Fair’s core beliefs, namely that price does not equal value. So far, Dalton and Powhida have staged two editions — the first in a barn in the Hudson Valley as part of Upstate Art Weekend, the second this fall at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan — together seeding more than 400 works of contemporary art into new homes. In this interview, Dalton and Powhida explain how the Fair’s unconventional contract works, why prioritizing access for people who “need help to live with art” reshaped their second New York edition, and what kinds of unexpected relationships and ripple effects have emerged along the way. https://www.zeroartfair.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    33 min

  3. 12/10/2025

    Ariel Fristoe’s Community Theater Actually Changes Communities

    For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater, she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and neighborhood groups to spark dialogue and move people toward collective action. Out of Hand’s work is now studied and replicated across the country, in part because it offers an alternative path at a moment when many arts organizations are searching for new models. Instead of focusing on season planning or ticket sales, Ariel and her team design programs that integrate theater with data, storytelling with civic participation and performance with tangible next steps for audiences who want to make change in their communities. In this interview, Ariel reflects on how this approach emerged, how her own leadership evolved alongside it, and why she believes artists are uniquely equipped to work on the most urgent social issues of our time. She also gives a glimpse into Out of Hand’s next chapter — including a major 2026 national initiative — and shares what she’s learned about building trust, building partnerships and sustaining purpose-driven work over the long haul. https://www.outofhandtheater.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    30 min

  4. 11/26/2025

    Byron Au Yong Composes a New Kind of Leadership

    For more than two decades, composer and educator Byron Au Yong has created music that bridges performance, ritual and activism. His highly collaborative works have been presented by such varied institutions as the Seattle Symphony, BAM, the Smithsonian, the American Conservatory Theater and Nashville Opera. Among his many large-scale projects is his long partnership with writer and rapper Aaron Jafferis, with whom he created the “liberation trilogy”: “Stuck Elevator,” “The Ones” and “Activist Songbook.” Byron is also Associate Professor and Director of Arts Leadership at Seattle University, where he’s reimagining arts education as a space of equity, imagination and community. His teaching encourages artists to consider leading beyond or outside institutions and to learn from one another as collaborators in liberation. His many honors include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Building Demand for the Arts Grant and a Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. In this interview, Byron reflects on how his art and teaching are both rooted in listening, whether it’s listening through the feet to the language of trees to compose his newest work or listening deeply to students and collaborators to imagine new, more equitable forms of leadership. https://byronauyong.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    27 min

  5. 11/12/2025

    Damian Stamer Paints with Intelligence, Artificial and Human.

    Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society. Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process. In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines. https://damianstamer.com/home.html Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    28 min
  6. Inside and Outside the Box with Sherrill Roland

    10/22/2025

    Inside and Outside the Box with Sherrill Roland

    When artist Sherrill Roland returned to grad school at University of North Carolina at Greensboro after nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he found himself haunted by the invisible weight of his experience. Determined to confront how incarceration had reshaped his body, psyche and place in the world, he — with the encouragement of then-faculty member, artist Sheryl Oring — turned that burden into "The Jumpsuit Project," a performance in which he wore an orange prison uniform on campus every day for a year. The project soon expanded beyond the university to public spaces across the country, where Roland sat inside a 7-by-9-foot square of orange tape, an echo of a prison cell, and invited passersby to step inside and talk with him, transforming uncomfortable encounters into moments of shared reflection and empathy. In the years since, Roland has become one of the most prominent conceptual artists in the South, translating that raw act of endurance into a studio practice that explores the architecture of confinement, the language of data and the humanity hidden within systems of control. His work, which is now in the collections of major museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the North Carolina Museum of Art, asks how objects and numbers can embody both memory and freedom. In this interview, Roland speaks about the fear and necessity of donning the orange jumpsuit, the emotional toll of transforming personal pain into public conversation, and how his practice continues to evolve toward accessibility, dialogue and compassion.  https://www.sherrillroland.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    27 min
  7. Valuing the Invisible: Esther Hernandez on Artists’ Labor

    10/08/2025

    Valuing the Invisible: Esther Hernandez on Artists’ Labor

    In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work, to give back, to support the community, to hold the weight of healing or justice when most of us aren’t even resourced to pay our bills, let alone afford health care or rest.” She also lamented that nonprofits were, in a time of admittedly frightening fiscal precarity, leaning on underfunded artists for financial support.   Esther clearly hit a nerve with artists everywhere, and her rants amassed thousands of views and messages of commiseration and support. She can also rant with some authority because not only is she an artist, but she has also worked in the arts nonprofits sector. A self-taught maker of stop-motion animation and movable or mechanized sculptures and zoetropes, she is currently Chief Curator at Union Hall, a six-year-old nonprofit in Denver, CO that provides support and professional development to emerging artists as well as curators. In this interview, Esther reflects on the inequities that drove her to speak out and on how her posts sparked broader conversations about the invisible labor of artists. She also shares how her dual perspective as both artist and curator informs her ideas for more sustainable funding models and healthier creative practices. https://www.instagram.com/esther.hz/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxcWHfyhpb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxdIksyoRh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    29 min
  8. Indigenous Ingenuity in Architecture: Wanda Dalla Costa

    09/24/2025

    Indigenous Ingenuity in Architecture: Wanda Dalla Costa

    Wanda Dalla Costa, a proud member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, has built a groundbreaking career by weaving Indigenous knowledge systems into contemporary design. As the first First Nations woman to become a licensed architect in Canada, she is Principal and Founder of Tawaw Architecture Collective, which has offices in Calgary and Phoenix. Through her leadership, Tawaw has shaped cultural, civic and educational projects across North America, from Calgary’s Arts Commons Transformation to Toronto’s David Crombie Park Revitalization. Her work is defined by deep engagement with communities. Over the past two decades, she and her team have conducted hundreds of sessions in dozens of communities, ensuring that every project reflects the lived experiences, cultural practices, and aspirations of the people it serves. At Arizona State University, where she is a professor and directs the Indigenous Design Collaborative, she mentors emerging Indigenous architects and demonstrates how architecture can carry forward cultural continuity while also addressing the urgent realities of climate change. In this interview, Dalla Costa discusses how she is redefining what it means to design “in a good way,” what she has learned from decades of listening to elders, youth and knowledge-keepers and how Indigenous ingenuity offers crucial lessons for building in a rapidly changing climate. She also shares how her firm reimagines the business of architecture itself through an Indigenous ethos. https://www.tawarc.com/about Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

    29 min
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5
out of 5
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About

Host Pier Carlo Talenti interviews artists who – whatever they make, wherever they work – are shaking up the status quo in their fields and their communities. Art Restart is produced by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    105
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Art Restart
  • Show Website
    Art Restart