Art Restart The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts

A major theme that reappears in episode after episode of Art Restart is the fact that audiences/consumers, institutions/businesses and sometimes even artists themselves often fail to recognize that art is labor, not a pastime or an unconventional way to earn a living. A recent labor action by America’s premier ballet company served as a fresh reminder.On February 6 of this year, by an overwhelming majority, the dancers and stage managers of American Ballet Theatre voted to authorize a strike. Among their demands were an increase in wages that had been frozen since the Great Recession of 2008 as well as an adjustment to their working hours. Represented by their union, AGMA (American Guild of Musical Artists), after approximately three weeks of negotiations, the ABT company members and management were able to reach an agreement and avert a strike. The terms of the new agreement include cost-of-living increases of between 9 and 19% (varying by rank) across three years​, their workday being shifted a half-hour earlier and reduced by one half-hour on Saturdays and new parental-leave benefits and a commitment to keep pregnant dancers on contract until the time of the dancer’s choosing​.In this interview, Art Restart speaks with Griff Braun, AGMA’s national organizing director, who was himself once an ABT company member. He speaks about the nuts and bolts of how and why dancers unionize and describes the challenges and opportunities of organizing as an artist in 2024 America. https://www.musicalartists.org/griff-braun-national-organizing-director-professional-bio/

For painter Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, the land on which she lives and works is the raw material for her art, both metaphorically and literally. In November 2016, ten days spent at Standing Rock, ND protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and meeting and working alongside fellow Native artists changed her life. Ka’ila, who is Klamath Modoc, learned about the Jordan Cove Energy Projects, a liquid natural gas LNG pipeline that was threatening her ancestral homeland in southern Oregon, and in 2018, she moved to Modoc Point, where she jump-started a new chapter in her activism and artistry journey, scoring a couple of big wins in the first year. She created her “Land Back” series of paintings, in which she started incorporating pigments and minerals from the land around her, and she was successful in blocking the Jordan Cove Energy Project. Now, in 2024, represented by the Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, she’s had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, including at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. One of her pieces is also in the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. On the activist front, she is suing the State of Oregon for illegal surveillance and is also combating lithium mining in Native regions of Southern Oregon and Nevada.In this interview, Ka’ila explains why she left the artistic hub of Portland to live in rural southern Oregon and describes how her activism and artistry have evolved hand in hand.https://www.kailafarrellsmith.com/

In February of 2024, after a year of touring the country, the musical group Rising Appalachia, an ensemble that marries American folk music with a wide array of world influences, made an announcement that might have been surprising only to those who don’t know them well. Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, who created Rising Appalachia over 15 years ago, had decided to take a sabbatical year, though they would honor the concerts already on the books in 2024. Longtime Rising Appalachia fans have been supportive because they know this is a band that has never taken shortcuts in how they manage their artistry and their lives. Since early on in their careers, Leah and Chloe have been advocates for and practitioners of the slow music movement, an ethos of touring and music-making that places sustainability, local engagement and creative control at the heart of their business. The current sabbatical is the latest tool in their slow music toolbox.Yet though last year’s tour was hugely successful and they’ve just released an album titled “Folk and Anchor,” Chloe and Leah’s decision was undeniably gutsy and far from conventional in the music industry. In this interview, the sisters, speaking from their homes in the North Carolina mountains, discuss why this was the right time for a yearlong break, how they prepared for it and the ways in which they and their bandmates keep the slow music ethos at the heart of their artistic practice.https://www.risingappalachia.com/tourhttps://www.risingappalachia.com/

Through her wildly multicolored and multitextured interdisciplinary work, April Bey loves to explore speculative realms. For example, in a recent installation of hers, titled “Atlantica, the Gilda Region,” she invited the viewer to imagine they’d just landed as aliens on the faraway planet Atlantica, an opulent galactic wonderland full of Black and Brown bodies savoring luxury and leisure. First exhibited at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the show then traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno this past fall.Art Restart was eager to speak with April specifically because of a project she created to transform one particular speculation into reality: What if the people who collected her art looked like her and/or had similar backgrounds to hers? What if the world of art collecting invited collectors who for a host of reasons had felt excluded from or intimidated by it? She named the new venture the Equity in Collecting Program, and it is already bearing fruit, with April currently reviewing the third round of applicants to the program.April spoke to Art Restart from Los Angeles, where she lives and works, including as a tenured professor at Glendale College. Here she explains why and how she created her singular program and explains how her radical invitation to new collectors is changing not only the art-collecting culture but also her relationship with her fans as well as with her own art.https://www.april-bey.com/

For New Orleans-based film composer Sultana Isham, plunging into research on her subject matter is as important as creating her score. Trained as a classical violinist, she moved from her native Virginia to New Orleans to steep herself in one of her passions, the peoples, history and culture of Créolité throughout the Americas and abroad. Once in New Orleans, Sultana Initially busked in various venues around New Orleans and then started playing with Les Cenelles, an ensemble devoted to Creole folk music and work by composers of color. She began to write her own pieces, and in 2017 she put out her first EP, “Blood Moon,” a mixture of avant-garde classical and pop fusion, attracting the attention of director Zandashé Brown, who hired her to write the score for the horror short “Blood Runs Down.” Other directors soon came knocking on her door.Director Angela Tucker hired her to be both researcher and composer on the documentary, “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk,” a PBS documentary about a historic New Orleans mayoral race between two Black women. Among Sultana’s other credits are “The Neutral Ground,” which also aired on PBS and received an Emmy nomination for best historical documentary, and the PBS series “Making Black America,” narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Sultana’s scholarship continues unabated. LSU Press is developing an essay she co-wrote with Dr. Denise Frazier – “Mémwa Nwa: Agency, Sound and Women in AfroCreole Louisiana Folk Music” – into a book. A month before this interview, she concluded her residency at Ace Hotel New Orleans by co-curating an exhibit titled “Them Handy Sisters,” celebrating the careers of noted performers and musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy Southall and D. Antoinette Handy.Here, Sultana explains how she developed her musical skills hand-in-hand with her research practice and why heeding her heart and feeding her curiosity continue to open incredible new doors for her.https://www.sultanaisham.com/

Zeke Peña is a Xicano cartoonist and illustrator who, for most of his professional life, has focused on the lives and stories of El Paso, TX, where he grew up and lived for decades. A self-taught artist with an undergraduate degree in art history from UT Austin, he has built a rich portfolio of varied works that, as he describes them, are “a mash-up of political cartoons, border rasquache and hip-hop culture.”He has illustrated several award-winning books, including “My Papi Drives a Motorcycle,” which The New York Times called a best children’s book of 2019, and “Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide,” a Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award Winner and a Moonbeam Children’s Book Gold Award Winner. Both were written by Isabel Quintero, who has become a close collaborator. In 2023 he illustrated bestselling author Jason Reynolds’ “Miles Morales Suspended: A Spider-Man Novel.” His editorial work has appeared in a wide array of publications, including VICE, ProPublica and Latino USA. Here he describes the evolution of his ambitious journalistic endeavor, “The River Project,” about the increasingly politicized Rio Grande and all it represents. He also discusses how he’s adapted to the latest moral book-banning crusade and how he wishes for publishers to honor their writers’ and illustrators’ collaborative spirits. https://www.zpvisual.com/