by Jonathan Lisenby
David Onri Anderson in his basement studio in the Wedgewood-Houston area of Nashville, 2017.
David Onri Anderson shows Omnifold curator Jonathan Lisenby around his basement-studio-gallery in Wedgewood-Houston, Nashville. They eventually sit down outside to look at paintings arranged on the ground. They talk about color's relationship to spirituality, Nashville's arts cultivation problem, living simply as a practice, and the skink being the spirit animal of the conversation, among other things.
Kelly S. Williams is a painter and educator and is currently based in Nashville, TN. She earned her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from SAIC in Chicago. She is represented by David Lusk Gallery and often exhibits with her old mentor, painter Michelle Grabner, at the arts project space The Suburban.
Artist and Omnifold curator Jonathan Lisenby sat down with Kelly in her Germantown home-studio to talk about adjusting to life after art school, the peculiar mysticism of the South, the effects of Nashville's recent intense gentrification on artist spaces, and the tondo versus the mandala, among other things.
Still from video "Apartment", 2016
Claire Stigliani is a painter, sculptor, and video artist currently based out of Knoxville, TN. She began teaching painting and drawing at University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2014 and previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Among other distinctions, Stigliani received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2015 to begin work on her most recent series, Half Sick of Shadows - work that this interview attempts to address.
