Art in Conversation is a podcast series that highlights America's emerging arts communities. In its debut season, host Manola Secaira investigates Seattle's arts scene, talking to visual poets, electronic composers, cartoonists, and other artists working with words, paint, music, and more. Interviews discuss the artists' lives and work and integrate wider social perspectives that demonstrate what life looks like for artists in America's great cities. A city and its art develop symbiotically, and we look to artistic expression as a lens into our current cultural pulse.
In this episode of Art in Conversation, Emma Lee Toyoda talks “soft punk,” their own take on Seattle’s DIY ethos. Finding strength in sensitivity, Toyoda talks about their music and their experience as a non-binary artist on the Seattle scene.
Read MoreIn this episode, sculptor Coco Spadoni talks about how their own relationship with pottery began, why their work focuses on stories of the body, and how they teach others to get comfortable with clay.
Read MoreComposer Paurl Walsh played a major part in the creation of Bascule, a stunning musical fusion of both classical chamber and electronic music. He talked to fields about his introduction to this music, what working in the bridge was like and how his personal relationship with it shaped his work.
Read MoreAngel Alviar-Langley, who also goes by Moonyeka, has always been drawn to dance. After getting introduced to the popping community in college, Moonyeka's been a large part of Seattle's popping community and is currently organizing the third iteration of a femme street styles dance event called What's Poppin' Ladiez?! In this episode, fields talked to Moonyeka about joining the popping community in Seattle, storytelling through movement, and the gender dynamics at play within the dance form.
Read MoreSeattle’s fourth youth poet laureate Azura Tyabji is working on publishing a book. For this episode, fields chatted with 18-year-old Azura about her experience at an experimental high school, the reputation of spoken word among poets, and why it’s important to have a youth-specific poet laureate in the first place.
Read MoreFor Art in Conversation’s third episode,fields spoke with two members of Seaside Tryst, a Seattle band that describes itself as super synthy "trans ass new wave" with a knack for aggressively danceable songs. Here, Seaside Tryst discusses what attracted them to Seattle's music scene and what diversity looks like within it.
Read MoreWith Seattle’s annual Short Run convention just around the corner — an underground comics and art festival — it seems fitting to chat with an illustrator who’ll be boothing at the event this year: Myra Lara. While she’s long been interested in comics, she’s especially focused her energy on it in recent years, getting published in various comics publications in the city (like Thick as Thieves) and an Ignatz-nominated anthology, La Raza Anthology: Unidos y Fuertes. In this episode, she discusses her entry into underground comics, bilingual art, and the fusion of illustration with activism.
Read MoreIn the podcast's inaugural episode, our host Manola Secaira sits down with illustrator and poet Gabrielle Bates. Bates is known for her poetry comics, an emerging hybrid genre which applies the lyric sensibility of poetry to hand-drawn images. Here, Bates shares with us her ideas on illustration, the Seattle poetry scene, and independent publishing.
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