Art Restart

Ja’ Malik is just wrapping up his fourth year as the artistic director of Madison Ballet in Madison, WI, but his path to leadership has been shaped by decades inside the field. A former professional d...

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 ...

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 we...

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 ...

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 t...

Few artists have woven their creative practice so seamlessly into the fabric of their home place as Shanai Matteson. A visual artist, writer, community-based researcher and environmental-justice organ...

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, th...

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to d...

Johnny Gandelsman is not only one of the world’s finest violinists, as comfortable playing contemporary works as he is interpreting pieces from the Western classical canon. He is also an inveterate mu...

The year 2020 was looking to be a banner year for musical and life partners Sarah and Austin McCombie, aka Chatham Rabbits. They had just made the biggest financial investment in their band, namely th...

To describe Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson as dancers is to name only a small sliver of their creative portfolio. To be sure, they are proficient, trained dancers and have created and performed seve...

For fiber artist Aaron McIntosh, quilting is an act of defiant documentation. Growing up in an Appalachian family with a generations-deep tradition of quilting, he learned the craft as a boy and went ...

Christopher Tin is an award-winning and genre-bending classical composer whose work has been featured in a variety of settings and media, from august concert halls to the world of video games. His orc...

Matthew Fluharty is the founder and executive director of Art of the Rural, an organization that works to support and promote the work of artists and culture bearers across the country and that also a...

Theater artists Annalisa Dias and Tara Moses are the co-directors of Groundwater Arts, an organization they founded in 2018 — along with Anna Lathrop and Ronee Penoi — to braid together goals that at ...

Calling Robert Gipe an author or novelist is a bit like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson a YouTuber. Yes, Robert wrote a widely praised self-illustrated trilogy of novels — “Trampoline,” “Weedeater” and “P...

You might be forgiven for guessing SHHH! Ensemble to be a collection of musically minded librarians, but you’d be way off the mark. Because SHHH! Ensemble makes noise. A lot of it. On a variety of ins...

On January 26 of 2024, San Francisco Ballet premiered a commissioned work by Canadian American choreographer Aszure Barton. It was titled “Mere Mortals” and explored the science and ramifications of A...

In 2016, while earning his doctorate in music at the University of Southern California, Alexander Lloyd Blake founded the choral group Tonality. His initial aim was to create a choral ensemble that wo...

Costume designer Kristen P Ahern has been thinking about sustainability since childhood, when her parents, her mother in particular, instilled in her a passion for environmental responsibility. As an ...

Of all the tasks to undertake in the current arts climate, leading a brand-new multimillion-dollar performing-arts center through its opening and first season must be one of the most daunting. Yet, Bi...

Tariq Tarey is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Columbus, OH. Over the years, he has captured thousands of portraits of refugees from around the world whom the U.S. government resettl...

Antonia Wright is an award-winning Cuban American multimedia artist based in Miami, FL whose work has been exhibited all over the world, from the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, ...

Phil Chan is a choreographer, director and ballet scholar who seven years ago decided to turn a longstanding frustration into a wellspring of activism. Although American entertainment had made great p...

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s compositions are finding evermore ardent fans among the public and musical institutions alike. This interview took place just days after his return to his Oklahoma City ...

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 ar...

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 protes...

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 ...

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 Reg...

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 Virgi...

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 arti...

One of the bona fide theatrical hits of 2023 was a play titled “Public Obscenities” by director-turned-playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury. It opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan in January of 2023 to the k...

In 2009, while expecting their first child, visual artists and life partners Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova and Frances Trombly co-founded a new artist space in their hometown of Miami. They named it Dimen...

Architect Andrew Schachman and multidisciplinary artist and educator Faheem Majeed are two of the four artists who, along with poet avery r. young and sculptor Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, co-lead Chic...

Cellist Leo Eguchi has played all over the world in a variety of settings, from frequent appearances with the Boston Pops and the Portland Symphony to playing for some of pop music’s biggest stars, in...

As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valu...

The raw materials of Philippa Pham Hughes’ art are human bodies and minds. Since 2007, when she hosted her first gathering of strangers, Philippa has worked as a social sculptor and cultural strategis...

In 2022, Steven Melendez was named artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet, becoming only the second person to lead the institution. In several ways, he was destined to become its next leader sin...

Precious Perez is a singer, songwriter, educator and disability activist who has recently been performing and recording under the moniker “La Reggaetonera Ciega,” the Blind Reggaeton Singer. A graduat...

To describe Meow Wolf as an artistic juggernaut might not be entirely hyperbolic. Founded in 2008 by a group of Santa Fe-based artists looking to show their work outside of the traditional art ecosyst...

When the Writers Guild of America strike began in early May of 2023, screenwriter, playwright and essayist Dorothy was in the middle of promoting an Apple TV+ mini-series titled “Extrapolations,” on w...

Actor and educator Charles Andrew Gardner is starting his fourth term as president of the Chicago local branch of the union SAG-AFTRA.He grew up in Chicago and studied acting at Northern Illinois Univ...

Terri Lyne Carrington is one of the most respected jazz musicians in the world. Her drumming career started at the age of 10, which is when she officially got her musicians’ union card, and in the dec...

Woodworker, furniture-maker, artist and educator Aspen Golann trained at the renowned North Bennet Street School in Boston and specializes in building furniture with the techniques of 18th and 19th ce...

Norma Baker-Flying Horse’s designs are the stuff of fashion runway dreams. They display the sophistication, impeccable tailoring and gorgeous lines of her fashion idols, including Chanel and McQueen, ...

Early in her career, Maura video essayist and performance artist Maura Brewer explored the relationship between representations of women in Hollywood films and the structures of contemporary capitalis...

Robin Tran has been performing standup comedy for the past 11 years, but it is only in the last eight that she has been performing under the name Robin. Before her transition in 2015, she presented as...

Alexandria Wailes is an accomplished actor, choreographer and dancer who just this last season appeared on Broadway in the acclaimed revival of Ntozake Shange’s seminal play “For Colored Girls Who Hav...

Perhaps the hottest ticket on Broadway right now is to the starry revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. Should you be ...

Theater director Sean Daniels has outstanding credits to his name. He co-founded the company Dad’s Garage, which is now a cornerstone of Atlanta’s theatrical scene, and then went on to lead Merrimack ...