In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by artist Lauren Goldenberg Longoria for a conversation that traverses personal memory, studio practice, and the tender labor of transformation. Known for her materially rich works that fuse paper, performance, and poetic intuition, Goldenberg Longoria speaks candidly about the healing logic of her process—and the quiet revolutions that can occur through repetition, care, and tactility.

Trained in traditional printmaking and now immersed in the world of handmade paper, Goldenberg Longoria discusses how she builds meaning through destruction—tearing and pulping paper from past works, using the remnants to seed new ones. Her practice becomes a kind of emotional composting: nothing is discarded, everything is metabolized. Whether she’s embedding hair into a fresh sheet of paper or excavating the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, her work investigates how memory and material collapse into one another.

Throughout the episode, Goldenberg Longoria shares stories of childhood, loss, and creative perseverance, always returning to the primacy of the hand. From squishing “gross things” as a kid to the meditative choreography of the studio, she makes a compelling case for process as a form of knowing—and for art as a space where grief can be held, rather than solved.

This episode offers a rare look at how artists turn vulnerability into methodology, and how even the most fragile materials can carry a resilient kind of weight.

— 🔗 Follow Lauren Goldenberg Longoria: @laurengoldenberglongoria 🎧 Listen on all platforms: whatsmythesis.com 🎥 Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@whatsmythesis ❤️ Support on Patreon: patreon.com/whatsmythesis

#HandmadePaper #ContemporaryArt #LaurenGoldenbergLongoria #WhatsMyThesis #MaterialityInArt #ArtAndGrief #PaperArt #ProcessBasedArt #EmotionalLabor #TactileArt

In this candid and moving conversation, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles-based artist Dena Novak, whose sculptural paintings and ceramics challenge the rigid codes of minimalism through what she calls “aggressive feminism.” Drawing from a rich personal archive of experience—one shaped by Orthodox Judaism, motherhood, neurodivergence, and trauma—Novak’s work reimagines historically male-dominated art historical tropes with unapologetic sensuality and material intensity.

A recent recipient of the Simon Gad Foundation Award and an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, Novak shares how a life-altering diagnosis of autism at age 50 reshaped her understanding of herself, her past, and her artistic practice. Her tactile impasto paintings, often described as “candy-colored” and “irresistibly edible,” subvert the pristine aesthetic of artists like John McCracken, replacing “fetish finish” with riotous layers of piped oil paint. As she explains, “The first response people say when they see my work is, ‘I want to touch it. I want to smell it. I want to eat it.’”

The conversation traces Novak’s evolution from a punk activist in Chicago to a ceramicist “boxing with Pollock,” and unpacks her years spent in Orthodox communities in Israel and Los Angeles, where gendered restrictions collided with a creative urgency that could not be contained. Today, her practice is a full-throated reclamation of space—for herself, for disabled artists, and for queer, neurodivergent joy.

Upcoming exhibitions include her MFA thesis show at Otis College (September 2025) and a group exhibition will support the Simon Gad Foundation’s work with disabled artists.

Explore more: 🖼 Shrine NYC – @shrine.nyc 🎓 Otis College of Art and Design – www.otis.edu

Diana Taylor: A practice where research and materiality meet. Presented by What's My Thesis? in partnership with DON’T LOOK Projects

In this illuminating live conversation recorded at DON’T LOOK Projects, UK-based artist Diana Taylor joins host Javier Proenza (What’s My Thesis?) for a deeply textured discussion around her first solo show in the United States, Flotsam and Jetsam. Organized by DON’T LOOK Projects in association with SLQS Gallery in London, the exhibition draws on Taylor’s research-intensive practice, exploring time through the fusion of research and materiality. Her work employs a remix logic, echoing Sigmar Polke's 1980s period.

Currently in a short-term fellowship at The Huntington, Taylor speaks about her practice-based research. Her PhD was in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, where she focused on how historical craft, screen-printing, and reproducibility inform her contemporary approach to painting. With roots in both rural Wiltshire and Cyprus, Taylor's early exposure to English landscape painting, tapestry, and devotional patternwork creates a foundation for her ongoing material inquiries into time, collapse, and visual culture.

The conversation explores:

• Taylor’s use of screenprinting on raw and repurposed canvas as a method of layering digital and analog imagery
• The influence of William Morris, The Divine Comedy by Gustav Doré, Sigmar Polke and 1970s suburban interiors on her visual lexicon
• A meditation on contemporaneity—the feeling of living amidst overlapping temporalities in the age of the internet
• The metaphor of Flotsam and Jetsam as a conceptual frame for image overload, cultural debris, and the residue of civilization
• Her experimental use of digital tools—zooming, pixelation, low-res 3D scanning—not to perfect, but to fail productively.
• Collapsing binaries: nature and culture, craft and tech, chaos and control, digital noise and sacred relic

Also discussed is Taylor’s current work at The Huntington, where she’s engaging with historical plant taxonomies, rare botanical prints, and Morris’s medieval utopian socialism to produce a new body of work and a forthcoming article in The Journal of William Morris Studies.

Flotsam and Jetsam is on view at DON’T LOOK Projects through August 30, 2025. Please email gallery@dontlookprojects.com to schedule a private viewing.

Listen to this episode to uncover:

• Why Taylor considers pixelation and printed crochet as relics of maternal labor and digital memory
• How screenprinting becomes a form of archaeological gesture
• The relationship between digital overstimulation and visual stillness
• Why artists might choose ruin, repetition, or failure as aesthetic strategies in a culture obsessed with optimization

Featured Institutions & Collaborators: The Huntington Library, William Morris Gallery, DON’T LOOK Projects, SLQS Gallery, What’s My Thesis?

Episode Credits: Hosted by Javier Proenza Guest: Diana Taylor Presented by DON’T LOOK Projects Podcast: What’s My Thesis?

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🎧 Listen now and step into the layered, fragmented, hyper-contemporary world of Diana Taylor. 📍 Flotsam and Jetsam runs through August 30 at DON’T LOOK Projects, Los Angeles in association with SLQS Gallery in London. 🔗 Follow Diana on Instagram and learn more at dontlookprojects.com

#DianaTaylor #WhatsMyThesis #DontLookProjects #ContemporaryPainting #WilliamMorris #DigitalCollage #ScreenprintArt #LAArtScene #SLQSGallery #TheHuntington #ArtistResidency #Multitemporality #ArtPodcast #unpainting