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

In this episode, artist and community advocate Corey La Rue. traces his relationship to the land, labor, and survival—from a near-death experience that altered the course of his life, to his ongoing advocacy for California’s agricultural workers and displaced communities.

Raised in the Bay Area in California, La Rue shares his early exposure to fieldwork through family ties to migrant labor. These firsthand experiences, coupled with his own time working in agriculture, shape his nuanced understanding of the exploitation embedded in the state’s economy. What emerges is a critique rooted not in theory, but in lived knowledge: the food systems that sustain us are built on invisible suffering.

In a conversation that flows between the local and the global, La Rue and Proenza examine the slow violence of gentrification, the complicity of liberal “investment” language, and the way grief and survival are interwoven. La Rue describes the rapid transformation of his Melrose neighborhood—where new development displaces working-class Latino families—and calls for greater grassroots resistance. The episode draws a powerful line from housing precarity to policy indifference to the long, often invisible, labor histories of California.

This is a conversation about who gets to stay, who gets erased, and what it means to fight for the dignity of people and place.

Explore Corey La Rue’s work: 🔗 Instagram: @corey_la_rue

Support the show and access episodes early: 💸 patreon.com/whatsmythesis

Subscribe and share if this story resonates—especially if you’ve felt the pressure of survival, loss, or systemic erasure.

#CoreyLaRue #WhatsMyThesis #AgriculturalWorkers #CaliforniaLabor #LatinxVoices #Gentrification #FarmworkerRights #NearDeathExperience #GriefAndResistance #ArtAndAdvocacy #LAArtScene

Dreams in Migrations: AAPI Identity, Diaspora, and Resistance in Contemporary Art

In this special live episode of What's My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza moderates a closing panel discussion at BG Gallery for Dreams in Migrations—the third annual AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) exhibition curated by artist and organizer Sung-Hee Son. This timely conversation assembles a multigenerational roster of artists whose practices interrogate identity, memory, imperialism, and the myth of the model minority through distinct formal languages and lived experiences.

Featuring artists Dave Young Kim, Mei Xian Qiu, and others, the episode moves fluidly between personal narrative and structural critique. Kim speaks candidly about growing up Korean American in Los Angeles, navigating ADHD through drawing, and finding community through both art and street culture. He reflects on his work’s deep connection to place—evoking the layered histories of Koreatown through archival images, signage, and symbolic compositions.

Mei Xian Qiu offers a moving account of displacement, spiritual ritual, and postcolonial trauma. Born into Indonesia’s Chinese diaspora, she discusses her early artistic impulse to create “sacred objects” as a means of processing survival and systemic erasure. Her multimedia works—reminiscent of stained glass and batik—expose the mechanisms of propaganda and the cultural inheritance of violence. Her series Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom revisits China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign with a provocative inversion: a mock invasion of the U.S. staged entirely by AAPI artists and academics.

Together, the panelists explore diasporic kinship, cross-cultural solidarity, and the politics of visibility within the art world. Proenza draws compelling parallels between the AAPI and Latinx experiences, from forced assimilation and linguistic loss to state violence and Cold War geopolitics. The conversation challenges the flattening effects of labels like “model minority,” advocating instead for nuance, specificity, and coalition-building.

The episode concludes with reflections on the power of artist collectives, including the Korean American Artists Collective co-founded by Kim, and a roll call of exhibiting artists whose works are transforming the gallery into a space of resistance, celebration, and shared memory.

Featured Artists in the Exhibition:

• Dave Young Kim

• Mei Xian Qiu

• Bryan Ida

• Tia (Otis MFA ‘23)

• Miki Yokoyama

Key Topics:

• AAPI identity in fine art

• Postcolonial trauma and Chinese-Indonesian history

• Korean American experience in L.A.

• Propaganda, memory, and resistance

• The myth of the model minority

• Artist collectives and community organizing

Explore how contemporary AAPI artists are reshaping cultural narratives and reclaiming space through radical aesthetics and collaborative practice.

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube 📍 Recorded live at BG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 📅 Presented in honor of AAPI Heritage Month

Queer Landscapes, Dual Lives, and the Art of Looking Closely with J. Carino

Painter J. Carino joins What’s My Thesis? for a candid conversation on the formation of a deeply personal visual language—one that straddles autobiography, queer identity, and reportage practice. Known for his emotionally resonant paintings that combine landscape, figure, and storytelling, Carino reflects on a unique career that led him to his upcoming solo exhibition Carry It With You at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, on display from June 26 - August 22.

Carino speaks candidly about the challenges and freedoms of sustaining parallel careers in publishing and contemporary art. He traces his transition from NYU to Parsons, where studies in reportage and drawing from life laid the foundation for his immersive painting practice. From plein air sketches in national parks to nude Zoom drawing sessions during the pandemic, Carino’s shift from illustration to painting allowed for a more intimate, layered exploration of what it means to live a dual life as a queer artist navigating coded and compartmentalized spaces.

The episode delves into the tension between visibility and vulnerability: Carino discusses using a pseudonym to separate his children's book authorship from his painting, and the risks of addressing queerness explicitly in art intended for young audiences. Yet it’s precisely this openness—to complexity, to contradiction, to personal mythologies—that infuses his paintings with emotional depth and political resonance.

Carino’s recent recognition on the cover of New American Paintings (juried by Jerry Saltz) and his upcoming show mark a pivotal moment in his trajectory. His reflections on drawing as survival, the spiritual force of nature, and the layered meanings embedded in his imagery reveal a practice rooted in authenticity, discipline, and deep curiosity.

Featured Topics: – Drawing as a foundation for painting – The politics of queer representation in children’s literature – National parks, plein air practice, and the American landscape – Eroticism, intimacy, and compartmentalized identity in art

Follow J. Carino on Instagram at @j.carino.art, and explore his upcoming exhibition Carry It With You at Yossi Milo Gallery (@yossimilo) through August 22.

Strategic Generosity: Collecting, Curating, and Championing Emerging Artists with Leslie Fram

In this galvanizing episode of What's My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by Leslie Fram—collector, curator, marketing strategist, MFA educator, and tireless champion of emerging talent—for a sweeping conversation that summons the urgent need for innovation as well as entrepreneurial literacy among artists today.

Fram’s multifaceted career is an exercise in forecasting trends. Formerly a dancer with the NYC Ballet, Fram studied art at Parsons, founded a fashion design company, became the Trends Editor of Cosmopolitan, obtained an MBA from Columbia University, segued into early Internet enterprises… and eventually arrived in Los Angeles to engage with the city’s emerging art scene. Fram has cultivated a holistic approach to art, deploying business models from the various industries she has worked in. Marrying aesthetics with infrastructure, community with commerce, her approach is unique.

Fram speaks candidly about the genesis of her annual MFAs of LA exhibitions, a curatorial endeavor born from her desire to showcase under-recognized artists while removing traditional barriers to entry for collectors. She shares her exhibition experiments in transparency, scale uniformity, collector-artist collaborations and her belief in art’s ability to generate new forms of economic and social engagement. Fram’s insights are consistently bracing, generous, out-of-the-box and solution-oriented.

Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of how artists can reclaim agency in the marketplace, why building relationships is central to sustainability, and how Fram herself continues to assist emerging artists on their respective trajectories to success. Through direct mentorship, educating with her strategic marketing workshops, sharing information as a form of gallery-whispering, and many other modes, Fram is always advocating on the artists’ behalf.

Topics covered include:

• The economics of emerging art: why size, pricing and communal experiences matter
• Institutional resistance to business education in art schools: how Fram works around it
• Collectors: her plans to ensure new collectors enter the marketplace, offering artists more opportunities for sales; understanding that they are artists’ best supporters and how to build authentic relationships with them; perhaps, finding a different name for “collector”
• New models and formats: from artists’ managers to new apps and technologies
• The future: art sales, blockchain royalties, and the power shift away from legacy galleries systems

This episode is a masterclass in strategic vision, offered by someone who has not only built a practice around elevating others, but continues to do so with a rare mix of compassion, clarity and enthusiasm.

Guest Leslie Fram Follow her on Instagram: @lesfram

Host Javier Proenza

Astrology, Embodiment, and the Myth of Power: A Conversation with Alystair Rogers

In this episode of What's My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by artist Alystair Rogers for a searching, radically honest exploration of transformation—personal, political, and astrological. Traversing terrains of gender, spirituality, social critique, and visual language, Rogers shares the deeply embodied trajectory that led to his MFA thesis: an immersive installation confronting capitalism, queerness, and cosmic time.

With the insight of a cultural theorist and the intuition of a mystic, Rogers recounts how early encounters with Scott Cunningham’s Solitary Practitioner and a DIY magical practice laid the groundwork for a conceptual framework rooted in astrology, myth, and critique. From testosterone therapy and shifting social legibility, to trans embodiment and the slow violence of neoliberalism, Rogers discusses the pain and revelation of becoming, with humor and precision.

Their thesis installation—centered around a reclaimed domestic space lit by planetary lamps and anchored by a satirical infomercial titled Sea World: Spiral 'Til You're Free—is a poetic and confrontational meditation on how billionaires might be coaxed into their own undoing. Through this absurdist yet sincere gesture, Rogers dissects the mythologies of power, proposing alternative logics of time, value, and being.

What emerges is a searing, wide-ranging conversation that refuses binaries—between subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and politics, or critique and care. Rogers makes a compelling case for astrology not as superstition, but as an expansive, generational clock—a way to read time not only in hours or revolutions, but in revolts and revelations.

Topics discussed include:

• Trans identity and the phenomenology of transition

• The astrology of Pluto in Aquarius and its revolutionary implications

• Queer embodiment and the aesthetics of self-determination

• The failures of liberal institutions and the weaponization of speech

• The installation Sea World, capitalist mythology, and speculative resistance

This episode offers a rare convergence of the personal and planetary, blending social analysis with an artist’s pursuit of symbolic coherence. Rogers’s work embodies a form of queer speculative myth-making—one that critiques the world as it is while gesturing toward the one that might be.

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Guest: Alystair Rogers Instagram: @alystair.rogers

Host: Javier Proenza Podcast: What’s My Thesis? Support the show: Patreon.com/whatsmythesis Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

#queerart #transartists #astrologyart #MFAthesis #artandpolitics #plutoinaquarius #socialpractice #whatsmythesis #aly stairrogers #artpodcast #decolonizegender #anti-capitalistart