Jennifer Sullivan is a New York-based artist whose painting practice evolved out of roots in autobiographical performance and video. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Parsons School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Devotional Paintings at Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL (2020), Exiled Parts at No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2019), Stretch Marks at Real Estate Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY (2018) and the soft animal of your body at Five Car Garage, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Sullivan is the recipient of awards including Paint School and Fine Arts Work Center fellowships, and residencies at the Lighthouse Works, Skowhegan, Ox-Bow, and Yaddo.
It’s a Process is an artist interview podcast Sullivan started in fall of 2020. Missing pre-pandemic creative dialogues with other artists, studio visits, and openings as well as the sense of community and inspiration that comes from that, she created this podcast as a way to fill in some of that missing space. “I assumed other artists were feeling the same way, missing community”. She decided to invite the audience to “listen in” on her conversations with other artists.
Click on the image to access the list of interviews
A lot the initial guests were her good friends, so she already had a history thinking about their work and practices and that set the tone of her approach to these conversations. “It felt very important to me that the conversations were casual and unplanned, and that they can go in whatever direction that arises. I want them to feel informal, the way that artists really talk to each other in private. It is also a chance to ask people questions of how their work is actually made, where does it start, how does it happen? There is a kind of endless mystery and intrigue for me around how each artist actually makes their work on a nuts-and-bolts level, as well as what inspires them.”
This project is a re-envisioning of an earlier performance project called It’s a Process that Sullivan performed as a live talk show/variety show for many years, in which she would interview other artists in front of a “studio audience” in various gallery spaces. One of the early performances of this project occurred at Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery when they were located in Williamsburg, in spring of 2009. Sullivan says of the live shows “they were really fun but also kind of crazy. I made a whole set, sang karaoke songs, showed clips of the guests' work on a TV monitor, and even handed out donuts and mudslide drinks in a certain part of the show, which I made with a blender in front of the audience”.
Itʼs a Process: Episode 4, 2012, Primetime, Brooklyn, NY (with Debo Eilers)
At a certain point she realized that live shows made it difficult for her to have sincere interviews in which people felt relaxed and open while trying to entertain people at the same time. Also, she found that a lot of artists were actually quite uncomfortable with revealing themselves in a spontaneous way, especially in front of a crowd. She finds the podcast format allows for a lot more intimacy and a more relaxed and revealing conversation with her guests.
Sullivan is very interested in oral history as an accessible and non-academic historical form. When she was in college in the 90s, she read Studs Terkel’s book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do from 1974 and it made a big impact on her. “It is a really honest account of people talking about their lives and how they feel about their work, and it’s very touching and humanizing”. Sullivan wants to do something like that with this podcast: to talk about the work and pleasure, and the challenge of being an artist in an honest and candid way. She believes it is a gift to have this opportunity to really listen to people and to be curious about them. “I think part of what inspired the project came out of being in psychoanalysis too, and the process of learning to really speak freely and how to learn how to stop censoring myself. I want to be able to have challenging conversations with my guests that allow for different questions and points of view. Podcasts are becoming a good place for dissent and dissection of popular discourse. Interviews are a really interesting thought space. They are very collaborative. I like that there can be moments of humor, playfulness, and diversion too”.
Don’t miss listening to these fabulous set of interviews !!
Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts
Click Jennifer Sullivan’s work www.jennifersullivan.org and Instagram
Work by Jennifer Sullivan: Courtney Smoking, 2020, Dye and acrylic on hand dyed cotton, 30 x 26 inches