Coffee & Culture with Matthew Chase-Daniel

Avra Leodas talks with Matthew about the Santa Fe Extension Master Gardener’s Fair (May 11th) and all that is happening there and what the Master Gardeners do: Plant sale, tool sale, pest questions answered, composting, soil health, demonstration gardens, education, music, food, and more great stuff like that.

Artist Brian Fleetwood (Mvskoke) talks with Matthew about his artist-in residence project, Place/Holding, with the O’Keeffe Museum’s Art to G.O. and Axle Contemporary.  The conversation touches on how jewelry and adornment can mediate between our bodies and the rest of the world around us, virology, immunity, cultural wisdom, plastic recycling, Oklahoma and Georgia, and setting processes in motion and ceding control.

Michelle Korte and Lena Weiss of Herstory Printmaking Collective talk with Matthew about their Women of The Rails project which they’ll be pasting up in the Santa Fe Railyard on April 20th, as part of the Railyard Art Project. They elucidate some of the history and personalities involved with railroads in America from the mid 1800s to the present.

In the late 1980s, Chip Thomas (jetsonorama) moved to a rural area of the Navajo Nation to work as a physician in a health clinic. He hoped to manage to stay for four years, and fell in love with the land and the people and the culture and stayed for 36 years. Since 2009, he has been installing large-scale photos, pasted onto mostly abandoned buildings along the roadsides on the Navajo Nation, and also across the country and abroad. In April he will install a project on The Lena Wall in Santa Fe. Chip chats with Matthew Chase-Daniel about life and work and history and inspiration.

Charine Pilar Gonzales is a filmmaker from San Ildefonso Pueblo. She talks about Pueblo storytelling, clay traditions and film, family, community, recent projects and awards, her film River Bank (Po-Kehgeh) upcoming projects, and Sundance.

John Brandi is a poet, essayist and painter. He has lived in New Mexico since 1971. His newest book, A Luminous Uplift: Landscape and Memoir is a collection of writings that explore land, light, culture, and spirit in his experiences across the planet, including Ecuador, Southern California, India, Bali, and Northern New Mexico. Matthew has a conversation with John by the wood stove, in John’s home in El Rito.

Jesse Wilson talks with host Matthew Chase-Daniel about SAFE HAVEN, her art installation at Axle Contemporary, and Ogres, mythology, feelings, winter, warmth, life choices, solitude, art and business, creative practice, expression, and  integrity.

The Aunties: Women of the White Shell Water Place features 3 local indigenous women speaking and sharing stories of place, community, and culture. Host Matthew Chase-Daniel talks with 2 of the Aunties, Nora Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owenge (Santa Clara Pueblo)) and Deborah Jackson Taffa (Quechan (Kwatsáan)/ Laguna), along with the performance’s director Kendra Mylnechuck Potter (Lummi). They talk about art and writing, their own work, women as community culture holders and communicators, and the power that birth, death, writing, and art all have to inspire and transform us.

b brown has been making ceramics for 30 years but is just now beginning to exhibit her work. Much of what came out of her kiln in the past was immediately destroyed by the artist herself. The process of working for her has been one of searching, questioning, and learning. Now brown is exhibiting her latest work of sculptural ceramics at Hecho a Mano Gallery inn Santa Fe (downtown on Palace Ave.) brown talks about her process and her approach with host Matthew Chase-Daniel.

Johnson is the director of the Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department. She talks with host Matthew Chase-Daniel about the various funding and support programs that the department offers as well as the Poet Laureate and City Historian programs. They also talk about her novel, Stray City, and how it adresses concepts of family and community, and how that has changed over the years. They also talk about foraging, karaoke, observing the world as an artist, avoiding adverbs, and the joy of squeezing puffball mushrooms.