Matthew Brown Los Angeles Podcast

Cal Siegel was born in West Newbury, Massachusetts and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. in Studio Art and Media Studies from Pitzer College in Claremont, California. In 2015 he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Solo and two-person exhibitions include The house your road ends on, Outside Gallery, North Adams, MA (2018); S.L.A.B., Violet’s Café, Brooklyn, NY (2015); wallflower frieze with Meena Hasan, 6Base, Bronx, NY (2017); and Smile in The Dark with Matthew Stone, Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA (2016).

He has participated in a number of group exhibitions including The Gift Shop, Red Bull Studios, New York (2016); The landscape changes 30 times, Anahita Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2015); Inside/ Outside: Works from the Skowhegan Archives, CSA Gallery, Waterville, Maine (2015); and To do as one would, David Zwirner, New York (2014); among others.

Siegel will open a solo exhibition with Matthew Brown Los Angeles summer 2020.

Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2013, where he was the recipient of the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Award.

Gibson’s work was most recently on view in the solo exhibition The Dangerous One at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has also exhibited at Fredericks & Freiser in New York and Loyal in Stockholm, and participated in the group shows The Curator’s Eggs, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; Woke!, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa; and A Being in the World, Salon 94, New York.

In 2016, Gibson co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo at 32 Edgewood Gallery, Yale School of Art. The show examined evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016, and garnered reviews in The New York Times and Art in America.

The artist released his first book, Some Monsters Loom Large in 2016 with funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The book was recently re- issued in a second edition in partnership with International Print Center, New York. Gibson’s second book Early Retirement was released in 2017 with Edition Patrick Frey in Zurich and was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Mark Thomas Gibson is represented by Fredericks and Freiser Gallery, (New York, NY), M+B Gallery, (Los Angeles, CA) and Loyal Gallery, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

In this debut episode of the Matthew Brown Los Angeles Podcast, artist Kenturah Davis conducts an interview with artist Diedrick Brackens in a conversation that spans the politics of pandemics, the history and process of Brackens' tapestry weavings, and Brackens' parallel, though lesser-known, practice of basket weaving.

Using text as a point of departure, Kenturah Davis explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, photographs and performances. Davis recently opened her first solo institutional exhibition,Everything That Cannot Be Knownat the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum (2020). Other solo and two-person exhibitions includeBlur in the Interest of Precision, Matthew Brown Los Angeles (2019); a two-person exhibition with Desmond Lewis at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN in coordination with the traveling venue, Seed Space (2019); as well asNarratives and Meditations(2014) andsonder(2013) at Papillion, Los Angeles. Davis lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Accra, Ghana.

Diedrick Brackens is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history.Recent solo exhibitions include blessed are the mosquitoes, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2020); If You Have Ghosts, Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL (2020); Allegiance, University Art Gallery, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN (2019); Diedrick Brackens: darling divined, The New Museum, New York (2019); and unholy ghosts, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2019). Brackens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA