Guests: Bruce Adams, Ben Ashworth, Sam Boo, Jamie Early, Amanda McDonald, Louis M Schmidt, Anne Smith
Host: Christopher Kardambikis
Recorded on April 14th, 2017
@ the Skate Bowl behind Union Market // Washington, DC.
***Windy day recording outside***
The art community will tell you Ben Ashworth is an accomplished visual artist, educator, designer, builder and skateboarder. His friends will tell you he’s a lunatic who skates too fast and works too hard. Either way, his work exists at the collision of art, skateboarding, community and play, and speaks largely for itself. His public projects blur the lines of activism and art, and tend to draw the surrounding communities in to participate.
Jamie Early started Twisted Skate Mag as a sophomore in high school to share the skate and music scene that was happening around him. Twisted ran from 1987 to 1992–back before the internet and social media–when ‘zines served a vital role in the underground community. In 1994, Jamie ran chump!, a satirical ‘zine for the burgeoning indie music scene that often took itself too seriously. The ‘zine world sparked a lifelong passion for photography and today Jamie is cataloging his photographs from the ‘zine days on Instagram @twisted.time.machine.
Louis M Schmidt is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He earned a BFA in Studio Arts (graduating Summa cum Laude) and a BA in Art History in 2004 from the University of Colorado, and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego in 2010. His work is centered on drawing, installation, photography and self-publishing, he has produced over 40 books of his own work. Schmidt has participated in the LA Art Book Fair at MoCA Geffen for many years, as well as the NY and Tokyo Art Book Fairs. His publishing work, drawings and photographs have been featured in group and solo exhibitions in San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.
Anne Smith (b. 1985, Syracuse, NY) is a visual artist in Washington, DC. Her art practice spans disciplines of drawing, printmaking, and sculpture in a study of boundaries, paths, and divisions of space. Her subject matter has included her childhood home, the horizon, and other spaces reconstructed or entirely imagined. Smith is a teaching artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and studio assistant to Master Printmaker Lou Stovall. She has participated in collaborative projects, including as master printmaker on a silkscreen book edition by Louis M. Schmidt under the imprint of Navigation Press. Smith received an MFA in Printmaking from George Mason University in 2015. She has studied woodworking at the Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, NC, and received a BA in Studio Art from Williams College, Williamstown, MA, in 2007. Her work is included in the collections of the U.S. Department of State and Capital One.