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Artists Talk with LVA: March 12, 2025

It's almost time for LVA Honors & LVA Executive Director Angela Hagan joined us to talk with two of this year's Honorees: Chuck Swanson & Juliet Taylor. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Dr. Angela Hagan became the Executive Director of Louisville Visual Art in September 2024. For over a decade, she worked in leadership functions including development, marketing and communications, and community engagement for nonprofit organizations focused on affordable and fair housing, education, youth development, and art (KMAC Museum) before spending a decade at Louisville-based Fortune 60 health plan Humana, where she led functions  and teams in member engagement and community health strategy and insights.

Chuck Swanson is an artist, primarily a painter, but he is also one of the pioneer gallerists in Louisville, having opened a gallery on Bardstown Road in 1982 and then in 1998 on East Market Street in what would eventually become the celebrated NuLu neighborhood. For the record, Swanson opened the space near Market and Clay well ahead of the rechristening of the area, so he must be counted as one of the reasons why the once-neglected and depressed environs became a hot spot for redevelopment.

Juliet Taylor is an interdisciplinary artist working with quilting & wearable art. She was a featured designer in the 2024 KMAC Couture and was a part of the Material Obsessions exhibit in the fall of 2024 at KMAC Museum. Most recently she has worked as the lead fabricator on the SPARK sculpture scheduled to be unveiled on the LVA building in February 2025. Juliet was a student in LVA’s Children’s Fine Art Classes and at DuPont Manual Visual Art Magnet.

Public Radio

Artists Talk with LVA: February 13, 2025

Tonight (February 13, 2025)t Louisville Visual Art unveils the SPARK Sculpture and its designers, Laura Haddad & Tom Drugan joined us to talk about it live in the studio. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Laura Haddad & Thomas Drugan specialize in conceptually driven public art that is often integrated into large-scale infrastructure projects. Past and current work includes art for roadways, bridges, transit stations, public utilities, architectural facades, industrial artifacts, museums, libraries, and urban plazas and parks. Working in the public realm, the artists pursue their interest in using site conditions as inspiration for art concepts. Haddad|Drugan strives to create poetic one-of-a-kind artworks that on one level act as place-making icons but on another are layered with subtler complexities that unfold over multiple viewings.

The studio’s site-specific approach to new projects includes research and investigations about a site’s physical, functional, natural, social, and historical aspects. 

From this the artists establish a conceptual framework for the art and develop specific forms and materials that best express the idea. Haddad|Drugan operates at the scale of both sculpture and planning and approach the thematic or sequential linking of individual artworks as a form of conceptual art unto itself.