Artists Talk with LVA: February 1, 2024

The Blazing World, a new solo exhibit from Megan Bickel opens at Wheelhouse Art February 2 and continues through March 16, 2024.

Megan Bickel is an artist, writer, and educator currently working out of Louisville, Kentucky. Her work considers and utilizes various approaches and technologies such as painting, data manipulation, digital collage, database reconfiguration, and poetry. 

Bickel recently received her Master of Arts in Digital Studies in Language, Culture, and History at the University of Chicago. Her thesis research assessed how Google Vision API and other related APIs would impact the fate of climate reporting due to their current labeling production design. She is currently working on expanding this data set and expanding the research into a book with coauthor Joseph Solis. 

Bickel is the proud founder and organizer of houseguest gallery (Est. 2018) where she organizes and curates works by emerging and underserved artists and curators. She’s had arts criticism, science fiction, and images published in Burnaway, Anarchist Review of Books, Ruckus, NEWCITY, Sixty-Inches from Center, and others. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Louisville, Bellarmine, and Indiana University Southeast where she teaches Painting, Video Production, and Web Design. 

Her work has been exhibited at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), University of Chicago Logan Center (Chicago, IL), LADIES' ROOM LA (Los Angeles, California), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KY), Georgetown College (Georgetown, KY), QUAPPI Projects (Louisville, KY), Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH), and MADS Mixed Reality Gallery (Milan, Italy). 

Artists Talk with LVA: January 25, 2024

Tricia Siegwald Senior Director, Festivals and Special Programs, Trager Family JCC has been overseeing the Jewish Film Festival for 3 years now. In her role, she coordinates the work of the film festival committee watching many, many films and cultivating ones for the event each year. The film festival is among many of the events and programs that Tricia oversees at the Trager Family JCC each year that also include the Israeli Street Fair. 

Tricia comes to the Trager Family JCC following her role as vice president at the Kentucky Derby Festival. She spent 25 years managing the Pegasus Parade, the Basketball Classic, Kroger’s Fest-a-Ville and the Great Steamboat Race.

Tricia grew up in Louisville and is a graduate of the University of Louisville.

Cantor David A. Lipp currently leads worship services at Congregation Adath Jeshurun, and directs the Adath Jeshurun Adult Choir. He was the featured soloist for one of Louisville's finest volunteer choruses, Voces Novae, on their first CD, Soul of the Synagogue. Cantor Lipp is currently the immediate past president of the Cantors Assembly.

Before embarking on his current career, Cantor Lipp was an actor performing in local and regional theater in the Midwest. 

The Louisville Jewish Film Festival will open on Feb. 3 and run through Feb. 18. This is the 26th year of the festival and as well as offering live movies at Baxter Theatre, Speed Museum and our own Trager Family JCC,  and films that can be viewed at home. This has been a popular addition since COVID and the at home movie options have been very popular

Artists Talk with LVA: January 18, 2024

Lori Larusso joined us in the studio this week to talk about her current exhibits in Dallas, TX and Danville, KY s well as the new monograph about her work, “Confected Landscapes”.

Lori Larusso is an American visual artist working primarily with themes of domesticity and foodways. Her body of work encompasses paintings and installations that explore issues of class, gender, and anthropocentrism, and how these practices both reflect and shape culture. Larusso’s work is exhibited widely in the US and is included in various public collections such as KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, 21c Museum, and other noteworthy private collections. She has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, and MacDowell where she received a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship. She is a recipient of the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Fellowship, Kentucky South Arts Fellowship, and multiple grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, and is represented by Rubine Red Gallery in Palm Springs, and Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX.

Artists Talk with LVA: January 11, 2024

Aurora Gallery and Boutique opens a dual art show with Ember Crow’s Inside Show and Kara Renee’s Big Feelings and both artists were live in the studio this week. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each week at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Ember Crow is a queer and strange artist based out of Louisville, KY. They make ceramics, assemblages, paintings, sketches, and more that are a mixture of macabre, nature-inspired, and light-hearted. 

Their new exhibit, Inside Show opens Saturday at Aurora Gallery and Boutique

Kara Renee was born in Kentucky in 1986, she is an established painter whose work exhibits attention to detail and captures her subject's emotion, as well as the power of affirmation.

Her new exhibit, Big Feelings, also opens at Aurora on Saturday and there will be a reception for both artists from 6 - 10 pm.

Artists Talk with LVA: January 4, 2024

Carnegie Center for Art & History opened "Intentionally Intimate: The Choice to Work Small," which runs through March 16 & the artists, Wendi Smith, Nancy Currier, Caroline Waite, Kay Grubola, and Rachel Singel joined us this week.

Wendi Smith’s work has been exhibited regionally for over thirty years. She has been a member of local co-ops Zephyr and PYRO Gallery, as well as a supporter of the local arts scene. Exhibit credits include Four Star Gallery in Indianapolis, the Carnegie for the Arts in Cincinnati, and Zephyr Gallery in Louisville. She has taught fine arts at Bellarmine University and Indiana University Southeast.

Nancy Currier is a painter who also creates drawings and mixed-media sculptures. She grew up around art as the daughter of the esteemed Louisville painter Mary Ann Currier. She also has taught art at Louisville's Foster Traditional Academy.

Caroline Waite is from an English village called Cookham Dean, known for its famous and eccentric resident, wartime artist Stanley Spencer whose stylized scenes in the 1940s of Cookham village life and residents have hung in the nation's leading museums. He described Cookham as a “village in Heaven”.

In England, Waite taught at Northbrook College, Sussex North East Wales University Telford College, Shropshire. Since moving to the U.S. in 2001, she has lived in Texas and New Mexico but prefers her current home Louisville.

Kay Polson Grubola is an artist and independent curator in Louisville, Kentucky. Creating assemblages using natural found objects, Grubola’s work is a celebration of nature. The work is also an allegory for the natural process of human life, both its ascendance and its decline. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. 

Grubola was the Executive Director of Nazareth Arts, a regional arts center on the campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, as well as the Artistic Director of the Louisville Visual Art Association.  For 10 years she taught drawing and printmaking at Bellarmine University and Indiana University Southeast. 

Rachel Singel is a printmaker and faculty at the Hite Institute at the University of Louisville. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, and Art Print Residence in Barcelona. As an artist interested in working using non-toxic methods, Singel, has studied with the founder Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia in 2018 and worked as a resident artist at Wharepuke studio in New Zealand.