A Creative Excuse

In this episode with Eliza Lutz, we talk about their solo exhibition, All the Lives Alive Inside Me and both the metaphorical and literal meanings of that title. 
Merging embroidered prints on paper with quilted portraits assembled from loved ones' clothes, the works in this exhibition chronicle the giving and receiving of care in all its forms, from child rearing to elder care, from domestic arts to community organizing.
Eliza’s exhibition opens at Hecho Saturday September 5 and is on view through September 27.

For years Daniel McCoy's work ran toward the surreal and humorous, full of recurring characters like Hot Sauce Man, a stand-in for the late-night regulars he remembers from New Mexico's Allsup's gas stations. More recently he has turned to the landscapes of Northern New Mexico, rendering the light, rock formations, and cloudscapes around his home with a slower, more observational eye while keeping a bit of cartooning alive in the line. Daniel returns to the podcast to talk about family, life in the high desert, and his newest exhibition, We Can Only Go Up From Here.

Zahra grew up in two deserts which vary drastically and have many similarities in culture. One close to the sea in Kuwait, the other close to the mountains in New Mexico. Working in watercolor and ink, her dreamlike paintings often begin with a sparse line of text, drawing on Arab poetry, family folklore, and the magic woven through everyday life to reflect both her cultural roots in Kuwait and her current life in New Mexico. In this episode we talk about pomegranates, cats in bags, hawk fledglings, and we go into the realities of how to navigate dark times with creativity. 

Annalise Gratovich creates her finely crafted prints by hand from start to finish, carving wood, etching metal, dyeing paper, and using manual printing presses to create multiple originals. Each piece is printed on the finest archival papers using oil based inks and hand dyed papers she produces in her studio. Annalise operates as a self publisher out of Austin, Texas and travels frequently across the country as a visiting artist and speaker and to publish prints with esteemed print shops.  In this episode we talk about Annalise’s newest body of work, Carrying Things From Home, a series of 8 monumental woodcuts that are 13 years in the making. On view at Hecho now for the first time in their entirety.

Jaydan Moore grew up in the Bay Area inside a family that has sold tombstones for four generations, an early apprenticeship in how objects hold a whole life. He went to CCA at eighteen, found metals, and never really left. Fifteen years ago he picked up a silver-plated platter at a junk shop and has been working in that single material ever since. We talk nostalgia, tragedy versus comedy, and how he got to metal.

Kat Kinnick is back on A Creative Excuse for her third solo appearance, and we get into it. We talk process over product, how the animals in her paintings sit at the edge of cuteness and brutality, and how the desire to connect, to nature, to people, to the things we don't say, runs underneath all of it.

Haley Greenfeather English is an artist and educator born and raised in Tiwa territory. Their paternal family is from Red Lake Nation and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and their maternal family is of European/Irish descent. Their art is an extension of their love of storytelling. It is something that deeply connects them to being and understanding what it means to be human. Through collections of loose drawings, written journals, and sentimental random objects, English visually brings pieces of stories together. English incorporates portraits of their family, warped perspectives, historical narratives, Indigenous and medicinal plants, cigarette smoking spirits, insects and animals.

Kate Wood (voted most likely to have bangs for her entire life) is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in painting/illustration, and paper mache sculpture. Kate considers herself a play-based artist whose works explores themes of relationship, body language and communication, family, and the point at which personal experience transcends identity and becomes collective consciousness. The daughter of a school teacher and an archaeologist, story and artifact became loci for Kate’s experience of and orientation to the world beginning in early childhood. Using a cast of glyphs rooted in archetype and mythology, Kate constructs visual narratives that invite and encourage viewers to have fun finding and experiencing themselves within the work. Kate grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives with her family in a rural mountain village on the High road to Taos.

Juana Estrada Hernández is a Mexican artist and Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Born in Luis Moya, Zacatecas, Mexico, she moved to the United States at the age of seven and grew up as an undocumented immigrant — an experience that became central to her artistic practice. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico and her BFA in Printmaking from Fort Hays State University.
Estrada Hernández's work draws on Mexican folklore, Hispanic cultural traditions, and her family's intergenerational migration stories, with a particular focus on the social and political realities facing Hispanic migrant communities. She is a DACA recipient and self-described "DACA-mented" artist, and her prints speak with both intimacy and urgency to the experience of living, creating, and belonging across borders. Her printmaking — primarily lithography and intaglio — is luminous, narrative, and dynamic, with a touch of the surreal.
She has exhibited across the United States, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Her work is held in several collections including the Janet Turner Print Museum, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Zygote Press Archives, Laval University, and Engramme, National Library and Archives of Québec.

Printmaker and educator Julianna Kirwin presents a window installation combining hand-pulled prints with the woodblocks used to make them. Informed by her experiences along the Camino Real, the work highlights printmaking as a bridge between cultures, revealing process, lineage, and Pan-American identity through image and material.