Art Restart

Apr 09 2025 100 ep. 27 mins 9

Art Restart Podcast artwork

Host Pier Carlo Talenti interviews artists who – whatever they make, wherever they work – are shaking up the status quo in their fields and their communities. Art Restart is produced by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts.

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Filmmaker Carlos López Estrada Uplifts Indie Voices with Antigravity

Apr 09 2025 29 mins

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to direct his first full-length feature film, “Blindspotting.” That well-reviewed film landed him his first studio feature when Disney hired him to co-direct the animated film �

Every Stitch an Immigrant Story: fiber artist Maria Amalia Wood

Mar 26 2025 30 mins

Trained as a fiber and textile artist, Maria Amalia Wood has in recent years been working with paper, manipulating and dyeing wet wood pulp to build richly layered pieces. As important to Maria’s creativity as her raw materials, however, is the community of Latina immigrants like herself that she has fostered through a series of creative workshops in her hometown of Madison, WI.

Small School, Big Vision: JP Reuer’s New Educational Path for Artists

Mar 12 2025 25 mins

For the last two decades, architect and educator JP Reuer has been exploring how artists can become vital, integrated members of their communities rather than isolated figures working on the fringes of society. That ethos now fuels his most ambitious project to date: Small School, a Raleigh-based arts organization that reimagines advanced arts education as more accessible, collabor

The Art of Land Back: James McAnally and Anita Fields on a historic rematriation to Osage Nation

Feb 10 2025 30 mins

In November of 2024, Counterpublic, a St. Louis-based arts and civics organization, and the Osage Nation made a historic announcement. After three years of negotiations, the entirety of historic Sugarloaf Mound, the oldest human-made structure within the City of St. Louis, was being rematriated to the Osage Nation, whose ancestors built this and other mounds in the region. Counterp

Art 25: a collective with joy and independence at its heart

Jan 27 2025 27 mins

What happens when best friends in different disciplines decide to formalize their creative relationship and then invite a third artist into their artmaking experiment? A vibrant, equitable and joyful collective by the name of Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is born.Art 25’s core artists are poet Lehua M. Taitano, visual artist Lisa Jarrett and multi-disciplinary artist Jocelyn Ka

Violinist Johnny Gandelsman gets scared ... and new music benefits.

Jan 13 2025 28 mins

Johnny Gandelsman is not only one of the world’s finest violinists, as comfortable playing contemporary works as he is interpreting pieces from the Western classical canon. He is also an inveterate musical innovator. A long-time member of Silkroad Ensemble and a co-founder of string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this past year, Johnny has long cham

Americana duo Chatham Rabbits thrive on authenticity and generosity through thick and thin.

Dec 30 2024 26 mins

The year 2020 was looking to be a banner year for musical and life partners Sarah and Austin McCombie, aka Chatham Rabbits. They had just made the biggest financial investment in their band, namely the purchase of a tour van, and were looking forward to months of being on the road and performing to promote their second album when the pandemic hit and their bookings vanished. What t

Access is the art itself: Kinetic Light’s disability-centered revolution

Dec 16 2024 30 mins

To describe Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson as dancers is to name only a small sliver of their creative portfolio. To be sure, they are proficient, trained dancers and have created and performed several works for Kinetic Light, the disability arts ensemble that Alice founded in 2016 and continues to lead. In Kinetic Light’s first piece, titled “Descent,” Alice and Laurel dan

Aaron McIntosh’s quilts archive queer Southern history

Dec 02 2024 26 mins

For fiber artist Aaron McIntosh, quilting is an act of defiant documentation. Growing up in an Appalachian family with a generations-deep tradition of quilting, he learned the craft as a boy and went on to develop his own ethos and mission, studying first at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee and then earning his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.In rec

Kickstarting Classical: Composer Christopher Tin keeps fans close on his musical adventures.

Nov 18 2024 27 mins

Christopher Tin is an award-winning and genre-bending classical composer whose work has been featured in a variety of settings and media, from august concert halls to the world of video games. His orchestral piece “Baba Yetu,” which Christopher originally composed for the game “Civilization IV,” was the first ever musical work written for a video game to win a Grammy Award.