Episode 022: American Artist

Show Notes

On this week’s show we sit down with the one and only American Artist, whose brilliant practice places a critical lens on technology and systems, often as a means by which to discuss the forms of systemic racism, control, and manipulation that become coded into the world. In our chat we’ll hear about _____________’s origins as an artist and graphic designer, and how their work extends across research and education. Tune in as well to hear about their current and ongoing research on the life and work of Octavia E. Butler 💜

Links from the conversation with ________________
> https://americanartist.us
> Shaper of God
> School for Poetic Computation

Join the conversation:
https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence
https://www.instagram.com/artobsolescence/

Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries. This is art and obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. 

Welcome back everyone this week. I'm very excited to share my conversation with an artist whose work I've admired for many, many years. 

[00:00:18] American Artist: Hi, my name is American Artist. I'm an educator and artist based in New York. 

[00:00:23] Ben: I've been drawn to American Artist's work for so many reasons, the critical lens on technology and the way they use this as a means by which to discuss the non-digital forms of systemic control and oppression. But in the background, there's always been this ongoing project of artistic attribution in anonymity. 

American Artist their chosen name, legally changed in 2013, is simultaneously distinctive, but also quite anonymous. And when I first saw that they sign off their emails with a blank under score, rather than their name. I just had to know more. Was this an artistic project? Was it personal? 

[00:00:58] American Artist: There's so many reasons for my name change, some of which came before I did it and some came after, because it's not the kind of thing you just do it and then it's over, which I think is also why I was so compelled by it. I say that because when I changed my name, I was thinking, this is something where every time someone is gonna say it or write it or whatever or at least the first time, you know, they're going to be kind of like, you know, what's going on.

And that to me felt like, you know, related to what an art experience could be, but also feeling like the system of naming, which we take for granted, why can't it be something where I have agency over it? There is this aspect of anonymity, and I think it's simultaneously an interest in anonymity and also an interest in recognition too it's kind of both, because it is so distinct, but it also is almost meaningless in a way. It definitely, isn't only artistic, it's very personal and it did come from this feeling of the name I have is not, adequate to who I feel I am. American Artists felt more right to me. I think in the sense that it's, this kind of, non-name, it's kind of like, not really gendered either. I'm actually really fascinated by like the ability to change at will. If there weren't, practical barriers, I think I could change names regularly or something like in digital space or virtual space where you can change your username at will or your username doesn't have to be representative of something specific. Like it could be something really wacky and I really liked that idea of just being able to change it. But I think even within the digital realm, that's becoming less possible because again, your name is so attached to your ability to be recognized or understood or tagged in something. And so if you continually change it, then you will become anonymous because it's not possible to align those different instances of yourself for people that aren't, you know, immediately engaged with the, all the time. 

[00:03:10] Ben: Now before we go any further today, I just wanted to jump in here to remind you all and let our new listeners note that a fundamental mission of this show is to equitably support the artists that we speak to, and that we are a listener supported project. In order to provide artists like today's guests with equitable speaking fees, I need your help right now is an incredible time to chip in thanks to the generosity of the Bates-Gosset Family Fund, any donation that you make right now will be matched one to one. So if you can chip in 25 bucks, that becomes 50 bucks. A hundred dollars becomes $200 and so on. A whole bunch of you don't hit last week. Thank you. So, so much to Parker, Alexis, Ellen, Caroline Yukiko, and Robert. Thank you for your collective generosity paired with our current match, we raised $2,300 last week. Let's keep it going this week. If you've been enjoying the show and you're not among the 18 folks that have supported the show so far again now is a great time to give thanks to the match from the Bates-Gosset Family Fund and you can make your tax deductible gift at artandobsolescence.com/donate. 

Thanks as always for any support you can provide, but most of all, thanks to all of you dedicated listeners out there that tune in every week. You are appreciated so much Now enough fundraising, let's dive into my chat with American Artist and as usual let's start from the beginning. 

[00:04:23] American Artist: I grew up in Pasadena California and when I was a kid, I, I really loved to draw. I really loved to play video games and I think those different things really made me feel, you know, I don't know, like a sense of agency when it came to making things and that was something that always inspired me. I always thought of myself as an artist. I was also interested in science and technology generally. And I think pretty soon as a youngster, I started to kind of like, think about my identity as an artist for some reason. And I think attributing a lot of agency to this ability to like make things and design things and I think at that point, you know, I wouldn't have imagined, making art in the way I do now, or being able to be a digital artist or make things in museum. It really just came out of this enjoyment of, creating things and also like, being someone who in the classroom, my classmates would be like, oh yeah, that's so-and-so, they know how to draw. They can draw me this thing and I started to see that as like who I was I think. 

Even though neither of my parents was, you know, an artist, necessarily they were creative people. My dad was kind of like poet and had an eye for being able to render things and helped me with a lot of projects when I was young. Building things for the science fair or the, Boy Scouts and things like this, we have to like craft things. And also my mom was also very studious and intellectual and was able to inspire me creatively that way. But I think it really just came out of finding that I had an knack for these things. I was always not someone who was very talkative, even now I'm not, but finding that I did have a voice and I could render things with a certain, Intellectual and poetic awareness that I can't always put into words. And I think being able to recognize that, and also have that validated at a young age. Many people did encourage me to embrace that aspect and I think that's why even early on, I was able to take that on as part of who I saw myself as.

 In high school is when I, when I did begin using the internet really you know, that's when My Space was popular and My Space, got me into like coding and things like that. That's where I first started using HTML. And at that time, I started to see myself as an artist for sure, but also I got into graphic design pretty heavily, and I wanted to go to art school for like college, but I was like, oh, I can't go to a big fancy art school. It's like very expensive and no one's going to pay for that. And as much as I was interested in art, I was also interested in graphic design. And so for me, it seemed like a logical step to move towards graphic design, because I could see a clear path to how this evolves into a job, how this evolves into economic stability. Whereas with it was so opaque to me, I could never have imagined, you know, what it means to be a working artist. It wasn't really until grad school that I even started to understand how someone can be an artist as their job. And I think part of that has to do with how we tell the narrative of what it means to be an artist, you know, in society in general, but even within art school, within the art field, it's so opaque. There's always sort of an emphasis on the conversations around art or the theories or the ideologies. And it sort of presumes that if you can master that, all the other things will fall into place. Which occasionally can, happen but I think by treating people in that way or treating education in that way, you know, 95% of artists, those things don't naturally fall into place, you know?

When I finished graphic design school, I started working for this furniture company designing their advertisements and also doing a little bit of freelance design. That was probably like my biggest first job out of college. But I was also making artwork on the side. I would go home and I would make all these like weird things and I had a schedule for like how I was doing it, but I was really like in a silo like I was working by myself. I didn't really have a community of quote unquote fine artists, you know? Cause all my friends were graphic designers or musicians but I was doing oil painting, I was doing digital works, I was doing screen printing, I was doing whatever the hell I felt like doing because up till then my creative practice was so driven by curiosity and where I feel like I can do something that I just haven't seen or I don't have a preconceived notion of how that's supposed to operate. I can just sort of create something interesting. And so the work that I was doing at that time, even though a lot of it was analog, it was still dealing with a designers ethos or, there were formal aspects of it that felt very much rooted in graphic design. I would paint these images that were photographic and then I would layer on top of that, something screen printed and like very graphic, to try and like create this depth between the two. And so I was approaching the craft with this, kind of logic of design and I really got interested in screen printing because it was relatively easy to like reproduce an image with this very tight design iconography, but you're doing it with paint, you know, and that was really exciting to me also. But at the same time, I was still experimenting with digital space as well. Even though it was kind of all over the place I felt like there was something unifying it and so I was doing that and then graph design really like was my job and I remember talking to one of my coworkers and I had written this long explanation for this artwork I was making and she was kind of like, if you need more than like a paragraph to explain what you're doing, like you should probably go to grad school for art. I was kinda thinking about school already because I was like, I want to know how I become an artist. I still wanted to be an artist, but I didn't know how it works, you know? I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm right now working on this project about Octavia Butler and it's interesting to hear the way she writes about having this kind of obsession with her writing, which I really identified with a bit, and for better or for worse, I didn't feel like it was something I could turn off or do something else. I was like, I'm going to be doing this, you know, regardless of whether it's my job and I want to figure out how to make this part of my life in a more sustainable way. It's still a very pervasive idea in the arts that you need to have an MFA to be a professional artist, and as someone who was, who was not in the arts, I'm like, that seems like what I need to do. And so I started applying to schools and I knew I wanted to go to school on the east coast, particularly. I was interested in coming to New York, just for all the stereotypical reasons young artists want to go to New York. Even though I was, you know, outside of Los Angeles, so I could have easily gone to, you know, a school there and been part of the LA art picture. But something about New York was really compelling to me and so I applied to Parsons the New School where I ultimately wound up. 

[00:12:00] Ben: So, I mean, what was the experience of being there, like 

[00:12:04] American Artist: It was jarring. It was really tough because I remember I had never read any critical theory. you know. I was so excited. I'm like, I'm gonna tear this thing up I'm gonna read every page. I'm going to be an expert. Again, I had been operating out of this idea of having agency over this particular craft or like feeling like I can be rewarded by my curiosity, towards my engagement with this thing. And that's not really the way that the field of fine art is set up and particularly in grad school either and so trying to subscribe to this methodology that was like so foreign to me, it was like really hard. But at the same time I was curious about it and gradually I got really interested in it, but it took a long time. Talking to all my peers and everything, it was a hard time to be in school. Like it was, kind of demoralizing and I think many people felt that way. It was around the end of grad school that I felt like things started to click into place in terms of understanding how I could create something within this new logic that felt meaningful to me. And so around then, yeah, it felt like I was starting to see the light and then it was like right after school, that I made something and I was like, okay I feel like this is a project that feels like something newly developed between who I am and what this field is asking. That's when I created this project A Refusal, and you know, gradually, since then I've felt pieces of myself returning to me and still finding myself at a intersection of that intuitive, idea of what it means to make work and a sort of, formal, professional, fine art way of doing things. 

Halfway through my last year in grad school I applied to be an intern at this gallery Koenig & Clinton. Margaret Clinton, has been a huge mentor for me and been really helpful for me since then. So yeah, I was working there for a bit and when that internship ended, it was like, after school that summer and then they kept me on for a few months as like a Webmaster. That was the job title I requested Webmaster. Cause I was basically working on their website primarily. And then when that ended, I was like, I don't have this skills in art administration or whatever, to have a job that actually pays me what I need to survive. You know? Like, my degree didn't prepare me to get a competitive job in that way. Seeing my partner work in the arts as well, it was just like, these jobs are like, underpaid and like, you know, disrespectful. and, I'd been working for many years now and I need more than this. So I was like to actually get paid decently, I have to go back to graphic design, you know, I need like a real job. I ended up working at this company, Hearst magazines, and when I first started there. I was full-time working there. But meanwhile, I'm still applying to things in the arts and like trying to make art or whatever. 

So while I was working in design, that was when I like applied for the Whitney independent study program. And wildly enough, I got accepted. I didn't expect it. I was really surprised cause everyone told me you need to apply, you know, three times at least. And if you don't get it, then, then you'll probably never get it. And also, you know, other people had said, they'll only accept, you know, one person from each school and all of these like myths around how you get in or whatever. And all my conceptions about it were erased, you know? Me and my partner both got accepted the same year and we both went to Parsons. So we were like, okay, we did not expect that to happen. That's that's wild. I think that was one thing where I felt like, okay, maybe I am a good artist. Maybe I know what I'm talking about. You know, cause I got into this like really prestigious residency or whatever. So when I went there the way the program works, you have to go there, you know, at least a couple of days a week. And so I had asked my job, like, can I work part-time and graciously enough? They said, yes. And so I was in working there like three days a week. And then the other two days I would go to the Whitney independent study program. They have a studio currently it's in Chinatown, it's on Lafayette and canal. That kind of area. Um, yeah, so I would, I would go there a couple days a week and then the other days I was in Columbus Circle, that's where I was working.

[00:16:53] Ben: Your work, is obviously deeply, socially engaged. It's taking on, I guess you could say politics in some way, but also just Blackness and race in America and class in some ways. You're also one of these artists who is deeply engaged with technology, but it's not always like, oh yeah, this is a video artwork. Or this is a piece of software based art, sometimes you're just using technology as, a site for discourse, like your neon piece, for instance, that I saw you post on Instagram, you know, it's like, a light-based piece, but you're engaging with the language of technology to discuss racial politics, for instance. So, I'm just curious if you could speak to, why time-based media for your work and what you think it does or doesn't lend to the themes that you take on in your work?

[00:17:45] American Artist: Yeah, well, firstly, I would say the reason I feel it's necessary to move between these different, aspects of, you know, systemic racism or the way technology is biased or the system employs, certain tactics or the way that is employed, the way policing and incarceration are employed. All of these things operate systemically in ways that I think not only are comparable, but they also have direct relationships. And I think something that I'm trying to do is create an image of how all of these things are part of one ecosystem. And I think within the, uh, the realm of how we understand most art should work, you know, it should have one simple statement or something like that. But I think that does a disservice to how our actual experience of these things is and how their actual complicity within one another is. So that's why I don't feel like these are all like different unrelated things, but rather are totally related with one another. 

I wanted to say something about, why the works are not always hyper digital or like very overtly digital. For one thing, I just find that incredibly boring, but also because it's very reductive, it's reductive to how these things move and operate. It's reductive to the complexities that they're describing. And so it's like, yes, I want this to be a conversation about software, but I don't want you to see software and just stop there. Like, oh, this is software, you know, especially for someone that's not, very digitally literate. If they see a computer or screen, you know, it's like, it stops there like, oh, a screen. Okay. I get it. You know? And so I'm like, what if I want to talk about how screens are impacting society? It might actually be doing a disservice to myself if there's a screen in it. It might be better to like, you know, make a metaphor for how screens are affecting people so that you don't immediately get caught up with that signifier, but you actually, you know, engage with the idea and then at the very end, you come around to the screen and you're like, okay, I get what's going on.

[00:20:06] Ben: That makes so much sense. Given the topics that you take on, in your work and your values, I'm curious if there are contexts or opportunities for showing your work or having it collected that you try to stay away from, or if there are certain contexts or places for your work it really feels most at home.

[00:20:26] American Artist: For the first few years of my practice, I was very lucky that a lot of the opportunities that came to me were from friends or people that I respected and wanted to work with. So I wasn't often put in this difficult decision of, you know, having to decide like, does this represent my values or not? But you know, now at this point in my career, I feel like I am having to do that, you know, deciding like, is this right? Or is this representative of my values? And I feel like within the arts, like, any other field that requires massive funding in order to exist, it's really hard to be able to draw those lines and so I think one way I'm addressing that is just like, still saying the things I want to say. Even if it's in conflict with the person that's trying to work with me or show the work or collect the work. I mean, obviously if I feel really cringe about it, I'm going to say no, but I'm just saying in the cases where you feel like it's not possible, I think that shouldn't like silence you from, you know, saying how you feel about, about the thing. But even that answer, you know, is very reductive to how it actually is. It's really complicated but I would say that I do have opportunities where I'm much more excited and it's much easier to say like, okay, like I'm a hundred percent on board with this. You know, if it's like friends or people that I know are out there doing similar work to me, but maybe we've never had the opportunity to work together, you know? And now the opportunity is here. Like that's really exciting, you know?

[00:22:04] Ben: Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think that, these kinds of questions can become so reductive and black and white and obviously life is not that simple and I like that perspective that you're bringing to it. So as an artist who works with technology, I'm curious what, if any conservation challenges you've faced over the years in terms of like maintenance or obsolescence. 

[00:22:30] American Artist: Oh my God. Don't even get me started. I made this piece a few years ago called Sandy Speaks and it's this chat bot that was, you know, inspired by what happened to Sandra Bland. The woman that was pulled over in her car in Texas and she was taken to jail and ultimately she died in jail and it seems that the police most likely had something to do with that, but then it was kind of like covered up or presented as like a suicide. But this piece was responding to her and her legacy. It was this chat bot and it used this platform. And, the user side interface, you know, it was something that I had developed and programmed. If you've tried to make a chat bot it's very hard because the amount of language you need to anticipate and be able to present in order to produce a realistic conversation is like way more vast than you would imagine it is. I'm sure those systems are, better now for someone, you know, working on a small scale of trying to make a chat bot but at the time it was really difficult and so that was like one aspect of it. I was just kind of disappointed in the performance of the bot, but also just in the, in the maintenance, like every time I want to show it, I have to do some work on it to make sure it's like working. 

And I had this other piece, this sculptural work called The Black Critique Towards Wild Beyond, and it has these cell phones that are playing these videos, like several of them and they're like plugged in and there's like, lights. It's really a complex object. And yeah, it's just really hard to like, communicate how it works even like I wrote like a manual for it which is so many pages long. And even then I feel like this is so complicated and it's because it's work that requires, you know, specific software or technology and it just made me feel like, you know, I really enjoy making work like this, but it's so hard, the maintenance, you know, is like really complicated. So it's made me like reconsider what kinds of pieces I make and if I take a risk like that and do something really complicated, I'm now thinking, you know, okay. What about after the show? What about all the shows after this? What if someone collects it? What if a museum wants it, you know, all these things that I wasn't thinking about, you know, a few years ago. And so if I do make something complicated, I have to like anticipate that there's going to be a lot of work going forward in relationship to those decisions.

One thing that I think I did learn from my brief internship at a gallery. I was writing manuals for how to update their website. Very long manuals so that kind of like gave me a precedent for how to make a manual for maintaining a work. I think how my brain works kind of lends itself towards this kind of activity, describing in detail how you're going to put this together. So that's something that I've like begun doing, you know, writing the installation instructions. It's very time consuming, but, that's sort of become at this point, at least this is like a normal part of making a work is being able to describe to someone else how it's going to be maintained, how to put it together. I feel like many of my technological choices are because the ideal that I would want isn't possible for me in that moment, you know? So in that sense, that specific technology is not important for the concept, but at the same time after I've like, you know, spent the time developing this. Now I have an emotional attachment to it. So I kind of do want it to be kept like that.

[00:26:16] Ben: So I guess kind of on this note of like, you know, back of house logistics, do you have a studio? Do you have like a, I show up at the studio at nine o'clock every morning, anything like that kind of thing?

[00:26:28] American Artist: Yeah. That's a great question. And it's honestly been so all over the place and like, whenever I describe like how my practice is going, I feel like every year is totally different from the last year. Because of the opportunities available. I mean, it's also because of like a pandemic, you know, other things, but yeah, I've done many residencies and so usually when I have a studio it's, for a certain amount of time, maybe up to a year, where I'm in one place. I don't think I've ever been in one studio longer than that. My hope is that soon I'll be able to have a long-term stay in one place studio. And then when I have had studios, my production has really, it's usually like there's a couple of months where I'm making a bunch of things for a show, and then there'll be a couple months where I'm not making things I'm just like researching or I'm just on my computer. Or in the case of the show I did for the Queens museum, where it was primarily a video installation, you know, with some seating and this curtain and everything, I didn't make any physical things for the show. So like I was really working on my computer for that show. Versus this show I did, um, I'm Blue If I Was Redacted, I Would Die. There was a video, but there was also a lot of sculpture, and those sculptures, I worked on myself, this was when I was at Abrams in residence. I mostly work alone, but I do occasionally work with people and that's been a really great experience. I worked with Tommy Martinez, who you had on the podcast, when he was at pioneer works, who helped me develop this incredible video. and I've worked with, Bomani McLendon who, another technologist who helped me develop an app. There's been moments where I've worked with people or, contracted people, but mostly I work on my own, you know, doing the admin and the, you know, building things as well. And so for that reason, it's like every day is different. Some days I'm in the studio physically cutting wood some days I'm just writing emails some days I'm on Zoom all day, some days I'm, you know, teaching students, some days I'm going to see art. It's always different and that's actually something that I like about it. I feel like if I was always doing the same thing every day, I would get bored. So I enjoy kind of like having these different types of activities. 

[00:28:53] Ben: I love that so in recent years I've noticed kind of an increasing broadening of your practice, namely, education and kind of like community building has become very integrated into your artistic works. What inspired this kind of like development 

[00:29:10] American Artist: I started teaching in 2018, I was invited, by Melanie Hoff to teach at School for Poetic Computation and so that was the first place I taught and then since then I've taught at different universities. Yeah, but that was also like, I think one of the most rewarding teaching experiences was, was teaching there. I feel like teaching is its own art form. I want to say, like being able to develop a syllabus and, you know, give it to the students and see what they make and what they say it's just, it's phenomenal. It's like super fascinating to me. For me, like the way I see the work is, the objects are just sort of the periphery of the, concepts, you know, so for me teaching is really rewarding because you have all these experiences of creating new knowledge and sharing that knowledge with others. And I really love it. And I didn't expect that at first before I started teaching, I always thought I would be really intimidated and it wasn't for me. but once I started doing it, I got really compelled by it. As far as my artworks relationship to education or, you know, being able to lay bare what concepts it's dealing with, I think I've also I don't know. I've had a series of conclusions about, you know, how people understand things and I think part of the opacity that's maintained within academia and within the arts, some of it there's an artistic value to it, but some of it is just pretense. And so trying to remove as much of that as possible. You know, I don't want to make something super on the nose, but if people don't know what's going on for me, that's kind of like, what's the point, you know? Not everyone feels that way, but that's something that I'm like gradually feeling more strongly about, you know? 

[00:30:59] Ben: On your website right now, I think it's an interview with Fred Moten that you have a clip of and he's not the only you've done an interview with, have you done a couple of those? I feel like I've seen more on social media. 

[00:31:10] American Artist: Let's see, I did a couple of talks with Robin DG Kelly, and I also spoke with Simone Brown. Who's a writer who I really admire. I think that, that goes back to what I was saying about like, wanting to make it accessible. You know, having Fred Moten go on IG live. It's a little bit silly, but I'm also like, but everyone I know, is watching it live right now why wouldn't I do it on there?

[00:31:37] Ben: Yeah. So American Artist what's coming next for you. 

[00:31:41] American Artist: I'm working on this show. Again, speaking to ancestors, I've been researching Octavia E Butler and, I found out within the last few years that she grew up in the same city I did, I'm surprised I didn't know him before that. But knowing that, and like knowing we went to the same high school, it just got me really fascinated and like, aside from the writing itself, I think I just got really compelled to learn more about her as a person. Also because it got me thinking, having grown up in this environment of Pasadena, California and seeing the different institutions there such as Caltech and JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and also thinking about, Pasadena City College and the different academic institutions, there the libraries. How all of those things being in my vicinity just sort of like informs the culture of the place and also my perception of like, what was possible and what reality was it just made me think about, you know, what was her life like growing up there? She grew up in like the fifties and sixties, you know, that's when she was young. And so just trying to get a sense of what the city was like and what industries were active. And so like the rocket science industry was just starting there at that time. And also the science fiction community is really growing in Los Angeles at that time. and then also just thinking about the fact that her mom moved there from Louisiana, and thinking of, you know, my parents who were her same age and their parents moved to that area from, Tennessee and Oklahoma, and thinking about this history of black migration to Los Angeles and to Pasadena and you know, all of this, I feel like all of those things had to happen in order for her to be this like incredible force. She's channeling all of those different historical trajectories. So that's kind of what this project I'm working on is about. It's like about all of that. It's going to be an ongoing thing. So I think there'll be different stages of presentation. I have one that's already online, which is this website called Shaper of God and it's kind of like a research archive, but the way you navigate it is kind of like video gamey so I think our listeners will be really interested in that. shaperofgod.kadist.org. Right now I'm working on this show that's going to be at Red Cat in Los Angeles, and this is a institutional gallery in Los Angeles. and there will be some sculpture and some video, and I've been speaking with some people that knew Octavia Butler and some people that researched her work. And so I'm hoping to involve them in that process somehow.

[00:34:36] Ben: That's awesome. What advice would you give to your younger self who might be 

[00:34:41] American Artist: Um, That's a great question. I think of a particular stage of myself, which was like my high school self. And I had a lot of creative energy and I just didn't know how to build a life around that. And little did I know wouldn't figure that out for many years after. But I think I would have told myself to like, not worry so much, you're not in a competition with others around you because like, you have your own interest in what you know your life is gonna bring and that's gonna be possible for you as long as you like, have that vision. I would just say not to worry because whatever you're after, like you'll be able to make it happen. And it's going to be okay.

[00:35:29] Ben: Awesome. I love it. American Artist thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. 

[00:35:34] American Artist: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. You've had some phenomenal guests on here, so it's really exciting to be part of this podcast.

[00:35:42] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's conversation with American Artist. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider supporting the show by heading on over to artandobsolescence.com/donate, where you can make your tax deductible donation through the New York Foundation for the Arts. If you're not in a place to donate, I hope you'll consider leaving a review that really helps other people discover the show and heads up if you're a Spotify listener, they have rolled out ratings on Spotify so you can do that there. As always, if you want to keep the conversation going on Twitter and Instagram, you'll find us @artobsolescence. 

Thanks so much for tuning in friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.