Artists on Coping: Merritt Johnson

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Merritt Johnson was born in West Baltimore and spent her childhood navigating between trees, tarps and concrete. She earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work navigates the spaces between bodies and the body politic, land and cultures by making images and objects that connect, reflect and refract vision and experience. The multiplicity of materials and processes Johnson employs embody her multiplicity, exploring layering, allegiance and agency in the face of continued threats to land, water and bodies. Johnson’s works are containers for story, feeling and thought: images of what cannot be seen, exercises for existence, and political bodies. She lives and works with her family on Tlingit land in Sitka Alaska.

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Artists on Coping: Sally Boon Matthews

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Sally Boon Matthews with Soundscape for March, April, May 2020. Water Colour, Ink, Felt Tip, Pencil, Thread on Mulberry Paper. 12”x 288”, 2020

Sally Boon Matthews is a British born and educated artist, educator, and yogi living in New York City. Though her background was originally in photography, in the last eight years she has developed a multi-discipline practice that includes video, painting, collage, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited and published in Europe, the United States and Latin America. Publications include Tricycle Magazine, NY Times, Blitz Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Penguin Books, Random House, Warner Books, A&M Records, Om Yoga, Battersea Museum of Art, UK, Galerie Solado, Caracas, Venezuela, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Art, Chateau de Trousse-Barriere, Briare, France, Jamaica Arts Center, NY.

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Artists on Coping: Niki Lederer

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Goldenrod, 2019, Found re-purposed plastic bottles, machine screws, hex nuts, wire, rebar armature, concrete base. Artist with sculpture currently on view at Wolfs Lane Park as part of Pelham Art Center’s Public Art Program.

Niki Lederer is a sculptor working with found materials including discarded umbrellas and post-consumer plastic. Born in London, Ontario and raised in Vancouver, she received her BFA from the University of Victoria and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Group exhibitions include Portal: Governors Island, 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks, Central Park and the Outdoor Sculpture Biennial Adelphi University, Garden City, NY. Solo exhibitions include Washington Square Windows, NYU and Preset Tense, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Niki recently collaborated with XAOC Contemporary Ballet for Norte Maar’s CounterPointe8. Currently her re-purposed plastic bottle sculpture is featured at the Pelham Art Center and Wolfs Lane Park and her discarded-umbrella based work will be included in the Wassaic Project 2020 Summer Exhibition. Niki lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Artists on Coping: Bill Travis

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Bill Travis, self portrait as a young man

Bill Travis is a photo-based artist, working in alternative techniques around such themes as desire, nostalgia, and impossible worlds that exist only in the imagination. He earned a Ph.D. in art history and was a tenured professor before turning full-time to creating art. He has had over sixty shows in museums, galleries, universities, and public institutions from New York City (where he lives) to San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and others. His work was featured in two monographs published in Italy and he recently co-curated an exhibition on Photography After Stonewall for Soho Photo Gallery in New York. He has lectured on his photography at Columbia University and was interviewed on Italian television. His work has been collected by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Kinsey Institute, Yale and Harvard Universities, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The New York Public Library, and national collections of photography in Russia, Japan, Portugal, and Hungary.

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Artists on Coping: John Moran

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


John Moran with Endless Night in his studio in Ghent, Belgium. Photo: Evert Van Laere

John Moran is a politically and socially engaged hot glass sculptor, mixed media artist, and all around nice guy. Originally from Philadelphia, Moran currently resides in Ghent, Belgium and is also the director of Gent Glas, a community glass studio he co-founded in 2014. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art, MFA from Illinois State University, and is currently pursuing his PhD at Eugeniusz Geppert Academy in Wroclaw, Poland. His work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums across the United States and Europe, including Habatat Galleries, SiC! Gallery, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, and Delaware Contemporary. His work is dedicated to his interests in politics, pop culture, social awareness, and contemporary art.

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Artists on Coping: Ronit Levin Delgado

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Ronit Levin Delgado by Written in Water (detail), site-specific installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, NY.

Ronit Levin Delgado is an Israeli–born, New York–based multidisciplinary visual artist and a Fulbright Scholar. Her work explores conditions and experiences of instinctual human interactions through the use of the body, rituals, and the intimacy of a kiss. In performances, videos, paintings and sculptural objects, she calls into question the personal narratives of vulnerability and desire. In immersive installations she invites the viewers to engage and share a private intimate moment in a collective environment experience. The artist’s personal rituals fuse the fragments of cultural traditions, rituals and beliefs into performative actions and objects.

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Artists on Coping: Seren Morey

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Seren Morey and her Ridgeback/Boxer Chloe in front of her latest painting Ingress

Seren Morey makes fantastical, nature inspired sculptural painting abstractions that reference the energy force of the particles that connect all matter together. She was born in Massachusetts to a family of artists and went on to complete a BA at Bard College and an MFA at Pratt Institute. Upon graduating from Bard she became an assistant to Kiki Smith and later a professor in fine arts at Pratt Institute. Morey’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows and reviewed by Robin Pogrebin, Barry Schwabsky and Helen A. Harrison of The New York Times. She currently lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is a partner in Guerra Paint & Pigment Corp., a specialty resource store for artists.

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Artists on Coping: Carmen Paulino

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Photo credit: Michael Paulino 

Carmen Paulino is a visual artist who works on providing community art programming in hospitals, community centers, and senior centers around New York City. Raised in the El Barrio section of New York City, her love for the arts was inspired by the murals in her diverse neighborhood, and her father who performed as a musician in several traditional salsa bands. As a young child, she watched her mother and grandmother knit, crochet, and sew unique traditional quilts and patterns. These experiences inspired her to develop her own techniques and produce her own mixed media works that incorporate her own life experiences, visuals from her immediate surroundings, and the inspiration that comes from living in a diverse melting pot of cultures. Paulino works at the Creative Center of University Settlement House, and in 2019 was artist-in-residence at El Barrio’s Art Space PS 109.

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Artists on Coping: Jeffrey Wilcox Paclipan

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Jeffrey Wilcox Paclipan With Andromeda, photo credit: Rosita Czekala

Jeffrey Wilcox Paclipan is a processed-based artist who works viscerally with marginalized and discarded materials to create new objects imbued with greater meaning. His work has been exhibited in the Hortt Museum, FL; Museum Of Contemporary Art, GA; Slotin Folkfest, GA; Hathaway Contemporary Gallery, GA; Life on Mars Gallery, NY; and is part of the collection in the Fulton County Arts and Culture Acquisition Program, GA.

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David Rios Ferreira – Catalytic Lines

(detail) Don’t you see I got everythin’ you need, 2019. Photo: Jason Wyche

David Rios Ferreira‘s energetic drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations flirt with cacophony yet manage to stay on the verge, creating an idiosyncratic sense of order out of chaotic turmoils. Through turbulent lines and vibrant colors, his imagery projects a rigorous visual universe where Geo-political and mythical narratives fuse organically. David Rios Ferreira shares with Art Spiel the main ideas behind his work, elaborates on some specific projects, and sheds some light on his prolific curatorial practice. Although our interview process started a few months before the Corona pandemic and the recent global protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement, David Rios Ferreira added his response to the current events, implemented at the beginning of this interview.

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