Amy Lincoln: On the Strangest Sea
Featuring Lincoln and Amanda Millet-Sorsa
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #1092 | September 19, 2024
Jan Dickey. Photo Credit: Farfar Studios
Jan Dickey with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Jan Dickey moved to New York City during the pandemic by way of Hawaiʻi, where he completed his MFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In New York, he has shown his paintings at My Pet Ram, D.D.D.D., and Below Grand gallery among other locations. Recently he completed a materials-based residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation(2023) and this interview seeks to delve deeper into his unique use of hand-mixed natural painting mediums like rabbit skin glue, casein, egg tempera, and oil paint. Currently he has an exhibition of new work at Bob’s Gallery, an experimental space in Bushwick: “The Generations” on through August 18th, 2024. Dickey is also the newest member of Artcake, an art center in Sunset Park that provides artists with affordable studio spaces and artistic programming.
Published in Art Spiel online August 2024
The Apex is Nothing
Featuring Bruce Pearson, Chris Martin, John O’Connor, Ken Weathersby, and Amanda Millet-Sorsa
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #1067 | May 15, 2024
“Rain” (2023)
60 × 48 x1" - pigment, glass, stone chalk, acrylic, cellulose, marker, & pastel on canvas
Michael Ambron in conversation with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Michael Ambron’s work is highly engaged in the play between pigments, binders, and additive mixtures as well as the exploration of substrates and surfaces. He arrives at complex color languages and textures made possible by his deep understanding of the alchemy and craft of paint making. The images, marks, gestures, and fields of color sit in between repetitive marks and symbolic imagery in an expansive dream space, often with a particular pigment he’s exploring at the inception of the work. Ambron experiences both closed and open-eye hallucinations when sleeping and records these visions in dream journals, which then make it into his painting. Ambron and Amanda Millet-Sorsa sat down at Ortega y Gasset, an artist-run non-profit gallery located in Gowanus, Brooklyn to speak about his work. The exhibition “Michael Ambron: No Time” was curated by Zahar Vaks and Lauren Whearty. It is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work.
Published in Tussle Magazine online March 2024
Portrait of Ouattara Watts, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.
Ouattara Watts with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Ouattara Watts is a painter whose works are infused with abstraction, symbolism, history, and alchemy, which embody a fusion of cultures throughout time and place. Painterly, gestural, and tactile, his work focuses on the crossover of semblances that we share as humans.
Karma gallery first exhibited his recent work in 2022 prior to the current show in their LA space this year. This conversation (translated from French) between Ouattara Watts and Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa took place in his Bushwick studio located near the Morgan Ave stop on the L train on a sunny afternoon over espresso.
Published in The Brooklyn Rail in Print & online March 2024
Tamara Gonzales in conversation with EJ Hauser and Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Klaus von Nichtssagend is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings by Tamara Gonzales, opening January 12 and on view through February 17, 2024. Titled Amplifiers, the show will feature new works focusing on ornate frame motifs that encompass the outer bounds of each canvas as well as paintings featuring Gonzales’s distinctive cast of figures and animalian forms.
In person at Klaus von Nichtssagen gallery, Tribeca, NY January 27, 2024
Retinal Hysteria hosted by Charlie Schultz, with Samuel Breslin
Retinal Hysteria curated by Robert Storr at Venus Over Manhattan. Writers William Corwin, Eleanor Heartney, Amanda Millet-Sorsa, and Saul Ostrow, and join Rail Managing Editor Charles Schultz for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Samuel Breslin.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #960 | December 11, 2023
Sarah McEneaney with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Sarah McEneaney: The World Around. Artist Sarah McEneaney joins Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rachel James.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #944 | November 17, 2023
Yevgeniya Baras with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Yevgeniya Baras: Stargazer. Artist Yevgeniya Baras joins Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #925 | November 20, 2023
Hearne Pardee with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Hearne Pardee: Just Looking. Artist Hearne Pardee joins Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Simon Pettet.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #899 | September 15, 2023
Portrait of Sheila Pepe, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.
Sheila Pepe with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Sheila Pepe lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and inaugurated her first major public sculpture for the exhibition My Neighbor’s Garden at Madison Square Park, curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport. We sat down for a conversation at ArtBuilt, which holds studios for artists at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park and where Pepe has had a studio for a number of years.
Published in The Brooklyn Rail in Print & online September 2023
André Ricardo in his studio in São Paulo (2021) Photo: João Liberato
André Ricardo in Conversation with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
André Ricardo in conversation with Amanda Millet-Sorsa at his first solo exhibition in New York, André Ricardo: Imaginarium (May 24 – July 28, 2023), with the gallery Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary in collaboration with Galeria Estação. He was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil and for the past 10 years, has been working with egg tempera uniting forms, images, and shapes from his urban environment, nature, architecture, and his mixed heritage in European, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous cultures.
Published online in WhiteHot Magazine July 2023
Laura Lappi in her studio in Ridgewood, Queens, NY. Courtesy of Amanda Millet-Sorsa
INTERVIEW with Laura Lappi
Laura Lappi in conversation with Amanda Millet-Sorsa at her studio in Ridgewood, Queens in May 2023 prior to her works being shipped to Helsinki, Finland, for her first solo exhibition in her home country’s capital.
Published in Theorema RE:view for Critique & Crisis online June 2023
The Camargo Foundation
The Camargo Foundation
Camargo Foundation Executive Director Julie Chénot and Camargo Foundation past and present residents author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, playwright Cassandra Medley, and artist Jenny Polak join Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Samira Negrouche.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #793 | April 21, 2023
Paige Beeber. Photo credit: Sharon Kendrick
Paige Beeber—On Phantom Thread
Prior to her exhibition, Phantom Thread at Freight+Volume, Paige Beeber spoke with Amanda Millet-Sorsa at the artist’s studio in Brooklyn. Nestled into a Cube Smart storage space building in Gowanus on the edge of Red Hook, the studio is part of TI Studios. Beeber’s long family roots in Brooklyn date back to the early 1900s, as she continues to live and work in this borough.
Published in Art Spiel online May 2023
Julia Rooney, Installation images of "Album" at Freight + Volume, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Freight + Volume.
Pixels, QR Codes, and Square Paintings: In Conversation with Artist Julia Rooney
Artist Julia Rooney’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, works on paper and installation that explore the tensions between analog and digital media. Her paintings offer both two and three dimensional approaches to abstract image making focusing on the square shape as a foundation. Through digital media in the use of QR codes, pixels, and grids are embedded with rigid right angle squares, Rooney challenges these images with her hand by cutting, sewing, drawing/painting loosely, with thick and thin marks bringing us closer to the analog, to painting, and to what is human.
Published online in Testudo Editorial January 2023
Red Moss, ink on paper, 28 x 32 inches, 2022
INTERVIEW with Roxane Revon
Roxane Revon joins Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a fireside chat at 68 Jay Street bar in DUMBO, Brooklyn NY for a conversation about her work and transition from theatre to multimedia art. Revon works with photography and video and uses plants, water, and transparent materials like reused plexiglass in her installation work alongside a practice dedicated to drawing. She’s exploring intersections between humans and vegetal beings.
Published online in Theorema RE:view for Critique & Crisis January 2023
Jim Drougas
Common Ground | Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books
Bookstore owner and curator James Drougas, filmmaker Beatriz Browne, curator Katharina McCarty, and artist Amanda Millet-Sorsa join Rail contributor Ann C. Collins for a conversation. We conclude with a musical performance by Dawn Landes.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment April 22, 2022
Bill Jensen
Bill Jensen with Amanda Millet-Sorsa and Rail staff
Artist Bill Jensen joins Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa and Rail staff for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Zach Savich.
The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment #524 March 28, 2022
Portrait of Koho Yamamoto. Pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Based on a photograph by Robert Banat.
Koho Yamamoto with Amanda Millet-Sorsa
We discuss the life and work of Japanese American artist Koho Yamamoto through several conversations over sushi and tea in her apartment above Bar Pitti on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village, in anticipation of her centennial birthday in April 2022. After seeing the artist’s first big show at the Noguchi Museum, Koho Yamamoto: Under a Dark Moon (May 2021), I started as her student to learn Japanese calligraphy. Though she is a dedicated teacher of traditional sumi-e subjects and has taught for over fifty years, her own work stems from the ideas and thoughts developed in postwar Abstract Expressionism in New York, where she has lived since 1945 after being held in the internment camps in Utah during WWII.
Published in The Brooklyn Rail in print & online April 2022 for her centennial