INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Amanda Ekery collaborates with everyone, literally. Historians, artists, engineers, bakers, you name it. Amanda works with all to create projects that invite others to explore and share their stories. She weaves her experience in improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and performances.  Her new album, Árabe, is about Syrian and Mexican shared history and culture, and covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes, to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. The vinyl release also includes an art book which contains essays for each track, and restored family and historical photos.

Friends since childhood, Eraserhood Sound partners, Vincent John and Max Perla’s unique songcrafting process includes sourcing and learning to play vintage instruments, and using reel-to-reel equipment to create the exact sound they are after. EHS also features an in-house boutique record label that specializes in vinyl releases. Operating out of the studio built for Questlove, EHS is uniquely positioned to carry on Philadelphia’s rich musical legacy.Their latest television project is PBS KIDS’ groundbreaking Carl the Collector, the network’s first animated series spotlighting central characters on the autism spectrum. The team’s handcrafted music for each episode gives the show a sophisticated, stand out sound that has not been seen in children’s entertainment since Peanuts. The score features Eraserhood Sounds’ trademark Synth & Soul palette, a distinctive blend of vintage analog recording stylings of 60s soul and traditional 70s funk, with 80s based synthesizers and drum machines. 

In Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and cultures to show how friendship can open up new levels of community. Through her inspiring prose, Vulchi reveals that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of resistance.Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM. Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia. Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe. Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art. In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

A candid and expansive talk between INTERLOCUTOR Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen and Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the Managing Partner of CANADA Gallery. She plays a key role in shaping the gallery’s program and strategic direction. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022 and spearheaded its digital evolution by establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy. Boyle’s curatorial practice is driven by a commitment to equity and intergenerational dialogue, as seen in her debut exhibition at Pace, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, which brought together 17 artists from the gallery’s program alongside figures from her wider network. She continues championing new perspectives in contemporary art through exhibitions such as Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed and Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Through her work, Boyle remains dedicated to expanding the reach of contemporary art, engaging collectors, and fostering dynamic connections between artists and institutions.