INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

Author and journalist Charlie Wells discusses his new book, What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium.That adulthood—a work in progress for more than a quarter century—has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic, and a sharp turn toward cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish, and supposedly riddled with failure.Now, 25 years after the first millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation’s defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas, and transformations of the century played out in private lives.

Artist Dan Alvarado discusses his solo exhibition PANDORA'S SWIPE, a satirical take on the temptation, overstimulation, and hypersexualization of online dating apps. Opening on September 5 and running through September 22 at Bushwick, Brooklyn's Botanica Grove, Alvarado’s paintings, composed of digitally altered and collaged dating profiles, become a landscape of portraits across the ether.Complimentary bright, colorful emojis accentuate the sexual stimulation and dopamine that dating profiles promote, and comment on how human society interacts and flirts with one another. To create a feeling of overstimulation, the profile images and emojis are screen-printed in vibrant colors before being hand-painted for their final touches, resulting in portraits with a more playful take on profiles users would see on dating apps.Significant events in the first half of this decade, such as the COVID pandemic and the correlation of ramped-up usage of dating apps during this time, inspired Alvarado to explore creating works on this particular topic.​ With dating app companies like Hinge, Tinder, and even Facebook promoting the idea that you can find love, many individuals are persuaded to take the leap and rely on these digital platforms to find their partners or significant others.

Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic Robin Givhan discusses her new book about fashion icon Virgil Abloh. She profiles Abloh’s legendary work and impact, revealing how the son of Ghanaian immigrants was able to infiltrate all aspects of our culture and inspire millions. Not only a remarkable biography of his singular creative force, the book is a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. With access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng, to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan tells a captivating, great American story of how a young man’s rise amid this cultural moment would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.

Musician Bob Holmes of the New York-based trio Suss talks about his unique and ambitious Across the Horizon music series. Bob and Northern Spy Records invited eight innovators from the wide landscape of instrumental music to curate the first volume of Across the Horizon, which was released at regular intervals over the past year, culminating in a double vinyl, which is out now and available to Bandcamp subscribers of the series.Curators and participants in the project include Mark Nelson (Pan American), Luke Schneider, Dave Harrington, Marisa Anderson, Stelth Ulvang, Walt McClements, David Moore, William Tyler, Chelsea Bridge, Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Julianna Barwick, and many more.

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes meant to be misleading.Utilizing chemical reactions within a painting, Estefanía experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces, opening the viewer's receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.In this interview, she talks in-depth about the seven paintings she has on display as part of the group show Past Tense/Future Perfect at NYC's Marc Straus Gallery, which will be up through August 8.

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.