Being An Artist With Tom Judd

John Leventhal has established himself as one of the most influential guitar players in contemporary music today.  A six-time Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer who has produced albums for: Rosanne Cash, The Blind Boys Of Alabama, Shawn Colvin, Joan Osborne, Loudon Wainwright III, and many others. He brings his unique vision of the American soul to everything he does. This  includes his first solo album in 2024,  Rumble Strip. Using his guitar as a vehicle for discovery he creates elegant tunes that reflect our history and longings.  He has been married to and created a musical alliance with his wife, the great Rosanne Cash for the last 35 years. Their collaboration has produced a catalog of poignant and profound music that both honors the past and look's forward to what's next.

Nicholas James Harris - a realist painter, and plein air master, can spend months on a single painting. Meticulous by nature, he combines old world painterly practices with contemporary technology, to create masterful paintings with impeccable attention to detail. Spending hours on the banks of the Wissahickon River in Philadelphia, he immerses himself in the subject matter of the landscape. This includes documenting the light and tracking the shadows as they change throughout the day.  It is a slow process that is the antithesis of our modern-day world. He also focuses on architecture, both interior and exterior, with an occasional portrait. In all cases, he takes his observations and artistic practices to a level not often seen anywhere in contemporary painting.  

Syd Carpenter, known primarily as a Ceramicist/scluptor,  investigates the intersection of art and gardens, African American history, agriculture ,the land, and the human form. The scope and extraordinary range of her 50 year art career is being celebrated in an unprecedented retrospective that is being exhibited in 3 different museums….Woodmere Art Museum, the Maguire Art Museum at Saint Joseph's University, and the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College.  She is also the recipient of multiple fellowships including United States Artist Fellowship,Anonymous Was A Woman grant, Pew Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship. Carpenter's work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[4] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[21] and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  

Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar is interested in telling stories, and getting personal. Known for both his intimate documentaries such as "In a Dream", a film about his father, and his Hollywood feature films "We the Animals" and "Hustle", he has put together a career in filmmaking that is independent, authentic and original. His work has won major awards at Sundance, Doville, and South by Southwest, to name a few. "In A Dream" was shortlisted for an Academy Award and received two 2010 Emmy nominations, including Best Documentary. His latest success is the gritty HBO American crime drama "Task", where he was Executive Producer and Director of several of the episodes. He is in the process of finishing his latest film, "The Painted Bride" starring Jeremy Allen White, Mandy Patinkin, and Isabella Rossellini that is due out next year. 

Philadelphia artist Larry Spaid has spent over 12 years of his artistic life travelling the planet,living and teaching in different countries and experiencing different cultures. His expansive output of art includes painting, printing and various experiments with mixed media. He taught at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University for thirty-seven years. This included teaching in Rome, Italy and Tokyo, Japan, for seven years, and was awarded three major sabbaticals allowing him to return and travel extensively in South East Asia. He retired in 2010 as Professor Emeritus. He has exhibited in galleries and museums extensively in the US and internationally including the United Kingdom, Italy, and Guatemala. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Tokyo Japan.  

Gbadebo's use of materials centers on her family history of enslavement in the American South, while her ceramics draw inspiration from traditional African pottery techniques, calling on her Nigerian ancestry. Fueled by research and a commitment to the archival record, Gbadebo's multidisciplinary approach investigates the complex relationships between land, matter, and memory.Grounded in historically and culturally significant materials such as indigo dye, human hair collected throughout the African diaspora and soil hand-dug from the True Blue plantation grounds in South Carolina, Gbadebo's practice is an exploration of heritage. She lives and works in Philadelphia. She received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a certification in Creative Place Keeping at The New Jersey Institute of Technology.  In 2023, she was the recipient of the Maxwell and Hanrahan Craft Fellowship and the Keynote speaker for the American Ceramic Circle annual conference. In 2022, she was a Pew Fellow at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. She has exhibited her work across the US and internationally in Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Nigerian born but living in America since the age of one, Odili Donald Odita's work explores color on the grand scale and his hard-edge large paintings and mural installations have redefined abstract painting in the context of sociopolitical concerns. Most of Odita's work is inspired by the vibrant textiles of his home country, Nigeria, mixed with patterns from Western modernity. He has exhibited his work prolifically in important museums and galleries around the world including a recent large installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also been an important critic, writer, and lecturer at major institutions including Yale University and his present position as Professor of Painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University in Philadelphia.

A Chicago painter with an endless amount of surprises that unfold inside her landscapes of the Rococo and fantastical. Her work represents a continuation of the Chicago Imagists of the 60's with an interest in combining eccentric figuration with abstraction. "Bramson incorporates the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas, and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons" said critic Miranda McClintic She has shown her work prolifically in prestigious galleries and Museums internationally and her work is included in over 100 major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago ,The national museum of American Art in Washington DC and many more. She also was a professor of art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago …. totaling over 40 years of being a teaching Artist.

My guest today is Henry Burmudez. He became a major artist in his home country of Venezuela in the 70's through the early 2000's. He made a good living and prospered as a creative force in his home town of Caracas. Among his other accomplishments, he represented Venezuela at the 1986 Venice Biennale. In 1998 , with the election of Cesar Chavez, his world began to fall apart. With the collapse of the economy, his  collector base evaporated and left the artist with no way of making a living and support his family. With the help of artist Frank Hyder, he was invited to show in Miami Florida.  He eventually made his way to Philadelphia where he forged a new life as an artist and in 2024 had a 20 year retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit  was a survey of his extraordinary reinvention of himself and his artwork in his new chosen home. With the results of the recent election in the US, he is now reminded of the challenges he faced in Venezuela.We will be talking about all of that and what it means to be an artist in the world today.  

Chip is a photographer, an international public street artist and activist who worked as a physician on the Navajo nation between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon in Arizona for 36 years retiring in 2023. In 2012 he formed the Painted Desert Project – a community project which resulted in a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by reservation artists and artists from  all over the world. As an artist, a doctor and community activist he has committed himself to the vital health of the Navajo nation and the planet earth in general.  Thomas was a 2018 recipient of a Kindle Project gift and in 2020 was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN's founding.