What’s My Thesis?

Kader Amkpa returns to What’s My Thesis? for a conversation about African history, colonialism, cultural representation, and political power. Beginning with his experience visiting a Catholic church in Côte d’Ivoire, the discussion examines religious imagery and the historical relationships between African societies and European institutions. The conversation expands to the partition of Africa, the political legacies of colonialism, regional integration, resource extraction, economic inequality, and contemporary ideological debates.

Taiwan-born, Los Angeles–based artist Ting Ying Han joins Javier Proenza to discuss her multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, and public art. Reflecting on her education at CalArts, Han considers the relationship between conceptual rigor, artistic intuition, and the changing priorities that accompany a sustained creative practice. The conversation explores immigration and belonging, community engagement, the ethics of representing neighborhoods, and the relationship between art and its audiences. Han also discusses her work with public art, experiments involving domestic space and memory, and a participatory project centered on comfort food.

Robert Gunderman, artist and former director of the Los Angeles gallery ACME, joins What’s My Thesis? for a conversation about his decades of experience working on both sides of the art world—as an artist and as someone running exhibition spaces. Gunderman reflects on art school, experimentation, the history of Los Angeles gallery culture, and the importance of building community around artists. The conversation examines how galleries became increasingly standardized, the influence of collectors and investment thinking, escalating prices, art fairs, and the pressures that encourage artists to repeat successful work. Throughout, Gunderman returns to a central question: what happens when the structures surrounding art begin to resemble the commercial systems art once positioned itself against?

Victoria Delgadillo is a multidisciplinary Chicana artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, video, performance, and collaborative projects, including her involvement with the MexiCali Biennial. In this conversation, she reflects on growing up along the Tijuana–San Diego border, working within Los Angeles Chicano art communities, the resourcefulness of rasquache aesthetics, artist collectives, institutional recognition, and her resistance to allowing the art market to dictate her practice. Delgadillo also discusses gender and body politics in her work and recounts traveling to Ciudad Juárez, where encounters with mothers searching for missing and murdered daughters transformed her understanding of her own images. The conversation considers how artists respond to violence and inequality, the relationship between art and political action, and the possibilities of creating cultural visibility outside established institutions.

Oscar Eduardo De Paz joins Javier Proenza to discuss his socially conscious painting practice and his participation in a group exhibition at Charlie James Gallery. De Paz traces an unconventional path from Chicago and Philadelphia to environmental policy and eventually art, including his work around environmental justice and the Flint water crisis. The conversation considers social realism, murals and gentrification, political polarization, institutional power, and the contested idea of art as propaganda. De Paz also reflects on homelessness, policing, his Guatemalan family history, and the autobiographical experiences that inform his paintings, asking how art and storytelling can create forms of understanding that political argument often cannot.

Painter Kristin Calabrese joins Javier Proenza to discuss her development as an artist and her commitment to painting, from studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA to building a life and practice in Los Angeles. She reflects on growing up between Massachusetts and Arizona, running away as a teenager, the relationship between personal history and artistic practice, and her continuing search for a visual language that can accommodate realism, abstraction, photography, and experimentation. The conversation also considers class, art education and student debt; the ethics of representing homelessness; curating and artist-run spaces; and the economic realities of sustaining an artistic life. Calabrese discusses Serious Topics, the Inglewood artist project space she runs with painter Joshua Aster, as well as her belief in painting as a medium and the importance of artists supporting and collecting the work of other artists.

Azul Silverio is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, curator, and arts administrator currently working at the Hammer Museum. Drawing on their experience at LACE and on the board of the National Performance Network, Silverio discusses supporting artists through institutions, developing a curatorial and writing practice, and navigating the contemporary art world. The conversation traces Silverio’s background in printmaking, performance, and autobiographical work exploring queer and trans identity, Latino and Mexican culture, and a Catholic upbringing. Silverio and host Javier Proenza also consider burnout, artistic ambition, networking, multidisciplinary careers, and the value of building a creative practice slowly and consistently over time.

Lebanese weaver and performance artist Saba Sadr, an MFA student at Otis College of Art and Design, joins Javier Proenza to discuss returning to Los Angeles after more than two decades in Lebanon and how experiences of displacement, caregiving, and political conflict inform an evolving artistic practice. Although Sadr's work centers on weaving and performance, the conversation expands into broader questions of identity, memory, and belonging. Together they examine the meaning of resilience, the complexities of Lebanese conservatism and resistance, queer community organizing in Lebanon, the challenges of public visibility, and the long-term consequences of war on individuals, families, and cultural memory. Throughout the discussion, Sadr reflects on the relationship between art, community, and the responsibility of speaking from lived experience rather than abstraction.

Juan Gomez returns to What’s My Thesis? to discuss his evolving practice across sculpture, installation, and drawing, and the ways his Mexican American identity and family history have resurfaced through materials associated with physical labor. Working with wire, knots, cement, bricks, packing materials, and found objects, Gomez reflects on his family’s roots in Zacatecas, his father’s blue-collar work, and the unexpected relationship between the labor he grew up around and the work he makes today. In conversation with Javier Proenza, Gomez considers the economics of sustaining an artistic practice outside the commercial art market, the role of mentorship and community, material impermanence and collecting, social comparison, failure, and the pressure to define success through institutional recognition. They also discuss Gomez’s time in Mexico, mortality and memory, AI-generated imagery and handmade objects, and his view of art not as a hobby but as a lasting discipline and way of life.

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles painter and sign painter Alex Gonzalez about the relationship between place, labor, and artistic practice. Drawing from a lifetime spent in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, Gonzalez describes how its density, street life, and changing social landscape have become the foundation of a narrative painting practice built on observation, symbolism, and allegory. The conversation explores the value of professional sign painting as both a craft and a sustainable career, the realities of maintaining an independent studio practice outside the gallery system, and the challenges of balancing artistic ambition with financial stability and family responsibility. Throughout, Gonzalez reflects on the ways everyday experience can be transformed into contemporary painting without losing sight of the community from which it emerges.