JL Interviews

31/08/2026

🇺🇲 🎨 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^One Final Glow: The Midnight Zone Closing Reception Bids Farewell to the Blacklight Room at Fish City Studios^^ The Midnight Zone had been the beloved corner of the gallery for roughly a year — and on Thursday, August 27, that corner existed for the very last time. The closing reception for Amy Chace’s bathypelagic blacklight exhibition took place at Jon Sarkin's Fish City Studios on Main Street in Gloucester, Massachusetts, from 8:30 to 10:30 PM EDT. It was the final night for the blacklight room, which glowed one last time with UV work by Amy Chace, alongside pieces by Jon Sarkin, James Formichella, and others. Fish City Studios is more than a gallery — it’s a living monument to the uninhibited compulsion to create. Stepping off Main Street, visitors enter an entirely different wavelength, a space dedicated to outsider visions, unconventional photography, and raw creativity. Sometimes obsessive, sometimes explosive, always alive. The gallery champions those who create from instinct, experience, and obsession, offering a home to outsider art, experimental photography, and forms that defy easy classification. Rooted in the spirit of Jon Sarkin’s unchained creativity — who worked from this very studio — Fish City Studios is a home for the raw, the unexpected, and the uncompromisingly original.

The Midnight Zone had been the beloved corner of the gallery since it was first built — and on Thursday, August 27, that corner existed for the very last time. The closing reception for Amy Chace'

31/08/2026

🇮🇹 🎵 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^Arte Solidale Festival 2026 Returns in September for Its Twelfth Edition (Como, Italy)^^ Arte Solidale Festival is a meeting of music and social engagement: a series of chamber music concerts that brings together young musicians from around the world in an artistic residency on Lake Como, with the dual aim of promoting emerging talent and supporting minors in difficulty across the Como territory. Founded in 2015, the Festival is entirely curated by young artists and is driven by the conviction that culture and solidarity can grow together. The twelfth edition opens with two pre-festival concerts on 1 and 3 September, followed by six chamber music events between 5 and 13 September, held in Como and Pianello del Lario, featuring experienced artists specialising in period-instrument performance from Japan, Mexico, the United States, Poland, Spain and Italy. Alongside four very young local talents from Como who will open the festival’s various concerts, ASF also presents its new Young Artist in Residence, violist Jaume Bo**er Toca.
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Arte Solidale Festival is a meeting of music and social engagement: a series of chamber music concerts that brings together young musicians from around the world in an artistic residency on Lake Como,

31/08/2026

🇺🇲 🎨 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^ Sara Sisun: A Season of Looking, Gathering, and Thinking — New Paintings, an October Residency, and Workshops Ahead^^ Sara Sisun is a visual artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She holds a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University, an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute under a full tuition fellowship, and an MA in Art History from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Alpine Fellowship. Her paintings are included in the public collections of Kaiser Permanente and in the private collection of Soledad O’Brien. Sisun currently teaches as Head of Foundations and Fine Arts at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Sisun has also been working from recent photoshoots with her sister and her sister’s husband. Her sister modeled for her painting American Bride, and Sisun is now excited to develop several new figurative compositions loosely inspired by Manet. Sisun recently shared the news that she has been selected for an October residency with Will Cotton at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She describes the honor with characteristic warmth, looking forward to the focused time, dialogue, and experimentation the residency will make possible.

31/08/2026

🇪🇸 🎭 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^“Libres!!!”: The Cabaret That Revives the Anarchist Women Who Fought to Emancipate Spanish Women^^ The Fundación Teatro de La Abadía opens its season with a production about “Mujeres Libres,” the anarcho-syndicalist organization that championed women’s education and autonomy. They never wavered in their purpose: “To emancipate women from the triple slavery to which they have been subjected: that of ignorance, of being a woman, and of being a producer.” Libres!!!, the premiere that inaugurates the season at Madrid’s Teatro de La Abadía, recovers the story of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarcho-syndicalist organization that, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, set out to liberate women from every kind of hierarchy and dependency. Directed by Andrés Lima, with a text by Esther F. Carrodeguas, the play takes us back to 1936 but steers clear of the solemnity with which Civil War fiction usually tackles the subject, choosing instead to explore its flip side.

The Teatro de La Abadía opens its season with a production about "Mujeres Libres," the anarcho-syndicalist organization that championed women's education and autonomy.

31/08/2026

🇺🇲 🇯🇵 🎨 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^Excavation Record I – Sayonara: Unearthing the Sally Mythology and the End of a Fantastical Kingdom at GR gallery^^ GR gallery is pleased to present Excavation Record I – Sayonara, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Japanese artist Kosuke Ajiro. The exhibition introduces Ajiro’s distinctive practice through the figure of the archaeologist, who ventures into a whimsical and enigmatic imagined realm known as the “Kingdom of Sally.” In Excavation Record I – Sayonara, Ajiro presents a body of mythology originating from the kingdom known as the “Sally Mythology.” The seventh chapter of this mythos, Sayonara, is believed to recount the end of the world, depicting a cataclysmic event comparable to Ragnarök in Norse mythology. GR gallery, 116 Chambers Street (btw Church & W. Broadway), New York, NY 10007

GR gallery is pleased to present Excavation Record I – Sayonara, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Japanese artist Kosuke Ajiro. The exhibition introduces Ajiro's distinctive practice

19/08/2026

🇺🇦🇺🇸🎨LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^Maryna Tsoneva (Mari Bloom): An artist of displacement and color, painting what survives — and the women who refuse to look away^^ Maryna Tsoneva is a Ukrainian oil painter and educator based in Lake City, Florida. She is the founder of Paint Bar Art Studio (Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine) and The Fun Pelican Art Studio at Artmosphere Gallery & Studios (St. Petersburg, FL). Her work is held in private collections in Ukraine and the United States, and has been featured by Voyage Tampa and the Women in Arts Network. Over the years, Tsoneva’s canvases have been exhibited in galleries across Florida and Italy, and many have found homes in private collections worldwide. “The beauty I first discovered as a child continues through my work, now living in homes across different continents,” she reflects.

https://www.jlinterviews.com/maryna-tsoneva-mari-bloom-an-artist-of-displacement-and-color-painting-what-survives-and-the-women-who-refuse-to-look-away/

16/08/2026

🇪🇸🎨LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^The Hands That Shape Faith: Jose Antonio Rivas Fernández and the Art of Remembering^^ José Antonio Rivas Fernández works a material as old as civilization itself. Born on the thirteenth of June, 1955, in the white hill-town of Cómpeta, Málaga, he has spent a lifetime proving that the humblest earth can hold the weight of the divine. To see his work is to understand that matter is never mute. In the Basilica of Our Lady of the Cabeza, his ceramic altarpiece Pentecost catches the descending flame and holds it — a tongue of fire rendered in tiles, yet warm as breath. His can also be found in the monumental friezes and ceramic murals that adorn the towns of Andalusia, quiet chronicles set into walls, telling the region to itself. But Rivas is not merely a maker of objects; he is a guardian of memory. Much of his calling lies in restoration, in the delicate surgery that returns to ancient images the face they once possessed.

In the quiet light of an Andalusian study, where the dust of clay hangs like prayer, José Antonio Rivas Fernández works a material as old as civilization itself. Born on the thirteenth of June,

16/08/2026

🇪🇸 💃 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^“Flamenco on Fire”: The Andalusian Cadence Rings Out, Against All Odds, in Pamplona^^ Navarre’s festival devotes its 12+1 edition to the era of the Ópera Flamenca, with a programme that bridges tradition and the avant-garde, bringing to Navarre names such as José Mercé, Mayte Martín and Yerai Cortés. It may not be possible to condense the entire history of flamenco into four chords, but it is possible to recognise one of its defining traits: the so-called Andalusian cadence. La menor, sol mayor, fa mayor y mi mayor — A minor, G major, F major, E major — trace a harmonic progression that has shaped the music and the sensibility of a whole territory. “It is a point of origin, because the guitar develops through those chords, and also a point of return: when guitarists and flamencos wander down other paths, the Andalusian cadence always brings them back to the root,” Arturo Fernández, director of FLAMENCO ON FIRE MANAGEMENT SL, explained in an interview. And that is the sonic journey this edition proposes, with the flamenco guitar as the great protagonist, wrapped in cante and baile.

Navarre's festival devotes its 12+1 edition to the era of the Ópera Flamenca, with a programme that bridges tradition and the avant-garde, bringing to Navarre names such as José Mercé, Mayte

16/08/2026

🇺🇿 🇵🇱 🎨 LATEST FROM JL Interviews: ^^The Endless Seeker: Art as the Alchemy of the Soul. A Literary Portrait of Dr. Stefania Fiedler, the Artist Who Materializes the Invisible^^ There are artists who paint landscapes, and there are artists who are landscapes—vast, shifting territories of memory, migration, and longing. Stefania Fiedler belongs to the second kind. Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and now rooted in Poznań, Poland, she carries within her the strange geography of a life lived between worlds. Tashkent gave her a beginning; Poznań gave her a language; and somewhere in the space between, she began the work that would define her: the endless, alchemical search for the self. There is something migratory about Stefania herself, and it finds its way into her art. Poland, and in particular the artistic soil of Poznań, shaped her formally—she is a graduate of the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts in Poznań (UAP) and of Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM)—while Uzbekistan remains a subterranean wellspring, a place whose memory never fully surfaces but never fully recedes. https://www.jlinterviews.com/the-endless-seeker-art-as-the-alchemy-of-the-soul-a-literary-portrait-of-dr-stefania-fiedler-the-artist-who-materializes-the-invisible/