What’s My Thesis? (2025)

26/08/2025

Feminist Ritual, Asian Art, and Curating Beyond the Western Gaze | Ann Shi (a poco art collective)

This week on What’s My Thesis?, nomadic curator Ann Shi joins Javier to discuss her ritual-infused practice and the founding of a poco art collective. Rooted in literati traditions and feminist mysticism, her work reclaims Asian art from the Western gaze through intuitive, spiritually charged exhibition design.
Ann shares how growing up with a classical painter father and a performer mother—both Buddhist practitioners devoted to the Five Precepts—shaped her sensibilities, why feng shui and unseen energies guide her curatorial choices, and how ink-on-paper can be both a site of history and resistance. Rooted in brushwork, ritual, and a Buddhist ethic of compassion, her practice unfolds as a curatorial offering that bridges diasporic identity, aesthetic lineage, and a more expansive, decolonized future of Asian art.
🎧 Now streaming on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts + more Follow: .poco.art.collective  

19/08/2025

🎙️ NEW EPISODE — 270 Filipino-American Artist Kim Garcia on Dementia, Diaspora, and Art as Emotional Archive

This week on What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza sits down with Kim Garcia (), a Filipino-American artist whose practice bridges sculpture, drawing, and community organizing. From flamboyant installations to intimate drawings, her work unravels the emotional residue of family, history, and colonial inheritance.
In this conversation, Kim opens up about: 🌀 Her father’s near-death experience and long decline into dementia 🧬 Uncovering ancestral myths and the legacy of Spanish colonialism 🏗️ Co-founding Gallery After Hours and sustaining artist-run spaces 🛠️ Sculpting interdependency, instability, and care into form 📖 Reimagining the archive as intuitive and illegible
“Understanding is a form of conquering. I don’t want to conquer my mother’s story.”
📍 Don’t miss her work at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in the group exhibition, The Endless Forever, which closes August 30th, and her upcoming two-person exhibition at DMST Atelier this October with artist Frannie Hemmelgarn.
🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts 📺 Watch on YouTube:  💸 Support the show: Patreon.com/WhatsMyThesis

12/08/2025

269 Paper, Process, and the Alchemy of Grief with Lauren Goldenberg Longoria

This week on What’s My Thesis?, we’re joined by artist Lauren Goldenberg Longoria to talk about the alchemical power of papermaking, process as healing, and the studio as a space for emotional transformation.
She tears up her past works to make new ones—turning grief into pulp, and pulp into something quietly resilient. Her materials carry memory. Her process demands care. And her practice redefines what it means to hold space through art.

🎧 Now streaming on all platforms 📺 Full episode on YouTube 🖤 Support on Patreon

05/08/2025

“Fetish Finish, Feminized.”

268 Aggressive Feminism, Neurodivergence, and the Reclamation of Minimalism with Dena Novak
 On this week’s episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza sits down with painter and ceramicist Dena Novak, whose aggressively feminist practice reclaims the minimalist aesthetic and reframes it through the lens of neurodivergence, spirituality, and personal transformation.
Diagnosed with autism at age 50, Novak speaks candidly about her late diagnosis, her past life in Orthodox Judaism, and the radical joy of making work that is both tactile and transgressive. Her oil “planks”—thick with piped paint and sensual materiality—challenge the legacy of male-dominated art movements and invite viewers to touch, smell, even lick the surface.
Now showing at Shrine (NYC) and preparing for her MFA thesis exhibition at Otis College, Novak’s voice is as powerful as her work—intimate, unfiltered, and deeply committed to reframing what gets called “serious art.”
🎧 New episode streaming now 🔗 Link in bio 📍.nyc | |

29/07/2025

“This land is not yours to flush us out on.”

267 Gentrification, Grief, and the Labor That Built California

In this week’s episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by Corey La Rue—artist, advocate, and son of migrant farmworkers—for a conversation that cuts deep into the structural violence of gentrification, the erasure of working-class communities, and the myth of progress.
Set against the backdrop of Melrose, CA, La Rue draws a direct line from local displacement to global systems of power—from soft-power evictions to the quiet violence of “community investment.” Together, they explore grief, labor, and what it means to resist through memory and embodiment.
This is a story about land, lineage, and the people who built California.
🎙 Listen now on YouTube + all podcast platforms 💸 Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/whatsmythesis 📍 Guest: .ammo

22/07/2025

In a belated celebration of AAPI Heritage Month, this week’s episode of What’s My Thesis? brings you a powerful live conversation from the closing reception of Dreams and Migrations at BG Gallery, curated by artist and organizer Sung-Hee Son.

Featuring artists Dave Young Kim and Mei Xian Qiu, this panel explores the complexities of AAPI identity, collective memory, and postcolonial resistance through art. From Kim’s intimate reflections on growing up Korean American in Los Angeles to Qiu’s profound insights on propaganda, trauma, and Chinese-Indonesian history, the conversation moves between the personal and political with urgent clarity.

Host Javier Proenza draws compelling links between the AAPI and Latino diasporas, asking what it means to build community, claim space, and create art under systems of erasure.

🎧 Available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube
📍 Recorded live at
🖼️ Featuring work by Dave Young Kim, Mei Xian Qiu, Bryan Ida, Tia, and Miki Yokoyama
🗣️ Presented by What’s My Thesis? in honor of AAPI Heritage Month

15/07/2025

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza sits down with J. Carino—author, illustrator, and now celebrated painter featured on the cover of New American Paintings—to unpack the evolution of a dual career that spans national parks, q***r figuration, and a radical commitment to authenticity. From plein air pastels to n**e Zoom drawing sessions, Carino’s journey explores the ways we compartmentalize identity—and how art can stitch it back together.
🎨 His solo show Carry It With You runs from June 26 to August 22 at Yossi Milo Gallery in NYC.
Explore the tension between intimacy and exposure, beauty and memory, fiction and truth.
📍Listen now on all platforms 🔗 .carino.art |  

08/07/2025

What happens when a collector sees the art world not as a market—but as a community in need of care?

Episode 264 Strategic Generosity: Collecting, Curating, and Championing Emerging Artists with Leslie Fram

This week on What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza sits down with Leslie Frame: curator, collector, strategist, and the rare kind of advocate who brings emerging artists into the spotlight and into collections—with intention.
From founding the annual MFA of LA exhibition to teaching business fluency in art schools, Frame shares her deeply original approach to mentorship, market transparency, and audience-building—while pulling from a background that spans Studio 54, Parsons, Cosmopolitan magazine, and the earliest days of digital media.
🎧 Available now wherever you get your podcasts 📍 Link in bio ⠀ 

24/06/2025

Astrology, Embodiment, and the Myth of Power

On this week’s What’s My Thesis?, artist Alystair Rogers joins Javier Proenza for a revelatory conversation on time, mysticism, and the deconstruction of capitalist mythologies.

Rogers—whose MFA thesis includes a surreal infomercial titled Sea World: Spiral ’Til You’re Free—discusses how astrology became a conceptual anchor for exploring trans embodiment, identity, and ritual.

This is a dialogue shaped by tenderness and critique, magic and materialism. Rogers offers an alternative grammar of belief—one in which revolution begins by reclaiming the center of the self.

🪐 Listen now on all platforms
🔗 Link in bio
🎧 .rogers | 🌀 | 💸 patreon.com/whatsmythesis

***rart stairrogers ***rfuturism

17/06/2025

Building Gene’s Dispensary: Community, Curation, and Creating New Art Spaces in LA - Keith J Varadi

In this week’s episode, host Javier Proenza sits down with writer, curator, and former painter to discuss how a once-side project evolved into Gene’s Dispensary—an independent art space on Wilshire Blvd that now functions as a gallery, project room, and cultural salon.

They talk curatorial practice as visual poetry, the creative logic behind Gene’s exhibition texts, and the power of showing up—with no blueprint, just vision and momentum. From collaborating with artists across disciplines to building community over chess and beer, this episode offers a blueprint for doing things differently in the Los Angeles art world.

🎧 Available now wherever you get your podcasts
📍Visit Gene’s Dispensary in L.A.
🖼️ recent show: Eat the Garnish by Leroy Stevens
🔗 Link in bio

11/06/2025

Liminal Spaces, Migration, and the Unseen - Ketty Haolin Zhang

This week, host Javier Proenza is joined by painter and mixed media artist , whose practice unravels the poetics of liminal space, identity, and cultural memory. Born in northeastern China and now based in Vancouver, Zhang brings an acute, deeply personal lens to themes of in-betweenness, dislocation, and the silent negotiations of belonging.

From commuting three hours a day to university, to quietly leaving behind a career in investment data analysis, Ketty journey is one of radical realignment—with painting as both compass and vessel.

🖼 Her work resists easy narratives.
🌀 She avoids overt cultural signifiers.
🌘 She paints from moments that disorient time, place, and self.

🎧 Tune in as the conversation moves fluidly between:
– The weight and freedom of the “1.5 generation”
– Artistic authenticity in the face of commercialism
– Code-switching, multilingual memory, and the vulnerability of self-presentation
– Choosing between Los Angeles and New York as a site for becoming

✍️ “It is joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” — Donald Winnicott, quoted by Zhang

—

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in.
🔗 Link in bio
📲
💬 Like, comment, and share to support global perspectives in art

10/06/2025

Liminal Spaces, Migration, and the Unseen - Ketty Haolin Zhang

This week, host Javier Proenza is joined by painter and mixed media artist , whose practice unravels the poetics of liminal space, identity, and cultural memory. Born in northeastern China and now based in Vancouver, Zhang brings an acute, deeply personal lens to themes of in-betweenness, dislocation, and the silent negotiations of belonging.

From commuting three hours a day to university, to quietly leaving behind a career in investment data analysis, Ketty’s journey is one of radical realignment—with painting as both compass and vessel.

🖼 Her work resists easy narratives.
🌀 She avoids overt cultural signifiers.
🌘 She paints from moments that disorient time, place, and self.

🎧 Tune in as the conversation moves fluidly between:
– The weight and freedom of the “1.5 generation”
– Artistic authenticity in the face of commercialism
– Code-switching, multilingual memory, and the vulnerability of self-presentation
– Choosing between Los Angeles and New York as a site for becoming

✍️ “It is joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” — Donald Winnicott, quoted by Zhang

—

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in.
🔗 Link in bio
📲
💬 Like, comment, and share to support global perspectives in art

What’s My Thesis?