What’s My Thesis? (2025)

28/10/2025

Sheng Lor: Hmong Refugee History, Weaving, and Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

The loom, once a tool of survival, becomes a site of memory and critique in the work of Sheng Lor. Born in a Thai refugee camp to Hmong parents displaced by the Secret War in Laos, Lor brings the weight of generational trauma and cultural inheritance into her sculptural practice. Her ongoing series of loom-wrappings transforms discarded weaving tools into ritual objects—meditations on labor, grief, and the persistence of textile traditions within contemporary art.
In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Lor reflects on her journey from painting and printmaking at UC Davis to an MFA at UCLA, her years of weaving as labor and craft, and the decision to redirect that lineage toward conceptual practice. The conversation opens onto questions of diasporic identity, superstition and shamanism in art, and the tension between survival economies and the contemporary art market.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of What’s My Thesis? now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

21/10/2025

277 Elmer Guevara — Painting the 1992 LA Uprisings, Inherited Trauma, and the Salvadoran American Experience

The 1992 Los Angeles uprisings marked a turning point in how the city—and the nation—saw itself. In this week’s episode, painter Elmer Guevara reflects on that legacy through a new body of work premiering at Charlie James Gallery.

Rooted in figurative painting and informed by his Salvadoran American heritage, Guevara reconstructs the emotional terrain of South Central LA, blending personal memory, community testimony, and historical research to capture the aftershocks of inherited trauma. His canvases hold the weight of protest, family, and survival—rendered with a painterly rigor that draws from Caravaggio, Bay Area Figuration, and the storytelling traditions of Los Angeles.

This conversation examines how art can serve as both historical document and generational healing, bridging the distance between personal history and collective memory.

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode of What’s My Thesis? with host Javier Proenza — now streaming on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

07/10/2025

How do we reconcile painting with the arrival of artificial intelligence?

276 David Lloyd on AI, Abstract Painting, and the Los Angeles Art World

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist David Lloyd reflects on a career that began at CalArts and Margot Levin Gallery and now pushes into new terrain where formalist abstraction meets AI hallucination. Lloyd discusses the uncanny possibilities of blending his own archive of paintings, drawings, and ceramics with digital processes, and how these works re-enter the physical world through resin, collage, and material experimentation.

The conversation situates Lloyd’s practice within the broader Los Angeles art scene, the shifting priorities of galleries and art fairs, and the enduring tension between conceptual discourse and the lived experience of making. His reflections on art education, postmodern theory, and the pressures of the market offer a rare, candid perspective for artists navigating both studio practice and institutional critique.
🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode of What’s My Thesis? now.

30/09/2025

275 Kristen Huizar: Drawing, Printmaking & Documenting Los Angeles Life

The act of drawing can be both immediate and archival. In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist Kristen Huizar reflects on her practice of wax pastel drawing on plastic vinyl, hand stitching, and printmaking, positioning these gestures as ways of documenting overlooked and fleeting moments in Los Angeles.

Born and raised in Commerce, CA, Huizar speaks candidly about navigating identity as a Chicana artist, the role of community studios, and the politics of representing everyday life. Her work engages both the history of reportage drawing and the lived realities of gentrification, displacement, and cultural persistence in East L.A.

This conversation offers insight into contemporary Chicana art, the intersections of medium and identity, and the ways artists archive their cities against erasure.

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode of What’s My Thesis? now.

23/09/2025

274 Emma Christ on Artillery Magazine, Gallery Work, and the Future of Artist Support

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Emma Christ, editor at Artillery magazine and gallerist working between Portland and Los Angeles. Christ reflects on her beginnings in photography, formative years at Bard and Reed, and her transition from artistic practice into gallery management, editing, and writing.

The conversation traces her early influences—from Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston to mentorship under No Wave photographer Barbara Ess—before moving into immersive installation work and a graduate thesis on trans-corporeality and the porous body. Christ discusses her experiences in institutions such as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, her role in supporting artists within commercial gallery structures, and the gendered dynamics that continue to shape the field.

Throughout the episode, Christ shares candid insights into navigating the hierarchies of the art world, balancing writing and curating, and the importance of advocating for emerging voices across both editorial and exhibition platforms.

09/09/2025

Jackie Castillo: Southern California Light, Class, & Installation Art | ICA LA

Born in working-class Orange County, Jackie Castillo transforms the overlooked corners of Southern California into sculptural, site-specific works that slow the act of looking. Trained as a film-based photographer, her practice merges photography, sculpture, and installation—turning images into objects that speak to light, class, labor, and the architecture of change.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Jackie reflects on the poetics of California light, the formal language of geometry and tonality, and the lived realities that shape her work. From cinematic influences and New Topographics photography to the politics of housing and displacement, she reveals how personal history and criticality inform her vision.

Her current exhibition, The Return, is on view at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through August 31, alongside new work in Back to the Earth at Roberts Projects.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
📍 Follow Jackie: []

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

What’s My Thesis?

28/10/2025

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07/10/2025

30/09/2025

23/09/2025

09/09/2025

26/08/2025

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29/07/2025

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