Interviews by Brainard Carey

Photo of the artist filming in Antarctica. Photo credit: Robert Cmar
Janet Biggs’s work focuses on extreme landscapes and situations, drawing connections between physical terrains and psychological, societal, or political dynamics. She has had solo exhibitions, film screenings, and performances at the SCAD Museum of Art, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, Jeu de Paume, Taubman Museum of Art, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Blaffer Museum of Art, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tampa Museum of Art, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Mint Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among many others.

Biggs is the recipient of numerous grants, including the 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, Moore College of Art & Design 2022 Visionary Woman Award, Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts Award, Media Arts Assistant Fund Grant, Arctic Circle Fellowship/Residency, Art Matters, Inc., Wexner Center Media Arts Program Residency, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the NEA Fellowship Award. Her works are in the collections of the SCAD Museum of Art, Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC), Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl (Ruhr Kunst Museen), Tampa Museum of Art, High Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Mint Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of Art. Biggs lives and works in New York.

She was interviewed previously on Yale University radio in 2021.

Janet Biggs, Eclipse (Antarctica, December 4, 2021), 2022-24 Single-channel 4K video with spatial sound Running time – 6:12 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC
Janet Biggs, Eclipse (Amazon, September 7, 1858), 2025 Three-channel 4K video with spatial sound 10:14 minutes Photo credit: Mikhail Mishin Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC
Janet Biggs, Eclipse (Amazon, September 7, 1858), 2025 Three-channel 4K video with spatial sound 10:14 minutes Photo credit: Mikhail Mishin Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC

Wade Schaming (b. 1984; Pittsburgh, PA) lives and works in New York City.  He studied at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (BA 2006) and the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (MFA 2010).

Residency awards include the Bronx Museum’s AIM program, Bronx, NY (2012), the Lower East Side Printshop’s Keyholder Residency, New York, NY (2015), Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2016), Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ithaca, NY (2017), The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Montauk, NY (2017), Jentel Foundation, Banner, WY (2018) and Art & History Museums – Maitland, Maitland, FL (2020).

“EASY FEELINGS,” a solo exhibition of new work opens September 10, 2026, at Equity Gallery, New York, NY, and is on view through October 10, 2026.

Yu-Wen Wu has exhibited at institutions such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.; Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece; Center for Border Studies, Cucuta, Colombia; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Perlman Museum at Carleton College, Northfield, MN; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; and Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA. 

She was the 2024 Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and her work is held in public collections including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; the Haslla Museum of Art, Gangneung, Korea; the Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; among others.   

Yu-Wen Wu, Artifact XIV, 2026, gilded stone on wooden base, 11.5 x 6.5 x 5.5 in; 29.2 x 16.5 x 14 cm

Yu-Wen Wu, Artifact XI, 2026, ceramic, concrete, and porcelain on wooden base, 12 x 5.5 x 5 in; 30.5 x 14 x 12.7 cm

Yu-Wen Wu, Accumulation of Dreams (Flight II) [detail], 2026, graphite, gold ink, and 18 carat gold leaf on Arches paper, 34 x 59 in; 86.4 x 149.9 cm, framed

Julian MacMillan (b. 1992) lives and works in New York. Working across painting, printmaking and sculpture he creates works that resemble mythical landscapes, mysterious figurations, and funerary objects. Through his multidisciplinary practice, which also spans carpentry and metalworking, MacMillan is able to combine and compress these genres, and make images that are both sensitive and other-worldly. Born and raised in Washington DC, MacMillan studied art at Dartmouth College prior to receiving his MFA in painting at Boston University. Recent exhibitions include Left Tower at Atlantic Mills (Providence, RI), Do It Again at East Manning Projects (Providence, RI), The View From Mars at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and Tell The Devil I’m Coming As Fast As I Can at Outlet Manhattan, New York, NY.

Surface Tension, 2025 oil on canvas 68 x 52 inches, 173 x 132 cm
Regretful Decoy, 2026 wood, glue, paint, steel 4 x 14 x 12 inches, 10 x 36 x 30 cm
Tomb Painting (Diver), 2025 oil, charcoal, and pastel rubbing on canvas 40 x 30 inches, 102 x 76 cm

Maia Cruz Palileo

Portrait of the artist by Mary Inhea Kang
(b. 1979, Chicago) creates paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculptures that honor familial archives and imagined contemporary realities. Beginning from a space of personal inquiry around their family’s migration from the Philippines to America, Palileo quickly uncovered the immense connective points between individual histories and broader global systems, like colonization, displacement, assimilation, and the Philippine–American War.

The artist’s research into overlapping historical timelines, paired with the transmutational effects of memory, provides a framework for their color-rich compositions. This overlapping is made physical through the layering of oil paint, which—even in instances where one layer is concealed by another—permanently maintains its material presence on the canvas, creating its own recorded history. While painting has been at the center of the artist’s practice in recent years, Palileo utilizes their background as a sculptor to incorporate hands-on processes, from mixing their own paints, to making cardstock cutouts of drawings, and incorporating collage techniques to create preparatory sketches.

By obscuring horizon lines and vanishing points, their paintings emphasize the densely varied landscapes—mountains, forests, bodies of water—present in the Philippines, while simultaneously foregrounding the figures represented in these archival materials and imbuing them with care, dignity, and presence of spirit that is often flattened in a photographic archive. For Palileo, these parallel modes of research open up narrative possibilities and account for some of the somatic information that gets lost to time and distance, filling in the gaps that emerge when people and families migrate outside of their ancestral land.

Maia Cruz Palileo Once Again There Was No Time, 2026 oil on linen 80 x 83 inches (203.2 x 210.8 cm) Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Maia Cruz Palileo Ulit Ulit (Again and Again), 2026 oil on linen 77 x 98 x 1 1/2 inches (195.6 x 248.9 x 3.8 cm) Photo: Christopher Stach. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Maia Cruz Palileo Makiling The Restless Mountain, 2026 oil on linen 82 x 107 x 1 1/2 inches (208.3 x 271.8 x 3.8 cm) Photo: Christopher Stach  Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery