Cerebral Women Art Talks Podcast

Ep.275 Boluwatife Oyediran (b. 1997, Ogbomoso, Nigeria) lives and works in Iowa City, USA. He holds an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was awarded the Presidential Fellowship. He is currently an MFA in fiction candidate and Sonny Mehta Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Oyediran’s multidisciplinary practice combines painting, creative writing, and photojournalism. His painting practice is committed to reimagining and reorienting Black identity within the canons of history, religion, and western art. His original, self-devised concept “inverted blackness” features portraits of Black migrants in the United States, depicted in luminous, photonegative paintings, visualizing their mutative and otherness identity. His practice centers on the Black diasporic experience in the United States and his vision is to elevate and insert this experience into the canon of art history.
Oyediran’s “inverted blackness” series was the subject of a solo exhibition at the AFIKARIS Gallery, Paris, in 2024, titled “Inverted Blackness” and accompanied by a publication of the same name. In 2025, following his MFA at RISD, Oyediran started Inverted Blackness, a Substack Photoblog that publishes photographs and oral accounts of the experiences of Black migrants in Rhode Island. In 2026, Oyediran’s work was acquired by Mattatuck Museum, and in the same year he becomes the first African writer awarded a Sonny Mehta Fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he’s at work on a novel.
Oyediran’s work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Krems Museum, Austria; FLAG Art Foundation, USA; RISD Museum, USA; Fondation Blachère, France; Mattatuck Museum, USA; Gallery 1957, Ghana; UTA Artist Space, USA; Featherstone Center of the Arts, USA; Sotheby’s Tel Aviv, Israel; Twelve Gates, USA; and many more. His works can be found in the collections of Mattatuck Museum, David Adjaye, Fondation Blachère, Kutlesa, Serge Tiroche, Amir Shariat, and so many more. You can find him on Instagram @boluoyediran.

Photo credit: Ehsan Ahmed Mehedi

Artist https://www.boluoyediran.com/
Substack https://invertedblackness.substack.com/
Iowa Writers Workshop https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/news/2021/06/iowa-writers-workshop-announces-sonny-mehta-fellowships-creative-writing
AFIKARIS https://afikaris.com/exhibitions/44-inverted-blackness-boluwatife-oyediran/
Gallery1957 https://www.gallery1957.com/artists/85-boluwatife-oyediran/
Overblog https://cultureetplus.over-blog.com/2026/06/boluwatife-oyediran.html
Collatar. al https://www.collater.al/en/boluwatife-oyediran-inverted-blackness-chromatic-inversion-identity/
onart media https://www.onart.media/events-centered-on-contemporary-african-art/chromatic-deconstruction-and-identity-the-nuances-of-african-identity-in-america-through-the-art-of-boluwatife-oyediran/
OLYM https://www.olymcollection.art/artists/51-boluwatife-oyediran/biography/
r.public https://rpublc.com/author/boluwatife-oyediran

Ep.274 Siri Devi Khandavilli is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice fluidly bridges tradition and innovation, drawing deeply from Indian artistic legacies while engaging in a broader contemporary dialogue. Working across sculpture, painting, and printmaking, she dissolves boundaries between disciplines to explore themes of cultural migration, feminism, ecology, mythology, and the nature of reality. Khandavilli’s artistic foundation was shaped from an early age at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, where she began her artistic journey, learning Mysore Traditional Painting under the tutelage of her aunt, Susheela Devi. She also holds a BFA and an MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University, as well as another MFA in sculpture from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath.
This diverse education informs a practice that is both meticulous and experimental, embracing elements of chance while also reflecting history, tradition, and transformation. A recurring motif in her work is the act of mirroring, both literally and conceptually. Her pursuit of the “perfect image” led her to invent a mirror finish on her canvases, blurring the distinction between painting and reflection. The image on the canvas is constantly being created in the present yet carries memories and imprints of the past. She also engages in an ongoing exploration of the tension between control and unpredictability, a theme that permeates her sculptural practice.
Her methods, mediums, contexts, and surfaces destabilize singular readings, inviting layered interpretations that oscillate between the apparent and the subversive. She believes that an artwork is never about just one thing but rather about everything happening in the world at the time of its creation, as the artist is thinking and experiencing it all.
Her works have been shown and are also held in major institutional collections, including the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Private Collection, the Albertina Museum, Durham University Museum, the Fidelity Art Collection, ASU Art Museum, and the Queens Museum, among others. Splitting her time between New Delhi and New York, Khandavilli navigates a transnational space where many experiences overlap, creating a body of work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Photo Credit Manoj Kesharwani 2024

Lisa Sette Gallery httpswww.lisasettegallery.comartists41-siri-devi-khandavilliworks
Gallery Ragini httpsgalleryragini.comsiri-devi-khandavilli
BOMB Magazine httpsbombmagazine.orgarticles20260311siri-devi-khandavilli-by-melissa-joseph
Art Centrix Space httpswww.artcentrix.com
Meer httpswww.meer.comen88201-40-year-anniversary-exhibition-shaping-a-life-of-curiosity
India Art Fair httpsindiaartfair.inexhibitors
Scale Magazine httpsscalemag.onlinedesignhighlights-from-the-india-art-fair-2025
Artwork Archive httpswww.artworkarchive.com

Ep.273 Born in 1982 in Dallas (Texas, USA), Rosson Crow lives and works in Los Angeles (California, USA).
Rosson Crow graduated from Yale University, New Haven, (MFA obtained in 2006), and from the School of Visual Arts, New York (BFA obtained in 2004). The artist was in residency at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2006.
She is part of the emerging artist generation of the young contemporary arena both in the US and in Europe.
Rosson Crows' work comprises immersive paintings, each steeped in a nostalgic atmosphere, with superimposed impressions and touching reminders of masterpiece films from the French New Wave, which she cites as one of her main artistic references. Rosson Crow recognizes in these literary films themes that are important to her: the fundamentally ambivalent character of reality, memory, experiential confusion and the multiple layers of interpretation that derive from them. By projecting this universe into a saturated future, with psychedelic colors and invasive ornamentations, Rosson Crow navigates between utopia and dystopia, at a time when the planet is threatened by our massive overconsumption: "In a way, the paintings are about the collective hubris of humanity, our bad behavior, inheriting a dream world and destroying it."
Rosson Crow’s work was featured in important solo exhibitions throughout the US, and Europe. She has a strong presence in prestigious public and private collections.
Rosson Crow has been represented by la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2005.

Portrait credit Rose Eichenbaum

Galerie Nathalie Obadia https://www.nathalieobadia.com/artists/37-rosson-crow/biography/
Miles McCenery https://www.milesmcenery.com/artists/rosson-crow
CNAP https://www.cnap.fr/rosson-crow-la-rupture
ArtsHebdoMedias https://www.artshebdomedias.com/agenda/rosson-crow-la-rupture/
Arts in the city https://www.arts-in-the-city.com/265337-rosson-crow-a-la-galerie-nathalie-obadia
Le Journal Des Arts https://www.lejournaldesarts.fr/evenement/2026/rosson-crow-la-rupture-182905
Actu Arts https://actu.art/event/la-rupture-rosson-crow/
Ocula https://ocula.com/artists/rosson-crow/artworks/
Art Currently https://artcurrently.com/rosson-crow-on-the-seductive-destruction#:~:text=In%20line%20with%20her%20continued,and%20deconstruction%20of%20current%20America.

Ep.272 David Smalling (b. 1987, Kingston, Jamaica) lives and works in New York. He studied Mathematics at Yale University, where he also trained at the Yale School of Art, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Smalling’s painting practice examines the invisible architectures through which cultural hierarchies, inherited rituals, and social taboos shape identity. Working through the visual language of Mannerism, Dutch Golden Age still life, and Old Master painting, he approaches the panel as a diagnostic surface: a place where shame, desire, aspiration, and restraint are staged with theatrical precision.

His meticulous compositions often unfold within domestic and ceremonial interiors, where silver platters, pearls, ribbons, brass instruments, mattresses, and other charged objects become symbols of belonging and control. These objects appear seductive at first, but gradually reveal systems of pressure: codes of class, gender, decorum, and performance that shape the body before the body itself appears. In Smalling’s paintings, the feast, the bedroom, and the still life become psychological arenas in which access to elite or aspirational spaces is granted only through subtle forms of compliance.

Drawing from the tradition of vanitas painting, Smalling reanimates the memento mori for a contemporary world whose inherited codes have aged but not disappeared. The snail, a recurring motif in his work, operates as a quiet agent of entropy: a slow, viscous disruption within otherwise pristine arrangements of wealth and beauty. Its trace becomes a measure of time, decay, and the instability beneath polished surfaces.

Smalling’s practice is also shaped by a rigorous computational process. Through proprietary systems developed by the artist, including Autoglaze and Wide Gamut Pigment, he decomposes images into physically realizable layers of translucent oil paint, translating questions of color, optics, and perception into a precise choreography of material execution. This fusion of algorithmic structure and classical craft allows his paintings to inhabit a space between artifice and revelation, where beauty becomes both seduction and evidence.

In 2026, TEMPLON New York presented Elizabethan Collar, Smalling’s first exhibition with the gallery. Taking its title from the veterinary device colloquially known as the “cone of shame,” the exhibition explored conditional belonging, the cost of access, and the fragile performance of identity within spaces of prestige. Through lacquered surfaces, artificial light, and meticulously staged symbolic objects, Smalling invites viewers to recognize the systems they inhabit, and the roles they have learned to perform within them.
Headshot Photo Credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Artist https://www.david-smalling.com/
Templon Gallery https://www.templon.com/artists/david-smalling/
Impulse Magazine https://www.impulsemagazine.com/articles
Galerie Magazine https://galeriemagazine.com/must-see-solo-gallery-shows-april-2026
Whitehot Magazine https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/elizabethan-collar-at-galerie-templon/7720
Ocula https://ocula.com/art-galleries/daniel-templon/exhibitions/elizabethan-collar/
Yale University Radio https://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/david-smalling/
Heni News https://heni.com/news?artist=David%20Smalling
Palo Gallery https://www.palogallery.com/exhibitions/32-david-smalling-wood-and-water/works/
ArtRabbit https://www.artrabbit.com/events/david-smalling-wood-and-water

Ep.271 Ruba Katrib is Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1 in New York, where she steers the museum’s program and is a member of the leadership team. At PS1 she has curated exhibitions such as The Gatherers (2025), Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancers Codex (2025), Sohrab Hura: Mother (2024), Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE (with Yasmil Raymond, 2023), Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally (2022), Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: Autonomous Drive (2022), Greater New York (2021), Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life (2021), Simone Fattal’s retrospective in 2019, and solo shows by Edgar Heap of Birds (2019), Karrabing Collective (2019), Fernando Palma Rodríguez, and Julia Phillips (2018). From 2012–2018 she was the Curator at SculptureCenter in New York, where she organized over twenty exhibitions including 74 million million million tons (2018, co-organized with artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan) and solo shows by Carissa Rodriguez, Kelly Akashi, Sam Anderson, Teresa Burga, Nicola L., Charlotte Prodger, Rochelle Goldberg, Aki Sasamoto, Cosima von Bonin, Anthea Hamilton, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Magali Reus, Gabriel Sierra, Erika Verzutti, and David Douard. In 2018, Katrib co-curated SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, Casa Tomada, along with José Luis Blondet and Candice Hopkins. She is an advisory board member of CCA Berlin and a board member of Topical Cream, and regularly writes for periodicals and museum catalogues.

Photo credit : John Kim

Ruba Katrib https://www.rubakatrib.com/

MoMA https://www.moma.org/magazine/authors/92

MoMA PS1 https://www.momaps1.org/en/events/663-ayoung-kim-in-conversation-with-dawn-chan-and-ruba-katrib

MoMA Greater New York Artists https://www.momaps1.org/en/programs/754-greater-new-york-artist-talks

Venice Biennale Qatar Pavilion Announcement

Art Basel Unlimited Announcement

Unlimited May 26, 2026 interview https://www.artbasel.com/stories/art-basel-2026-unlimited-ruba-katrib-moma-ps1-curator

Biennial Foundation https://biennialfoundation.org/2026/04/national-pavilion-of-qatar-at-the-61st-venice-biennale-presents-untitled-2026-a-gathering-of-remarkable-people/

Qatar Museums https://qm.org.qa/en/calendar/untitled-2026/Art Newspaper https://www.artnewspaper.fr/2025/09/02/ruba-katrib-nommee-commissaire-du-secteur-unlimited-dart-basel

Document Journal https://www.documentjournal.com/2025/10/the-curators-shaping-the-future-of-archives-ruba-katrib/

Le Quotidien De l’Art https://www.lequotidiendelart.com/articles/27830-ruba-katrib-commissaire-d-unlimited-%C3%A0-art-basel-2026.html

Anderson Ranch https://www.andersonranch.org/people/ruba-katrib/

Oolite Arts https://oolitearts.org/event/talks-ruba-katrib/

Site Santa Fe https://www.sitesantafe.org/en/artists/ruba-katrib/

Culturalee https://culturalee.art/art-basel-names-ruba-katrib-as-curator-of-unlimited-sector/

Cultured https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2025/09/02/art-basel-unlimited-ruba-katrib-curator/

Canvas https://canvasonline.com/ruba-katrib-appointed-curator-of-art-basel-unlimited/

Dazed https://www.dazed.me/news/forever-and-always-ruba-katribs-favourite-selection-of-dazed-mena-features