Artists Telling Stories

In this extended trailer, please join Austin Tichenor, Aline Smithson, Joe Harjo, Vincent Valdez, Jay Tolson, Alicia Olatuja, and Jim Lavilla-Havelin in discovering the importance of stories, the language of our humanity, and the transformative power of art. Artists Telling Stories Podcasts draw out human stories in the hope that in their telling, artists will offer a new story of our shared humanity, bringing all of us closer toge...

Jim Lavilla-Havelin has written six collections of poetry, with several more in the works. His work has been anthologized widely, and he has been nominated for Poet Laureate of Texas, where he has lived for the last few decades. This episode of Studio Aesculapius is different. Jim reads three poems and has a wide-ranging discussion with co-host, Eddie Dupuy:  about the poems, about poetry, about art and activism, about language and...

Joe Harjo says he didn’t have “access to seeing ‘artist as profession,’” while he was growing up in Oklahoma as a member of the Muscogee (Creek) nation. When he told a guidance counselor in high school that he wanted to teach, the counselor rebuffed him. When he said he wanted to be an artist, he got a similar response. Now he’s both artist and teacher, and his work tries to counter misrepresentations of Native peoples in popular c...

Aline Smithson was always drawing as a child growing up in Los Angeles. After a stint as a large format painter, Smithson went to New York for 10 years, working in fashion. She returned to LA, took a class in photography and realized she “could use the camera to make art.” She had found her “visual voice,” and now, as a teacher for more than 20 years, savors the moments she sees that voice arise in her students. Smithson is one of ...

Adriana Corral credits both sides of her family for her interest in art. Her father's side had several physicians who invited her to see their work of healing and who gave her a strong sense of the body. On her mother's side were an aunt and uncle who opened to her ideas of social justice. Like her place between her father’s and mother’s families, Corral sees between spaces as “where vital content exists.” She invites tho...

Paul Elie (from the Berkley Center at Georgetown University) talks about his two books, The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), especially the “hard won” pilgrimages of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.  Elie goes on to speak of his own pilgrimage in and around the Catholic Church, his struggle to remain within its story while writing about some “a...

Jay Tolson says, following T.S. Eliot, that "in my beginning is my end." And what an end, one that has led him to see art's power to connect us to one another through a shared reality.

He began as an undergraduate studying cultural and intellectual history and after a long career in journalism at US News and World Report, the Wilson Quarterly, and Radio Free Europe, he was asked by the University of Virginia...

Austin Tichenor loves his work, and it certainly comes through when you speak to him. He's funny, "I've always loved telling stories...and I have an irreverent sense of humor." He also lives in dread of taking himself too seriously. The arts tend to foster that, but he avoids it like the plague.

He says he's forever grateful to his father for telling that he would "hate law school" and th...

Alicia Olatuja partially credits Ms. Marsh, one of her elementary school teachers, for her singing career. Ms. Marsh told her she would be a famous singer but warned her not to "get the big head." Alicia's mother and grandmother, both educators, also facilitated her trajectory, giving her a strong worth ethic and a sense of purpose through music.

And Alicia has not disappointed. The New York Times has noted ...

Although he studied visual communication as an undergrad at the American University of Sharjah, Mohammed Al Shaibani (Momo) knew that comics were his passion. So his family sold their house and moved into his Grandfather's house so Momo could attend the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) where he would earn an MFA in Sequential Art (Comics). Young and highly energetic, Momo nevertheless classifies himself as a connoisse...

Fr. Sean Duggan, OSB, knew as a teen that he wanted to find a way to combine his love of music with his call to a religious life. He ultimately found that combination by joining the community of Benedictine Monks at St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana, where liturgy and music thrive. Fr. Duggan sees music, like the other arts, as an opportunity to approach God through beauty, and though he has mastered the work of countless co...

Vincent Valdez says he began drawing when he was four and "hasn't looked back." We are the happy recipients of his forty-four years of learning to "tell a story through images."

He happily cuts against the grain of contemporary art, he says, and though he didn't start out with the idea of critiquing what Gore Vidal calls "the United States of Amnesia," he can't turn away from wh...

René Paul Barilleaux knew he had a problem with reading when he was young, but no one did anything to help him overcome it. Instead, he drifted toward what he knew he liked—images, objects, drawings. It is no wonder, then, that he became a visual artist and later a curator, now head of curatorial affairs at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.

In our inaugural program, René discusses his everyday work, "somethi...