Hot Coffee with Dawn Delikat and Parker Daley Garcia of Pen & Brush
“Pen & Brush provides a platform to showcase the work of women, non-binary and female-identified transgender artists and writers to a broader audience with the ultimate goal of effecting real change within the marketplace.” This mission-driven organization has been supporting community for the last 130-years. When Dawn Delikat, Executive Director and Parker Daley Garcia, Artistic Director, have reached out to me with the idea of the joint exhibition now on view in the space I thought it will be a perfect timing for this interview and an opportunity to spread the word about their worthy efforts in the art field.
Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?
Dawn Delikat:One of my favorite spots to drink coffee is in Central Park. I am drinking a Starbucks dark roast. I see trees everywhere, with their poignant signs of strength and perseverance through the winter. I see moments in the distance of New York City’s buildings reaching up into the crisp blue sky reminding me that my favorite experience of nature is when the pulse of a city is never too far away. And I see dogs, so many happy dogs living their best life right now, maybe some of their best moments at the park.
Parker Daley Garcia: My favorite coffee or tea spot is definitely in Europe. I find that I don’t spend time in coffee shops in New York, or anywhere else that I am quite familiar with, which is sort of sad, really. So, at the risk of sounding cliché, my favorite café is probably in Paris, but off the beaten path, and I would be drinking a café au lait with cinnamon. If I look around I see history, the shop is old not modern. I see the most perfect Parisian light—the kind that only seems to be in cities of old. The third thing I see is a connection, a connection that I don’t feel many other places. It’s a combination of things that satisfy my eyes, people buzzing about, and a sense of okayness.
Dawn and Parker at Pen & Brush surrounded by Hit Me With Your Best Shot exhibition. Photo courtesy of Pen & Brush.
Nina: Please tell me more about your ongoing exhibition at Pen and Brush in March. What prompted this exhibition? What is the underlying idea to bring all these curators and artists together?
Dawn: The idea was to bring together our female allies to think on and discuss through art - what is at stake for women and non-binary artists and people. During this extremely challenging time in our world my instinct is to root and re-root within our existing community to both inspire and develop new ways to move forward together through our efforts to make and hold space for artists.
Parker:The exhibition is called Hit Me With Your Best Shot. It’s a premise that Dawn came up with. The boiler plate idea is that Pen + Brush has asked some of our visionary women colleagues, like yourself, to select their “best shot”, or a woman or non-binary artist that they think is creating real change, impact, and influence in the art world, and globally. It’s really a beautiful combination of connections we have made in recent years, especially since COVID, with brilliant women in the field, who are powerhouses in their own right. But what you get is this wonderful spectrum of viewpoints, multigenerational, and diverse across professional and background. Some curators who were asked have made successful commercial careers for not just themselves, but many artists, too. Others are writers, others institutional curators, and others non-profit workers.
Michela Martello, Venus Tucum 2022, 2022. Acrylic, ink, stitching, gilding, tucum's fiber on found charcoal paper bag, 21 × 27 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pen & Brush.
Nina: Could you pick one work that you have selected for the March exhibition and zero in on it. What is it called? What influenced your decision to choose it? How does it fit the overall direction of your curatorial practice?
Dawn: I selected Michela Martello’s “Venus Tucum 2022”, which depicts a harnessing of divine feminine strength. With women’s rights perpetually under attack, this work reaches through the ages to offer an ancient symbolic feminist expression that is both tied to nature and in conversation with contemporary art.
The direction of my curatorial practice is in a sense very much tied to my work at P+B in that my view comes from an institutional perspective. I am always looking for work that speaks to our world, our society, our current time period in a substantive way, that is in some way “new” by way of the artist’s fingerprint in some manner. For me, Martello’s Venus is all of this.
Parker: Well, since every curator was asked to select one work, by one artist, I can speak about the artist and work I selected, which is by Lola Flash. One piece in particular is called Party Boys and it is from 1993. The work is a photograph that is about 13 by 9 inches and is part of Flash’s cross-colour series, where the artist has developed the image using opposite materials (negative paper). The resulting image is one of divine surrealism. I chose it because of this effect. Black bodies inevitably become white, color has lost all sense of meaning and the two bodies depicted exist in a utopia of surrealist flowers and bright oranges. To me, this image, taken in 1993 at the height of the AIDS crisis, shows that happiness can exist amongst sadness. I think it actually fits my own curatorial practice really nicely because it taught me something. It taught me about a bias of imagery. Before I had worked with Lola Flash and seen this image, I don’t think I acknowledged that I hadn’t seen images like this before, especially from this time—of LGBTQI+ people in regular scenes of joy, and if you know me, you know I love work that discomforts what was once passive or that can show me something.
Lola Flash, Party Boys, 1993. Vintage dark room process photograph, 11 1/2 × 9 in
Nina: Pen and Brush has an illustrious history as an institution. And both of you have significant roles in running it over the years. In your respective roles of executive director and art director what are the challenges you encounter?
Dawn: Securing and insuring solvency is engrained in my thinking every single day which has been evermore challenging in this post COVID landscape. When thinking over the course of a year and the financial limits of our resource and seeing how many underrepresented yet deserving artists are in our submission pool and our broader community, I am always working to both fundraise and stretch the budget and workload with my small, but mighty team, so that we can all do the very best job of strategically accomplishing our mission on behalf of artist and writers we are working with.
Parker: Oh, I love and hate this question. For me many of the challenges are personal. The best answer I can give is that I have always found it difficult to separate myself from the work. That isn’t to say I am a workaholic and on top of everything—I am not. But, I never cease thinking about it. Most of the artists we work with, I have started saying, I would tattoo their work on my face. What I mean by that, is that I care so deeply about them, the work, their importance and success, that it becomes that literal for me.
Installation photo, Hit Me with the Best Shot, Pen & Brush,March 7-April 20, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artists and Pen & Brush.
Nina: Securing adequate funding of non-profit institutions such as yours is a complex issue tied to governmental support (or lack thereof), private donors, grants. What grand shift could theoretically change this reality and make the process easier for mission-driven institutions?
Dawn: I have long thought that a government funded WPA type initiative is needed to to shift the support and filter the relevance of the humanities back into everyday life. A few years ago, post COVID, Jason Farago, actually wrote about this in the NYTimes with many excellent points. Additionally, I have also long thought that the top end of the primary and secondary commercial art markets could be better activated to dedicate a portion of their profits to support arts non-profit and incubator spaces in a more structured and concerted effort so that they are feeding the entry point to the marketplace in a more direct and supportive way. This act could help insure the health of the entire ecosystem from which they ultimately derive their business from.
Parker: This is a great question. One that I am sure Dawn would have a better answer to. But the first thing that comes to my mind would be to A) make the grant writing and grant application process more accessible in every way and B) make funding or receiving those grants less of a song and dance, meaning: don’t make non-profits chase that same $10,000 around every year in fear that they won’t receive it the next.
Installation photo, Hit Me with the Best Shot, Pen & Brush,March 7-April 20, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artists and Pen & Brush.
Nina: What other projects excite you in 2024?
Dawn: I’m excited about our next iteration of “The Now” exhibition series that will take place during our gala later this spring. We started “The Now” series back in 2020, and it’s become our yearly version of a “biannual” in that it showcases what artists are creating “now” that considers, reflects, dismantles ++++ the present state of art and society. We are going to be partnering with The Feminist Institute on a more regular basis, as we are finding ways to lift each other and our congruent missions addressing gender inequities in the field. I am also looking forward to teaming up with Novella Ford again who will be serving as guest editor of our literary journal, P+B In Print for a second time. Additionally, for our community of writers I look forward to continuing our workshop partnership series with the NY Writers Coalition and their artistic director UGBA.
Parker: Honestly, anything we do at P+B, but I am really excited about the next two upcoming exhibitions. One is still in the works but it has to do with dreams and I think this surrealism or dream-like theme is something we will see a lot of in the next couple of years.