John Chaich Interview
Thanks to a generous Research Grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, I had the opportunity to interview John Chaich, the curator of the exhibition Queer Threads: Crafting Identity & Community, which debuted at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in 2014 and traveled to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the Boston Center for the Arts in 2015-16. An admitted three-time crochet making drop-out, John is not a maker, but possesses a maker’s innate appreciation for the haptic nature of fiber craft, blended with a charmingly irreverent queer sensibility. When we met, he was preparing to launch the Queer Threads book, designed by Todd Oldham Studio currently available via Ammo Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and select booksellers. Along with full color spreads of 30 artists works, the book features interviewers between the artists and queer and ally makers and thinkers such as Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, Justin Vivian Bond, Tim Gunn, and more. The book has since launched in New York, with related events at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Book Fair, and more. You can keep up with the events via Facebook through the Queer Threads page.
DandyCraft: I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I’ve recently interviewed two of your featured artists, Rebecca Levi and Nathan Vincent. Both reference how Queer Threads created a strong sense of community among the artists. Can you speak to how this community evolved?
John Chaich: It warms my heart to hear that artists or other people spoke of their experience of the exhibition that way. On one level, just the sheer presence of the 26 artists in the exhibition from opening to related programing provided points of connection. It was important in the programming to let the artist voice lead wherever possible. I witnessed intergenerational connections happening during the exhibition. Community may have naturally grew from the identity of the artists and the nature of their work. Have you ever heard of the phrase the “love hours” that go into craft? When you’re working on a four feet wide needle point, you have to love this process and practice because it takes such extreme, precise, time and care. I think that energy comes through on the way people respond to the work.
DandyCraft: When I spoke with Nathan, he mentioned the accessibility of crochet offers a sense of immediacy. These domestic objects initially appear benign, but take on a subversive agency though the artist’s intervention. Yet, it retains a domestic aesthetic. It recalls Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where an object that has a seemingly benign meaning, but then possesses a subversive layer beneath.
John Chaich: Several of the artists subvert or explore the meaning of materials themselves. I think a piece like Sheila Pepe’s “Your Granny’s Not Square” speaks to that uncanny-ness, and with a sense of mystery. It’s this fourteen feet wide abstract installation, that you recognize is crocheted, but then looking closely, you realize its crocheted using shoe laces as thread. That aha moment triggers that sense of familiar use of materials and that feels queer. In his Leather Pansies series of embroideries, John Thomas Paradiso uses leather as canvas, stretched in a traditional embroidery hoop and filled with hundreds of intricate stitches. James Gobel's paintings with felt, piping, and craft store materials subvert our idea of paint. Jesse Harrod specifically uses rip cord for her macrame installations to trigger ideas of survival and utopia. I've witnessed viewers experience a sense of surprise when they look closely at the material choices these artists have made and hopefully begin to question the meanings embedded in materials themselves.
DandyCraft: These objects straddle the art vs craft binary, which seems to be a queer concept.
John Chaich: A big point of inspiration for me, was Julia Bryan Wilson’s writing on Harmony Hammond’s floorpieces. A rough paraphrasing of one of her points is that craft objects, like queer desires, are multiple and refuse to be just one thing. I think that speaks to where these pieces ride the fence, push the binaries of art and craft, fiber and other mediums, push the boundaries of gender and gendered associations. I’m also very inspired by Elissa Auther’s String, Felt Thread writings on the hierarchy of art and craft, and how these works fit into that discussion. Because fiber and craft is so gendered, sexism influences our perception of craft. Queer fiber craft is perhaps triple marginalized.
DandyCraft: Through what I’ve seen, there seems to be a strong LGBTQ presence in ceramics and fiber.
John Chaich: Certainly. On a commercial level, Jonathan Adler can be seen as a distinctively gay aesthetic based in ceramics and fiber. I've also been following a range of queer ceramic artists like Erik Scollon, Tony Sonnenberg, Klein Reid, and Nikki Green. Have you spoken with Caitlin Rose Sweet? She’s an amazing queer artist who combines them both. Her Garden of Earthly Delights installation is stunning, stunning work combining fiber and ceramics.
DandyCraft: That’s interesting. I haven’t found anyone that’s combined them. I also haven’t found many LGBTQ makers within furniture. LGBTQ designers, certainly. But not many people who include their sexual orientation into the work via iconography.
John Chaich: Have you seen the work of Liz Collins pieces with furniture? Her practice is based in fashion, textile, fiber, and fine art, and she did a collaboration with furniture designer, Harry Allen, where she wove her work into his original chair frames.
DandyCraft: The one individual who did emerge was a furniture designer named Neal Ulrich. One of his pieces is a set of jock grip drawer pulls. The way they’re designed you can’t quite grab them, because of the incised, and rounded surface. They blend this masculine, heteronormative space of the gym, with a sense of non-function. When I asked if encountered many queer furniture makers, and he said he hadn’t. But many makers don’t make queer a part of their works.
John Chaich: For me, one of the most fascinating questions that is asked often in the book's interviews is: how queer are threads for you? Or how consciously queer is your way of making? I’ve been fascinated by the variety and at times disparity between the answers. For every artist who says, “I’m humanist first and I avoid any labels,” there may be an artist who says, “I’m more feminist than queer, even though I’m a queer woman.” Or an artist who says, “I hate it when gay artists say I’m not a gay artist. It’s who I am as a person, of course it informs what I do.” Or an artist who says, “Well, if you just love what you’re doing, the ideas will come through.” I guess that variety of political or intentional approaches to embracing queerness as a part of their making, is something I’ve found coming through in the book. There’s no one answer, nor should there be.
DandyCraft: It’s been interesting to try and unravel that too. Visible queer, invisibly queer, queer experience, queer utility. How did you grapple with these concepts the context of the show?
John Chaich: The two frameworks for that type of questioning in the exhibit, were queer the adjective versus queer the verb. Or rather, is it queer subject matter or content expressed using a fiber craft tradition, and that’s what makes it kind of queer. Or is it an artist who is more remixing or queering the materials, the fiber, the practice itself, and in the process, that’s a queer approach. Even if there’s not a recognizable visual iconography or subject matter. Some of the artists do both--these concepts are not binary.
Two oldest works in the exhibition exemplify those two frames. There’s a 1955 needlepoint from Leslie-Lohman’s collection by an artist we don’t know much named Allen Porter. It’s just about three-feet wide by two-feet high needlepoint of these two men, naked, lounging together. We think it’s based on a Paul Cadmus drawing, stylistically, and what’s been documented about their friendship. I think it speaks to those love hours that in 1955 Allen Porter took the risk of making this very, if not homosocial, homoerotic content, maybe only for himself, but fully executed in needlepoint. I’ve loved it when the craft aficionados note how it takes so long just to do a small loop, and this man filled an entire canvas, three-feet wide.
Harmony Hammond’s piece in the exhibition, Girdle, from 1972, exemplifies the queering of fiber and textile and responding to abstract painting as well. She uses a crocheted grid as the canvas, she then collected scraps from female friends in her life, that she then painted on and pulled those strips of fabric through the crochet. It’s just held up with two pins, so gravity then becomes a medium as it flows off the wall. I consider that a queering of painting, using textile, and even of queering of working with textile. It fits in that space between a painting, sculpture, fiber, and for Harmony at the time, she speaks of it as a reaction to the machismo of abstract painting. I see this piece as a precursor to Sheila Pepe’s crocheting with shoe laces or Jesse Harrod using rip cord for macramé.
Beyond these frameworks, Queer Threads simply ask: why are so many queer artists drawn to fiber?
DandyCraft: As a counterpoint to that, Neal Ulrich mentioned some of the barriers to entry he experienced as a furniture maker. As a slender, gay man, going into a hypermasculine woodshop, learning how to manipulate the massive machines and exist in that social space was a distinct challenge. There were intellectual and physical barriers to entering that world, which he overcame. Conversely, fiber is more domestic, accessible and communal.
John Chaich: Exploring masculinity through "women's work" is an influence for some of the Queer Threads artists. I’m really touched by the backstory of Ramekon O’Arwister’s work. He learned to sew and crochet as a little sissy boy in the south, with his grandmother, who recognized that, “He’s not like other boys. I want to give him something that’s his and that’s ours together.” A large part of his practice consists of community crochet jams. He invites people to come and learn how to crochet with him using these gorgeous, oversized, walnut hooks. For the yarn, he binds together found textiles and invites others to bring their own pieces to add. that he not only brings but invites others to bring, so it becomes made of these found remnants. There’s not only the making of the materials itself, the making of the thread becomes communal and interactive with all these anonymous histories that take on a new life as yarn. But then the crocheting together is a communal act that results in a textile that the group may decide together how to install on the wall. He’s honoring that matrilineal craft thinking that influenced him.
DandyCraft: When I was interviewing Nathan, he referenced that grandmothers have reached out to thank him for setting an example of male voice in fiber arts. Nathan also mentioned he’s been invited to speak at an all boy’s school.
John Chaich: I grew up in a home where my mother and grandmother both crocheted, made needlepoint, quilted As a child, I don’t think I appreciated the uniqueness of something not being store bought. I was a selfish kid, I didn’t really think of what it meant for my mom or my grandmother to have that time for themselves to meditate. My mom would buy whatever yarn was on sale to work with, and that led do color combinations like maroon and peach, or lavender and yellow, that feel very queer to me.
Dandycraft: The inspiration to begin this project started with watching Craft in America’s Service Episode. It focused on how to process identity shaping moments, like the horrors of war, through making. I began to wonder how LGBTQ individuals processed their own experiences through making. Have you had a similar moment that inspired your work?
John Chaich: When I was in barely 21 in college, I saw the AIDS quilt displayed on the White House lawn. This was the last time it could be shown in its entirety because no other public space could accommodate the growing number of panels. Seeing the AIDS quilt had a profound effect on me as young gay man--seeing the love hours that went into every panel and feeling the power of how we are something greater, together. In Queer Threads, Allyson Mitchell's Queer Un Nation banners from her Deep Lez series reference the history of hand-made protest banners across liberation movements. Beyond queerness, I am moved by quilting project for survivors of domestic abuse called The Monument Quilt. Like the display of the AIDS quilt, it becomes this public art piece displayed in the streets.
DandyCraft: In reading L.J. Robert’s “Put Your Things Down, Flip It and Reverse It,” she discussed applying tactics of queer theory to look beyond the traditional classification of handmade, or mass produced. Her application of Jose Munoz’s concept of disidentification illustrates how artists can appropriate, recontextualize, and recombine processes to insert their own queer voice.
John Chaich: I’m glad you brought that up. L.J. so brilliantly established that platform of merging queer theory with queer making and applying the concept of disidentification, and finding a new, different meaning, to an existing object. I’m thinking of subverting, or queering, the domestic into the public again. When you add the layer of domestic into the public, then add an art space designed for dialogue and building relationships, it’s quite powerful. I’m thinking of Anne Cvetkovich’s work, Public Feelings. She looked at Allyson Mitchell’s “Menstrual Hut” installation, that’s an immersive room of granny squares, afghans, fun fur, that Allyson created to invite people to come, sit in, experience, and reflect on this experience of the female body. There’s a nod to Faith Wilding’s “Womb Room” from Woman House too.
DandyCraft: In your own curatorial practice for this show was there any queer strategy or intent that sought to break down the barrier between the viewer and the object?
John Chaich: Nathan’s “Locker Room” has so many moments that trigger our desire to touch, and make us aware of our desire to touch. Not only the desire to touch the handle, or the lock, that makes us reflect on the same sex desire to touch one another in the locker room. Also L.J. Robert’s piece, “Queer Houses of Brooklyn” specifically includes the pins that are not only placed on the large textile, but also flow onto piles on the floor so viewers are encouraged to take them. It’s a gift to the viewer to touch something and take the work home with you.
DandyCraft: It becomes a romantic encounter of sorts.
John Chaich: It's romantic and also physical. We touch fiber and fiber touches us on a daily basis-it's on our bodies, it’s on our beds, it’s on our floors, whether we made it or not. We can wonder, is it a particularly queer strategy to make the viewer aware of those moments of tactile, haptic tension the way L.J. and Nathan do? I think Rebecca Levi’s new work, where she’s taken those gorgeous photographs of the reverse side of her embroideries. Or Aubrey Longley-Cook’s “RuPaul Cross Stitch Animation”. For his work, we presented two back to back flat screen TV that showed the finished side of the hoop, and the other with the knots and loose threads that is more typically shown against the wall, unseen. The visible facture--revealing how it was made, even how it was finished or not--feels like a queer gesture.
DandyCraft: I know we’re coming close to the end of our time. Thank you for being so generous with your thoughts and energy. After studying the artists, it was a distinct pleasure to meet you and glean your insights into their work.
John Chaich: It was my pleasure as well. I look forward to seeing what comes out of your work and thank you again for choosing to spotlight some of the artists from the show.
DandyCraft: I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I’ve recently interviewed two of your featured artists, Rebecca Levi and Nathan Vincent. Both reference how Queer Threads created a strong sense of community among the artists. Can you speak to how this community evolved?
John Chaich: It warms my heart to hear that artists or other people spoke of their experience of the exhibition that way. On one level, just the sheer presence of the 26 artists in the exhibition from opening to related programing provided points of connection. It was important in the programming to let the artist voice lead wherever possible. I witnessed intergenerational connections happening during the exhibition. Community may have naturally grew from the identity of the artists and the nature of their work. Have you ever heard of the phrase the “love hours” that go into craft? When you’re working on a four feet wide needle point, you have to love this process and practice because it takes such extreme, precise, time and care. I think that energy comes through on the way people respond to the work.
DandyCraft: When I spoke with Nathan, he mentioned the accessibility of crochet offers a sense of immediacy. These domestic objects initially appear benign, but take on a subversive agency though the artist’s intervention. Yet, it retains a domestic aesthetic. It recalls Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where an object that has a seemingly benign meaning, but then possesses a subversive layer beneath.
John Chaich: Several of the artists subvert or explore the meaning of materials themselves. I think a piece like Sheila Pepe’s “Your Granny’s Not Square” speaks to that uncanny-ness, and with a sense of mystery. It’s this fourteen feet wide abstract installation, that you recognize is crocheted, but then looking closely, you realize its crocheted using shoe laces as thread. That aha moment triggers that sense of familiar use of materials and that feels queer. In his Leather Pansies series of embroideries, John Thomas Paradiso uses leather as canvas, stretched in a traditional embroidery hoop and filled with hundreds of intricate stitches. James Gobel's paintings with felt, piping, and craft store materials subvert our idea of paint. Jesse Harrod specifically uses rip cord for her macrame installations to trigger ideas of survival and utopia. I've witnessed viewers experience a sense of surprise when they look closely at the material choices these artists have made and hopefully begin to question the meanings embedded in materials themselves.
DandyCraft: These objects straddle the art vs craft binary, which seems to be a queer concept.
John Chaich: A big point of inspiration for me, was Julia Bryan Wilson’s writing on Harmony Hammond’s floorpieces. A rough paraphrasing of one of her points is that craft objects, like queer desires, are multiple and refuse to be just one thing. I think that speaks to where these pieces ride the fence, push the binaries of art and craft, fiber and other mediums, push the boundaries of gender and gendered associations. I’m also very inspired by Elissa Auther’s String, Felt Thread writings on the hierarchy of art and craft, and how these works fit into that discussion. Because fiber and craft is so gendered, sexism influences our perception of craft. Queer fiber craft is perhaps triple marginalized.
DandyCraft: Through what I’ve seen, there seems to be a strong LGBTQ presence in ceramics and fiber.
John Chaich: Certainly. On a commercial level, Jonathan Adler can be seen as a distinctively gay aesthetic based in ceramics and fiber. I've also been following a range of queer ceramic artists like Erik Scollon, Tony Sonnenberg, Klein Reid, and Nikki Green. Have you spoken with Caitlin Rose Sweet? She’s an amazing queer artist who combines them both. Her Garden of Earthly Delights installation is stunning, stunning work combining fiber and ceramics.
DandyCraft: That’s interesting. I haven’t found anyone that’s combined them. I also haven’t found many LGBTQ makers within furniture. LGBTQ designers, certainly. But not many people who include their sexual orientation into the work via iconography.
John Chaich: Have you seen the work of Liz Collins pieces with furniture? Her practice is based in fashion, textile, fiber, and fine art, and she did a collaboration with furniture designer, Harry Allen, where she wove her work into his original chair frames.
DandyCraft: The one individual who did emerge was a furniture designer named Neal Ulrich. One of his pieces is a set of jock grip drawer pulls. The way they’re designed you can’t quite grab them, because of the incised, and rounded surface. They blend this masculine, heteronormative space of the gym, with a sense of non-function. When I asked if encountered many queer furniture makers, and he said he hadn’t. But many makers don’t make queer a part of their works.
John Chaich: For me, one of the most fascinating questions that is asked often in the book's interviews is: how queer are threads for you? Or how consciously queer is your way of making? I’ve been fascinated by the variety and at times disparity between the answers. For every artist who says, “I’m humanist first and I avoid any labels,” there may be an artist who says, “I’m more feminist than queer, even though I’m a queer woman.” Or an artist who says, “I hate it when gay artists say I’m not a gay artist. It’s who I am as a person, of course it informs what I do.” Or an artist who says, “Well, if you just love what you’re doing, the ideas will come through.” I guess that variety of political or intentional approaches to embracing queerness as a part of their making, is something I’ve found coming through in the book. There’s no one answer, nor should there be.
DandyCraft: It’s been interesting to try and unravel that too. Visible queer, invisibly queer, queer experience, queer utility. How did you grapple with these concepts the context of the show?
John Chaich: The two frameworks for that type of questioning in the exhibit, were queer the adjective versus queer the verb. Or rather, is it queer subject matter or content expressed using a fiber craft tradition, and that’s what makes it kind of queer. Or is it an artist who is more remixing or queering the materials, the fiber, the practice itself, and in the process, that’s a queer approach. Even if there’s not a recognizable visual iconography or subject matter. Some of the artists do both--these concepts are not binary.
Two oldest works in the exhibition exemplify those two frames. There’s a 1955 needlepoint from Leslie-Lohman’s collection by an artist we don’t know much named Allen Porter. It’s just about three-feet wide by two-feet high needlepoint of these two men, naked, lounging together. We think it’s based on a Paul Cadmus drawing, stylistically, and what’s been documented about their friendship. I think it speaks to those love hours that in 1955 Allen Porter took the risk of making this very, if not homosocial, homoerotic content, maybe only for himself, but fully executed in needlepoint. I’ve loved it when the craft aficionados note how it takes so long just to do a small loop, and this man filled an entire canvas, three-feet wide.
Harmony Hammond’s piece in the exhibition, Girdle, from 1972, exemplifies the queering of fiber and textile and responding to abstract painting as well. She uses a crocheted grid as the canvas, she then collected scraps from female friends in her life, that she then painted on and pulled those strips of fabric through the crochet. It’s just held up with two pins, so gravity then becomes a medium as it flows off the wall. I consider that a queering of painting, using textile, and even of queering of working with textile. It fits in that space between a painting, sculpture, fiber, and for Harmony at the time, she speaks of it as a reaction to the machismo of abstract painting. I see this piece as a precursor to Sheila Pepe’s crocheting with shoe laces or Jesse Harrod using rip cord for macramé.
Beyond these frameworks, Queer Threads simply ask: why are so many queer artists drawn to fiber?
DandyCraft: As a counterpoint to that, Neal Ulrich mentioned some of the barriers to entry he experienced as a furniture maker. As a slender, gay man, going into a hypermasculine woodshop, learning how to manipulate the massive machines and exist in that social space was a distinct challenge. There were intellectual and physical barriers to entering that world, which he overcame. Conversely, fiber is more domestic, accessible and communal.
John Chaich: Exploring masculinity through "women's work" is an influence for some of the Queer Threads artists. I’m really touched by the backstory of Ramekon O’Arwister’s work. He learned to sew and crochet as a little sissy boy in the south, with his grandmother, who recognized that, “He’s not like other boys. I want to give him something that’s his and that’s ours together.” A large part of his practice consists of community crochet jams. He invites people to come and learn how to crochet with him using these gorgeous, oversized, walnut hooks. For the yarn, he binds together found textiles and invites others to bring their own pieces to add. that he not only brings but invites others to bring, so it becomes made of these found remnants. There’s not only the making of the materials itself, the making of the thread becomes communal and interactive with all these anonymous histories that take on a new life as yarn. But then the crocheting together is a communal act that results in a textile that the group may decide together how to install on the wall. He’s honoring that matrilineal craft thinking that influenced him.
DandyCraft: When I was interviewing Nathan, he referenced that grandmothers have reached out to thank him for setting an example of male voice in fiber arts. Nathan also mentioned he’s been invited to speak at an all boy’s school.
John Chaich: I grew up in a home where my mother and grandmother both crocheted, made needlepoint, quilted As a child, I don’t think I appreciated the uniqueness of something not being store bought. I was a selfish kid, I didn’t really think of what it meant for my mom or my grandmother to have that time for themselves to meditate. My mom would buy whatever yarn was on sale to work with, and that led do color combinations like maroon and peach, or lavender and yellow, that feel very queer to me.
Dandycraft: The inspiration to begin this project started with watching Craft in America’s Service Episode. It focused on how to process identity shaping moments, like the horrors of war, through making. I began to wonder how LGBTQ individuals processed their own experiences through making. Have you had a similar moment that inspired your work?
John Chaich: When I was in barely 21 in college, I saw the AIDS quilt displayed on the White House lawn. This was the last time it could be shown in its entirety because no other public space could accommodate the growing number of panels. Seeing the AIDS quilt had a profound effect on me as young gay man--seeing the love hours that went into every panel and feeling the power of how we are something greater, together. In Queer Threads, Allyson Mitchell's Queer Un Nation banners from her Deep Lez series reference the history of hand-made protest banners across liberation movements. Beyond queerness, I am moved by quilting project for survivors of domestic abuse called The Monument Quilt. Like the display of the AIDS quilt, it becomes this public art piece displayed in the streets.
DandyCraft: In reading L.J. Robert’s “Put Your Things Down, Flip It and Reverse It,” she discussed applying tactics of queer theory to look beyond the traditional classification of handmade, or mass produced. Her application of Jose Munoz’s concept of disidentification illustrates how artists can appropriate, recontextualize, and recombine processes to insert their own queer voice.
John Chaich: I’m glad you brought that up. L.J. so brilliantly established that platform of merging queer theory with queer making and applying the concept of disidentification, and finding a new, different meaning, to an existing object. I’m thinking of subverting, or queering, the domestic into the public again. When you add the layer of domestic into the public, then add an art space designed for dialogue and building relationships, it’s quite powerful. I’m thinking of Anne Cvetkovich’s work, Public Feelings. She looked at Allyson Mitchell’s “Menstrual Hut” installation, that’s an immersive room of granny squares, afghans, fun fur, that Allyson created to invite people to come, sit in, experience, and reflect on this experience of the female body. There’s a nod to Faith Wilding’s “Womb Room” from Woman House too.
DandyCraft: In your own curatorial practice for this show was there any queer strategy or intent that sought to break down the barrier between the viewer and the object?
John Chaich: Nathan’s “Locker Room” has so many moments that trigger our desire to touch, and make us aware of our desire to touch. Not only the desire to touch the handle, or the lock, that makes us reflect on the same sex desire to touch one another in the locker room. Also L.J. Robert’s piece, “Queer Houses of Brooklyn” specifically includes the pins that are not only placed on the large textile, but also flow onto piles on the floor so viewers are encouraged to take them. It’s a gift to the viewer to touch something and take the work home with you.
DandyCraft: It becomes a romantic encounter of sorts.
John Chaich: It's romantic and also physical. We touch fiber and fiber touches us on a daily basis-it's on our bodies, it’s on our beds, it’s on our floors, whether we made it or not. We can wonder, is it a particularly queer strategy to make the viewer aware of those moments of tactile, haptic tension the way L.J. and Nathan do? I think Rebecca Levi’s new work, where she’s taken those gorgeous photographs of the reverse side of her embroideries. Or Aubrey Longley-Cook’s “RuPaul Cross Stitch Animation”. For his work, we presented two back to back flat screen TV that showed the finished side of the hoop, and the other with the knots and loose threads that is more typically shown against the wall, unseen. The visible facture--revealing how it was made, even how it was finished or not--feels like a queer gesture.
DandyCraft: I know we’re coming close to the end of our time. Thank you for being so generous with your thoughts and energy. After studying the artists, it was a distinct pleasure to meet you and glean your insights into their work.
John Chaich: It was my pleasure as well. I look forward to seeing what comes out of your work and thank you again for choosing to spotlight some of the artists from the show.