More Light

Inspiring podcast featuring interviews with artists, meditators and pioneers of culture. Hosted by Brooklyn, NY based artist Dan Gratz.

Episodes

Todd Bienvenu

Jun 5, 2026

Jun 5, 2026

1 hr 4 min

Todd Bienvenu is a prolific, seriously brilliant painter whose uniquely prolific brilliance is most exuberantly expressed when he succeeds in keeping his creative seriousness in check. At times, this regard entails cheesiness, cheekiness, tongue-in-cheek-ness, or simply butt cheeks. Bienvenu has shown extensively worldwide and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Jun 5, 2026

1 hr 4 min

Nick McPhail

May 28, 2026

May 28, 2026

1 hr 20 min

Nick McPhail (b. 1982, Laingsburg, MI) is an artist whose work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, collage and installation. He is known for vivid landscapes, inventive experiments with perspective, and explorations of light, space and color that utilize multiple mediums. He has exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, and San Francisco, and his works are held in collections worldwide. McPhail lives and works in Los Angeles.
 

May 28, 2026

1 hr 20 min

Julia Garcia

May 20, 2026

May 20, 2026

1 hr 11 min

Julia García (b. 1992, Pompano Beach, FL) uses a collage-like application of acrylic and ink onto wet raw canvas, where water acts as a collaborator, introducing an unpredictable external force which determines the outcome alongside the artist’s hand. With a practice that moves across painting and drawing, García’s work is unified by the compositional relationship between material and visible substrate, which proposes a state of tension between openness and resolution, information and exposure. Julia received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 2014 and her MFA in 2016 from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. 
 

May 20, 2026

1 hr 11 min

Andrew Brischler

May 13, 2026

May 13, 2026

1 hr 14 min

Andrew Brischler makes paintings and drawings that explore queer identity through the lens of American popular culture. Rooted in drawing, his practice reinterprets pop-cultural ephemera into graphic compositions with bold, saturated color. Typography and graphic design are central to his work, which often evokes the aesthetics of vintage book covers and movie posters. Drawing from personal archives and historical references, Brischler investigates the tension between visibility and erasure in queer representation and how collective media consumption shapes both autobiography and identity.

May 13, 2026

1 hr 14 min

Rebekah Kim

May 5, 2026

May 5, 2026

1 hr 1 min

Rebekah Kim is the founder and director of Picture Theory, a contemporary art gallery in New York focused on artists engaging with materiality, technology, and evolving cultural narratives. Since founding the gallery in 2023, she has built a program that bridges emerging voices with historic practices, emphasizing both critical discourse and market development. Picture Theory is establishing a distinct voice that balances curatorial vision with the realities of building a sustainable gallery model.

May 5, 2026

1 hr 1 min

Drea Cofield

Apr 29, 2026

Apr 29, 2026

1 hr 19 min

Drea Cofield is a painter based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Kravets Wehby Gallery (NYC), Galleri Urbane (Dallas), and Soho Revue (London). Her work has been featured in publications such as CULTURED, The Wall Street Journal, Office, Dazed, and Whitehot Magazine. She is a recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and has participated in residencies including Yaddo (NY) and La Napoule Art Foundation (France), as well as just receiving a Lab of Experimental Art Residency Prize at CAN Art Fair in Spain. Cofield earned her BA from DePauw University and her MFA from the Yale School of Art.

Apr 29, 2026

1 hr 19 min

Wardell Milan

Apr 22, 2026

Apr 22, 2026

1 hr 7 min

Building upon a conceptual foundation in photography, Milan’s practice encompasses drawing, collage, and painting to explore ideas of the body, beauty, and the unconscious. The composite, fragmented figures in his work inhabit ambiguous landscapes of painted abstraction, navigating themselves through recontextualized historical and contemporary environments. Through them, the body—the physical, the psychological, and the photographic body—is understood as a multi-faceted, intersecting site of gender, race, sexuality, and history. 
Wardell Milan received his BFA from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2001) and his MFA from Yale University (2004), both in Photography. Notable solo exhibitions of his work include Wardell Milan: Recent Work at the Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College (2022-23), and America. God Bless You If It’s Good To You, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2021).

Apr 22, 2026

1 hr 7 min

Ashlie Atkinson

Apr 15, 2026

Apr 15, 2026

1 hr 17 min

Ashlie Atkinson is an Arkansas-born actress now living in Brooklyn, NY, who has amassed a pile of over 100 credits in film and television since her debut in 2004. Notable roles include a virulent klan wife in Spike Lee's Blackkklansman, the psychopathic taxidermist Janice on Mr. Robot, and the ever-capable dispatcher Ruby in The Lost Bus (starring Matthew McConaughey) on Apple TV. Ashlie currently portrays 1880s party girl Mamie Fish on HBO's hit show The Gilded Age, and unlicensed nurse and facilities manager Miss Dot on the NBC comedy Stumble, currently available on Peacock. Ashlie is also a writer and producer, most recently of the documentary Hank's Saloon.@Ashlie_atkinson on IG

Apr 15, 2026

1 hr 17 min

Leon Chase

Apr 7, 2026

Apr 7, 2026

1 hr 1 min

Leon Chase is a self-taught filmmaker, musician, visual artist, occasional writer, and full-time curious person. For nearly a decade, he has dedicated himself to capturing—and celebrating—the "vanishing weirdos" of New York City. 

Apr 7, 2026

1 hr 1 min

Bob Holman

Apr 1, 2026

Apr 1, 2026

1 hr 18 min

Founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and the author of 22 poetry collections (print/audio/video), most recently two books written 50 years apart The Unspoken (YBK/Bowery), Life Poem (YBK/Bowery) as well as Bob Holman’s India Journals (Rattapallax), The Cutouts (Matisse) (PeKaBoo Press) and Sing This One Back To Me (Coffee House Press). He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. As the original Slam Master and a director of the Nuyorican Poets Café, creator of the world's first spoken word poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word, slam and digital poetry movements of the last several decades. All told, he has performed well over 1,000 times, around the globe, from Madison Square Garden and rock stadiums to church basements and Ethiopian Tej Bets (honey wine bars). Co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman's study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages. He is the producer/director/host of various films, including The United States of Poetry, a PBS series that aired nationally and won the International Public Television Award, directed by Mark Pellington and produced with Joshua Blum, and On the Road with Bob Holman. His film about language loss and revitalization, Language Matters with Bob Holman, winner of the Berkeley Film Festival's Documentary of the Year award, was produced by David Grubin and aired nationally on PBS. Holman traveled for the film and led workshops at language revitalization centers across Alaska and Hawaii, sponsored by the Ford Foundation; in 2022 he was invited by the Basabali Langauge Reclamation Society to screen it in Bali. His short film, produced by Steve Zeitlin of City Lore, Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues, has lines of poetry in 50 languages, and premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival. In 2018, Holman was awarded He is also known for his ekphrastic poetry and performances, including Talking Pictures, a film by Kristi Zea of Holman performing his poems with the paintings of his late wife, Elizabeth Murray. At Sundance in 2023, a digital restoration of SLAM, the movie made by Marc Levin and starring Saul Williams and Sonja Sohn, was screened. The film originated at the Nuyorican Poets Café 25 years earlier when Holman was MC, a role he recreated live at Sundance. Holman’s poetry film, We Are the Dinosaur, directed by Paul Moon, featured at a dozen film festivals, was the basis of Holman’s 2024 tour of Oslo, Vienna, Tbilisi, and Tokyo. In 2025, he was selected by the Venice Biennale to perform his poetry on Venice’s streets, canals and bridges, as well as in theaters.

Apr 1, 2026

1 hr 18 min

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