Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society.

Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process.

In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines.

https://damianstamer.com/home.html

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When artist Sherrill Roland returned to grad school at University of North Carolina at Greensboro after nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he found himself haunted by the invisible weight of his experience. Determined to confront how incarceration had reshaped his body, psyche and place in the world, he — with the encouragement of then-faculty member, artist Sheryl Oring — turned that burden into "The Jumpsuit Project," a performance in which he wore an orange prison uniform on campus every day for a year. The project soon expanded beyond the university to public spaces across the country, where Roland sat inside a 7-by-9-foot square of orange tape, an echo of a prison cell, and invited passersby to step inside and talk with him, transforming uncomfortable encounters into moments of shared reflection and empathy.

In the years since, Roland has become one of the most prominent conceptual artists in the South, translating that raw act of endurance into a studio practice that explores the architecture of confinement, the language of data and the humanity hidden within systems of control. His work, which is now in the collections of major museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the North Carolina Museum of Art, asks how objects and numbers can embody both memory and freedom.

In this interview, Roland speaks about the fear and necessity of donning the orange jumpsuit, the emotional toll of transforming personal pain into public conversation, and how his practice continues to evolve toward accessibility, dialogue and compassion.

https://www.sherrillroland.com/

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In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work, to give back, to support the community, to hold the weight of healing or justice when most of us aren’t even resourced to pay our bills, let alone afford health care or rest.” She also lamented that nonprofits were, in a time of admittedly frightening fiscal precarity, leaning on underfunded artists for financial support.

Esther clearly hit a nerve with artists everywhere, and her rants amassed thousands of views and messages of commiseration and support. She can also rant with some authority because not only is she an artist, but she has also worked in the arts nonprofits sector. A self-taught maker of stop-motion animation and movable or mechanized sculptures and zoetropes, she is currently Chief Curator at Union Hall, a six-year-old nonprofit in Denver, CO that provides support and professional development to emerging artists as well as curators.

In this interview, Esther reflects on the inequities that drove her to speak out and on how her posts sparked broader conversations about the invisible labor of artists. She also shares how her dual perspective as both artist and curator informs her ideas for more sustainable funding models and healthier creative practices.

https://www.instagram.com/esther.hz/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxcWHfyhpb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxdIksyoRh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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