The Side Woo

Hello! After some consideration we are moving all The Side Woo content over to our YouTube channel. Please join Thibault there for all kinds of antics including interviews, tarot readings, essays, and other unique content that people put on The YouTubes.

This week Thibault does a reading for the full moon in Taurus, which is super charged to support your efforts around grounding and connecting with community.

Deck: The Official Tarot of The Grateful Dead

ALSO - Lisa Crallé s gallery Personal Space is in Vallejo NOT Alameda as is referenced in the video. Apologies to all.

This episode, Thibault a does reading for the week of October 28 - November 3, 2025.

Deck: The Official Grateful Dead Tarot Deck.

This episode, Thibault does a quick reading for the new moon in Libra happening on October 21st. The effects of the new moon lasts about a month, so this reading has more bang for your buck. Deck: The Official Grateful Dead Tarot

This week's episode was recorded and broadcasted live from the Axel Contemporary Truck onto Radio Tomada in Santa Fe. Thibault talks with Mathew and Jerry about woo, and talks with Zina about the sound bath she did at Electra Gallery, living in Arkansas, and the art world.

About Radio Tomada

This week Thibault talks with Dana Hemenway at The Space Program studio where Dana is doing a residency. They talk about Dana's background in public art, how motherhood has changed her practice, and what it was like working together as co-director at Royal Nonesuch Gallery in the 2010s.

Check out our next bonus episode for Dana's hot takes.

About Dana Hemenway

Dana Hemenway is an artist based in San Francisco. Her work is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects to make visible what has become habituated in our built environments. Hemenway uses these functional items as materials to form traditionally fiber-based crafts–– lights and cords are woven through ceramics or the gallery wall, extension cords are transformed into macramé chains. Hemenway has had residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), ACRE (Stueben, WI), SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Joya: arte + ecología (Spain), The Wassaic Project (Upstate New York) and at Recology Waste Management (San Francisco). Dana is a 2024 Eureka Fellow, Fleishhacker Foundation and the recipient of The San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and a Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. She has a public art commission at SFO’s Terminal 1. Dana has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally. From 2015 – 2017, Dana served as a co-director of Royal Nonesuch Gallery, an artist-run project space in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College and her BA from University of California Santa Cruz. She is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery.

This week Thibault talks with gallerists and power couple, Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour of Et Al Gallery and all the other projects they tackle separately and together. They talk about San Francisco's evolution as a center for art, best taqueria in town, and other important, timely topics.

This week, Thibault talks with Renate Hume, a healer and artist who offers mandala readings to help guide people through their many chapters in life. They discuss Hume's many self-reinventions throughout her life, astrology, walking on hot coals, and ultimately how she learned to read mandalas.

About Renate Hume

Renate Collins Hume has been a counselor and spiritual development advisorfor most of her adult life. She holds a Master in Neurolinguistic Programming; an Advanced Degree in Ericksonian Hypnosis.  She is a Reiki Master and a Certified Instructor for the Julian Method of Natural Healing. At the C.G.Jung Institute in Zurich Renate extended her studies of symbols and dream interpretation. An accomplished artist and writer her sensitivities extend into her psychotherapy work. Renate is an Intuitive and a Healer and considers Personal Mandala Readings her life work. She recently got certified as Respite Caregiver in Taos and surrounds.

We are back with Season 5 of The Side Woo podcast and our first guest is LA-based artist Raina Lee. Thibault and Raina talk about life in and out of LA after the fires in January, karaoke as an art form, ceramics and feng shui.

About Raina Lee

Raina Lee is a second-generation Taiwanese-American artist working in ceramic sculpture and installation. She is an author and zine publisher, having written in creative-nonfiction and technology for fifteen years. In the ceramics, she is known for her experimental glazes and textured surface vessels. In her current practice, she combines sculpture and ceramic glaze paintings, creating installations of significant moments in art history. Her work highlights the ways non-Western cultures and art practices have influenced the Western art canon. While acknowledging that cultural influence goes in all directions, Lee questions what is interpretation versus cultural appropriation, and how the boundaries between these reflect structures of power, class, and colonialism. She explores Asian diasporic identity, displacement, and the erosion of time through a material practice. She draws from classical Chinese, Greek, and Persian art history. She has worked in 3D-clay printing as an artist-in-residence at the Expressive Computation Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara and has also made functional ceramics. Other residencies include Watershed (Maine), High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree), Texere (Oaxaca), Ikea Residency (Los Angeles), and Salmon Creek Farm (Mendocino).

Her work is influenced video games, science fiction futurism, and a Southern California immigrant upbringing. She grew up between Taiwan and her parent’s pizzaria in Torrance, California. Her work has been featured in press worldwide, including The New York Times: T Magazine, Surface Magazine, and MilK Decoration. She is the author of Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide To Karaoke Domination (Chronicle Books) and publisher of cult zine about technology and gaming culture, 1-Up MegaZine. She has a B.A. in sociology from U.C. Davis and M.A. in Film and Media Studies from the New School.

This week Thibault sits down for a conversation with LA-based artist Samantha Rosenwald. They talk about a life-changing moment when Sam saw the face of someone (maybe g*d?) in a vision as a child, and life as a hard-working artist.

About Samantha Rosenwald

Rosenwald is based in LA and works primarily in colored pencil on canvas. By threading together contemporary culture, visual pun, and the dogmas of art history, she creates absurd, personal, and darkly funny portraits which illustrate what it feels like to be alive.

She received her BA in Art History from Vassar College in 2016 and her MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts in 2018. Rosenwald has shown with galleries such as Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Carl Kostyal (Milan), Stems Gallery (Brussels), and Sebastian Gladstone (Los Angeles). upcoming solo exhibition at Carl Kostyal. She and has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Art of Choice.

Show Notes

In October 2024, Thibault sat down with Malado Francine and Kayla Tange to talk with them about moments when life forced change on them. They also talk about past lives, woo woo stories and being careful what you wish for.

About Malado Francine

Malado Francine (b. Malado Francine Baldwin-Tejeda)  is an American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.  Her work in multiple media examines the intersection of culture and identity. Outstanding influences in her work include a childhood spent in Dakar, Senegal and Bamako, Mali as the daughter of former Peace Corps volunteers in a mixed-race family of Hispanic descent.  She holds a BA in comparative literature from Swarthmore College, and an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School. She spent more than 15 years living and making art in New York City before moving to Los Angeles in 2013.

About Kayla Tange

Kayla Tange was born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese American family. Her love for poetry and photography slowly progressed into a conceptual performance practice which incorporates elements of exotic dancing. Physical and psychic boundaries, sexuality and permanence are also recurring themes. She often uses dark comedy in her performance work to explore love and longing, societal taboos and catharsis. She is the co-producer of Sacred Wounds, a show around ritual, subverting cultural stereotypes and ancestral healing.

Show notes:

This week Thibault sits down with artist and activist Rio Asch Phoenix to talk about his solo show with Monte Vista Projects, While Light Still Falls Here, documenting the hotly contested Canyon Hills property near the Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles. They talk about Rio's nerd-level love of plants, Instagram's effect on art and why photography is still relevant.

This week Thibault talks with best-selling author Sarah Thornton about her latest book "Tits Up: Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts", which was listed as one of the New Yorker Best Books of 2024. After her own botched breast reconstruction surgery, Thornton delved into what breasts/tits/titties mean to women all over the world from the sex work industry to witches and everyone in between.

About Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton  is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture.[1] Thornton has authored four books and many articles about artists, the art market, bodies, people, culture, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures,[2] and ethnographic research methods.

Show Notes

This episode is a recording of a live conversation between Thibault and Allison Schulnik, reknowned painter, ceramicist, animator, and filmmaker based out in the desert in Sky Valley, CA. They talk about trying to live a dumb phone life, being witchy, and delve into Schulnik's artistic practice. Schulnik's latest show, "Dumb Phone" was at The Pit in Los Angeles and can be found on their website. The conversation was recorded on December 12, 2024. About Allison Schulnik Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Show Notes

This is a little check-in to say happy new year, and a teaser to get you excited for all the good stuff we have coming your way in 2025, which is just days away - on Thursday of this week, no less.

Also a huge thank you to all of our fans! We are listed as a Top 10, and Top 5 favorite podcast for hundreds of people which is incredible. And to the 37 of you who love us best, I love you best of all too :)

Our first episode comes out on January 2, 2025 with Allison Schulnik!

This week on The Side Woo, Sarah talks with grad school buddy Roberto Fatal about their beautiful short films, student loan debt, using grant money for good and the hilarity of sci-fi's white apocalypses.

About Roberto Fatal

This week Sarah sits down with Bay Area artist, owner of Pinckney Clay and karaoke aficionado, Holly Coley.

About Holly Coley

Holly Coley lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Born in LA county and raised in the desert of Southern California. Coley comes from a family of artists and craftspeople. An artist and educator, she is the owner of Pinckney Clay Studio in San Francisco. Coley studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State, and SFCC.

As an artist working in education, she has worked with many art education nonprofits in the Bay Area. Such as The San Francisco Art Education Project, Streetside Stories, Root Division, and The Crucible.

Show notes:

Sarah sits down for a live chat with Hayley Barker at Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth DTLA in honor of her new catalog release, co-produced with Shrine Gallery,

About Hayley Barker

Hayley Barker (b.1973) is a Los Angeles based painter whose bold and beautiful paintings combine apparently prosaic personal details of her immediate surroundings in her home and studio in LA, with an awareness of time passing and the contradiction of painting as a means of both measuring time and freezing the moment. Her subjects are sometimes explicitly rendered from life – the tree from her bedroom window, the view across her lovingly tended yard, or the plants on her windowsill – and yet they seem to come from an interior place, balancing real and imaginary worlds in works that suggest as much a dreamscape as a landscape.

Show Notes

Sarah talks this week with LA-based artist Amir Fallah about his family of origin, immigrating to the US when he was 7, speaking at the recent UCLA School of Arts and Architecture commencement, and all the hard work that it took to get where he is now.

About Amir

Amir H. Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include The Fowler Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.

Show Notes

This week we share a convesration between Sarah and friend of the pod, artist Natalja Kent. They cover so much ground from childhood stuff to Natalja's storied career in artist collectives, Sasha the Flute, and queer surfing.

About Natalja Kent
Natalja Kent is a Czech-American artist based in Los Angeles,CA. Her work investigates process, materiality and embodimentthrough the expanding parameters of photograms, painting andsculpture. Solo Exhibitions includeLight Wavesat Oolong Galleryin San Diego, CA 2024;Light Waves Broken Watersat And PensGallery 2024 andLight Movesat Situations Gallery/ForelandCatskill, July 2022. She was recently included in group exhibitionsat The Museum of Museums, Seattle, WA; Pace Gallery NewYork, NY, Good Naked Gallery, Los Angeles/NYC and The BerryArt Museum, Norfolk, VA. She has shown work and/or performedat Tate Liverpool; Carpenter Center for The Visual Arts at Harvard;Hiromi Yoshi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; PS1, MOMA Queens. She isthe recipient of the ArtAffect Grant, Google Artist-in-Residence,Camera Obscura at the City of Santa Monica AIR, RISCA ArtistFellowship amongst others.

Show notes:

This week we share a live recorded conversation Sarah hosted as part of her solo exhibition, Things Worth Saving, at Dreamsong Gallery in Minneapolis. Elisabeth Workman flips the script and asks Sarah questions this time. Let's get nerdy about painting!

About Elisabeth Workman

Xiao Wang (b. 1990), is a Chinese born, New York based figurative painter primarily working with oil paint. Wang’s work combines dramatic and moody color palettes with a realism approach. He creates constructed scenes from photographs of still lifes, foliage, interior spaces, landscapes, himself, his friends, and loved ones. The contents of these scenes are rooted in everyday life, while the attention to atmosphere and emotion pushes the paintings to an uncanny space. With the use of theatrical lighting and distortion or exaggeration of colors, the world depicted in Wang’s paintings is elevated to a dreamlike space. At the center of this space are human figures, often in solitude, unaware of the fourth-wall in front.

Show Notes

This week Sarah chats with Basement VHS podcast and filmscreening hosts, Luca Antonucci and Mitsu Okubo. Sarah asks them about their love of horror and why it might be the best thing to get over the nighttime scaries.

About Basement VHS

The premier VHS seed bank of San Francisco! Highlights from our +3000 and counting vhs library. Basement Radio Fridays 6-8pm on Radio Valencia. Hosted by Luca and Mitsu.

Show Notes:

This week Sarah talks with author and educator Natalie Serber, a former mentor of hers that she met randomly - so random - during the pandemic. They talk about writing good endings, loving your worst characters, and how Natalie thrived after her breast cancer diagnosis.

About Natalie Serber:

Natalie Serber is a fiction writer, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Shout Her Lovely Name, a book that was reviewed by the NY Times Book Review, O Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. She also wrote Community Chest, a compilation of essays written during her recovery from breast cancer.

Natalie received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Bellingham Review and Gulf Coast, among others, and her awards include the Tobias Wolff Award. She teaches writing at various universities and lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Show Notes

Sarah sat down for a chat at the Space Program Recording Studios in November 2023 to ask Griff Williams, Founder of Gallery 16 about his 30+ years running a San Francisco-gallery. We also talk about his documentary "Tell them we were here" about 8 artists making art outside the gallery system and the impact they have made on the Bay Area's many diverse and underrepresented communities.

About Gallery 16

Gallery 16 was founded in 1993 by artist Griff Williams with the primary focus of representing and advocating for the work of living contemporary artists. In addition to the regular exhibition schedule, the gallery sponsors artists talks, and hosts performances and music throughout the year. It’s our belief that the brick and mortar gallery model, to be culturally relevant, needs to embody new strategies for facilitating and presenting artist’s projects. The space, as Williams describes it, “allows for the artist to fail. We don’t create exhibitions around curatorial agendas, but extend an invitation to artists we trust and hope they use the opportunity to challenge themselves without restrictions.

Studio notes

As part of the Pure Beauty exhibition at Eleanor Harwood, Sarah hosted a live panel discussion on Resilience and Joy with artists Tara Daly, Mary Finlayson, and Rachel Kaye. Everyone shares the trials and triumphs they have faced over the course of their careers and fields audience questions.

The conversation was recorded on March 13, 2024. To inquire about any work in the show, reach out to the gallery directly.

Show Notes

In honor of the end of Flip Phone February, this week Sarah talks with the co-creator of the Light Phone, a "dumbphone" made to help people spend less time using their phones. Most recently Light Phone has done a collaboration with Kendrick Lamar for their instantly sold-out Light Phone II this past fall.

Joe shares how he and his partner Kaiwei Tang came up with the idea for the phone, and what impact running a business has made on his creative life. We also talk about the very real addiction most of us have to our smartphones, and some strategies for stepping back from the most unproductive digital habits.

About Joe Hollier

Joe Hollier is a multi-disciplinary artist from Brooklyn. He studied design at the School of Visual Arts. He's a filmmaker, designer, director, and entrepreneur. He likes to make stop animations, collages, patterns and drawings, music videos, documentaries, and books.

Show Notes

This week Sarah is in San Francisco and gets the chance to talk with artist Jason Hanasik about his career as a photographer and filmmaker. Jason talks about creating GAP’s contribution to the It Gets Better Campaign, losing a sister to mental health challenges and what personal liberation can look like. Sarah shares some personal news.

About Jason

Jason Hanasik is a filmmaker, artist, journalist, and curator. His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, screened at various international film festivals, and featured on the BBC, The Guardian and in The Los Angeles Times. He has curated exhibitions for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and his scholarship has been published in the academic journal “Critical Military Studies.” Hanasik’s photography monograph, "I slowly watched him disappear," is in the research collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA NYC, and other institutions.

Show Notes:

This week Sarah talks with Bay Area artist Amber Jean Young about her work, grief from losing her mother, and then why she chose to have a double mastectomy and an oophorectomy after the birth of her second child.

About Amber Jean Young

Amber Jean Young (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist residing in Berkeley California. Young’s work explores ideas about place, grief, and resilience across mediums, creating vibrant patterns and plant imagery in her compositions. She has exhibited nationally including Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Hashimoto Contemporary, and Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, Monte Vista Projects and Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. She is a 2012 Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellow. Her work has been published the San Francisco Chronicle, Palo Alto Weekly and in catalogs including The MediaMath Collection: Selected Acquisitions 2012 - 2016, A Celebration of 50 Years of Women Artists At Kenyon College, MusiCares 2010 catalog. Her art has been used on the covers and inside jackets of multiple Neil Young and Pegi Young albums and is included in the MediaMath and Fidelity Investments corporate art collections.

Show Notes

This week Sarah talks with editor, creative director and co-writer of Taschen's Library of Esoterica books, Jess Hundley. Jess shares her plan for creating the as of today four encyclopedic books, Tarot, Astrology, Witchcraft and Plant Magick, and the important part the Philosophical Research Society played in finding materials for the books.

About Jess Hundley
Jessica Hundley is a Creative Director, Writer & Producer specializing in music, film, counterculture, magick and psychedelia.

As an author and editor, Hundley is currently engaged on projects for book publishers Abrams, Phaidon and Rizzoli. Hundley is also creator, author and Series Editor for Taschen Publications multivolume collection, The Library of Esoterica, a book series exploring the visual history of Tarot, Astrology and other esoteric traditions.
Recent projects as a Creative Director include overseeing staging, visuals and overall concepting for John Legend's 2021 Bigger Love Tour and Legend’s 2022-23 Las Vegas residency. Hundley continues to work collaboratively with John Legend and his team as a Creative Director and Producer, overseeing the recent launch of Legend's LOVED01 skincare line, as well as album art, limited edition book and album packaging and commercial projects. Hundley also served as co-creative director alongside Darren Romanelli on the DomeRX an immersive art experience at the 2022 FORMAT Festival. Other recent copywriting and creative directing work includes drink brand GHIA and an expansive campaign for Corona/Mexico alongside the team at CAA/Observatory.
As an author, Hundley has published over a dozen books in the last decade, an acclaimed biography on country rock icon Gram Parsons for DaCapo, a book on music and meditation with the director David Lynch, and an overview of photographs from longtime Michael Jackson photographer Todd Gray and extensive overview of the photography of Dennis Hopper from Taschen Publications.

Show notes:

Ever since she picked up Moonology in 2019, Sarah has been wanting to talk with Yasmin Boland, creator of Moonology the book and oracle decks inspired by the phases of the moon. Finally, this week, Sarah shares her conversation with Yasmin in early November 2023. During their conversation, Yasmin shares her career path from Journalist to Witchy Astrologer, and what led her to create a system of New Moon and Full Moon rituals to help her manifest her life goals and dreams.

About Yasmin Boland

Yasmin Boland is an award-winning astrologer and the Sunday Times best-selling Hay House author of books including Moonology and Astrology Made Easy and the creator of the Moonology oracle cards, possibly the best-selling oracle cards in the history of oracle cards. A former journalist and TV producer, Yasmin's work has been featured around the world, including Vogue, Oprah and Red, and she was recently named as one of the most spiritually influential people on the planet. Yasmin' taps into ancient lunar wisdom to explain to people that they can use Moonology and the Moon, as the most consistent and effective manifesting tool.

Show Notes

On November 5, 2023 Sarah hosted three guest artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art - San Francisco for a live panel discussion on creativity and what blocks it.

During their conversations they discuss where ideas come from, why do we as artists get creatively blocked and what can we do about it.

Show Notes

This week we share a conversation with Sarah and Bay Area artist Jamil Hellu. They talked during a shared artist residency at the Space Program in August 2023.

About Jamil Hellu

This week Sarah talks Delia Brown, an artist and psychedelic-therapist-in-training living in the Bay Area.  Delia shares her ups and downs of having a multi-decade career in the art world and why she is leaving it all behind.

She shares her experience getting diagnosed with cancer, her subsequent recovery, and how she came to her new career path in psychedelic therapies.

About Delia Brown

Delia Brown's work is primarily engaged in exploring desire as an individuated experience that connects the personal to the collective unconscious, often mediated through advertising and commercial culture. Referencing early bourgeois painting genres, she paints herself and her friends enacting their fantasies of being part of the leisure class, with props from snacks and beverages to million-dollar artworks functioning as important accessories in the assumption of privilege.

Show Notes