 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Monica Di Giovanni, who is a return guest. She last appeared two years ago in July, so we're celebrating her return and here to celebrate and promote her new show that we're going to tell you about a little later. But let's start by my reintroducing Monica for those of you who didn't tune in the first time. I'd like to read her bio and as I read it, I'd like to show you some of her current work that will be displayed in the show. Monica Di Giovanni studied painting and drawing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art before transferring to the Massachusetts College of Art. There she graduated in 1999 with a BFA in the Studio for Interrelated Media with a focus on creative involvement in the human body as medium, as well as a variety of other multimedia disciplines. Yes, what would you like to add? Well, you said creative involvement. It's creative movement. Thank you. Thank you, Monica. Creative movement that makes a little more sense. Thank you. Between 2012 and 2013, she spent four months in residency at Welcome Hill Studios in Westchester, New Hampshire, taking the time to reconnect with and unleash her creative spirit for many years of dormancy. In 2021, she received a fellowship to participate in the creative imperative online residency through the Vermont Studio Center. She had been selected to participate in VSC's Vermonters Week residency in 2020, which sadly didn't happen because of the pandemic. Currently, she is a co-owner of the Front Cooperative Gallery in Montpelier. She currently lives and works out of her apartment studio in Montpelier, Vermont. In addition to being an artist and zen practitioner, she loves her role as yoga and meditation teacher. Welcome again, Monica. Thank you, Anne. It's good to be back. You've been involved with the Front for how long? It's been a little over a year. I started, I was a member as of May last year, so just about a year. That's a new development since we last spoke. Yeah, it's actually really great. It's one of the only art galleries in the capital, city of Montpelier. We have about 20 members, and I'm always kind of amazed at how much gets accomplished because we work on consensus. It's a lot of voices to get input from and to consider, and yet the gallery has been going, this is coming up on its seventh year. It started with a group of folks in town who just wanted the space as studio space, and it kind of evolved from there as a bit of an experiment, and it's been a successful experiment. I think so. We live near there, and people are always coming. I love that it's centrally located, and very welcoming. Yeah, it's just, it's really right near town, kind of kitty corner from where Shaw's supermarket is right on the corner of Berry Street, so it's accessible from the highway. You can walk to it if you're walking around town. Yeah. Are you looking for new members, or do you have? We are actually. We have a call for new members right now, and you can go to the front website, and there's an application online that you can fill out. Very good. Well, that's where your show is going to be in July. Yeah. Yeah, so the show, the galleries managed where we alternate between solo shows and group shows, and in the scope of having so many members, we've now scheduled all of our solo shows all the way through 2024, and I was really lucky as a new member to get my show within a fairly short amount of time. So I have my month-long solo show coming up next month in just a few weeks for the month of July, and the opening is on July 1st. I'll also be doing an artist talk at some point, but that's not scheduled yet. I'm a little late this year getting ready for everything, but I'm excited. The gallery is open usually on the weekends, and it's always available if you want to make a special appointment to come and see it. The gallery can be opened at any time. Well, it's open Fridays between four and seven, and Saturdays and Sundays between 11 and five. Yes. And if you want to see Monica's show and you can't make it then, you can email her personally for a private showing. And I'm absolutely happy to do that. I live right in town, so I can actually walk there from home as well, and I love, of course, having an opportunity to share my work with people. Well, I've marked the opening down on my calendar. I have a meeting at four, but we're going to stop by around five. So I hope your artist talk is that night. I went to another of your shows, and you gave a wonderful artist talk. Oh, yeah. That was a couple, that was quite a few years. That was at Jay Layton and Antiques here in town in 2018. It was fun. It was when we could gather in person. There were a bunch of people there, and I actually read a small thread of a memoir that I had been working on, which I had since put down, but it's out there. Someday I'll pick it up again. Thank you. Well, let's look at your artistic cradle as shared on your website. Let me read it if I may. Monica's work is inspired by many years of yoga and meditation practice, different forms of dance and movement, and a love of nature. She's developed a meticulous style working with a deliberate multi-layering technique that mirrors the effects of watercolors and takes full advantage of the complex transparencies of high quality oil paints. Painting surfaces evolve and shift, depending on the light, from sun up to sun down. The support of pollinators as part of the Blood Butterfly series that we saw in your last interview, and we've seen other samples of that work in the last couple of years. I put together a resource list of organizations and other outlets that are doing the work of saving pollinators for anyone to use and share. That's a great first phase of your work, would you say, and is it continuing into your present practice? Well, it's not necessarily a first phase because I started painting in Ernest in about 2003, and then it's been kind of on and off with different life events. And that was kind of the impetus, the inspiration of the butterflies was an impetus to start painting again after a break from painting. And my love of nature is eternal. It's always there. I still get really excited when I see butterflies on my first Tiger Swallowtail this year. And that was like my first butterfly of the year. So small pleasures of enjoying their company at my community garden. Yeah. Well, let me let's switch to the current show. The upcoming show will feature ENSO paintings inspired by Monica Zen Art Practice, a year in recovery from post-concussion syndrome, meditations on consciousness, and your many years as a yoga practice practitioner. Would you mind telling us a little more about that? Sure. So last year, in addition to the challenges of the pandemic and a changing world, I last March, after the online residency that Anne had mentioned in my bio introduction, I fell and suffered a concussion. And it was a pretty serious concussion. I was unable to drive for over a month. I couldn't teach yoga for about three or four months. And I'm still having a few residual symptoms from that. In addition, dramatically changed my art practice because I wasn't really able to concentrate in any way without getting intense headaches. I was plagued with migraines and a variety of different headaches. So I had shifted my focus. I had been doing the ENSO painting as part of my Zen practice prior to the fall. And I just I embraced that as the central point of as being an artist of making art because the painting style that I had developed doing the butterflies specifically in over a long period of time, it just wasn't my brain just couldn't handle it. So I dropped it, which was really sad because I was working on a bunch of things and excited to see where it was going to take me. But I had all these years of meditation practice, yoga practice, and all the teachings that go along with that. And so it was has been really integral for me to be able to heal from the concussion and kind of manage to muddle through the last year. It's been so difficult because not only have we experienced the pandemic, but all these other unrelated health, physical difficulties people have gone through. It's really been hard. But let me ask you a general question. What is ENSO painting? Well, I can I can talk about it. It's like it's like anything else is that what it means is really reflective of the person expressing it. And that's one of the joys of the open ended facet of a spiritual practice is that each of us come to it with our own understanding our own experience and the practices evolve from that. So ENSO practice is originally from Japan. And it was something that Zen masters did as a way of starting their day. And it was a way for them to to kind of see their own mind is it's a it's a reflection of the self or reflection of the moment. A lot of people talk about mindfulness now and a lot of folks know what that is. And they can experience it for themselves if they're you know rushing around or upset or or kind of feeling unhinged in some way. We have all of these wonderful teachings that are really completely present in our lives right now about how to return back to a state of mindfulness and and ENSO painting is a reflection of the moment. It's a mirror of the the person making the artwork. It's a mirror of the world around there. As we know in yoga teachings and in Zen teachings there's no separation and that every single thing is connected to every other thing. And so they contain multitudes to quote literature. They contain everything that is there and as well you know the the the focus and concentration as well as all of the distraction. Yeah I love a literary quotation when you last run you quoted Romeo and Juliet now we have Walt Whitman one of my favorites but let's move from the verbal to the actual you offered to do a little demonstration and I think you know we're going to show some of your paintings later in our conversation but would you mind demonstrating um so this is I'm going to switch cameras here okay and so I have this set up here I'm going to roll over and try not to bang anything out of the way too much I have to move my roving desk these are the basic tools that you need for an ENSO painting yeah and I think one thing can you hear me okay yes so I think one thing to know that's really important is that um you can make art out of anything and I've been doing a Zen art class online with a teacher from the Zen Mountain Monastery Hogen Sensei and we do a two an hour and a half art practice on Friday afternoons and she's always exploring different ways of of expression and she has us what she calls juicing where we go outside and we get plants and we smush them and then we paint with the juice from the plants or if people aren't near nature they can paint with coffee grounds and herbs off the shelf you can paint with dirt you can you can paint with anything and so I have some more traditional um this is a brush stand here where your brush sits so it doesn't move around too much this is a Chinese brush and some ink here um and then I'm using water paper not rice paper but you can really make art with anything so I thought it would be interesting to do a couple I also have a larger piece of paper here um so I have this book here and this is going to be the first ENSO in this book I I had shown briefly but last year as I was making these I kept a journal of sorts and when I sat down and did a practice I would record that practice in this book so you can see they are all the different colors and and they although it's a single circle that single circle can be very expressive and take on a lot of different things based on what I was just talking about about embodying everything that is in that moment and so I'm just gonna wet my brush here and it's simple in a way but when you sit down to do it it it can often be very humbling and particularly when I had the concussion um because my mind and my brain were so knocked around I I didn't really have the ability to do what I'm going to do right now it was gone because of the injury so but I just thought it would be really interesting um to see it happen so this is a fairly large brush for this size of paper but that's okay I kind of like it and um I did a retreat an art retreat with kazoaki tanahashi and one of the words of advice he offered is that when you sit down to do something to smile at your paper so you can't right now um but I'm smiling at my paper and then we'll start at the bottom so single enzo painting and then if I wanted to make it bigger I have a bigger piece of paper here just so you can see how much they can vary from shape to shape and and as I do this it really requires me to come into a place of stillness and so we think about things as being active and passive and formal and informal in terms of practice but really it's all practice and there's really no distinguishing between one or the other and one thing that I love about this is it's art which is really important to me and it's very clearly um distinctively meditation and it requires me to breathe and to focus and to calm my body down and to calm my breath down so it takes on a very important role in terms of all the other ways that I want to be present in the world so I'm gonna um I'll do another one for you so I'm holding the paper still sometimes we put weights in the corners of the paper this for this time I have my hand at the bottom so the paper doesn't slide around and one way of approaching it is to do the circle in a single breath other times you can pick a theme or an idea and meditate on that theme or idea and then translate that into your from your breath into ink that's really interesting and I was holding back questions because you're supposed to concentrate and be still as you said I'm coming back I'll just take a second to shift the camera here we are why are they mostly circular there are some samples we're going to show that aren't but why the circle well this these are circles because my mind is clear and I have a steady hand they're very much reflective of of what's going on and and we don't have time to show all the images that I sent you but in the moments where my brain was really addled they were not circular they can't they they they took a variety of different shapes some of them were really wobbly and and I just I found that all really interesting so it's one of the reasons why I've stayed up with this I have a whole gallery's worth of these paintings over the course of the last couple of years because like I said I had started doing this before the fall but then it came my primary focus well let's look at some examples that are going to be in the show the first is unfollow the rules and so yep um that's a larger piece so that some of them are small some of them are large that one's on a piece on a 22 by 30 watercolor paper and that one was from a couple years ago that was actually um from 2019 one of the first artistic ones that I had done I had prior to that been following a fairly standard protocol in terms of how I was approaching the practice and then at some point I heard within Zen teaching that there is a point in time to break the form and what they're saying is that you have a structure and then what happens is people get very attached to the structure to the point where it kind of it it undermines the whole process of being fully present and so I took that in particularly because I'm not I like rules and then I also like breaking rules and this that title is from a Rufus Wainwright album that he released during the pandemic and I really enjoy his musical and his spectacle you know his musical abilities and the spectacle that he provides and um and I just thought that was so perfect it was I think he had had that going on he said it was a quote from his daughter unfollow the rules and so I instead of just working straight with ink I mixed in I started using mica pigments and I actually put glitter in there the because Rufus can be kind of sparkly and and I let it get really messy and so it was kind of a kick started this whole thing for me a bunch of years ago let's look at the next one calamity of separation yep so that one I did last summer it was after the concussion and again it was a similar process of working very simply because I really didn't have any degree of mental stamina after the head injury um and at that point when I started working on that piece my brain was starting to heal I was recovering from the concussion um and I had also sadly my zen teacher died last year very unexpectedly it was a pretty rough year for me so I went from the concussion and then had some health stuff and then my teacher passed away and um there I was experiencing a tremendous amount of isolation at that point and I was still doing the online zen class and that was a quote from Hojin sensei where she was teaching us about the importance of connection and the importance of of the idea of Indra's net of everything being into interconnected and that's that's also a theme I've been exploring with prisms I think you saw the installation I had at the gallery where I hung many prisms in the windows and I'll be doing that again for the upcoming show but so I started to allow myself to overlap the end zones and just keep putting all of the end zones in one space and just instead of it just being a particular moment I allowed many moments to collide within that painting and and I worked over I worked on it over many months as well there are many many layers of those circles um you said that simple circle reflects clarity again it can it can read it the simple circle reflects the moment and so it can reflect clarity it can reflect confusion it can be an expression of an idea or or a teaching it can be it can really be anything and and titling them is kind of a newer more contemporary approach to the art form it used to be you know an expression of the moment it was an expression of oneness and interconnection and and so in that that painting of the calamity of separation it was all those different moments overlaying each other um and maybe not you know sometimes you can be lonely in the company of of others and so really you know when we do these Zen art classes on Fridays there's people from all around the world and at some point there were a lot of folks expressing a tremendous amount of isolation base you know for different reasons and you know folks in far-flung places of Canada or people in different countries who weren't allowed to leave the house um people living in cities who had health issues and didn't want to go in so you know we had all these little boxes these zoom experiences where we're all there but we're there's still a separateness and yet there's still the the connection and the togetherness let's look at night and so ink on water color paper yep so that one is a relatively recent one and again um kind of looking at breaking the form and kind of on the heels of a rough year my beloved cat died at the beginning of the year and I was really having a dark night of this whole moment it was just a lot of grief and a lot of sadness and um a lot of consternation about things and it was late one night and I wanted to paint and and I was feeling so agitated and and so unsettled and you know like grief can do it can just really send you into a horrible feeling if um and I was working to you know I was I was needing to move some of the energy around and I couldn't sit with a brush like the brush and so what I did is I painted my hands I put ink all over my hands and just went on the page and really and and you know we're always learning in the center art is that it's really a bodily practice and I've heard from another teacher that buddhism is a bodily practice it comes up our bodies are the culmination of everything that's come before us in this present moment and a lot of times people get really into the ideas or they get into the the meditation but it's also very much about the body and so I painted my hands and I painted that with um this this heart shape and then there's like these dragon heads kind of at the center of it they look like two dragon heads kind of meeting each other and then that little character I painted with my finger is the Chinese character for night and I felt better after for what I thought. Well the title of the last image we're going to show is a tale for our time patient endurance and so tell us about that it's ink watercolor mica pigment on watercolor paper. Yeah um so there are teachings of buddhism called the paramitas and one of them is patience and um it is it's something it's completely it's totally relevant to our time and that we've had to be very patient with all of the change that's happening we have to be patient with ourselves and our loved ones and um all of the dynamics of the world that are never going to be the same um and and we have to keep going because what else is there so it's um you can talk I could talk for a long time on patience just based on being a yoga teacher and my own personal practice of what that means for me you know we have to be I had to be patient with grief I had to be patient with the healing process because my brain was not functioning properly um have to be patient with the pandemic and being able to get close to people and interact with people so so really yeah despite um all the struggles you're a very busy person what's next well um next week I'm launching two outdoor yoga classes so I've been pacing myself I I worked for a little bit I had a regular job as a contracted event planner um which was really a gift because through the healing process of the pandemic I couldn't focus and I didn't have the mental endurance to kind of focus on anything for any length of time and as I started to heal I was so I just I was asked to do this job so that just completed last week um and so now I'm kind of shifting gears pretty quick I have two online yoga classes and I'll be teaching two more outside here in Mark Piliar and I love that it's a beautiful setting at the top of north street we get 180 degree views of the mountains and one time I was teaching and I get to sit under an old apple tree and it was we taught I taught right through the end of the season in 2020 right till the end of October and at 1.01 morning I was sitting there and this whole flock of birds descended on this tree to munch on all the shriveled up apples in the tree and we just had to stop the class because it was so joyful and so spontaneous and so wonderful it was like they totally stole the show like you know that's really what it's all about it's you know you want to feel fit and breathe properly and and have you know feel good about yourself and clear your mind but if you can't connect to a flock of tiny little joyful birds like gorging themselves on these apples and I don't know what it could do for you I don't know what what to offer that's a great note to end on Monica thank you for joining us and audience see the show yeah thank you Anne it's wonderful to talk with you it's been really fun thank you as I have said before this is an election year and we have several high profile positions that have become open and one is for the Vermont senator to the us senate and joining us today is a candidate running in the democratic primary for that seat please welcome to all things lgbtq Isaac Evans france welcome Isaac thanks so much Keith it's great to be with you here oh I I'm so glad that we got to invite you on and to have you on early enough in the primary so people can really get to know you because what people may not know is that you have a strong connection and involvement in Vermont activism going to back to when you were in high school could could you share a little bit about how Isaac might have become a member of the Vermont Board of Education sure when I was a high school student I organized students around the state to campaign for student seats on the Vermont State Board of Education I thought that it was important for us to have a seat at the table with decisions being made about our lives about our education I thought it was strange that not one single student was on that board that was in charge of the Vermont public school system this idea resonated with lawmakers we testified the House Education Committee the Senate Education Committee we spoke to the Vermont State Board of Education and we brought it to the governor himself and when Governor Howard Dean heard this idea he immediately supported it and after that the bill moved very quickly through the state legislature and he signed it into law at Brattleboro Union High School where I was a student and then he appointed me as the first student with a vote on that board and and I think that it was important to recognize that you weren't just symbolically put on the board of education you had real voting privileges that's true there and the way that we set it up is to have two students at any given time on the board one who's a junior member and then there's the first year and then the second year they're the senior member and that second year they have a vote on the board so it's like a year in training but my first when we were just starting the program there I was just right in as the voting member I was going to say that that's a really great model because having somebody who is participating in in the wings they're ready to step in they know the lay of the land they know how process happens and actually for you at this point in time having been involved in politics at that granular level that early on you've got a real understanding of what you will be asked to do once you go to Washington it's true I remember that feeling of responsibility as one of the members of the Vermont State Board of Education you know something else I should share is when I was in high school I well actually when I was in eighth grade I joined the Gay-Straight Alliance that was just forming at the High School Brattleboro Union High School I then worked with my peers to organize the first Gay-Straight Alliance conference that ever happened in Vermont we brought people from around the state to Brattleboro and came together and it was such an exciting time because growing up in rural Vermont I mean I think there were more chickens than there were gay people within a square mile like and surrounded basically surrounded by dairy cows so to connect with other LGBT youth was incredibly exciting and powerful as a young person and I was so grateful for the LGBT elders and leaders who helped make it possible to have experiences like going to the outright prom up in Burlington going to the the Pride March the rally you know that it was a small group of young people but it was a powerful group and it was so wonderful to have that warm welcome in that sense that there's a place that we belong that the advantage that the poultry had over us at that point in time is they knew who each other were we we didn't right okay so jumping ahead to 2022 what makes Isaac our best choice to go to Washington? Newkid I'm an activist I'm an organizer I build coalitions and I've done that in Vermont and I've done that nationally and I played a leadership role in moving legislation through the United States Congress that that image right behind you moved legislation to stop U.S. participation in the war in Yemen we got that through the U.S. House that was run by Democrats we got that through the U.S. Senate when it was run by Republicans bringing people together across the country getting people rallying in front of congressional offices meeting with their members of Congress leading meetings with Senator Schumer securing commitments from him I have that activist spirit and we need that sort of energy that sort of passion and that sort of understanding of the challenges facing everyday Vermonters in Congress so I will bring a fresh perspective and I am independent from some of the entrenched interests of the corporate domination of our of our Congress that I will be following in Senator Sanders steps in refusing corporate PAC money from the start it sounds as though being in Washington would not be new to you you already know the ins and outs the protocols you you know where the potholes are and and and what it takes to navigate them but you also have some very specific issues that you are as part of your campaign that you believe are important and that the Senate should be addressing could can we start with the one that has to be foremost in everyone's mind right now and it's what do we do for responsible gun control it is certainly been at the forefront of my mind these last few weeks in particular I think the tragedies in Buffalo and Texas have just underscored the importance of action and I see this as an LGBTQ plus issue because I don't know if you remember but the nightclub shooting in Orlando that affected me really deeply at that time I was working at an LGBT community health center and I remember when we rallied I sat on the curb and I just cried I just felt like this is this there's such grief and my friends lost loved ones in that shooting there's no reason that that kind of shooting has to happen black people should be able to go shopping children should be able to go to school and members of our LGBTQ plus community should be able to go out at night and be able to return home at the end I support universal background checks I support red flag laws and I support enforcing the laws that we already have on the books we must fully fund the agencies that are responsible for enforcement I also support removing semi-automatic weapons from from the streets it doesn't make sense for people to be able to be going in and having a weapon that fires hundreds of bullets in just a few seconds like that just doesn't make sense you made a reference to having worked at a health care facility I noticed that on on your website that health care was also a priority what what is it that you see as being the changes that are needed in our healthcare system I see a need to move from a profit-driven system to one that's about caring for people this that puts people at the center I worked at a community I've worked at multiple community health centers and at one of them I remember a time when I was meeting with a patient I provided reproductive health education and I was meeting with this patient and she received fantastic reproductive health care at the clinic and as she was leaving she asked me hey I have this pain in my gum in my teeth in like my tooth could I see a dentist and we said sure the sliding scale starts at $50 for a visit and she shook her head she said I can't afford that I have three young children I'm a single mom I'm an immigrant I just can't do that and she walked out of the health center and I could tell that her spirit was down and in that moment I felt that and I felt such sadness that our health center and our health system was not set up to actually meet the needs of the people living right there in the community so I would prioritize making Medicare for for all but not just Medicare for all but improved Medicare for all my parents who use Medicare here in Vermont if they want to see a dentist they have to pay out a pocket the thing is that our mouths are part of our body we need to make sure that people would get the mental health care they need addiction treatment and the dental care and also a complementary medicine like acupuncture it's so important that we're listening to patients and hearing what's important to them and helping meet the needs that Vermonters have and Americans across this country hey and building off the you know here here is this young mother who can't afford a $50 copay which actually thinking in terms of health care the $50 copay is fairly minimal you're also advocating for an increase in the federal minimum wage and tax credits and ensuring social security and veterans benefits can you talk a bit about that effort to fight for our families sure well I'll start by saying my husband and I both of our fathers and all of their brothers all were in the military they're all veterans and so this is an issue that it's home for me that we need to make sure that we're protecting and supporting the people who have gone you know have spent years of their lives in service of the country and I'm a peace activist but that doesn't mean that I don't support veterans and the people who have done that work so I think that it's critical that we are taking care of seniors that we're taking care of young people that we and we have the means in this society this is the richest country on the face of the planet and so there's no reason that anybody should be going hungry or not have a roof over their head or it doesn't have health care that just doesn't make sense there are middle-class families in this state that are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires in this country that's illogical so I support senator sanders with his initiatives for taxing billionaires that makes sense there is the resource in this country it's just a matter of distributing it in a way that actually takes care of people and actually makes sense and tax credits in the minimum wage what what are you envisioning mm-hmm so I appreciate that Vermont has a minimum wage that includes people with disabilities I think that nationally we need to make sure that that happens that people's disabilities are not excluded we also need to make sure that tipped workers farm workers are included and that we raise the federal minimum wage I support a $15 an hour minimum wage I think we probably should be going higher than that based on what actually is needed based on the value that workers contribute to our economy in terms of tax credits I support the expanded child tax credit the renewing that expansion we saw that last year that lifted millions of children out of poverty just like that and I think it was fantastic how it was given in six installments over six months and that really provided important support to low-income families and middle-income families as well looking at one of the high-profile issues at the congress right now excuse me and it's the house hearings on January 6 insurrection do you have thoughts about what we need to do to ensure that our democracy as we know it stays intact yes I think that for one thing we need to make sure that everyone can vote in this country I'm so concerned by the ways that there has been voter suppression that polls have been closed especially I've heard about this happening in southern states where polls have been closed in communities of color we're making it harder for people who black people in particular to get to polls we need to make sure that everybody has access to the ballot box to preserve our democracy getting corporate money out of our system so that people in this country have confidence in our government so that they know that our government is actually there for for us for everyday americans that's really important and I think that we have a lot of work to do in terms of educating people about racism and the history of racial injustice in this country you know when I saw those images of somebody carrying a confederate flag in the US capital that capital that I have walked into when I went to meet with senator schumer's national security advisor seeing that flag in there no I thought wow we have so much work to do and it's important that we provide the education so that we all can have this conversation about racism and well I was going to say and and you've made numerous references to racial justice racial equity what do you see as this is the next step that we should be taking to respond to that endemic sense of racism in our culture and maybe a bit about what you see as the needs as it relates to law enforcement and how our law enforcement agencies are perpetuating that racial inequity sure to start I do think we need police accountability I support the qualified immunity so that police officers if they commit crimes there's accountability I so and I've been excited to connect with young people in Vermont high school high school student in southern Vermont in particular who's been working on this I support investments in communities rather than in investments in militarizing our police the amount of equipment that's really designed for warfare that that goes into our police departments in the United States doesn't make sense and I think it's a waste of taxpayer dollars so so I think that we need to get clear that a lot of times it doesn't make sense to be sending a police officer and it makes more sense to send a social worker but that means that we need to provide the funding for that. Second of all I think there's a real issue with wealth inequality in this in this country around race so the and one of these areas is in housing housing is so important for economic stability and I you know here in Vermont we know about the housing crisis and this is particularly hard on people of color do you I recently learned that right now the racial gap in homeownership is greater than it was even when housing discrimination was legal so we've gone backwards I support initiatives like the one that Senator Warren introduced with support from Senator Sanders called the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act which would help bring people up and would provide support for first-time homeowners that's the sort of initiative that I think we need and I also really believe that we must create the multiracial democracy that this country is supposed to be and that means that we pass the Freedom to Vote Act introduced by Senator Klobuchar and supported by the majority of Democrats it means that we have to show up for our fellow Americans because it's not just good enough to have good voting laws in Vermont we need to have that kind of law nationally because we are part of the same country and what affects another state is ultimately going to affect our state. So in in our closing time with each other what is the question that candidate Isaac wished had been asked that gives greater dimension to your candidacy and supports why we should be sending you to Washington? Thanks Keith I think one thing is like a little bit about me personally so I grew up in a family where we received public assistance when I was a child here in Bravo. I am an openly gay man I have the experience of struggle in my life and if I were elected if viewers of this program elect me to the U.S. and I would become the first openly gay male U.S. senator in history and I think that that sort of representation is important we need diversity in terms of race in terms of gender in terms of class background in terms of sexuality in our U.S. Senate for the people who are in charge of making laws about our society. So I will bring the voices to Washington just as I have all along the voices of everyday Vermonters everyday Americans from across this country bringing people farmers nurses nuns students I will continue to bring those voices to the halls of power so that Vermonters have a real chance at directly shaping the laws of our country. And with that thank you for spending this time with us good luck on the campaign and I'll be looking for you in the debates. Excellent and August 9th is the Democratic primary and I'll be running and you can find more about my campaign at Isaacforvermont.com all spelled out. Hi everybody I'm here with Monica D Giovanni who is a return guest. She last appeared two years ago in July so we're celebrating her return and here to celebrate and promote her new show that we're going to tell you about a little later but let's start by my reintroducing Monica for those of you who didn't tune in the first time. I'd like to read her bio and as I read it I'd like to show you some of her current work that will be displayed in the show. Monica D Giovanni studied painting and drawing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art before transferring to the Massachusetts College of Art. There she graduated in 1999 with a BFA in the studio for interrelated media with a focus on creative involvement and the human body as medium as well as a variety of other multimedia disciplines. Yes what would you like to add? Well you said creative involvement it's creative movement. Thank you. Thank you Monica creative movement that makes a little more sense. Thank you. Between 2012 and 2013 she spent four months in residency at Welcome Hill Studios in Westchester New Hampshire taking the time to reconnect with and unleash her creative spirit for many years of dormancy. In 2021 she received a fellowship to participate in the creative imperative online residency through the Vermont studio center. She had been selected to participate in VSC's Vermonters week residency in 2020 which sadly didn't happen because of the pandemic. Currently she is a co-owner of the Front Cooperative Gallery in Montpelier. She currently lives and works out of her apartment studio in Montpelier, Vermont. In addition to being an artist and zen practitioner she loves her role as yoga and meditation teacher. Welcome again Monica. Thank you and it's good to be back. You have been involved with the Front for how long? It's been a little over a year. I started, I was a member as of May last year so just about a year yeah. So that's a new development since we last spoke. Yeah yeah it's actually really great. It's one of the only art galleries in the capital city of Montpelier. We have about 20 members and I'm always kind of amazed at how much gets accomplished because we work on consensus and so it's a lot of voices to get input from and to consider and yet the gallery has been going this is coming up on its seventh year. It started with a group of folks in town who just wanted the space as studio space and it kind of evolved from there as a bit of an experiment and it's been a successful experiment. I think so we live near there and people are always coming. I love that it's centrally located and very welcoming. Yeah it's just it's really right near town kind of kitty corner from where Shaw's supermarket is right on the corner of Berry Street so it's accessible from the highway you can walk to it if you're walking around town. Yeah are you looking for new members or do you have we are actually we have a call for new members right now and you can go to the front website and and there's an application online that you can fill out. Very good well that's where your show is going to be in July. Yep yeah so the show the galleries managed where we alternate between solo shows and group shows and in the scope of having so many members we've now scheduled all of our solo shows all the way through 2024 and I was really lucky as a new member to get my show within a fairly short amount of time. So I have my month-long solo show coming up next month in just a few weeks I have for the month of July and the opening is on July 1st. I'll also be doing an artist talk at some point but that's not scheduled yet I'm a little late this year getting ready for everything but I'm excited the gallery is open usually on the weekends and it's always available if you want to make a special appointment to come and see it the gallery can be opened at any time. Well it's open Fridays between four and seven in Saturdays and Sundays between 11 and five. Yes and if you want to see Monica's show and you can't make it then you can email her personally for a private showing. And I'm absolutely happy to do that I live right in town so I can actually walk there from home as well and I love of course having an opportunity to share my work with people. Well I've marked the opening down on my calendar I have a meeting at four about ordering the stuff by around five so I hope your artist talk is that night. I went to another of your shows and you gave a wonderful artist talk. That was a couple that was quite a few that was at Jay Layton and Antiques here in town in 2018. It was it was fun it was when we could gather in person there were a bunch of people there and I actually read a small thread of a memoir that I had been working on which I've since put down but it's it's out there someday I'll pick it up again thank you. Well let's look at your artistic credo as shared on your website let me read it if I may. Monica's work is inspired by many years of yoga and meditation practice different forms of dancing movement and a love of nature. She's developed a meticulous style working with a deliberate multi-layering technique that mirrors the effects of watercolors and takes full advantage of the complex transparencies of high quality oil paints. Painting surfaces evolve and shift depending on the light from sun up to sun down in support of pollinators as part of the blood butterfly series that we saw on your last interview and it's we've seen other samples of that work in the last couple of years. I put together a resource list of organizations and other outlets that are doing the work of saving pollinators for anyone to use and share so that's a great first phase of your work would you say and is it continuing into your present practice? Well it's not necessarily a first phase because I started painting in earnest in about 2003 and then it's been kind of on and off with different life events and that was kind of the impetus the inspiration of the butterflies was an impetus to start painting again after a break from painting and my love of nature is eternal it's always there. I still get really excited when I see a butterfly I saw my first tiger swallow tail this year and that was like my first butterfly of the year so small pleasures of of enjoying their company at my community garden yeah. Well let me um let's switch to the current show the upcoming show will feature ENSO paintings inspired by Monica Zen art practice a year in recovery from post concussion syndrome meditations on consciousness and your many years as a yoga prince practitioner would you mind telling us a little more about that? Sure um so last year in addition to the challenges of the pandemic and a changing world I last March after the online residency that Anne had mentioned in my bio introduction I fell and suffered a concussion and it was a pretty serious concussion um I was unable to drive for over a month I couldn't teach yoga for about three or four months and I'm still having a few residual symptoms from that um in addition it dramatically changed my art practice because I wasn't really able to concentrate in any way without getting intense headaches I was played with migraines and a variety of different headaches um so I had shifted my focus I had been doing the ENSO painting as part of my Zen practice prior to the fall and um I just I embraced that as the central point of of as being an artist of making art because the painting style that I had developed doing the butterflies specifically in over a long period of time it just wasn't my brain just couldn't handle it so I dropped it um which was really sad because I was working on a bunch of things and excited to see where it was going to take me um but I had all these years of meditation practice yoga practice and all the teachings that go along with that and so it was has been really integral for me to be able to heal from the concussion and and kind of manage to muddle through the last year it's been so difficult because not only um have we experienced the pandemic but all these other unrelated difficult health physical difficulties people have gone through it's really been hard but let me ask you a you know general question what is ENSO painting well I can I can talk about it it's like um it's like anything else is that what it means is really reflective of the person expressing it and that's one of the joys of the open ended uh facet of a spiritual practice is that each of us come to it with our own understanding our own experience and the practices evolve from that um so ENSO practice is originally from Japan and it was something that Zen masters did as a way of starting their day um and it was a way for them to to kind of see their own mind it's a it's a reflection of the self a reflection of of the moment um a lot of people talk about mindfulness now and a lot of folks know what that is and they can experience it for themselves if they're you know rushing around or upset or or kind of feeling unhinged in some way we have all of these wonderful um teachings that are really completely present in our lives right now about how to return back to a state of mindfulness and and ENSO painting is a reflection of the moment um it's a mirror of the the person making the artwork it's a mirror of the world around there uh as we know in yoga teachings and in Zen teachings there's no separation and that every single thing is connected to every other thing and so they they contain multitudes to quote literature um they contain everything that is there and as well you know the the the focus and concentration as well as all of the distraction um yeah I love a literary quotation when you last run you quoted Romeo and Juliet now we have Walt Whitman one of my favorites but let's move from the verbal to the actual you offered to do a little demonstration and I think you know we're going to show some of your paintings later in our conversation but would you mind demonstrating here um so this is I'm going to switch cameras here okay and so I have this set up here I'm going to roll over and try not to bang anything out of the way too much I have to move my roving desk these are the basic tools that you need for an ENSO painting yeah and I think one thing can you hear me okay yes so I think one thing to know that's really important is that um you can make art out of anything and I've been doing a Zen art class online with a teacher from the Zen Mountain Monastery Ho Jin Sensei and we do a two an hour and a half art practice on Friday afternoons and she's always exploring different ways of of expression and she has us what she calls juicing where we go outside and we get plants and we smush them and then we paint with the juice from the plants or if people aren't near nature they can paint with coffee grounds and herbs off the shelf you can paint with dirt you can you can paint with anything and so I have some more traditional um this is a brush stand here where your brush sits uh so it doesn't move around too much this is a Chinese brush and some ink here and then I'm using water paper not rice paper but you can really make art with anything so I thought it would be interesting to do a couple I also have a larger piece of paper here so I have this book here and this is going to be the first ENSO in this book I I had shown briefly but last year as I was making these I kept a journal of sorts and all the time I sat down and did a practice I would record that practice in this book so you can see they are all the different colors and and they although it's a single circle that single circle can be very expressive and take on a lot of different things based on what I was just talking about about embodying everything that is in that moment and so I'm just gonna wet my brush here and it's simple in a way but when you sit down to do it it it can often be very humbling and particularly when I had the concussion um because my mind and my brain were so knocked around I I didn't really have the ability to do what I'm going to do right now it was gone because of the injury so but I just thought it would be really interesting um to see it happen so this is a fairly large brush for the size of paper but that's okay I kind of like it and um I did a retreat an art retreat with Kazawaki Tanahashi and one of the words of advice he offered is that when you sit down to do something to smile at your paper so you can't right now um but I'm smiling at my paper and then we'll start at the bottom so single enzo painting and then if we wanted to make it bigger I have a bigger piece of paper here just so you can see how much they can vary from shape to shape and and as I do this it really requires me to come into a place of stillness and so we think about things as being active and passive and formal and informal in terms of practice but really it's all practice and there's really no distinguishing between one or the other and one thing that I love about this is its art which is really important to me and it's very clearly um distinctively meditation and it requires me to breathe and to focus and to calm my body down and to calm my breath down so it takes on a very important role in terms of all the other ways that I want to be present in the world so I'm gonna um I'll do another one for you so I'm holding the paper still sometimes we put weights in the corners of the paper this for this time I have my hand at the bottom so the paper doesn't slide around and one way of approaching it is to do the circle in a single breath other times you can pick a theme or an idea and meditate on that theme or idea and then translate that into your from your breath into ink that's really interesting and I was holding back questions because you're supposed to concentrate and be still as you said I'm coming back I'll just take a second to shift the camera here we are why are they mostly circular there are some samples we're going to show that aren't but why the circle well this these are circles because my mind is clear and I have a steady hand they're very much reflective of of what's going on and and we don't have time to show all the images that I sent you but in the moments where my brain was really addled they were not circular they can't they they they took a variety of different shapes some of them were really wobbly and and I just I found that all really interesting so it's one of the reasons why I've stayed up with this I have a whole gallery's worth of these paintings over the course of the last couple of years because like I said I had started doing this before the fall but then it came my primary focus well let's look at some examples that are going to be in the show the first is unfollow the rules and so yep um that's a larger piece so that some of them are small some of them are large that one's on a piece on a 22 by 30 watercolor paper and that one was from a couple years ago that was actually um from 2019 one of the first artistic ones that I had done I had prior to that been following a fairly standard protocol in terms of how I was approaching the practice and then at some point I heard within Zen teaching that there is a point in time to break the form and what they're saying is that you have a structure and then what happens is people get very attached to the structure to the point where it kind of it it undermines the whole process of of being fully present and so I took that in particularly because I'm not I like rules and then I also like breaking rules and this really that title is from a Rufus Wainwright album that he released during the pandemic and I really enjoy his musical and his spectacle you know his musical abilities and the spectacle that he provides and um and I just thought that was so perfect it was I think he had had that going on he said it was a quote from his daughter um unfollow the rules and so I instead of just working straight with ink I mixed in I started using mica pigments um and I actually put glitter in there the because Rufus can be kind of sparkly and and I let it get really messy um and so it was kind of a kick started this whole thing for me a bunch of years ago let's look at the next one calamity of separation yep so that one I did last summer it was after the concussion and um again it was a similar process of working very simply because I really didn't have any degree of mental stamina after the head injury um and at that point when I started working on that piece my brain was starting to heal I was recovering from the concussion um and I had also sadly my zen teacher died last year very unexpectedly it was a pretty rough year for me so I went from the concussion and then had some health stuff and then my teacher passed away and um there I was experiencing a tremendous amount of isolation at that point and I was still doing the online zen class and that was a quote from Hojin Sensei where she was teaching us about the importance of connection and the importance of of the idea of Indra's net of everything being interconnected and that's that's also a theme I've been exploring with prisms I think you saw the installation I had at the gallery where I hung many prisms in the windows and I'll be doing that again for the upcoming show but so I started to allow myself to overlap the enzos and just keep putting all of the enzos in one space and just instead of it just being a particular moment I allowed many moments to collide within that painting and and I worked over I worked on it over many months as well there are many many layers of those circles um you said that simple circle reflects clarity again it can it can read it the simple circle reflects the moment and so it can reflect clarity it can reflect confusion it can be an expression of an idea or or a teaching it can be it can really be anything and and titling them is kind of a newer more contemporary approach to the art form it used to be you know an expression of the moment it was an expression of oneness and interconnection and and so in that um that painting of the calamity of separation it was all those different moments overlaying each other um and maybe not you know sometimes you can be lonely in the company of of others and so really you know when we do these Zen art classes on Fridays there's people from all around the world and at some point there were a lot of folks expressing a tremendous amount of isolation base you know for different reasons and you know folks in far flung places of Canada or people in different countries who weren't allowed to leave the house um people living in cities who had health issues and didn't want to go in so you know we had all these little boxes these zoom experiences where we're all there but we're there's still a separateness and yet there's still the the connection and the togetherness let's look at night and so ink on water color paper yep so that one is a relatively recent one and again um kind of looking at breaking the form and um kind of on the heels of a rough year my beloved cat died at the beginning of the year and I was really having a dark night of this whole moment it was just a lot of grief and a lot of sadness and um a lot of consternation about things and it was late one night and I wanted to paint and and I was feeling so agitated and and so unsettled and you know like grief can do it can just really send you into a horrible feeling if um and I was working to you know I was I was needing to move some of the energy around and I couldn't sit with a brush like the brush and so what I did is I painted my hands I put ink all over my hands and just went on the page and really and and you know we're always learning in the Zen art is that it's really a bodily practice and I've heard from another teacher that Buddhism is a bodily practice it comes up our bodies are the culmination of everything that's come before us in this present moment and a lot of times people get really into the ideas or they get into the the meditation but it's also very much about the body and so I painted my hands and I painted that with um this this heart shape and then there's like these dragon heads kind of at the center of it they look like two dragon heads kind of meeting each other and then that little character I painted with my finger is the Chinese character for night and I felt better after for what well the title of the last uh image we're going to show is a tale for our time patient endurance and so tell us about that it's ink watercolor micro pigment on watercolor paper yeah um so there are teachings uh of Buddhism called the paramitas and one of them is patience and um it is it's something it's completely it's totally relevant to our time and that we've had to be very patient with all of the change that's happening we have to be patient with ourselves and our loved ones and um all of the dynamics of the world that are never going to be the same um and and we have to keep going because what else is there so it's um you can talk I could talk for a long time on patience just based on being a yoga teacher and my own personal practice of what that means for me you know we have to be I had to be patient with grief I had to be patient with the healing process because my brain was not functioning properly um I have to be patient with the pandemic and being able to get close to people and interact with people so so really yeah despite um all the struggles you're a very busy person what's next well um next week I'm launching two outdoor yoga classes so I've been pacing myself I I worked for a little bit I had a regular job as a contracted event planner which was really a gift because through the healing process of the pandemic I couldn't focus and I didn't have the mental endurance to kind of focus on anything for any length of time and as I started to heal I was so I just I was asked to do this job so that just completed last week um and so now I'm kind of shifting gears pretty quick I have two online yoga classes and I'll be teaching two more outside here in Mark Piliar and I love that it's a beautiful setting at the top of north street we get 180 degree views of the mountains and one time I was teaching and I get to sit under an old apple tree and it was we taught I taught right through the end of the season in 2020 right till the end of October and at one point of one morning I was sitting there and this whole flock of birds descended on this tree to munch on all the shriveled up apples in the tree and we just had to stop the class because it was so joyful and so spontaneous and so wonderful it was like they totally stole the show like you know that's really what it's all about it's you know you want to feel fit and breathe properly and and have you know feel good about yourself and clear your mind but if you can't connect to a flock of tiny little joyful birds like gorging themselves on these apples and I don't know what I could do for you I don't know what what to offer that's a great note to end on Malika thank you for joining us and audience see the show yeah thank you Anne it's wonderful to talk with you it's been really fun thank you thank you for joining us and until next time remember resist