Art Yap

About Art Yap

Convos with the creative folk shaping the arts and culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hosted by Shawna Vesco Ahern.

Publisher

Shawna Vesco Ahern

Category

arts · arts

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 May 2025

Latest episode

28 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

20 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Aug 2026

   19 - Crowded Fire Theater, Nailah + Adin

   Welcome back to Art Yap, where I gab, gossip, and otherwise chitchat with San Francisco Bay Area arts and culture baddies about how they build community through creativity. I'm your host, Shawna Vesco Ahern. Today I'm sitting down with two people who go way back — like, high school musical, grew-up-in-Maryland, performing in-Hair-together way back. Nailah Harper-Malveaux is co-executive director of Crowded Fire, a Bay Area theater company that's been making fierce, boundary-pushing new work for 28 years. And Adin Walker is a director and movement choreographer who's currently directing Crowded Fire's West Coast premiere of Manning, by Benjamin Benne. Manning is running September 5th through the 26th at Potrero Stage, opening night is Saturday, September 12th — and it is, hands down, one of the strangest and most beautiful loglines I've heard in a while. Two brothers and their father, grieving the loss of their mom, spread her ashes in the garden. And overnight, a five-foot zucchini shows up. it's an exploration of the mysteries of life, death, parenting, family, masculinity, and what it means to build a new emotional language for grief — because, as you'll hear, this script came out of the playwright's own decade-long, unprocessed grief for his father. The joy I found in grief was sitting with these two wonderful guests who have done some very deep thinking and intensive collective practice exploring the depths of what it means to be human. This conversation is such a good reminder of why theatrical explorations of imagery, movement, dynamics, and language are so important in your daily life—buy your tickets to Manning today, you don’t want to miss it. Let's get into it.

2. 

   22 Jul 2026

   18 - Suzy Varadi, The Yenta of SFMOMA

   Before she was brokering multi-million dollar partnerships at SFMOMA, Suzy was training monkeys to play computer games in a neuropsychopharmacology lab. In this episode, she talks about her winding path from grad school research to Meals on Wheels to Macy's parade sponsorships to finally landing her dream job at SFMOMA — and how she uses psychology, listening, and a little bit of "yenta" energy to match brands with the museum in ways that actually feel authentic. Plus: her two Border Collies, the Google.org gift behind the Ruth Asawa show, and why she thinks San Francisco's creative energy is alive and well.

3. 

   20 Jun 2026

   17- Demetri Broxton, Building an Artistic Future Bead By Bead

   Today's guest is Demetri Broxton, someone who I think practices radical attention in his artistic practice as well as in his general disposition toward the creative community he builds at Root Division as executive director. Demetri is an Oakland-born artist who takes photographs of ancestors, some named, some lost to time, and brings them back through an act of almost impossible attention. Bead by bead, stitch by stitch, he places them into futures they were never allowed to have. His work is in the collection of the de Young, and right now he is having a moment. His very first museum solo at MOAD and a public art piece going up in the community where his own family put down roots. We sat together inside an interactive art installation, fabric all around us filled with lavender, the warm air carrying the scent through the [00:02:00] whole conversation. It felt like the right place to talk about what it means to lead for other artists while keeping your own creative fire alive, what his family thought when he chose art over everything else, and what happens when a stranger stands in front of your artwork and starts to cry. This one felt like a conversation I needed to have, and I hope you feel the same way.

Who has been a guest on Art Yap

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Allison Gamlen
• LE BohemianMuse
• Craig McIntire
• Stella Lochman
• Jonathan Carver Moore

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

18 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

10 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 22 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

24

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

51

Contact Art Yap

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Art Yap