What’s My Thesis?

Artist Flora Kao joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss the evolution of her practice from painting to large-scale installation, and how Taiwanese mourning rituals, Buddhist symbolism, and diasporic memory shape her approach to space. Trained at Otis and later UC Irvine, Kao describes discovering installation as a way to create experiences that “elicit a sense of wonder,” pairing conceptual clarity with meditative, labor-intensive processes. The conversation traces her early years moving between Houston, Wisconsin, Taipei, and Boston; her family’s history under Taiwan’s martial-law era; and her transition from environmental science and strategy consulting into art school. Kao explains the cultural and personal significance behind folding 108 origami lotus forms each week for seven weeks—a ritual she adapted into a suspended installation of 756 hand-folded lotus at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Kao also speaks about using archival photographs, bamboo prayer-leaf structures, and cyanotype processes to explore grief, family history, and the shifting landscapes of Taiwan and Los Angeles. She offers rare insight into sustaining an installation-based practice through grants, community networks, and long-term professional relationships, while navigating motherhood and the realities of working outside commercial gallery systems.

Artist Manuel Vdah Bracamonte joins What’s My Thesis? for a grounded conversation on graffiti, identity, and the lived conditions that shaped Los Angeles street culture in the 1980s and 90s. Born in El Salvador and raised in downtown LA, Bracamonte traces his earliest memories of tagging, the shift into “tag banging,” and how the social and political pressures of that era intersected with his development as an artist. A pivotal high-school teacher introduced him to portfolio building and ultimately to the CalArts CAP program—a transformational moment that opened a different pathway into art, community, and education. Throughout the episode, Bracamonte reflects on moving from name-based graffiti to narrative, community-oriented mural work; researching Mayan hieroglyphs; and developing a hybrid visual language that holds both ancestral history and futurist possibility. The discussion expands outward into questions of Latinx identity, diaspora, public art, youth mentorship, and the politics of presence—what it means to show up in spaces that often assume you don’t belong. Bracamonte’s reflections move between personal history and broader frameworks of street culture, muralism, pedagogy, and the ongoing transformation of LA’s art landscape. This episode offers a direct, unfiltered look at how artistic practices emerge from lived experience, community ties, and the need to create meaning beyond institutional boundaries.

Artist Kelly Witmer joins host Javier Proenza to talk about material process, experimentation, and what it means to sustain an art practice in the desert. Based between Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, Witmer works across glass, ceramics, and painting, transforming the unpredictability of the kiln into a meditation on control, failure, and transformation. In this episode, she traces her trajectory from photography and printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to her later exploration of sculpture and abstraction. The conversation moves through her early life in Pennsylvania’s Mennonite community, her relocation to Los Angeles in the 1990s, and the gradual evolution of her visual language — from figurative painting to material-driven forms that balance fragility and chance. Witmer also reflects on the changing realities of the art world: the economics of desert living, the value of art school, and the rise of Instagram as both tool and trap for visibility and survival. Along the way, she discusses her fascination with prehistoric art, Utah pictographs, and the enduring human impulse to leave marks in stone and clay. A grounded, candid conversation about process, persistence, and the quiet negotiations between art, livelihood, and place.

René Camarillo is a Mexican-American craftsperson from East Los Angeles whose practice resists the hierarchies of the art world. Trained in apparel design at LA Trade Tech, fiber and material studies at Cal State LA, and textiles at RISD, Camarillo positions weaving and garment-making as acts of cultural inheritance, labor, and community survival rather than commodities of privilege. In this conversation, Camarillo reflects on rejecting the label of “artist,” his experience with exploitation in fashion and sweatshops, and the deep political stakes of textiles in shaping both history and everyday life. The dialogue explores craft versus fine art, sustainability, gentrification in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and the importance of teaching weaving, dyeing, and self-reliance through Grow Lincoln Heights and his brand Dust of Course. With a Fulbright in Japan to study indigo farming, Camarillo embodies a practice that is at once monastic, technical, and communal—insisting on fundamentals in a moment dominated by spectacle and commodification.

Artist Sheng Lor reflects on her journey from a Thai refugee camp to a studio practice in Los Angeles. Born to Hmong parents displaced by the Secret War in Laos, Lor discusses culture shock, grief, and the intergenerational legacies that shape her art. Her loom-wrapping series transforms discarded weaving tools into sculptural memorials, addressing the histories of labor, invisibility of craft, and Hmong spiritual traditions. This conversation explores how weaving, diaspora, and ritual intersect in contemporary art and the Los Angeles art scene.