We recently connected with Todd Schroeder and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Todd thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

From my point of view, risk is an essential element of making art – a necessary ingredient. Risk brings tension. It opens the work to failure and failure is so human. Risk opens the work to misinterpretation, hurt feelings (yours and theirs), unexpected results, growth, mold-breaking… Propelling your endeavor with risk foregrounds questions over answers.

In 2017, I started working on pages of the New York Times. Initially choosing national news and opinion pages weekly from the Sunday New York Times. It started as a reaction and a protest. I would choose between 6 to 10 pages to work on each week. I began by superimposing a grid onto the pages by poking holes into the paper surface at the points where the vertical lines would cross the horizontal lines on the grid, aka the “crosshairs”. After that, I would blow paint that I mixed up into small plastic bottles onto the surface of the chosen pages via a mouth atomizer – mixing just a little bit of my DNA into the paint. My initial motif being HAHAHA (I got the idea from a highway CAUTION sign, the form of the grid to generate language that is). This segued into various other language motifs: X’s, Z’s, Y’s, OM’s, and ultimately a gridded heart of dots. I suppose there is risk in the mix here, certainly, the “talent” aspect is played down (I could teach someone to do this for me/you could make your own – minus my DNA, of course). The papers will yellow, and age, they are quite impermanent – regarding investing in them. It expresses a political point of view, that is always risky to put out there, especially starting in 2017. There were smaller risks too, risks involved in the systematic process I initiated for the making of the work. Items would be obscured or highlighted by chance but due to my authorship, I would be seen as responsible. I like all of this, or maybe respect is a better word – I respect all this tension and contradiction.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an artist based in Savannah, GA where I am a professor of painting at The Savannah College of Art and Design. I have a varied studio practice focusing on painting, drawing, and object making – often working with print media. I have shown my work internationally including solo shows at White Columns in New York, Jepson Center – Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, William Busta Gallery in Cleveland, Savannah College of Art and Design’s Pinnacle Gallery in Savannah, Kent State University in Cleveland, Gallery Stokes in Atlanta, and Laney Contemporary in Savannah. I have been in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Bridget Donahue Gallery, Exit Art, AC Project Room, and 407 Gallery, all in New York City – Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Cleveland State University, Oberlin College’s Here Here Gallery, Moot gallery in Hong Kong, as well as several venues in Serbia and Montenegro including the Contemporary Art Center Montenegro in Podgorica, the National Gallery of Serbia in Belgrade, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad. My work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Out/New York, ArtPulse Magazine, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, among others.

I have most recently shown with Laney Contemporary at Future Fair in NYC in 2022 and I have another show (my 3rd solo) penciled in for the end of 2023.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal is to become more and more open. My most recent artist statement is a boil-down:

“My work is the result of a steadfast romance with paradox.

Addendum:

I dance around abstraction, and I think a lot about options.”

I intend to carry on with this romance and dance project

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It is a compulsion for me, making, exploring, and discovering – the cliché “the more you know the more you realize you don’t know” is a drive. As I continue, seemingly simple things reveal themselves as immensely nuanced – I like that, or it drives me to work, to continue making.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.toddschroederartist.com/
• Instagram: toddschroeder0