Apologies for the delay on getting this posted - been dealing with life - so I will be posting back to back radio show episodes this month.
In May, I chatted at the Wave Farm / WGXC studio in Catskill, NY with my dear friend Bobby Abate, who is a Queer artist, filmmaker, and editor whose work has been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art’s MediaScope series in New York, the New York Film Festival, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and International Objects in NYC. Bobby’s residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Space on Governors Island (2023), the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, NY (2024), and the VCCA in Amherst, VA (2024) and Zaratan in Lisbon, Portugal (2025). They are a recent recipient of the Princess Grace Special Projects Grant (2024) and the Leighton International Artist Exchange Program grant (2025). Bobby edited seasons 3 and 4 of the Queer docuseries We're Here on HBO which won Peabody and Television Academy awards. Bobby’s Outsider Tarot, published in 2021 and now sold out, is part of the permanent collections at the Harvard Fine Arts Library and the Peabody Essex Museum in MA. Bobby completed filming The Ghost at Skeleton Rock in Fall 2024 with a premiere planned for late 2025.
Bobby is someone whom I have known longer than I care to remember, and once upon a time, we shared an art studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he was working on the Outsider Tarot and whom I credit as the person who brought me to tarot. My Tarot Club gatherings are inspired by gatherings that Bobby used to hold where all invited would be asked to sit and read massive tarot spreads together. It was so fabulous to have him on, especially since so much curiosity about making decks has been expressed to me. I really was so grateful to hear about his process and what he learned from making his first deck, and that he is working on a second that sounds absolutely amazing.For more info about all Bobby’s work and his new film, check out his website.
