In Conversation: Anna RG & Theodore (ted) Kerr

Throughout 2026, past Artists-in-Residence and Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows will activate ISSUE Online (io) — an evolving platform for digital-first works — in celebration of the 20th anniversary of ISSUE’s AIR program.

On Tuesday, May 26th at 12pm EDT, ISSUE brings together anna RG (2025 AIR) and Theodore (ted) Kerr (2022 SFCF) for an exchange that moves beyond conversation. Drawing on RG’s speculative fiction project, Sick Music Center, the pair establish a shared set of rules, organizing their dialogue around three key prompts they call “Strategy,” “Focus,” and “Loose Ends.” Kerr sets an 8-minute timer for each section, and with that, they play, discover, and ultimately, disobey.

During her 2025 residency, RG wrote one of the first pieces for the io series. In the essay, she asks: “how could questions of access be held, communally, more equally? what if access were a group project, as it benefits us all?” 

As part of ISSUE’s ongoing commitment to these questions and, in the words of Artistic Advisory Council member George Lewis, to cultivating the conditions needed to “create an atmosphere conducive to artistic endeavors,” the return of both RG and Kerr in this anniversary season feels especially resonant. Together, thinking about musicians like J Dilla and Arthur Russell,  they consider the creative energy sick artists must devote to securing basic access; the tension between sustaining a personal practice and engaging in community organizing; and the need for more complex stories about the grief of making art while sick, alongside an ode to those who make that work possible.

References and resources include:

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music (2007) by George E. Lewis

Capitalist Time (2025) by Megan Bent

Éliane Radigue: Intermediary Spaces (2019) by Julia Eckhardt

Practicing Inclusion in the Time of COVID

anna RG works in composition, sculpture and community organizing, towards possibilities of Sick Music making and listening. For a decade, she toured with her research-based ballad project, Anna & Elizabeth, their Smithsonian Folkways album called a “radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do” by The New Yorker. They performed at Carnegie Hall, Big Ears Festival (where she was guest curator of traditional music), NPR’s Tiny Desk and many other venues not currently accessible to high risk artists. Anna has collaborated widely, including with the Aizuri Quartet, Lonnie Holley, Glen Hansard, Paul Wiancko, Jim White, and the dearly departed Susan Alcorn, and has won blue ribbons in fiddle contests across Appalachia. They hold an MFA in sculpture from Bard College, is a MacDowell Fellow, and recently exhibited at Tulca Festival (Galway). She is a member of the collective Artists In Resistance NYC (AIRNYC) which operates a lending library of the community-owned air purifiers used in the show, which are available for anyone to borrow, for free.

Theodore (Ted) Kerr is a writer, educator, cultural organizer and artist whose work explores the history and ongoing impact of HIV/AIDS through the lenses of art, activism, and community storytelling. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He is a founding member of the international collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018. He teaches at The New School, and is currently a Visiting Professor at Manhattan University.