Pond Farm Pottery: How the Bauhaus Found a Home in California
Full Expression
From the revolutionary ideals of the Bauhaus to a remote mountaintop pottery studio in Northern California, the legacy of Marguerite Wildenhain continues to shape artists generations later. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff travels to Pond Farm Pottery—a National Historic Landmark tucked into the redwood-covered hills of Sonoma County—to explore one of the most remarkable artistic lineages of the 20th century. Historian Leah Halper traces Wildenhain's extraordinary journey from the Bauhaus in Germany through Nazi persecution, exile, and ultimately to California, where she...
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John Muir Laws: Journaling Will Transform Your Life
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with naturalist, artist, educator, and lifelong journaler John Muir Laws for a conversation about attention, creativity, and the transformative power of keeping a journal. They explore journaling as more than a record of experience, but as an essential tool for observation, reflection, and deeper engagement with the world. Drawing from decades of nature journaling, John Muir Laws explains how sketching, writing, mapping, and asking questions on paper can expand our capacity to notice, learn, and connect. The...
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Ava Mingo and Royer Bockus: The Magic of Repertory Theater
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with actresses Ava Mingo and Royer Bockus from the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, one of the largest and longest-running repertory theater companies in the United States. Eva and Royer take us behind the scenes of life at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, from building characters and mastering Shakespeare's language to understudying major roles, sustaining creativity over months-long runs, and finding balance between the characters they play, and their everyday lives. This is a conversation about artistic...
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Cathy Bailey and Robin Petravic: Heath Ceramics and the Art of Everyday Objects
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Cathy Bailey and Robin Petravic, the owners of Heath Ceramics, for a conversation about craft, California design, and the art of making things built to last. They reflect on discovering the struggling Sausalito factory in the early 2000s, rebuilding an iconic American ceramics company, and balancing creativity with the realities of manufacturing. The conversation explores Edith Heath’s legacy, the philosophy behind Heath’s glazes and forms, and why imperfection, materiality, and human touch remain central to the...
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Amy Bowers Cordalis: The Century Long Fight to Save the Klamath and its People
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Amy Bowers Cordalis—Yurok attorney, activist, and author of The Water Remembers—for a conversation about storytelling, sovereignty, and the long fight to restore a river. Amy traces her journey from growing up between Ashland and the Klamath River to becoming a leading legal voice in one of the largest dam removal and salmon restoration efforts in history. At the center of the conversation is an intergenerational story: a family, a tribe, and a river bound together through culture, survival, and resistance....
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Charles Loi & Hannah Lee: Reimagining How We Tell The Climate Story
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with filmmakers Charles Loi and Hannah Lee to explore storytelling, the climate climate, and the creative process. Both trace their paths from early experiments with film to collaborating on Climate California, a documentary series that reimagines how we tell stories about the climate crisis from NorCal Public Media. The series shifts away from the doom and gloom approach to climate change reporting, and toward beauty, connection, and lived experience. They discuss the challenges of making ambitious work with limited...
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Narsiso Martinez: Making Hidden Labor Visible Through Art
Full Expression
In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with artist Narsiso Martinez for a conversation about labor, migration, and the creative process. Narsiso traces his journey from a rural town in Oaxaca, Mexico—where he worked in the fields as a child—to immigrating to Los Angeles in search of opportunity and education. What began as a pursuit of stability gradually evolved into a deep artistic practice, shaped by his lived experience and the communities he came from. Working on discarded produce boxes, Narsiso creates portraits of farmworkers that merge subject and...
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Angelo Garro: Life of a Master Craftsman
Full Expression
Craft lives in the hands. And in a world increasingly shaped by speed, automation, and abstraction, what does it mean to dedicate your life to making things slowly, by hand? In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Angelo Garro, Sicilian-born blacksmith, sculptor, forager, and founder of Omnivore Salt, for a conversation about craft, culture, food, and the creative life. Angelo traces his journey from a small village in Sicily to apprenticing with a master metalworker in the Swiss Alps, before building a life in North America as an architectural blacksmith and artist....
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Thomas Lauderdale on Pink Martini & Building a 'United Nations of Sound'
Full Expression
Behind Pink Martini’s unmistakable sound is a simple idea: music can bring people together across cultures. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Thomas Lauderdale—pianist, bandleader, and artistic director of Pink Martini, the “little orchestra” that blends classical, jazz, pop, and world music into a style that feels both timeless and global. Thomas traces the unlikely path that led him to the band. Raised on a plant nursery in rural Indiana, he began piano lessons at six and later studied history and literature at Harvard, originally planning a career in...
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Mindy Marin: The Unsung Art of Casting Direction
Full Expression
Behind every unforgettable performance is great casting. Today, we explore this often invisible process that’s part intuition, part logistics, and part relentless creative problem-solving. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff talks with legendary casting director Mindy Marin, whose career spans four decades and more than a hundred films, including Juno, Drive, Nightcrawler, the upcoming Matchbox, and multiple Mission: Impossible projects—along with a long history in television that helped shape the industry from the inside. Mindy walks us...
info_outline#32: Mary Gabriel is an American author and biographer whose books include Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and currently lives in Ireland.
Her book Ninth Street Women is a deep exploration of the mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist in New York City. Ninth Street Women is a chronicle of not just one — but five American women artists: Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollock), Elaine De Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning), Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.
I spoke with Mary Gabriel about her work habits and the era when non-representational abstract painting came of age in the wake of world war, nuclear weapons and a changing America.