Studio artist Anna Segner on humans' relationships with animals in art and life

Minnesota native Anna Segner's art is at once whimsical, intriguing, and thought-provoking. She's a studio artist focused on painting, mixed media, and assemblage. Her work pulls you in with familiar imagery of things like Beanie Babies and rhinos, and it holds your attention as you begin to see the rich layers of meaning. Anna uses critical animal studies and other research to explore the human act of “toying” with animals and nature, and she discusses how her art has evolved to focus on this area. Anna and host Rachel Lauer met when they both worked in journalism, and Anna now teaches drawing in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University. You can view her work on her website: http://www.annasegner.com/ and follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/painted_annamal/. We also discussed per capita spending on state arts agencies and how that affects quality of life. You can find this data in Table 6 of this document for fiscal year 2019: https://nasaa-arts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NASAA-FY2019-SAA-Revenues-Report.pdf Rachel and Aleisha talked about NaNoWriMo and London Writers Salon Writers' Hour at the start of the episode: https://nanowrimo.org/ https://community.londonwriterssalon.com/c/writers-hour-links