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Saudi-Palestinian artist Dana Awartani studied at a famously conceptual art school, before learning traditional Islamic crafts and principles, like sacred geometry. Now Dana is exploring the destruction of build heritage in the Arab world, most recently the devastated city of Gaza. Her work is being shown at Adelaide's Samstag Museum of Art and at the Venice Biennale.

Rosa visits the Melbourne studio of ceramic artist Georgia Harvey. Taking influences from Mesopotamian art and our cross-cultural obsession with lions, Georgia tells us about her 'cauldron' of inspiration.

Artist Anna Park was first exposed to American culture through Disney. By the time her family migrated from Korea to Utah, USA, she was a keen observer and prodigiously talented drawer. Anna's satirical and masterful charcoal drawings capturing online life, are the focus of Look, Look. Anna Park, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Archie Moore has won the top honour at one of the world's most prestigious and oldest art festivals – the Venice Biennale--  for a monumental work showing thousands of years of family lineage, and invoking lives lost under the colonial state.

Monsignor Alberto Rocca is an Italian priest and art curator who has a singular job: accompanying pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, to the other side of the world. This Codex is the largest collection of Leonardo's drawings and notes, made up of thousand pages.  After spending so much time with Leonardo's works  as curator of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, Rocca has some theories about the Renaissance polymath.

'Unshakable destiny' was how democracy and self-rule was supposed to manifest for the people of Hong Kong, according to the last British Governor. Nikki Lam has been working on a trilogy of art films about that promise, as personal tragedy and the impact of the city's new laws alter her relationship to her homeland. The unshakable destiny is on at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Nicholas Mangan is drawn to the stories behind some of our most contentious commodities: phosphate from Nauru, copper from Bougainville and cryptocurrency, which Nick compares to an ancient form of stone money from Yap, a Micronesian island. Nick takes the viewer into these histories through sculptural installations and intriguing films. His survey exhibition World Undone is now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

My Thing is… GPS Art. ABC science reporter Belinda Smith makes art on the run, creating increasingly detailed pictures of animals on GPS maps, that she then matches with perfect puns, via her Inst account @animalpunruns. First broadcast May 2023.

A teapot made by the South Australian ceramic artist Bruce Nuske is a beautiful thing to behold: ornate, whimsical, exquisitely crafted –  and importantly, it can also pour a hot cup of tea… if you’d dare put it to use! Bruce's teapots and vessels are also steeped in a rich knowledge of the history of the arts and crafts movement. Listen to an interview with Bruce's collaborator, the late designer Khai Liew, from a previous episode of The Art Show, at 26 minutes.

Visnja Brdar's art motto is “The more nothing, the better”. She is one of this country’s most internationally successful graphic designers, the child of Croatian migrants who took her solo agency from Melbourne to New York,  head-first into the competitive world of international branding -- and she's the subject of the first significant art survey of a female graphic designer in Australia, Visnja Brdar: Design Exalted at MUMA.

Inner sanctum is the title of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Rosa Ellen speaks with three of the artists taking part: Lawrence English, George Cooley, Ruha Fifita and curator Jose Da Silva.  The chamber music is ‘All Flesh is Fire’, sung by the Adelaide Chamber Singers, composed by Anne Cawrse, conducted by Christie Anderson, recorded by Jakub Gaudasinski.

Katy Hessel's podcast and bestselling book on the great women artists ride the wave of interest in a parallel cannon of art, where women have long been missing. So, what sparked her work correcting the record, and what has changed since she started? Katy is appearing at Sydney Writers Festival and other book events in Australia in May.

Ellen Dahl ventured out to a frozen archipelago in the Arctic Ocean to take photos. The striking images won her Australia's National Photography Prize. She speaks to Daniel about her motivations to show climate change in action, and the influence of her Sami heritage. Read about her win here.

My Thing is...  the ocean. They describe grief as being a wave - it can hit you when your back’s turned. Julia Ciccarone knows that. The Melbourne figurative painter also finds peace in the water, particularly the open sea. 

 

Australia's art resale royalty scheme was supposed to help artists (or their families) get a small percentage when paintings were re-sold at auction for big bucks, particularly Indigenous artists. But it hasn't gone according to plan. ABC national business reporter Emilia Terzon tells Daniel about her year-long investigation into what many says is an unjust state of affairs.

For four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about the most profound and difficult subjects in Australian art: truth-telling, violence and ecological destruction. From her beginnings with the famed Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, to her monumental public artworks, Daniel speaks to Judy Watson at her largest survey show at the Queensland Art Gallery.