Episode No. 683 features artist Tala Madani and curator Jamillah James. James is the curator of "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Madani is among the 60-plus artists included in the exhibition. "The Living End" surveys the arc of painting over the last half-century with a particular focus on artists who have redefined painting by using new technologies, imaging techniques, and their own bodies. The exhibition will be on...

Episode No. 682 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist Leslie Martinez. Martinez is included within "Shifting Landscapes," which is at the the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York until January 2026. The exhibition considers how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they address the world around them (which is to say US artists are addressing land and landscape as they have since the days of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Cole.) The show was...

Episode No. 681 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Tidawhitney Lek. Lek is featured in "Spirit House" at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. The exhibition considers how 33 contemporary artists of Asian descent challenge the boundary between life and death through art, including how the spiritual relates to diaspora, connections to ancestral homelands, and the experience of feeling present within multiple cultures and multiple geographies. The show's curatorial...

Episode No. 680 features artist Ronny Quevedo and curator Jillian Kruse. The Menil Drawing Institute is presenting "Wall Drawing Series: Ronny Quevedo" through August 2025. The work on view, titled C A R A A C A R A, is a site-specific drawing that explores the relationship between origin, transfer, and translation. Each of the drawing's three panels reveals a different step in Quevedo's process. The presentation was curated by Kelly Montana. Quevedo has had a solo show at the Queens...

Episode No. 679 features artist Hugh Hayden.  The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is presenting "Hugh Hayden: Homecoming," an exhibition of new works informed by Hayden's upbringing in Dallas. The show includes sculptures that explore themes such as nostalgia, childhood, education, and religion. The exhibition was curated by Leigh Arnold and will be on view through January 5, 2025.  The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is presenting "Hugh Hayden: Home Work," a survey of the last...

Episode No. 678 features curator Stephan Wolohojian. Along with Laura Llewellyn, Caroline Campbell and Joanna Cannon, Wolohojian is the curator of "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition examines the role of Sienese artists such as Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and before the onset of the plague in around 1350. While Florence is typically considered the most...

Episode No. 677 features artist Andrea Carlson. As mentioned at the beginning of this week's program: Help Asheville and my friends and neighbors across the southern Appalachians! These are all local organizations helping people in western North Carolina: Southern Smoke Foundation; Asheville Food & Beverage United (also here); and Beloved Asheville. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is presenting "Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons," the latest exhibition in its "Chicago...

Episode No. 676 features curator Jay A. Clarke. With Jill Lloyd, Clarke is the co-curator of "Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me," which is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 12, 2025. The career-surveying exhibition features Modersohn-Becker's proto-expressionist works that address subjects and themes such as childhood, the bodily experience of motherhood, pregnancy, and old age. "Modersohn-Becker" also features many of the artist's self-portraits, including the first...

Episode No. 675 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Ken Gonzales-Day.  The Yale Center for British Art is presenting "Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown" a two-part public art project informed by Gonzales-Day's investigation of YCBA's collections. Both works, a billboard along Interstate 95 in West Haven, Conn., and a site-specific vinyl work on the museum, feature Gonzales-Day's interrogations of historical constructions of race and the limits of...

Episode No. 674 features curators Kristen Collins and Nancy K. Turner, and curator Thea Liberty Nichols. Collins and Turner are the curators of "Lumen: The Art and Science of Light" at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. "Lumen" explores how scientific understandings of light shaped the visual culture of the Middle Ages. It includes over 100 works, including celestial globes, golden altars, and illuminated manuscripts from the Christian and Islamic worlds. It's on view through December 8,...

Episode No. 673 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Matthew Brandt.  Brandt is included in "Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene" at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition shows how 45 photo-based artists from around the world have examined the Anthropocene. "Second Nature" was curated by Jessica May and Marshall N. Price and is on view through January 5, 2025. An excellent catalogue was published by Rizzoli Electa. Amazon and Bookshop...

Episode No. 672 features curators Kimberly A. Jones and Mary Morton; and curators Sant Khalsa and Juniper Harrower. Along with Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, Jones and Morton are the curators of "1874: The Impressionist Moment" at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition examines the condition of Parisian art in 1874, both official standards exhibited at and effectively promoted via the official salon, and the renegade works exhibited at the first impressionist exhibition. Included are...

Episode No. 671 features curator, professor, and former museum director Dean Sobel, and artist Jackie Winsor. Winsor, a leading Canadian-American post-minimalist and feminist sculptor, died last week at 82. She was the first female sculptor to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979), which holds five of her works in its collection. The most recent institutional survey of Winsor's work was at MAMCO Geneva in 2022. This week's program opens with Sobel, who...

Episode No. 670 features artist Arlene Shechet.  Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY is showing "Arlene Shechet: Girl Group" through November 10. The exhibition joins Shechet's recent work exhibited in a typical gallery setting to six new monumental sculptures Shechet  created for installation at Storm King. The exhibition was co-curated by Nora Lawrence and Eric Booker, with Adela Goldsmith.  On September 27 and 28, a group of six women will gather to dance at dusk in the midst of...

Episode No. 669 is a summer clips episode featuring artist Tammy Nguyen. This late summer and fall Nguyen will be featured in two institutional exhibitions, one a solo show and the other a group show. On October 4, the Sarasota (Fla.) Art Museum will present "Tammy Nguyen: Timaeus and the Nations." The show was curated by Rangsook Yoon. On September 4 the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University will present "Spirit House." It's an examination of how contemporary artists of Asian descent...

Episode No. 668 is a summer clips episode featuring historian and author David Bindman. Bindman’s most recent book is ‘Race Is Everything’: Art and Human Difference. It examines nineteenth and early twentieth-century racializing science (sometimes referred to as pseudoscience) and how European art both influenced it, and was itself influenced by it. The book pays special attention to the racialization of people of African and Jewish descent. It considers the skull as a racializing marker,...

Episode No. 667 is a summer clips episode featuring artist Melissa Cody. MoMA PS1 is presenting "Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies," through September 9. The exhibition features over 30 weavings and a new work. It was curated by Isabella Rjeille and Ruba Katrib. Cody, a fourth-generation Navajo weaver, creates tapestries from traditional techniques that engage both ancestral and contemporary ideas and forms. Her work is partly informed by the Germantown style, developed in the nineteenth century...

Episode No. 666 features author and art historian Michael Lobel. Lobel is the author of "Van Gogh and the End of Nature," which was just published by Yale University Press. The book interrogates Van Gogh's presentation of nature, and finds that Van Gogh was looking more intently at industry, pollution, and environmental degradation than is typically recognized. Bookshop and Amazon offer the book for about $42. Lobel is a professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center,...

Episode No. 665 features curator Cathleen Chaffee and critic Elisabeth Kirsch.  Chaffee is the curator of "Marisol: A Retrospective," which is at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) through January 6, 2025. The exhibition presents work Marisol, sometimes remembered as 'the forgotten star of pop art,' made between the 1950s and the early 2000s. It builds on an extraordinary collection of works that Marisol left to the Buffalo AKG Museum upon her death. The...

Episode No. 664 features curator Sarah Kelly Oehler and artist Rebecca Manson. With Annelise K. Madsen, Oehler is the co-curator of "Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks." The exhibition spotlights O'Keeffe's paintings of New York City, surrounding them with pictures she made of Lake George and the Southwest. It's at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 22, when it will travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The exhibition catalogue was published by the AIC. Amazon and Bookshop...

Episode No. 663 features artist Jeremy Frey and curator Sarah Humphreville. The Portland Museum of Art is presenting "Jeremy Frey: Woven," a twenty-year survey of Frey's basketry and printmaking. The exhibition features more than fifty baskets made from natural materials such as black ash and sweetgrass, as well as prints and video. The exhibition is in Maine through September 15, when it will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was curated by Ramey Mize and Jaime DeSimone. The...

Episode No. 662 features artists Sarah Sze and Zoë Charlton. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is showing "Sarah Sze," a presentation of new works that explore how memory marks time and space, and how art negotiates image and object. The ex\xhibition is on view through August 18. Sze represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Other -ennials at which her work has been featured include the Whitney (2000), Carnegie (1999), Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008),...

Episode No. 661 is a holiday clips episode featuring curator Elizabeth Hutton Turner.  Along with Austen Barron Bailly, Turner was the co-curator of “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle.” The exhibition, which debuted at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts in 2020, presented Lawrence’s 1954-56 “Struggle: From the History of the American People.” The series presents a revisionist and pictorial history of the first five decades of the US republic, or what Lawrence called “the...

Episode No. 660 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday clips program with artist Kiyan Williams. Williams' work is on view in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York through August 11. On July 6, Art Omi in Ghent, NY will present "Kiyan Williams: Vertigo." It features large-scale works including Vertigo and 2022's Ruins of Empire, a reimagining of Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom, which was installed atop the US Capitol dome in 1863. Ruins...