Lisa Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements, in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, which ...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Novelist Jonathan Lethem is the author of Girl In Landscape, Chronic City , and Brooklyn Crime Novel , as well as ten other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in seven volumes. His fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn , won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and he has been the recipient of The Berlin Prize and a Macarthur Fellowship among other honors. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine. He and Zuckerman discuss writing stories about Art, growing up as a child of a painter, whe...
Jun 17, 2025•54 min
Glenn Lowry became the sixth director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) in 1995. He has overseen the physical transformation of the Museum’s campus through two building campaigns that have more than doubled the size of MoMA’s galleries, quintupled its endowment, created an education and research center, and inspired a new model for the presentation of modern and contemporary art. Lowry has championed innovation, both onsite and online, to grow MoMA’s annual visitation to nearly 3 mill...
Jun 03, 2025•53 min
Cultural journalist Jori Finkel is based in Los Angeles and won the 2023 Rabkin Prize for excellence in the field. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the West Coast contributing editor of The Art Newspaper , covering artists and the art world with particular attention to gender issues. Previously, she was a senior editor of Art+ Auction magazine in New York. She developed and co-produced the Emmy-nominated 2018 PBS documentary Artist and Mother , working to flip the script th...
May 27, 2025•55 min
Los Angeles based, Australian artist Ricky Swallow uses ordinary materials to create precisely rendered objects that he then casts in bronze. The unique works that result are expressions not only of the objects’ constructed forms, but also of the process of transformation by which an inert grouping of things becomes a sculpture. Swallow is invested in equal measure in the making of things and the testing of concepts; in hands-on work with cardboard, tape, wood, and rope and the mediated potentia...
May 13, 2025•50 min
Madeleine Haddon , Curator of V&A East, is a curator and writer whose work reexamines art historical narratives through contemporary lenses. Her interests and projects span both historical and contemporary art, from Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library to current commissions by contemporary artists for the new V&A East. Madeleine brings a critical and innovative perspective to the evolving role of museums for diverse audiences. She serves...
Apr 29, 2025•48 min
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City who is currently at work curating the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, titled Once Within a Time and opening in June 2025. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams , which...
Apr 15, 2025•53 min
Jennifer McCabe is a distinguished curator, educator, and museum director with over 20 years of expertise in leading cultural institutions, fostering innovative curatorial practices, and supporting artists. Currently, she serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the SFO Museum, the only airport-based institution accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Under her leadership, the museum operates more than 25 exhibition sites throughout the San Francisco International Airport, engaging mi...
Apr 01, 2025•53 min
Artist Claire Tabouret studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Motivated by a sensitivity to the passing of time and the floodgates of vulnerability opened by human relationships, Tabouret's painting practice is paced between periods of productive urgency and quiet reflection, and animated by layers, fabrics, and full, loose brushstrokes. Her hydrous palette is suspended somewhere in the ether between the synthetic hues of makeup and subdued tones of the earth, simultaneously referencing the...
Mar 18, 2025•43 min
Stephan Jost is an art museum director who is currently the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. Previously, he served as Director of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, and the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California. He also held curatorial positions at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Jost serves as Past President and Nominating Chair on the Board of the Association of...
Mar 04, 2025•54 min
Carrie Scott is an English American curator and arts commentator based in London. Over the past two decades, she has worked globally with galleries, artists, and collectors. She began her career as curator of the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, later becoming Director of the James Harris Gallery and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York. In 2009, she launched Carrie Scott & Partners, collaborating with artists like Nick Knight, John Pawson and Walter & Zoniel. She has curated exhib...
Feb 18, 2025•59 min
Art collector and philanthropist Komal Shah, originally from Ahmedabad, India, migrated to the US in 1991 to study computer science in California. After completing her Masters at Stanford, she earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, eventually holding positions in the executive suites of Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo. In 2008, Shah left the tech industry to focus on philanthropic pursuits. She then began developing the Shah Garg Collection with her husband and tech entrepreneur...
Feb 04, 2025•52 min
Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle is a New York based art dealer and curator. Ine-Kimba Boyle was recently appointed partner and co-owner at CANADA gallery in New York. Her previous positions include leading the online sales strategy at Pace gallery as Senior Director and Global Head of Online and working as a Senior Director at CANADA. Her latest curated exhibitions include Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed , a two-person exhibition featuring Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester II and “Rest...
Jan 21, 2025•49 min
This week on my podcast, “About Art” I spoke with the British contemporary artist Robert Montgomery. Montgomery is well known for his work in public space. He makes light works, billboard poems, fire poems, paintings and watercolors. His work brings text art closer to the language of poetry. He represented the UK in the 2012 Kochi Biennale and the 2016 Yinchuan Biennale. His work is in museum collections across the world including the Albright Knox in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Housto...
Jan 07, 2025•56 min
A compilation episode of the answer to the question "why does art matter?" Thank you for being apart of our community, and we will see you in the new year. Happy holidays!
Dec 24, 2024•21 min
Dr. Shauna Shapiro, PhD, is a best-selling author, clinical psychologist and internationally recognized expert in mindfulness and self-compassion. She is a professor at Santa Clara University and has published over 150 papers and three critically acclaimed books, translated into 16 languages. Dr. Shapiro has presented her research to the King of Thailand, the Danish Government, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Summit, and the World Council for Psychotherapy, as well as to Fortune 100 Companies ...
Dec 10, 2024•57 min
Alex Anderson lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Anderson uses the delicate medium of ceramics as his main vehicle to explore the sublime experiences that make up both the man-made and natural worlds, as well as deeper, more complicated issues of race and cultural representation. His artworks combine a dexterity in the medium with a confluence of baroque imagery and compositions, Japanese pop art references, and current contemporary fashion and design trends in order to probe the depths...
Nov 26, 2024•23 min
Marine Tanguy is the CEO of MTArt agency. At the age of 21, Tanguy became Europe’s youngest gallery manager, working for Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s discoverer. By 23, she launched her first gallery, De Re, in Los Angeles. Inspired by talent agencies like CAA and UTA, Marine founded MTArt Agency in London in 2015 at age 25. MTArt, a Certified B Corporation, is now the leading talent agency in the art world, working with global organizations and cities, nurturing an international community of art-l...
Nov 12, 2024•57 min
Mary Weatherford is one of the leading painters of her generation, exploring and expanding the legacies of American abstraction. Over the last three decades, Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice: from early target paintings in the 1990s based on operatic heroines, to expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that have been a presence in her work since 2012. With a physically embodied approach to painting, Weatherford explores abstraction as both a for...
Oct 29, 2024•42 min
Shamim Momin is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington. In this role since 2018, she has overseen the Curatorial Department and organized numerous exhibitions, including the museum-wide group exhibition In Plain Sight, as well as major commissions by Tala Madani, Gary Simmons, Kelly Akashi, Donna Huanca, Diana Al-Hadid, and others. Prior to joining the Henry, she was director, curator, and co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a nonprofit ...
Oct 15, 2024•56 min
California-based artist Ed Templeton is known for his interdisciplinary practice, most notably of photographs documenting people and street life of Huntington Beach, California, intimate portraits of his wife, and paintings depicting the psychological complexity of American suburbia. He first gained recognition as a teenage skateboard prodigy in the late 1980s and taught himself to photograph on the fly while actively touring for competitions. All of Templeton’s subjects come from his own life: ...
Oct 01, 2024•48 min
This is the second “Ask Me Anything” episode with our founder and host Heidi Zuckerman, a globally recognized leader in contemporary art, a prolific content generator, and a fierce advocate for Why Art Matters! In addition to being the first woman to build two art museums and raising nearly $200M dollars for museums, she has had hundreds of courageously authentic conversations with artists and other people she finds interesting that are featured on five years and 150 podcasts and in four volumes...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Melissa Chiu is Director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary art. Since her appointment in 2014, she has advocated for contemporary art through the Museum’s exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programs, with landmark exhibitions of work by some of today’s most important artists. A native of Australia, Chiu earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and criticism from the University of Western Sydney in 1992 and her master’...
Sep 03, 2024•52 min
Art historian and curator Anne Radice. Radice previously served as Director of the Division of Public Programs at NEH. Prior to joining NEH in July 2018 she served as Executive Director of the American Folk Art Museum. From 2006 to 2010 Radice served as Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Her previous government positions include Acting Deputy Chairman for Programs and Special Advisor to the Chairman of NEH, Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Education, Acting Chairm...
Aug 20, 2024•49 min
Los-Angeles based artist Diedrick Brackens is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Bracken’s work the reasoning beast (2021)—currently installed in OCMA’s exhibition Color is the Fir...
Aug 06, 2024•42 min
Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers has made art that activates for more than 30 years. Bowers works in a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, and explores pressing national and international issues. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, operating as chronicler of contemporary history. A passionate ecofeminist, the symbiotic relationship between women and ecology is a recurring theme in her work, central in Femme Trans-Corporeal Fa...
Jul 23, 2024•46 min
Tony Marsh is an artist and educator who earned his BFA in Ceramic Art at California State University Long Beach in 1978. After graduating he spent three years in Mashiko, Japan at the workshop of Tatsuzo Shimaoka. Marsh completed his MFA at Alfred University in 1988. He teaches in the Ceramic Arts Program at California State University Long Beach where he was the Program Chair for over 20 years. He is currently the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB. He was named a ...
Jul 09, 2024•52 min
Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which seeks to promote innovation among art museums across the United States. An attorney and entrepreneur, Reily served as Director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky from 2017 to 2021 where he invigorated a newly renovated museum with a mission of public service and dramatically increased both contributed revenue and accessibility. Under his leaders...
Jun 25, 2024•55 min
Mehak Vieira is the Director and Founder of Jahmek Contemporary Art, a dynamic platform promoting a critical and provocative dialogue about artistic and visual expression in Luanda, Angola. Raised in Luanda, Viera founded the gallery alongside Jardel Vieira in 2018 with the vision of strengthening the artistic infrastructure in Angola for the next generation. Over the past five years, she has worked with emerging and established artists with ties to the country to build an ambitious program of e...
Jun 11, 2024•42 min
British sculptor Antony Gormley’s (Sir Antony Mark David Gormley OBE RA) work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with recent exhibitions at Musée Rodin, Paris (2023); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2022); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy (2019); Philadelphia Museum of A...
May 28, 2024•38 min
