This episode is a rare, live conversation between Zuckerman and artist Mark Manders recorded as part of an exhibition opening walk through in Los Angeles! For more than three decades, Mark Manders has developed an endless self-portrait in the form of sculpture, still life, and architectural plans. Described by the artist as his ongoing “self-portrait as a building,” Manders’ works present mysterious and evocative tableaux that allow viewers to construct their own narrative conclusions and meanin...
Mar 21, 2023•39 min
Derrick Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Adams probes how the experiences and narratives of Black communities are reflected in and refracted by American history, entertainment, consumerism, iconography, and the dynamic relationship between personal identity and cultural environment. Expanding the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture, through scenes of normalcy and perseverance, he developed and presents an iconography of joy, leisure, and th...
Mar 07, 2023•46 min
Kelly Crow is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering the ever-changing contemporary art market since 2006. Her work includes reports on sales at auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's and analyses of the funding and buying practices of the world's leading arts institutions, artists, and collectors. Extending her expertise beyond the newsroom, Crow has assisted in teaching journalism courses at Columbia University’s Graduate School, where she earned her master’s degree in...
Feb 21, 2023•1 hr
Jeffrey Deitch has been a prominent player in contemporary art for over fifty years. Born in 1952 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Deitch went on to study at Wesleyan University, turning his primary attention from economics to art history. As a college student, he opened his first gallery in 1972 in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1978 Deitch received his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he authored his thesis on Andy Warhol as a business artist and sought to find synergy between aesthetics ...
Feb 07, 2023•55 min
Angel Otero is an artist known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience. Otero is best known for the Oil Skin works he began in 2010, an ongoing series that demonstrates the inherently transformative nature of the artist’s practice as well as his dedication to...
Jan 24, 2023•52 min
With Episode 106 we have changed a few things up! First, our name, we have dropped the word conversations from the podcast title. The podcast is “About Art” so that’s what we’re now calling it! Simple and elegant. Second, we added a new photo! The previous one was when OCMA/Orange County Museum of Art was under construction, the new one is from the opening press conference. And, third, this is our first “Ask Me Anything” episode. Thank you so much to everyone who sent in your questions, we were ...
Jan 10, 2023•43 min
Dara Birnbaum is a groundbreaking figure in the emergence of media art. Among the earliest practitioners working in video, among the first women to adapt the medium, and the first to focus on TV specifically. Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, she has created a prescient body of work that in many ways prefigures our current digital realities, where anyone on social media can now “talk back” to media in ways similar to what Birnbaum has done throughout her artistic practice. Her early ...
Dec 27, 2022•56 min
This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, a curator who established the Foundation in 2009 as a catalyst and advocate for the arts, not only in Sharjah, UAE, but also in the region and across the world. With a passion for supporting experimentation and innovation in the arts, Al Qasimi has continuously expanded the scope of the Foundation to include major international touring exhibitions; artist and curator r...
Dec 13, 2022•56 min
Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, co-founders of WORKac and principals of the firm. Wood has extensive experience leading large scale and complex US and international projects. Andraos is also the dean emeritus and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. WORKac creates architecture and strategic planning concepts at the intersection of the urban, the rural and the natural. Embracing reinvention and collaboration with other fields, they strive to de...
Nov 29, 2022•53 min
Ella Fontanals-Cisneros is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and collector of contemporary art. She began collecting art in the 1970s and her collection, which today has more than 2500 works, has an international profile with emblematic figures of modern and contemporary art with a focus on Latin American art. She is also cofounder of CIFO, a non-profit organization that fosters cultural exchange and enrichment of the arts. In this position, she recently worked to launch the CIFO-Ars Electronica Aw...
Nov 15, 2022•50 min
Dr. Salah M. Hassan is founding Director of The Africa Institute. Hassan concurrently holds positions at Cornell University as the Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Africana Studies and Research Center; in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies; and as Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM). Hassan also served as Professor of History of Art in African and African Ame...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Cristina Iglesias is a Spanish born artist who studied Chemical Sciences at the University of the Basque Country and Ceramics and Sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art in London. Her museum exhibitions include Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She additionally has been commissioned to create major projects and installations at Bloomberg headquarters, London; Mexican Fou...
Oct 18, 2022•40 min
This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Kate MccGwire, a British sculptor who spent her childhood growing up on the Norfolk Broads. Taking feathers as her primary medium, MccGwire goes through labour-intensive processes of collecting, sorting and cleaning her materials to create muscular, writhing forms reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology. Through her practice, MccGwire celebrates feathers, which are commonly shed or discarded, as the medium thr...
Oct 13, 2022•51 min
Sandra Jackson-Dumont is the Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Tasked with leading the institution through its opening and beyond, she comes to the museum from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she has served as the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education and Public Programs since 2014. Throughout her career, Jackson-Dumont has developed programming around museum collections and special exhibitions to engage a broad range of audiences. She ...
Oct 04, 2022•57 min
Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. In 1964 he established his own firm to realize Habitat ’67, an adaptation of his undergraduate thesis and a turning point in modern architecture. Embracing a comprehensive and humane design philosophy, Safdie is committed to architecture that is informed by the geographic, social, and cultural elements that define a place; and that responds to human needs and aspirations. Over a celebrated 50-year career, Safdie has exp...
Sep 20, 2022•49 min
KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades KAWS’ work shows formal agility, underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies. KAWS often appropriates an...
Sep 06, 2022•45 min
Jérôme Sans began his career in the early 1980s as one of the first independent curators in Europe. His mission has been to rethink contemporary art exhibition making through an engagement with emerging artists. He is the former director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and creator, and former creative director and editor-in-chief of the French cultural magazine L’Officiel Art, former artistic director of Rives de Saône-River Movie...
Aug 23, 2022•44 min
Marianne Boesky established her eponymous gallery in New York in 1996. Since its inception, the gallery has represented and supported the work of emerging and established contemporary artists of all media and genres. In its first decade, the gallery was instrumental in launching the careers of major artists including Barnaby Furnas, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Sarah Sze, and Lisa Yuskavage. The gallery currently represents many significant international artists, including Ghada Amer, Jenni...
Aug 09, 2022•50 min
Hebru Brantley was born and raised in Chicago. A product of the 80's, Brantley's early inspiration to create visual art derived from the cinematic Blaxploitation and science fiction depicted in the previous decade. His affinity for mythological comic book heroes, Japanimation, and graffiti has strongly influenced his work, and eventually, he began fusing elements of urban society with pop culture. From that, he developed his own unique approach to visual art, layering youthful expression with hu...
Jul 26, 2022•45 min
Fred Eversley’s lenses and mirrored forms reflect and refract the world, and our place within it. Eversley hit his stride with his primary mode of working at the same time the Light and Space movement gained momentum in Southern California. Yet unlike his Light and Space and Finish Fetish peers who often collaborated with scientists and outsourced fabrication of their work, Eversley’s firsthand technical understanding as a scientist himself (Eversley came to Southern California in the 1960s to w...
Jul 12, 2022•34 min
Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in self-reflection and conceptual wayfinding. Her immersive, monumental works are inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often drawing inspiration from the natural world, Fernández’s practice unravels the intimacies between matter, places, and human beings. Her work questions power, visibility, and erasure in ways that prompt reflective engagement for individual viewers. ...
Jun 28, 2022•46 min
Sanford Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “future ethnographies.” His work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked cultural and polit...
Jun 14, 2022•50 min
Leo Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions in light. His goal is to create a rich environment in which emergent behavior can occur without a preconceived outcome. His work is focused on stripping systems down to their essence to better understand the underlying structures and rules that govern how they work. He is interested in lowest common denominators such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. The resulting forms move, change, interact a...
May 31, 2022•41 min
Fred Tomaselli’s work reveals a uniquely American vision. Growing up in Southern California, he was influenced by both the manufactured unreality of theme parks and the music and drug countercultures of Los Angeles during the 1970s and 80s. His distinctive melding of these traditions coalesces in an updated, personalized, folk-driven vision of the American West. Tomaselli amasses pills, herbs and other drugs, along with images of plants, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations carefully cut...
May 17, 2022•40 min
Robert Nava draws inspiration from sources ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to Egyptian art and cartoons to create hybrid monsters populating a mythical contemporary world. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art. An MFA graduate from Yale University, Nava builds on the gesturalism of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He and Zu...
May 03, 2022•32 min
This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” we are reissuing one of our earliest—recorded in October 2019–when I spoke with artist Seth Price. Price in addition to making paintings has designed a fashion line, written a novel, and made music. He and I talk about the allure of being unavailable, the power of defocused thinking, creating a sound track for artists, #menswear, and skin.
Apr 19, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Mike Kaplan is President and CEO of Aspen Skiing Company for the last 17 years. He recently announced that after 30 years with the company, that the 2022-23 winter season would be his last at the helm of the organization. Together he and Zuckerman in a completely unprecedented, brave, and innovative way collaborated to place art by world renowned contemporary artists on all lift ticket products and to integrate art into the company in unexpected places and ways. He and Zuckerman discuss powder d...
Apr 05, 2022•48 min
Tamar Zagursky was born in Beer-Sheva, Israel in 1975 to an Israeli born Engineer father and an American born English teacher and translator mother. She grew up in a small town in the Negev desert and Zagursky served as a tank driver in the Israel army. From 2002 to 2020 she was the Director of Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv, one of top galleries in Israel, curating exhibitions and representing the gallery at art fairs all over Europe and the United States. In 2029 she began to manage the s...
Mar 22, 2022•39 min
Christopher Y. Lew is Chief Artistic Director at Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art. He has over fifteen years of experience working at American museums and arts nonprofits. He is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he oversaw the emerging artist program and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial . At the Whitney, he organized Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2018), and mounted the first US solo exhibitions for several artists. Prior t...
Mar 08, 2022•47 min
After more than a decade as an art dealer and gallery owner specializing in contemporary Southeast Asian art, in the last year Tyler Rollins founded a nonprofit organization nurturing connections between contemporary art and religious faith. The Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts is based in Charleston, SC and forefronts a focus on transcendence and orienting oneself to a higher power knowing that these can be a source of insight, illumination, and inspiration. He and Zuckerman discuss Edg...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 7 min
