This is our last regularly-scheduled episode for WOWD-LP Takoma Park, although we may, from time to time, present a special unscheduled episode. After almost 150 shows, we decided to take a break and figure out where we’re going from here. In this episode, Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the history of the show, and what […]
The National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, has mounted a small exhibition showing three sublime Vermeer paintings and three false Vermeers. Our episode discusses: what makes Vermeer so good (a little art criticism/theory) the scientific research done by the museum’s conservation department, how forgeries are made, marketed, and detected, and more.
Sargent, as revealed in Sargent and Spain, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, gives us visions that are full of desire and celebration – both documentary and dreamlike. John Singer Sargent was, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe; but his obituary in the London Times described him […]
We explore the art of Robert Rauschenberg, the influence of John Cage, and two of Rauschenberg’s paintings, Factum 1 and Factum 2, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in their current exhibition, Then Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900. We find a lot of terrific information in a new book […]
Hosts Sheila and Peter Blake visit the outsider/folk/self-taught art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: We are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection. This is perhaps our third show on folk art, and every time, we probe deeper into this rewarding art world. Artists include Bil Traylor, Dan Miller, Judith […]
Sheila and Peter Blake use the current exhibition, The Double, Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900, at the East Wing of the National Gallery, to explore art over many decades, mixing famous masters with contemporary artists, all creating with some aspect of visual doubling, reversal, or the split or doubled self.
Sheila Blake and Peter Blake discuss portraiture as a art form, and the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the finalaists of the Outwin 20221 competition. You can find images of the exhibition works here: https://portraitcompetition.si.edu/exhibition/2022-outwin-boochever-portrait-competition/
With insights from our recent episode on postmodernism, we reprise our conversation about the Laurie Anderson exhibit currently at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in DC. We draw out the connections between Anderson’s work and that of John Cage: even though their music is completely different, their ethical purposes are in alignment.
Sheila and Peter Blake discuss postmodernism in the visual arts and architecture: what it is, in plain terms, and how it followed from and differs from modernism. Our facebook pages has pictures of what we’re talking about:
We’re posting a lightly edited rebroadcast of last year’s popular program on the American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley. Peter and Sheila are hosts, and take an excursion into discussions of Emerson and Transcedentalism. Pictures of what we”re talking about…
We visit the new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Afro-Atlantic Histories, an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the 17th century. More than 130 powerful works of art, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and time-based media by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the […]
We examine the practice of learning to draw, the advantages to non-professionals in learning to draw, and some tips.
Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) was a major American painter. Sheila was a friend of his, beginning in art school in NYC. Sheila and Tom recollect his life and his art. [LBS id=xx]
Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss the use of photography by painters.
The Baltimore Museum of Art has just put up a show curated by the guards. The works repay long observation, as you might expect for the choices of the museum guards, who look at art for long periods of time. Tom, Sheila and Peter visit the exhibition, and discuss several interesting issues brought up on […]
Joan Mitchell at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss Abstract Expressionism.
We visit the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC: Picasso: Painting the Blue Period. We discuss the transition of Picasso, at the age of nineteen, from painting scenes of the Paris nightlife to the paintings known as the Blue Period, and then the Rose period. We explore our thesis that Picasso was […]
Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the dark side of Picasso’s life, and give an introduction to his innovations in art, and how the revelations of Picasso’s treatment of women might influence our understanding of his art. Along the way,we touch on Georges Braque, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.
We discuss several major Black visual artists from before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance (with a nod to philosopher Alain Locke): Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles White, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Amy Sherald. Poems by Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes.
Our hosts, Sheila and Tom, with Peter Blake, visit Glenstone, discuss issues in contemporary art brought up by sculptures by Charles Ray, chalk drawings by Tacita Dean, large-scale photographs by Jeff Wall, and drawings by Vija Celmins.
After several visits to the Laurie Anderson Exhibit at the Hirschhorn Museum, in Washington DC, Sheila and Peter discuss this avant garde artist and her exhibit. Music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.
Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful is the title of the retrospective of Alma Thomas at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC. Sheila and Tom respond to her brilliant color-field paintings to explore the topic of color. The exhibition at the Phillips traces her journey from semi-rural Georgia to Washington, DC, in 1907, then […]
Sheila, Tom, and guest Peter Blake discuss the David Driskell exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Driskell was a painter and the whirlwind center of energy and attention to established and emerging African American artists in the late Twentieth Century and into recent decades.
We interview local puppeteer, Rachel Gates.
Sheila and Tom discuss the Spanish painter, Juan Gris, a compatriot, contemporary, and rival of Picasso – on the occasion of a current exhibition of gorgeous cubist paintings by Gris at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Themes include cubism, modernism, John Dewey, color theory and more.
We have edited an earlier episode, from 2018, adding a new introduction to our show on Cezanne Portraits. This episode adds to and reinforces the content on our last episode, also on Paul Cezanne, the master at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Broadcast on WOWD-LP, Takoma Radio, 10/23/21
An exhibit of Paul Cezanne Drawings just closed at MOMA, in New York. Our visit there occasioned this discussion of one of the great progenitors of modernism. Sheila and Tom go inside the experience of viewing Cezanne, and give listeners a unique view of the experiences he provides, and the technical innovations in his drawing […]
Sheila and Tom take on a special topic this week: Creativity. Sheila begins with a discussion of John Dewey’s anti-hierarchical formulation of the art experience, which establishes a continuum between “high art” and the esthetic perceptions of everyday life, then analyzes how these experiences are created, arranged, and orchestrated in the individual viewer’s experience. In […]
We visit Tudor Place in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, the home for over two hundred years of descendants of Martha Washington. The family retained this house over this entire period, through the Civil War, the gilded age, the Roaring Twenties, until the last owner deeded it to the foundation that now runs it […]
Before continuing in their series considering the relation between artists and their gardens, Tom and Sheila discuss the art of Chuck Close, who died last week. They turn then to Emil Nolde, Charles Burchfield, and Odilon Redon.
