As a child, Alan Michelson often rode the T past sculptor Cyrus Edward Dallin’s “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (1908) outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). He was riveted by the statue’s grand horse and the powerful yet melancholy figure wearing a striking Plains Indian war bonnet. It was only in his 20s that the artist learned that he had been separated through adoption from his own Native heritage and Mohawk birth family in the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. He soon ...
Jun 03, 2025•52 min•Ep. 117
When World War II broke out, museums across France took their most precious artworks off the walls and hid them away for safekeeping from bombing. But no one suspected the greatest threat to these treasures: the Nazis’ massive art looting scheme , wherein they sought to plunder museums to bolster the image of their own galleries, take modernist (or, in their words, “ degenerate ”) art down from view, and disenfranchise Jewish art collectors — while raking in money for themselves along the way. W...
May 21, 2025•42 min•Ep. 116
At Hyperallergic , we take pride in covering protesting museum workers who take to the streets. But few realize that these workers are taking part in a practice that’s as old as some of the ancient artifacts in their institutions. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, we’re joined by professor, public historian, and Hyperallergic contributor Sarah E. Bond, who shares her knowledge on labor organizing in the ancient world, which stretches back to the earliest recorded strike, which took p...
May 06, 2025•49 min•Ep. 115
In 1971, a seven-year-old Sandra Fabara moved with her family from a city nestled in an Ecuadorian rainforest to the dense brick landscape of Brooklyn. By the time she was a teenager, she had gone from climbing trees to hopping the fences of the MTA train yards. Soon, she was known as the queen of New York City graffiti: the one and only Lady Pink. If you’re as mesmerized by the 1970s and ’80s world of New York City graffiti as we are, then you’ve seen her before, immortalized in classic photos ...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 114
The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) holds what is arguably the most important collection of early graffiti art and ephemera, amassed by Martin Wong, a queer Chinese-American self-taught painter who wore cowboy hats and, for a time, paid for his lodging in a dingy Lower East Side hotel room by working as a night porter. Drawn to the bustling art scene of late 1970s New York, Wong developed a tight network of friends in what may have seemed like an unexpected community at the time: graffiti ...
Apr 10, 2025•49 min•Ep. 113
We’ve been taught by high school movies and pop culture at large that art and sports are diametrical opposites. You know the trope: The sporty jocks and the nerdy theater kids are all relegated to separate lunch tables, and never the twain shall meet, save the occasional High School Musical . But a recent exhibition, Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture , takes this stereotype to the mat. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Hrag Vartanian sits down with San Francisco Museum of Modern ...
Mar 25, 2025•38 min•Ep. 112
One of seven brothers, Nick Cave grew up watching his family create magic out of scraps. His aunts would cut paper bags into patterns, and in just one day, make an entire new outfit to wear that night. Since then, the artist has been dedicated to studying how to lay ornamental patterns on the body. Leading the way for a current groundswell of adornment in art, Cave is known for highly decorated, maximalist works, particularly in his “Soundsuits,” which are both unapologetically joyous and respon...
Mar 11, 2025•38 min•Ep. 111
Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, came from vastly different backgrounds. But a current show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their perspectives and sensibilities blend seamlessly. Both were maligned for their figurative, comic book-influenced styles: Guston by the elite art world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the 1...
Feb 25, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 110
In 1973, gallerist Tibor de Nagy gave Joyce Kozloff a call. His voice quivered as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a searing review of her latest work. Greenberg had scoffed at the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, and said that it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that was a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor freaked out” and as...
Dec 17, 2024•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 109
In the late 1950s, a Manhattan-born college student was running from an art history course at Barnard to a George Balanchine ballet practice at the storied School of American Ballet on 82nd Street and Broadway. Soon, she began to make connections between the old-school Russian ballet instructors who taught her “ferocious point class” and were constantly “aspiring to an abstract ideal,” if a ruthless one, and the extending lines of Anthony Caro’s sculptures striving toward an arabesque. These rig...
Dec 10, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 108
This August, journalist Moustafa Bayoumi broke the story that the first photo of a detainee in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site had been declassified. It shows an emaciated Ammar al-Baluchi, standing shackled and naked in a starkly white room. Subjected to years of torture, according to CIA protocol, the photo of the Pakistani detainee was meant “to document his physical condition at the time of transfer.” In a recent Hyperallergic opinion piece , Bayoumi reflected on the dark hist...
Dec 04, 2024•2 hr 12 min•Ep. 107
When Lucy Lippard left New York City for the tiny village of Galisteo, New Mexico, some were shocked: How could this giant of 20th-century art criticism, this leader in the fight for feminism and equitable representation in museums, leave the so-called “center of the art world” for such a rural area? Lippard is renowned not only for her strident activism but also for changing the game of art criticism itself. The author of a whopping 26 books, Lippard was a co-founder of both the standby press f...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 106
In 1915, Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel at a hardware store in New York City. He inscribed his signature and the date on its wooden handle. On the evening this episode is released, the fourth version of this classic “ready-made,” which he titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” will be auctioned off at Christie’s during their 20th Century Evening Sale . It’s estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million. How could a simple snow shovel be valued at such a steep price? Was Duchamp an unmatche...
Nov 19, 2024•58 min•Ep. 105
The sports world may be on the edge of their seats as we draw close to the 2024 Olympics in Paris. But the “Olympics of the art world” is already well underway in Italy: Hundreds of thousands of art lovers are flocking to the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 24. This massive exhibition has been held every two years with very few exceptions since 1895, when it was inaugurated as the world’s first art biennial. Visitors who devote a whole week of their time will still only be able to t...
Jul 25, 2024•43 min•Ep. 104
Shelley Niro (Kanien’kehaka) grew up watching her father craft faux tomahawks to sell to tourists who flocked to her birthplace, Niagara Falls. In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, she reflects on how witnessing him create these objects planted the seeds for her brilliant multidisciplinary art practice spanning film, sculpture, beading, and photography. She joined us in our Brooklyn studio for an interview, where she reflected on growing up in the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Nat...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 103
Anyone who remembers New York City’s “ golden age ” of graffiti in the late ’70s and early ’80s knows about the lion spray-painted on the handball court at Corlears Junior High School, roaring next to metallic blue letters spelling the word “Lee.” In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, we speak with its creator, Lee Quiñones, whose paintings of dragons, lions, and Howard the Duck on over 120 MTA train cars were part of the movement that brought light and color to the otherwise dingy, dark...
May 03, 2024•58 min•Ep. 102
Since 2009, Hyperallergic has published tens of thousands of articles about art. But who are the writers behind these posts? And what drives them to write about art of all things? Many of the authors who have passed through our virtual hallways have gone on to do incredible things, including publishing books on topics that they first wrote about or more fully developed through articles in Hyperallergic . In 2022, we held an event called “From Blog to Book” at Brooklyn’s pinkFrog cafe, where our ...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 101
We are thrilled to be back with a new episode of the Hyperallergic podcast. For our one hundredth episode, we spoke with legendary collage and mixed media artist Tommy Lannigan-Schmidt. His works, made from crinkly saran wrap and tin foil, emulate the gleam of precious metals and jewels in Catholic iconography. They reference his upbringing as a working class kid and altar boy in a Catholic community in Linden, New Jersey, where tin foil was an expensive luxury they could rarely afford. But they...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 100
If you’ve been online, and especially on Twitter, then you probably know the name Eli Valley and his brushy drawings that use the grotesque and absurd to make larger points about life, culture, and politics. But it wasn’t until the Trump administration that the New York City-based cartoonist was propelled into the public spotlight. Valley was attacked by a wide range of politicians, particularly Republicans, including Meghan McCain, who called the comic he drew of her “one of the most anti-Semit...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 99
Artists Tali Hinkis and Daniel Temkin have been at the leading edge of digitally informed contemporary art that explores the boundaries of programming, digital aesthetics, and the handmade. Their work is certainly unique, but they also share some commonalities around media-based art, glitch, and how their work in the gallery and online is circulated and experienced. I invited them to join me for a conversation to hear the thoughts of two intelligent artists who are fully engaged with the new wav...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 98
Last year, we published a dossier of statements by leading scholars supporting the fight of Tamara Lanier to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her ancestors from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Lanier, who lives in Norwich, Connecticut, had long heard stories through her family about an ancestor named Papa Renty, a learned man from Africa who was enslaved and brought to the United States under inhumane conditions. Those stories about Renty were important to her family and to the memory of ...
Apr 21, 2022•56 min•Ep. 97
Something incredible happened a few months ago. After Oklahoma lawyer Brett Chapman (Pawnee) started tweeting about the tomahawk of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, which is currently in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the revered object may actually be going home. His short messages asked why the tomahawk was in the care of that institution and not with one of the two federally recognized Ponca tribes. The questions raised eyebrows, and as...
Jul 21, 2021•24 min•Ep. 96
A painter who may be best known for her contribution to the Photorealism movement, Audrey Flack has been a working artist for roughly 70 years. Now at age 90, Flack reflects on the art world, from her days as part of the New York School of artists in the 1950s and 60s; her rise to fame as the only prominent female Photorealist; her embrace of sculpture and public art in the 1980s and 90s; and her return to painting only a few years ago. In this wide-ranging conversation, Flack also shares her ex...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 95
Tim Kang started his career as a software engineer for Deutsche Bank and invested a year of savings in Ethereum in early 2016, and let’s just say it’s paying off. The North Carolina native, who is known online as “illestrater,” is now a digital art collector and purchased works by Murat Pak and Beeple before all the recent auction sales and press coverage propelled them into the spotlight. He’s founded other artist platforms, including CUE Music and Universe.XYZ, and his latest organization, Sev...
May 31, 2021•53 min•Ep. 94
Diya Vij started her new job as Associate Curator of Creative Time just last fall, in the midst of the pandemic. She has since announced the first Creative Time Think Tank cohort, which includes La Tanya S. Autry, Caitlin Cherry, Sonia Guiñansaca, Namita Gupta Wiggers, and a number of other engaged voices of the art community. This new initiative invited people to submit proposals for an open call, drawing 200 individual or group applicants. The selected cohort will meet regularly for the next 1...
May 11, 2021•44 min•Ep. 93
Since 2001, Bitforms gallerist Steven Sacks has been exhibiting and selling digital art (though he hates that term) and building an audience and support network for artists working with new media. After Sara Ludy, one of the artists Bitforms regularly exhibits, told Hyperallergic about her plans to negotiate new more equitable contracts for any NFT she sells , I decided to speak to Sacks to hear about his experience during this pandemic period when NFTs dominate many mainstream conversations abo...
Mar 30, 2021•49 min•Ep. 92
Lindsay Howard is the head of community at the Foundation , one of the new platforms that have been part of the current wave of NFT art. She joined me in our Brooklyn studio to discuss the audience for crypto art and the collectors eager to fork over money for it. We also delve into what it could mean for an art scene facing the fact that the post-pandemic world may be very different for creators, sellers, collectors, journalists, scholars, and everyone else. This is the second podcast in a seri...
Mar 09, 2021•53 min•Ep. 91
Contemporary artist Addie Wagenknecht is a veteran of the blockchain space — as much of a seasoned pro as one can be in a field that’s only a decade old. She’s been observing the gold rush over NFTs in the last few weeks and agreed to join me on this episode to educate newbies about blockchains, NFTs, and all the issues they bring up. Are NFTs good for artists and the art community? The short answer is maybe. In addition to being an artist, Wagenknecht is Director of Technical Ecosystems at the ...
Mar 02, 2021•48 min•Ep. 90
Photographer Scout Tufankjian was glued to her screens like Armenians around the world following news of developments in Artsakh. After the ceasefire was announced, she decided to rush to the region, which she's visited numerous times before, to document the handover of territories to Azerbaijani forces. It was an emotional trip but one she knew she wanted to make. Best known for her photo book Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History Making Presidential Campaign , Tufankjian also created what was onc...
Feb 27, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 89
This week’s headlines were dominated by news that the Museum of Modern Art will not remove billionaire Leon Black from their board. Hyperallergic’s Jasmine Weber and Valentina Di Liscia join me to talk about it along with PEN America’s new handbook for persecuted artists , Mexico’s request that Christie’s auction house halt its sale of pre-Hispanic objects , the return of looted artifacts by the Museum of the Bible to Iraq and Egypt , and how some of the important quilters of Gee’s Bend now have...
Feb 08, 2021•26 min•Ep. 88
