In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s landscape would be dramatically altered without the mosques of the city. In Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), Ünver Rüstem takes a stab of a slice of that history, arguing that we should see the eighteenth-century Baroque...
Jul 27, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 102
Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of d...
Jul 27, 2025•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 81
The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these ...
Jul 26, 2025•38 min•Ep. 68
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet and visual artist Zachary Logan about his beautiful collection of poetry and art, Green (Radiant Press, 2025). An exciting new collection of ekphrastic poems accompanied by a compilation of green sketches via the lens of a queer poet and visual artist. Zachari Logan carried a sketchbook as he travelled the world and responded to iconic artwork as well as art that once existed but is now lost, destroyed, or far away. Whimsical art and thou...
Jul 24, 2025•50 min
Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive and accessible coverage of the materials and techniques that are encountered in furniture of this century. After putting the design, manufacture and conservation of twentieth-century furniture into context, the volume then offers an A-Z of materials organised into 12 chapters. Within each chapter a wide variety of material types are discussed, observed, analysed and contextualised, and a list of further sources ...
Jul 18, 2025•46 min•Ep. 8
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between th...
Jul 15, 2025•40 min
How can art shape historical memory and national identity? And how can cultural heritage and historical references be used to enact a vision of a nation? In Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024), Lanlan Kuang explores these questions through the lens of Dunhuang expressive arts — a twentieth-century music and dance performance style inspired by the images, music descriptions, and narratives found in the Dunhuang Mogao Gro...
Jul 15, 2025•56 min
No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But what about women? As shown by Juliet Rix in London's Statues of Women (SafeHaven Books, 2025), women are surprisingly well represented amongst London’s statues. Recent years have seen new statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington, even boxer Nicola Adams in Brent. But there are also groundbreaking statues commemo...
Jul 14, 2025•48 min•Ep. 176
Along with the rise of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the interwar years in Italy also saw the widespread development of its modernist interior design and furnishing practices. While the regime’s politics were overtly manifest in monumental government architecture, Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Ignacio G. Galán examines the subtler yet effective role of household goods and decor in the cultivation of Italy’s exclusionary sens...
Jul 12, 2025•55 min
The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch (Quickthorn, 2025), shares the deeper story of The Red Dress, its embroiderers and Kirstie Macleod's own story whilst opening up the wider issues the garment prompts for its audiences through thematic essays by individuals involved in the greater project on subjects such as empowerment, finding voice, feminism, community and healing trauma. This project offered a platform for people, mostly women, who are vulnerable and live in poverty to share their storie...
Jul 09, 2025•31 min
In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Lexi Eikelboom. Dr Lexi Eikelboom is both a visual artist and a scholar of philosophical theology. Her academic work analyses aesthetic concepts such as rhythm and form as way to illuminate the human implications of the philosophical arguments in which the concepts appear. She also leads collaborative projects investigating art as a form of thinking and the effects of engagement with art on theoretical work. They discuss rhythm and time in cubist painting, lett...
Jul 07, 2025•34 min
In the sixth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with John Holmstrom a comic illustrator and founder of Punk magazine. In the early 1970s, Holmstrom moved from suburban Connecticut to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts where he studied under the celebrated comic illustrator Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman creator of MAD magazine. In 1975, Holmstrom conceived the idea for Punk Magazine by collaborating with Ged Dunn and Eddie “Legs” McNeil as an independent zine to ...
Jul 06, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police” for violating hijab rules. Beyond its feminist undertones and the remarkable courage of the young protesters, what sets this uprising apart from previous ones is the abundant and diverse art it has inspired. This book, rather than merely analyzing the artworks that garnered atte...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 1 min
What happens when the 'modern woman' ages? Modernist Poetics of Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2025) answers this question by being the first book-length study of three late modernist women's writers. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, who are often thought of as the quintessentially youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s. Taking a literary, ageing studies and cultural criticism approach, this...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr
Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe’s rebirth. The Renaissance was c...
Jun 22, 2025•52 min
A young girl forms a special connection to the modernist painter Florine Stettheimer, and imagines herself joining in on Florine’s exciting life. When a young girl visits the museum, she finds an unexpected friend in a self-portrait of Florine Stettheimer. They’re both artists; they both have Jewish families; they even look alike! Florine’s life was wild and glamorous. She painted people in flight and buildings that grew from the ground like crooked trees, bright colors and shapes and animals. S...
Jun 21, 2025•42 min
Ten beautifully illustrated essays tell the stories of handcrafted objects and their makers, providing inspiration and insight into Black history and craftsmanship. Black artisans have long been central to American art and design, creating innovative and highly desired work against immense odds. Atlanta-based chairmaker and scholar Robell Awake explores the stories behind ten cornerstones of Black craft, from the celebrated wooden chairs of Richard Poynor, an enslaved craftsman who began a dynas...
Jun 17, 2025•50 min
Andreas Beyer joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist (Reaktion, 2025). Benvenuto Cellini was a murderer, thief, lover of all genders, rival of popes and princes, as well as an ingenious artist. In his legendary autobiography, the Vita , Cellini describes his activities vividly and in lurid detail. Many of the most disturbing passages have been dismissed as fiction, but in this clear-eyed portrayal, Andreas Beyer argues that these se...
Jun 17, 2025•44 min
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in Southern California provided early filmmakers with a template for building a myth-making business and envisioning ideal moviegoers. These art forms positioned California as a land of transformative experiences and catapulted the dusty backwater town of Los Angeles to the largest city on the West Coast by 1915. Photography aided the Southern Pac...
Jun 11, 2025•53 min
How can cultural organisations better support diversity? In Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector antonio c. cuyler, Professor of Music in Entrepreneurship & Leadership and Faculty Associate in Voice & Opera in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD), and Faculty Associate in the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan , explores a series of practical interventions that can shape creative institutions implementation of access, diversity, equity, and ...
Jun 10, 2025•41 min
Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the ...
Jun 09, 2025•44 min•Ep. 51
In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Timothy Deane-Freeman. Dr Timothy Deane-Freeman works as a teacher and researcher in philosophy in Naarm/Melbourne. His work is primarily focussed on the intersection of politics and art, and the ways in which sensible materials can be combined to produce different forms of thought. He is currently co-editing a book on philosophical accounts of artistic agency. They discuss bourgeoise culture, shock, chronopolitics, and Afrofuturism as the place of the new. A t...
Jun 08, 2025•34 min
How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025), Katie Beswick , a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines this question by analysing the figure of the ‘slag’ across a range of cultural forms, including theatre and television. Alongside a history of the idea of the ‘slag’, the book draws on deep case studies of key artists, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carra...
May 31, 2025•41 min
Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious process of securing a letter using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it becomes its own envelope. This almost entirely forgotten practice, used by historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I and her spies to Japanese samurai lords, was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social ...
May 27, 2025•44 min
Join me for conversation with Dr. Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia) about her book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory (Duke University Press, 2025). Our discussion brought us to topics like the artists’ muse, the modern laborer, and other figures precariously suspended between the object/subject dialectic. In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction , ...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 171
A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated m...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 46
Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024) explores the visual culture of national recollection in modern and contemporary East Asia by emphasizing memories that are under the continuous process of construction, reinforcement, alteration, resistance, and contestation. Expanding the discussion of memory into visual culture by exploring various visual sites of recollection, and the diverse ways commemoration is represented in visual, c...
May 09, 2025•35 min•Ep. 168
Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures , extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. In Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts (MIT Press, 2025), Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like D...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 281
Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, in Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (Lund Humphries, 2023) Dr. Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous en...
May 04, 2025•46 min•Ep. 116
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today. In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021), Dr. Karen L. Cox offers an eye-op...
Apr 29, 2025•54 min•Ep. 264
