Archie Moore has won the top honour at one of the world's most prestigious and oldest art festivals – the Venice Biennale-- for a monumental work showing thousands of years of family lineage, and invoking lives lost under the colonial state. Monsignor Alberto Rocca is an Italian priest and art curator who has a singular job: accompanying pages from Leonardo Da Vinci 's Codex Atlanticus, to the other side of the world. This Codex is the largest collection of Leonardo's drawings and notes, made up...
Apr 24, 2024•54 min
Nicholas Mangan is drawn to the stories behind some of our most contentious commodities: phosphate from Nauru, copper from Bougainville and cryptocurrency, which Nick compares to an ancient form of stone money from Yap, a Micronesian island. Nick takes the viewer into these histories through sculptural installations and intriguing films. His survey exhibition World Undone is now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. My Thing is… GPS Art. ABC science reporter Belinda Smith makes art on ...
Apr 17, 2024•54 min
Visnja Brdar's art motto is “The more nothing, the better”. She is one of this country’s most internationally successful graphic designers, the child of Croatian migrants who took her solo agency from Melbourne to New York, head-first into the competitive world of international branding -- and she's the subject of the first significant art survey of a female graphic designer in Australia, Visnja Brdar: Design Exalted at MUMA. Inner sanctum is the title of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian...
Apr 10, 2024•54 min
Katy Hessel's podcast and bestselling book on the great women artists ride the wave of interest in a parallel cannon of art, where women have long been missing. So, what sparked her work correcting the record, and what has changed since she started? Katy is appearing at Sydney Writers Festival and other book events in Australia in May. Ellen Dahl ventured out to a frozen archipelago in the Arctic Ocean to take photos. The striking images won her Australia's National Photography Prize. She speaks...
Apr 02, 2024•54 min
Australia's art resale royalty scheme was supposed to help artists (or their families) get a small percentage when paintings were re-sold at auction for big bucks, particularly Indigenous artists. But it hasn't gone according to plan. ABC national business reporter Emilia Terzon tells Daniel about her year-long investigation into what many says is an unjust state of affairs. For four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about the most profound and difficult subjects in Austr...
Mar 26, 2024•54 min
Interviewing visual artists is just one of the things that Jennifer Higgie has mastered in her decades-long career at the helm of Frieze magazine, as a writer, reviewer and podcast host. Daniel speaks with London-based Jennifer as her new podcast series for the National Gallery of Australia is released. Listen to Jennifer and Daniel's conversation about women artists and the spirit world . In 2007, a group of 'new media' artists came together in India's largest city to form CAMP, a studio with a...
Mar 19, 2024•54 min
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Mar 12, 2024•54 min
We meet the Maori artist who’s single-handedly reviving the lost cultural tradition of barkcloth making. As a right-wing conservative government winds back the prevalence of Maori culture and the teaching of Te Reo Maori, Nikau Hindin is collaborating with artists from across the Great Ocean for the Biennale of Sydney . She explains the complexities and risks in trying to breathe new life into a cultural practice after more than a century. My Art Crush …is Lavinia Fontana. National Gallery of Vi...
Mar 05, 2024•54 min
Maria Madeira escaped the Indonesian invasion of Timor Leste in 1975, to end up in a refugee camp in Portugal. In 2005 she returned as the first artist to hold a solo exhibition there, ever. Now the artist, who came to Australia in 1983, is representing Timor Leste at the Venice Biennale . A fountain of drool, the realities of catheter bags and people 'seeing but pretending not to see': Yucky is an exhibition developed by artist Sam Petersen that confronts ideas of 'yuckiness' and other prejudic...
Feb 27, 2024•54 min
Emeka Ogboh used years of field recordings to create layered soundscapes of his hometown, Lagos in Nigeria. When he moved to Berlin, he added music and combined the sounds of both global cities in critically acclaimed albums. Now Emeka is in nipaluna / Hobart for Mona Foma , where he's making work with the locals – including 2023 Tasmanian of the Year John Kamara . My Thing is... the chickenosaurus. As a teenager, JESWRI took to tagging to 'disrupt' the omnipresent advertising in his inner-city ...
Feb 20, 2024•54 min
So, you're given the keys to Australia's largest visual art festival, what next? Romanian-born curator Cosmin Costinas and Colombian Inti Guerrero are the co-directors of the Sydney Biennale. The art power couple tell us how they got to know Australian art and how they selected 116 artists from dozens of countries to showcase a world of contemporary art in this year's Biennale Ten Thousand Suns . My Thing is... the 'olla'. Ceramic artist Richilde Flavell has been inspired by the ancient plant wa...
Feb 13, 2024•54 min
Helen Molesworth is a curator and writer who became widely known for her hit podcast Death of an Artist , about the artist Ana Mendieta, whose husband sculptor Carl Andre was charged then acquitted of her murder in the 1980s. Carl Andre died last week, and Helen has a book of collected art writing out: Open Questions: Thirty years of writing about art . Daniel visits the backyard studio of Olana Janfa . The Ethiopian-Norwegian artist started painting relatively recently but his distinct voice, d...
Feb 06, 2024•54 min
When you see a David Shrigley picture – at worst, you’ll chuckle, at best you’ll laugh out loud every time you think of it (which is sometimes years later.) The Shrigley universe is filled with badly drawn hands, everyday disappointment, and simple pleasures. In short, it’s sublimely silly and pretty dark. Daniel speaks with the British artist during his Australian visit for the National Gallery of Victoria's Triennial . We meet up with Australian artist Daniel Boyd , fresh from his first major ...
Jan 30, 2024•54 min
Tacita Dean is one of the UK's most acclaimed artists, best known for working with 16mm analogue film. Daniel speaks with her about recent work on important living artists, and her huge, mesmerising chalk drawings, from her exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art . My Thing is... getting squished. Actor and choreographer Smac McCreanor went viral for her Hydraulic Press Girl videos, imitating household objects getting crushed by a hydraulic press. Now she's in the art gallery -- featur...
Jan 23, 2024•54 min
Naomi Hobson grew up on some of the most beautiful country on the continent, Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland, and is named after the hoop pine that grows there. Her southern Kaantju and Umpila culture has always been a driving force in her art, from bold expressive paintings to ceramics and photography. Her series Adolescent Wonderland features teenagers in her small community of Coen, displaying their humour, creativity and brilliance. First aired March 2023. My Thing is ...the Pers...
Jan 16, 2024•54 min
Painter Prudence Flint has a career spanning 35 years, best known for enigmatic pictures of female protagonists in surreal domestic scenes. Despite a serious local following, her paintings have proved much more popular overseas, and she only produces around eight a year. All situate the viewer in an intriguing psychological space -- but does the painter ever feel too exposed? A Beginner’s guide to art openings. The art exhibition opening is a rite of passage for artists and art lovers alike, but...
Jan 09, 2024•54 min
Daniel speaks with the pioneering US photographer, activist and UCLA Professor Catherine Opie , whose early portraits of her genderqueer community challenged homophobia and moral panic during the heightened atmosphere of the AIDS epidemic. Catherine has gone to become one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographers. Binding Ties is the first survey of her work in Australia. My Thing is… improvising music to art. Musician Rosie Westbrook is hired by galleries and sometimes artists t...
Jan 02, 2024•54 min
When did artists begin doing ‘residencies’? From the patronage system of Renaissance Italy, to artists’ colonies of the 19th Century and the decades-long stint of an artist-in-residence at the NYC Sanitation Department, researcher Amaara Raheem tells us the history and ideas behind the Artist-in-Residence. Producer Lisa Divissi catches up with the artist-in-residence of Melbourne’s Footscray Railway Station, David Wells . And artists Nicole Barakat , Nikki Lam and Gegee Ayurzana share messages f...
Dec 26, 2023•54 min
Jerry Saltz is the Pulitzer prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine. Before he turned his hand to writing at the age of 40, he drove long-haul trucks and was a failed visual artist. Jerry reckons the gatekeepers of the art world have effectively 'effed off' and now anyone can —and must— take part. Jerry Saltz's latest book of essays is Art is Life . First broadcast January 2023. Many great artists have claimed to communicate with the spirit world, especially in the heyday of Theosophy and...
Dec 19, 2023•54 min
On our final show of the year, we look at the work and career of the great Emily Kam Kngwarray. A senior Anmatyerr woman from Utopia who took up painting in her 70s, Kngwarray is arguably the most significant contemporary artist from Australia to emerge in the twentieth century. Daniel speaks with Hetti Perkins, the co-curator of a summer blockbuster showcasing Kngwarray's work on at the National Gallery of Australia, as well as art historian Stephen Gilchrist. That's a wrap, 2023! Daniel is joi...
Dec 12, 2023•54 min
In the middle of a rarefied gallery or in a busy city square, a bronze statue of a woman looms in front of you. But this figure isn’t on a plinth or striking a heroic pose: she’s an ordinary modern woman, looking at her phone with a calm detachment. It’s said the monument Reaching Out is only the third public statue in Britain of a Black woman. The artist behind it is Thomas J Price - one of the country’s leading contemporary artists, who takes on the problem of colonial monuments and representa...
Dec 05, 2023•54 min
Lee Miller cut a glamorous figure among the Bohemian art circles of Paris. As a fashion model she captured the eye and heart of Man Ray; as a gifted photographer she rivalled his artistic vision, photographing their world with Surrealist wit and a feminist conviction. Lee's career lasted 16 years up until her time as a photojournalist in Nazi occupied Europe, when the horrors of the Holocaust led her to quit photography. Antony Penrose is Lee Miller’s only child and in charge of her archive whic...
Nov 28, 2023•54 min
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Nov 21, 2023•54 min
Motherhood, childhood wounds and Freudian nightmares preoccupied the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who was especially iconic to younger followers in the latter part of her life. One of them was Philip Larratt-Smith, who became her literary archivist. He talks to Daniel about the importance of psychoanalysis on the artist. A new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. My thing is... the 'souvenirs' of consumerism. Artist Joyce Lubotzky takes plastic things f...
Nov 14, 2023•54 min
A culture that flourished 3,500 years ago in Thailand. They made jewellery and ceramics, not war. You may never have heard of Ban Chiang —That’s possibly because the objects that tell the story of this fascinating archaeological site are in limbo, caught between voracious collectors, tomb-raiding locals and undercover federal agents. Art historian Dr Melody Rod-ari tells Daniel the story. My Thing is... Black Histories. Prince made 'Purple Rain' famous, but five years later in 1989, a group of C...
Nov 07, 2023•54 min
Vasily Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract painting, writing influential theories on spirituality and colour. But for all his correspondence, his inner life can be hidden to art historians, the Guggenheim's Megan Fontanella tells Daniel. And with the discovery of earlier abstract painters like Hilma Af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, does labelling Kandinsky 'the first' still apply? Daniel speaks to Megan on the new eve of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Inside the Victorian Spiritualist ...
Oct 31, 2023•54 min
The town of New Norcia in WA is a monastery in the bush, home to a community of Benedictine monks and a treasure chest of 17th and 16th c. European religious art -- all of which was stolen in a brazen heist in 1986. It's an art crime that RN's Marc Fennell set out to unpack with art historian and fraud expert Dr Pamela James in a new SBS TV series. My Thing is… The Resilience Coat. Rowena and Angela Foong, from the label High Tea with Mrs Woo, have designed a coat for all bodies, all trends and ...
Oct 24, 2023•54 min
Catherine Sarah Young is an artist working with science to talk about the climate crisis. Most recently, she's making art about petrichor -- the smell of recent rain emanating from the earth, and what it might be like when fire and flood obliterate it... or what petrichor smells like on Mars! Catherine is the Art Show's ABC RN Top 5 resident. When James Tylor discovered the laborious but beautiful 19th C. photography method of daguerreotype, he found a medium that expressed the darkness of histo...
Oct 17, 2023•54 min
US artist Lonnie Holley is a prolific maker of things - whether it’s his assemblages of found objects or the fluid, jazz-style improvisations of his music. He’s one of those polymath creative spirits who don’t separate one artform from the other. But his life of improvisational creativity wasn’t a certainty for Lonnie, who was born 73 years ago in the Jim Crow era in a hotbed of racial politics in America’s Deep South. Classicist Mary Beard examines art inspired by the lives and excesses of the ...
Oct 10, 2023•54 min
We start this week's episode on a lapping city harbour where Quandamooka artist Megan Cope has prepared 85,000 oyster shells for her monumental artwork Whispers for the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House — before that, it's where Gadigal people gathered for thousands of years. Tarek Atoui is attuned to the sounds of harbours -- from Sydney to Beirut, Porto to Singapore, the Lebanese sound artist records the many frequencies and sounds that make up the bodies of water around which cities ...
Oct 03, 2023•54 min
