Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part podcast series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. In this final episode, Flash takes a quick trip north to Harlem, where Idris Mignott and Pamela Sneed discuss the impact of AIDS on Black and Brown folks in the city. Then, she concludes with a reflection on the state of AIDS today, calling upon the perspectives of a queer elder who lives through the crisis and a younger person who was born after its peak....
Jul 02, 2025•13 min•Ep. 52
Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part podcast series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. In this penultimate episode, Flash concentrates on a single site: St. Vincent’s Hospital, which, in the 1980s, housed the first and largest AIDS ward on the East Coast. In conversation with friends Pamela Sneed, Idris Mignott, Agosto Machado, and Aldo Hernandez, Flash shares how this hospital touched their lives. She also introduces us to a new friend—some...
Jun 26, 2025•9 min•Ep. 51
Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part podcast series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. For episode four, Flash wanders through memories of Christopher Street and the queer histories that took shape there. She’s joined by fellow artist Agosto Machado, as well as familiar friends Pamela Sneed and Idris Mignott, to discuss different places and spaces along the street. They share memories of the people they met on Christopher Street, and the way...
Jun 20, 2025•12 min•Ep. 50
Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part podcast series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. Episode three looks at the ways people built community during the epidemic, and how these communities mobilized to spread knowledge, resources, and care. Flash is joined by friends Aldo Hernandez, Pamela Sneed, and Idris Mignott to discuss two organizations: the Clit Club and the Hetrick-Martin Institute. Learn more about Lola Flash, her work, and the stor...
Jun 11, 2025•15 min•Ep. 49
Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part series exploring New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. Episode two reunites Flash with her longtime friend Aldo Hernandez. They discuss their involvement with ACT UP and two sites that helped shape their activism: the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village and Aldo’s apartment near Tompkins Square Park. Learn more about Lola Flash, her work, and the stories shared in this project at https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/12...
Jun 06, 2025•17 min•Ep. 48
Join artist and photographer Lola Flash for a six-part series exploring the sites, sounds, and stories of New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. In this first episode, Flash introduces the series and the people you’ll meet along the way. Learn more about Lola Flash, her work, and the stories shared in this project at https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/1222
Jun 03, 2025•4 min•Ep. 47
A climate scientist and an architect discuss how design can be a force for positive environmental change. “I certainly remember, as a child growing up in the UK, we had a lot more snow than we do recently,” says UK-based climate scientist Ed Hawkins in this month’s episode of the Magazine podcast . Hawkins’s work, which visualizes the globe’s warming temperatures over the last 160 years, is striking in more ways than one, showing us just how quickly and dramatically the environment has been chan...
Apr 22, 2025•23 min•Ep. 46
Listen to a teen-led conversation with DonChristian Jones, about building spaces for belonging and memory. When artist DonChristian Jones started at MoMA as the inaugural Adobe Creative Resident, they created a vision for working with young people to share their stories about what art and community meant to them. In the summer of 2024, DonChristian—through their Residency at MoMA, along with the nonprofit they run, Public Assistant—and the Lower Eastside Girls Club collaborated on Frequency Gard...
Apr 15, 2025•13 min•Ep. 45
Hear from two artists and an educator about how they use improvisation to engage with art. Improvisation informs all kinds of creative practice. But how does chance really play out in an artist’s work? And how might it inform their everyday lives? Choreographer and dancer Mariana Valencia and artist and musician Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero test these ideas in the performance Jacklean (in rehearsal) . In this episode of the Magazine podcast , they discuss how chance operates in their work, what a perfo...
Mar 28, 2025•28 min•Ep. 44
The future of this complex emotion is still being written, but its history can offer interesting insights on our present day. “ Everybody fundamentally wants to be loved…to feel like they belong,” says historian Fay Bound Alberti. “But many people don’t find that, or they think about romantic love as the answer to all of their problems.” As a result, many of us end up feeling something else entirely: loneliness. Recent scientific research has described loneliness as a “modern epidemic,” an exper...
Feb 14, 2025•23 min•Ep. 43
Hear from artists, writers, and therapists about what happens when art and grief collide. When was the last time you grieved? What is for a person or an animal? A place or a thing? Did you experience grief at the loss of something intangible? These questions are not meant to cause pain. Rather, they offer an opportunity to acknowledge the grief that may be hiding within us—even if it’s been several years since you experienced the loss. Many artists have used their talents to document, understand...
Jan 29, 2025•27 min•Ep. 42
Society ridiculed the modern art she loved, so Lillie P. Bliss set out to create a museum to house it. It might be hard to imagine, but there was a time when the work of modern artists like Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne was ridiculed by the public. Despite all the criticism, three women founded a museum dedicated to art that was new. In this edition of the Magazine podcast , we explore the life and work of Lillie P. Bliss, one of MoMA’s three founders and a passionate advocat...
Jan 10, 2025•29 min•Ep. 41
A hundred years later, a Surrealist artwork continues to inspire curiosity in all who encounter it. “It is an object that—once you’ve seen it, it’s there in your imagination forever,” says former MoMA senior curator Anne Umland about Meret Oppenheim ’s Surrealist Object . Objects conservator Caitlin Gozo Richeson had a similar reaction on seeing the fur-lined teacup, saucer, and spoon for the first time as a MoMA intern. “I remember seeing it in the galleries and just being floored,” she recalls...
Oct 17, 2024•36 min•Ep. 40
Jazz in the Garden, Episode Three: “Return to the Garden” An overwhelmingly popular series of jazz concerts in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden in 1985 proved…a little too popular, and it would be nearly a decade before live jazz was once again a regular occurrence at the Museum. In our third and final episode, hear about a new generation of musicians who revived the legacy of jazz at the Museum in the 1990s, and brought it into the 21st century. Writer/producers: Naeem Douglas, Alex Halberstadt, Jason P...
Jun 24, 2024•19 min•Ep. 39
Hear from current and former teens about their experiences of growing up queer. When was the last time you thought about your teenage self? For a lot of us, our teenage years were an uncomfortable time. Sure, there were some good moments, but there were also a lot of confusing thoughts and big emotions that we couldn't figure out. For Pride 2024, we invite you to enter the world of Open Art Space (OAS), MoMA’s weekly drop-in program for LGBTQ+ high school students and their allies. You’ll hear f...
Jun 19, 2024•23 min•Ep. 38
Jazz in the Garden, Episode Two: “One Magic Summer” After a golden age of big names and big crowds throughout the 1960s, by the mid 1970s live jazz at MoMA had become something of an afterthought. But a magical summer of performances in 1985—including landmark concerts by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, “Butch” Morris, and the “saxophone colossus” himself, Sonny Rollins—put the music back at center stage. Join us for our second episode, and hear the story from Rollins and others who were there. Wri...
Jun 11, 2024•19 min•Ep. 37
Jazz in the Garden, Episode One: “In the Beginning” Our story begins on June 16, 1960, when George Wein and the Storyville Sextet played the first jazz concert in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden—and launched more than a decade of legendary performances and recordings from some of the leading lights of jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Sonny Rollins. In this episode, you’ll hear about the first era of jazz at MoMA from some of the musicians who were there. Writer/produ...
May 27, 2024•16 min•Ep. 36
Hear how this popular crop is helping craft a more sustainable future in Mexico. What do corn, craft, and Mexico have in common? The answer to this question comes in the form of Totomoxtle , a project and materials created by designer Fernando Laposse in collaboration with the village of Tonohuixtla. On view through July 7 in the exhibition Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design , Totomoxtle is an example of how good design can do more than please the eye—it can offer new pathways to ...
Apr 23, 2024•24 min•Ep. 35
Is art the secret to everlasting love? It’s no secret that some of the most powerful art has been inspired by love, that singular, indescribable feeling that, as it turns out, we are all capable of experiencing. “We all have the 12 brain areas that are critical for love,” says Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, a leading figure in the neuroscience of social connections. It doesn’t matter if that love we feel is for our friends, our community, or our romantic partners, the only thing that changes between th...
Feb 13, 2024•28 min•Ep. 34
Join meditation artist Dora Kamau for an eight-minute guided audio meditation that explores the spectrum of emotions and energies associated with each color. We’ll delve into color theory and the psychological and emotional effects colors can have on us. Composer James Pratley Watson, who created the soundscape for this meditation, aligned each color with its respective sonic “healing frequency,” in an attempt to infuse it with a deeper vibrational resonance. As Kamau leads you through this imme...
Jan 29, 2024•9 min•Ep. 33
A neuroscientist discusses how smell influences everything from emotions and relationships to identity and wellbeing. Our sense of smell is something many of us take for granted, but this sensation is more powerful than you may think. “It literally filters through all aspects of our existence,” explains neuroscientist Rachel Herz, “and the more we deliberately use our sense of smell…the better our brain health is, and even the general health of our bodies.” Smell also plays an important role in ...
Jan 17, 2024•10 min•Ep. 32
The founder of Harlem Chocolate Factory reflects on her lifelong journey with chocolate—and why you should never buy it at a low price. Inspired by artists’ inventive uses of chocolate, we interviewed Jessica Spaulding, local chocolatier and cofounder of Harlem Chocolate Factory. For Spaulding, chocolate offers endless opportunity: “I think that being a chocolatier is that space where you get to get into your Willy Wonka greatness and just let your imagination run wild.” For this month’s Ten Min...
Oct 19, 2023•10 min•Ep. 31
Beekeepers reflect on how fear transformed into love after they realized the huge impact of these tiny creatures. In 2016, Tim Jackson and Nicole Lindsey founded Detroit Hives , a local organization dedicated to transforming vacant lots into urban bee farms, where they not only produce honey for their communities but also host educational programs about the crucial role of bees. This month’s Ten Minutes podcast is all about bees—what they do, how they’re organized, and why we need them. Bees do ...
Sep 27, 2023•10 min•Ep. 30
Hear from the revolutionary artist about his iconic designs for the Black Panther newspaper. Emory Douglas has a battle cry: “Culture is a weapon.” And this chant reverberates throughout everything he does. In 1967, Douglas was chosen as the minister of culture and revolutionary artist for the Black Panther Party, where he designed the layouts and iconic imagery for the Black Panther newspaper. For this month’s Ten Minutes podcast , Douglas shares his path toward arts activism and the power of a...
Aug 18, 2023•11 min•Ep. 29
A maker of multisensory artworks reflects on the importance of listening to our surroundings. In 2014, Nigerian-born artist Emeka Ogboh moved from Lagos to Berlin. This experience marked not only a shift in his surroundings, but also a shift in his artwork. “Shuttling between two places,” Ogboh explains, “your brain has to do this switch. And that fusion of two places started occurring to me.” His immersive installation Lagos State of Mind III , currently on view in MoMA’s second-floor galleries...
Jul 14, 2023•10 min•Ep. 28
The winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars reflects on how drag changes us for the better. For this month’s Ten Minutes podcast , we spoke to the award-winning opera singer and drag queen Monét X Change about the anti-drag movement , which has led to protests across the country in response to the growing popularity of drag. “With all these legislations and bills to try to keep drag away from certain people,” says Monét X Change, “it feels like an attack on our livelihood and this, like, way to d...
Jun 21, 2023•10 min•Ep. 27
For many, a trip to MoMA means confronting questions of access: Does this space welcome people like me? Will I be given what I need in order to feel safe and included? At the core of this month’s Ten Minutes podcast is the question, What does access look like? According to Laura Aguilar’s work Access + Opportunity = Success , access includes, among other things, “the right to enter or use.” But Dr. Therí Pickens argues that access goes deeper than that. Using Aguilar’s work as a point of departu...
Apr 28, 2023•10 min•Ep. 26
What do video games reveal about our reality? In this Ten Minutes podcast , hear from gamer and content creator Amira Virgil, developer of the Melanin Pack for The Sims 4, about her vision to create a more accurate and inclusive version of the game. Access a transcript of the conversation here: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/778
Mar 07, 2023•10 min•Ep. 20
In Bangladesh, a garment worker barely makes enough money to cover the cost of rent. Discover the truth about the unfair labor practices behind many of the clothes we wear. In this Ten Minutes podcast episode, Kalpona Akter, founder of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS), describes the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and some of the ways we can advocate for fair labor practices when making purchases. Access a transcript of the conversation here: https://www.moma.org/magazi...
Mar 03, 2023•9 min•Ep. 25
What is the relationship between literature and modern art? Join Adam F. Bradley, English professor and co-editor of Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, for a discussion about race and invisibility on the written page and beyond. Discover Ellison's iconic book Invisible Man and the ways it continues to resonate with readers (and artists) 70 years after its original publication. Access a transcript of the conversation here: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/751...
Mar 01, 2023•10 min•Ep. 21
