The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 783 features artist  Cynthia Daignault. The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston is presenting "Cynthia Daignault: Valley" through January 18, 2027. The exhibition features a monumental, multi-panel paintings installation that shows the most iconic Miwuk landscape: an elevated view looking east into the Yosemite Valley that includes El Capitan on the left and Bridalveil Fall on the r...

Episode No. 782 features artist  Terry Winters , and remembers the late artist Ursula von Rydingsvard. The Menil Collection, Houston is showing "Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry" through April 4, 2027. The exhibition presents 44 prints and works on paper recently acquired by the museum. It was curated by Sophie Asakura. Four four decades Winters has joined abstraction to addresses of the natural...

Episode No. 781 features artist  Clare Rojas and curator Hillary Olcutt. The Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art is presenting "Clare Rojas: Returning" a survey of 60 works the Ohio-born Rojas has made mostly over the last decade. It particularly spotlights works Rojas has made that examine the cyclical nature of life. "Rojas" was curated by Katherine Brodbeck and is on view through February 7, 2027. Ro...

Episode No. 780 features curator  Edward Town and author Tim Barringer , and curator Leigh Arnold. The Yale Center for British Art is presenting Town's "John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined" through July 25, 2027. The exhibition examines Constable's open-air paintings, pictures which helped transform European landscape painting, and which had significant impacts on United States painters too....

Episode No. 779 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday weekend clips show featuring artist Stacy Kranitz. This week Terrible Baby Books is publishing Kranitz's Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down , a new book that examines the evolving representation of the Appalachian mountaineer, tracing how poverty in the region has been constructed, challenged, and reimagined over time. Work in the bo...

Episode No. 778 features artist  Celeste Rapone. The MCA Chicago is presenting "Atrium Project: Celeste Rapone" in the museum's two-story entrance space through Jun 20, 2027. The presentation was organized by Jamillah James with Korina Hernandez. Rapone's work centers domesticity, intimacy, and daily life, particularly as experienced by women. She has been included in exhibitions at the Institute...

Episode No. 777 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Jitish Kallat. The Menil Drawing Institute is presenting "Wall Drawing: Series: Jitish Kallat" through August 8, 2027. For the exhibition Kallat has produced a site-specific wall drawing that grows out of his years-long engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 1958 US Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. T...

Episode No. 776 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Mark Thomas Gibson and curator Ben Colman. The Tang Museum at Skidmore College is presenting "Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation," a survey of Gibson's recent considerations of US history and the relationship between our past and our present. The exhibition was curated by Ian Berry in collaboration with the artist and is on vi...

Episode No. 775 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historian Richard J. Powell and curator Danielle Canter. Powell is the author of "Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect," which was just published by Princeton University Press. The book examines the historical and cultural work color does in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Sa...

Episode No. 774 is a summer clips episode featuring curators  Shawnya L. Harris  and  Jeffrey Richmond-Moll. Harris and Richmond-Moll are the curators of  "Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone" at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. The exhibition presents the life and work of nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis in the context of her contemporaries and artist...

Episode No. 773 is a summer clips episode featuring artist  Lotus L. Kang. The Frye Art Museum, Seattle is showing "Lotus L. Kang: I hear the hollow boom of time" through September 27. The installation features large sheets of unfixed industrial film that have been exposed to light sources as part of a process Kang calls 'tanning,' a process that aligns film's surface to skin. Sculptures that incl...

Episode No. 772 features art historians  Zanna Gilbert and Andrew Perchuk ; and curator Meg Linton , museum director Taras Matla , and associate museum director Steve Comba. Along with Emily Pugh, Gilbert and Perchuk are the project leads for "Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles," a Getty Research Institute project that has, among other things, digitized Ed Ruscha's five-decade-long photographic pr...

Episode No. 771 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a summer clips episode featuring art historian Michael W. Cole. Princeton University Press has just published Cole's Sofonisba's Lesson, New Edition: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work.  The book updates Cole's 2020 edition of the book, an assessment of Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), a pathbreaking painter who substantially made it possible for...

Episode No. 770 features former museum director,  former Association of Art Museum Directors president, and Souls Grown Deep president Maxwell L. Anderson, and Oakland Museum of California director Lori Fogarty. With the Trump administration and its Congressional allies having threatened, diminished, or attacked national cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center...

Episode No. 769 features a conversation with  Betye Saar recorded in 2016. Saar died on Sunday a few days short of her one hundredth birthday. Saar, known especially for her use of assemblage and her often pioneering address of complicated and often troubling US, and diasporic African and Caribbean histories, was one of the most influential artists of the last 60 years. Generations of artists, inc...

Episode No. 768 features artist  Derrick Adams. The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston is presenting "Derrick Adams: View Master" through September 7. It is the first mid-career survey of Adams' twenty-year career. The exhibition was curated by Dexter Wimberly and Tessa Bachi Haas. An Adams monograph was published by Monacelli in association with Gagosian, an art dealership chain, last year in a...

Episode No. 767 features artist  Young Joon Kwak and curator Laura Igoe. Kwak is featured in the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Curated by Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guerrero with assistance from Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, it's on view through August 23. Kwak uses sculpture, performance, and collective action to explore bodily transformation, intima...

Episode No. 766 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin , and artist Nic Nicosia. The Museum of Modern Art, New York is presenting "Marcel Duchamp" through August 22. The exhibition, the first Duchamp retrospective in the United States since 1973, features over 300 works from across Duchamp's career. The show was curated by Affron, Kuo, and Te...

Episode No. 765 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist  Hew Locke. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston is presenting "Hew Locke: Passages," the first US survey of Locke's career, through September 13. Across sculpture, painting, photography and installations, Locke's work considers colonialism, its power, and the ways in which we respond to colonialism and its impacts. Locke, who is Guyanese-Brit...

Episode No. 764 features artist  Louis Fratino. The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting "Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again" through September 6. The exhibition shows how Matisse -- specifically Baltimore's great Matisse collection -- has informed Fratino's painting. The exhibition was co-curated by Virginia Anderson and Katy Rothkopf. Fratino, who earned his undergraduate degree at Ba...

Episode No. 763 is a summer clips episode featuring artist  Jes Fan . The Yale University Art Gallery is presenting "Jes Fan: Unbounded" through June 28. The exhibition spotlights how  Fan makes sculptures that combine elegant abstract forms with an experimental and innovative approach to materials. Fan's sculptures often explore the porousness of identity, and incorporate living matter, such horm...

Episode No. 762 features artist  John Akomfrah. The Menil Collection, Houston is showing "John Akomfrah: The Hour of The Dog" through October 11. The work, co-commissioned by the Menil and the Baltimore Museum of Art, explores the history of the US civil rights movement between 1954 and 1963. The presentation was curated by Michelle White and Cecilia Wichmann. Akomfrah is one of the world's most c...

Episode No. 761 features artists  Denzil Forrester and William Wylie. Forrester is featured in  "Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 20. The exhibition explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art produced in the Caribbean, New York, London, and be...

Episode No. 760 features curators  Marko Daniel and Elsa Smithgall , and curator Rachel Vogel. With Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Daniel and Smithgall are the co-curators of "Miró and the United States" at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. The exhibition explores the exchanges between Joan Miró and the mid-twentieth-century US art scene. Not only did Miró have retrospectives at th...

Episode No. 759 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Sarah Humphreville . With Eric Crosby, Humphreville is the co-curator of "Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery." The exhibition surveys Abercrombie's synthesis of surrealism, landscape, portraiture and still-life, and is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date. It is at the Milwaukee Art Museum...