Atelier

This special series of Atelier follows a group of American women who studied and practiced art in Paris at the height of the Belle Époque, then reunited in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as artists in one of the era’s most important printmaking collectives. The series features conversations with participants from the October 2026 symposium, Drawn Together: Trailblazing American Women Artists in Bell...

Now available in Arabic. Listen to the English version of the episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4xJRXq4eCRRqXjk1go0FLY?si=D33b2ASpREC-IEq0y2F1Pg In April 2024, after enduring six months of war, Palestinian artist Maha Al-Daya was forced to flee her home in Gaza with her family. Throughout her exodus, Al-Daya continued to make art using whatever surrounded her: charcoal from burnt wood...

This episode was recorded live at Reid Hall as part of the Voices in Journalism series. Award-winning journalist and author Alex Perry speaks with Phil Chetwynd , Global News Director at Agence France-Presse (AFP), on Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas , a gripping investigation into the human, political, and economic forces driving one of the world's most powerful industri...

In April 2024, after enduring six months of war, Palestinian artist Maha Al-Daya was forced to flee her home in Gaza with her family. Throughout her exodus, Al-Daya continued to make art using whatever surrounded her: charcoal from burnt wood, canvas from her tent, flyers dropped by the Israeli planes. It was the only way she knew how to process her loss and maintain her identity. Al-Daya is now a...

How can a young girl’s experience of starvation lead to metabolic issues in her grandchildren? The answer is transgenerational epigenetic inheritance – how biological responses to physical, emotional, or environmental stress can be passed down through generations.  In this episode, Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin, the Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research at the Zuckerman I...

An institution founded to welcome American women artists once turned Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller away at the door. Decades later, bringing a symposium on Fuller to that same place, Reid Hall, was a deliberate act of reckoning.  In this episode, Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and Brune Biebuyck, director of Reid Hall and...

Though archival work can piece together Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s work, exhibitions, and influence across generations, some things can only be known through the people who knew her: the everyday details, memories, and stories that bring an artist’s life into focus. In this episode, David Fuller, grandson of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, shares personal memories of the woman he knew as a gentle, tirel...

Artistic influence rarely travels in straight lines. It moves through chance encounters, shared geography, oral advice passed between generations, and letters that outlast the people who wrote them. Understanding how one artist shapes another requires tracing those paths across time and place, and accepting that the connections most worth studying are often the ones history has not yet named. In t...

A catalogue raisonné could be considered as an act of recovery, built from scattered archives, family memory, and chance encounters. Tracking an artist's full body of work means deciding, piece by piece, whether something is destroyed or simply unlocated, and living with the uncertainty that distinction requires. In this episode, art historian Erika Schneider discusses her years-long project to bu...

Art history has long organized itself around movements and groupings that determine whose work gets taught, preserved, and remembered. When the gaps in that history align with race, gender, and geography, what gets lost is structural. In this episode, artist and academic Catherine Hahn discusses how she first encountered Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller in a fifteen-minute segment of a Harlem Renaissance...

More than a cultural flourishing, the Harlem Renaissance was a deliberate act of remaking the image of Black America at a moment when it was suppressed and rendered invisible by the mainstream art world. For the women artists at its center, that effort operated under an additional pressure: the expectation that marriage and family should take precedence over a professional artistic career. In this...

Museums rarely build a permanent space around a single artist's life, but doing so can transform how an institution understands its own collection. The Danforth Art Museum's relationship to Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose family gifted nearly 400 works to the museum in 2006, has evolved through building a hard-won permanent gallery and a recreated studio space modeled on a single surviving photogr...

Founded on what its creator called "vindicated evidence," the Schomburg holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Black art in any public institution — including diaries, correspondence, photographs, poetry, and sculptures by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. In this episode, Crystal Moten, Associate Director of Collections at the Schomburg Center, and Tammi Lawson, curator of the Art and Artifac...

In this episode, Kellie Jones, Hans Hoffman Professor of Modern Art at Columbia University and MacArthur Fellow, and Heather Nickels, independent curator and doctoral candidate at Columbia, discuss Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller's place within African American art history, the structural conditions that shaped her access to sculpture as a medium, and what was lost — in practice and in the historical rec...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris drew young American artists with the promise of training unavailable at home. For African American artists, it also promised an escape from the racism that governed their professional lives in the United States, though that promise was not always kept. In this episode, art historian Renée Ater discusses Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller's three formative years in...

When the frameworks built to translate lived injustice into legal and political power come under direct assault, the question of how — and whether — to speak becomes a matter of survival. In this episode, recorded live at Reid Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University joins Keithley Woolward, associate director of the Columbia M.A. in History an...

While being a universal experience, sleep remains a poorly understood biological necessity whose mechanisms, disruptions, and cultural meanings have occupied scientists, philosophers, and artists for centuries. In this episode, recorded live at Reid Hall during the Nuit de l'imagination, concert pianist and harpsichordist Magdalena Stern‑Baczewska and sleep physician Jordan Stern trace the interse...

What can a drawing do that a photograph cannot? In an era of collapsing newsrooms and widespread distrust of the press, comics journalism has emerged as a form of reporting that slows the reader down, grants access to spaces traditional journalists cannot enter, and protects the anonymity of those whose stories most need telling. In this episode, Aubrey Gabel, assistant professor of French at Colu...

What happens when a physician steps outside the system she knows and begins to observe another, not as a critic, but as a learner? In this episode, Dr. Mirna Giordano reflects on what a visit to Paris's leading children's hospitals has revealed about how pediatric care is organized, communicated, and experienced across two very different healthcare cultures. A pediatric hospitalist and faculty at...

Cross-border journalism has reshaped investigative reporting over the past two decades — but as the model matures, it faces real pressure: inequities between partners, funding strain, and the question of whether collaboration can remain both ambitious and sustainable.  Recorded live at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, this episode brings together three leading practitioners t...

Museums today must reckon with an expanding set of demands—community, spectacle, education, preservation—and their buildings must reckon with them too. In this episode, Chris Dercon, directeur général of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, reflects on the museum’s new home in the center of Paris, reshaped by Jean Nouvel. The conversation closes with the next exhibition, a project by Gha...

Description: Recorded live at Reid Hall in Paris as part of the annual Saving Journalism Conference, this episode brings together journalists, researchers, legal experts, and content creators to examine one of the most consequential shifts in the modern media landscape: the rise of the influencer. What does it mean when influencers drive more political engagement than journalists? Who is accountab...

Irish composer Finola Merivale’s creative practice sits at the intersection of collaboration and solitude, structure and improvisation. In this episode, she discusses recent compositions shaped by field recordings and environmental research. She also discusses creative collaboration with other artists during her fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination and exploring the creative proce...

In the high-stakes world of pediatric heart transplantation, every saved life is inseparable from another family’s loss. In this episode, Dr. Teresa Lee reflects on the ethical and emotional dimensions of caring for children with heart failure and guiding families through transplant. Drawing inspiration from Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Réparer les vivants , she explores what it means to honor donor...

As climate change accelerates the unravelling of ecological and social systems, questions of knowledge, care, and responsibility become ever more urgent. In this episode, cultural and environmental anthropologist Paige West reflects on several decades of collaborative research in Papua New Guinea. Through long-term partnerships with local communities—most notably with fisheries expert and Indigeno...