About Art

Pritzker Prize-winning American architect and educator Thom Mayne is the founder of Morphosis, an innovative architecture, urbanism, and design collective. Named after the Greek term for ‘to form or be in formation’ – Morphosis has gained recognition for its sustainable designs. Notable projects include the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Emerson College in Los Angeles, New York’s Co...

Artist Sarah Cain creates playful, abstract paintings and installations that feature a bold use of color, improvisation, and a variety of perspectives. Cain redefines abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience – intentionally subverting male-dominated art historical traditions. Known for expansive, site-specific murals, often she makes decisio...

Artist Narsiso Martinez details the vital, but often unseen, labor carried out by farmworkers in the United States in his mixed media installations, predominantly using discarded cardboard produce boxes. His work resonates with the spirit of social realism from the 1930s – drawing from his personal experiences as a former farmworker.  In 2023, Martinez was honored with the prestigious Frieze Impac...

Allison Berg, Founder and Executive Director of the A&L Berg Foundation, is a lawyer turned arts and culture writer, philanthropist, museum trustee, art collector,  producer  and more. Her work is informed by the desire to ensure everyone has access to equity in career pathways along with inclusive platforms for their narratives. Allison is LALA Magazine’s former executive editor and has contr...

Simphiwe Ndzube stitches together a subjective account of the Black experience in past and present-day South Africa from a mythological perspective creating universes with his sculptures, paintings, and assemblages. Living and working between Los Angeles and Cape Town, South Africa, Ndzube’s work was recently on view in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold exhibition at the Orange County Mus...

Catherine Opie is an American photographer known for her portraits and landscapes that explore the complexities of contemporary life. Opie documents how individuals interact with the spaces they inhabit, expanding the dialogue on community, identity, and the marginalized subcultures of America. She was a recipient of The Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art...

Robert King “Bob” Wittman is a highly decorated former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who was assigned to the Philadelphia Field Division from 1988 to 2008. Having trained in art, antiques, jewelry and gem identification, Wittman served as the FBI's "top investigator and coordinator in cases involving art theft and art fraud". During his 20 years with the FBI, Wittman...

Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri founded the gallery that united their surnames in Mexico City in 1999, and soon became an international reference for Latin America and to the world: kurimanzutto. The gallery helped plant the seeds of Mexico City’s thriving art scene. Recently the husband-and-wife couple expanded their North American presence to a 622 sqm New York gallery that their artists helped de...

Neville Wakefield is a curator and writer interested in exploring the ways in which art behaves outside of institutional contexts. He offers that art is most successful, enlightening, and provocative when it goes beyond stereotypical labels and white spaces and is revealed in new spaces that suggest new paradigms. Previously MoMA PS1’s Senior Curatorial Advisor and Frieze Projects’ Curator, Wakefi...

Hilary Pecis makes paintings and drawings in which tableaus rich with interlocking fields of saturated color, geometric patterning, and bold linework provide views of sun-drenched domestic still lifes and landscape environments. Books crowding a coffee table, the remains of a dinner party, and terrains lush with Southern California succulents make frequent appearances in her work; these meticulous...

This episode is a rare, live conversation between Zuckerman and artist Mark Manders recorded as part of an exhibition opening walk through in Los Angeles! For more than three decades, Mark Manders has developed an endless self-portrait in the form of sculpture, still life, and architectural plans. Described by the artist as his ongoing “self-portrait as a building,” Manders’ works present mysterio...

Derrick Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Adams probes how the experiences and narratives of Black communities are reflected in and refracted by American history, entertainment, consumerism, iconography, and the dynamic relationship between personal identity and cultural environment. Expanding the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture, through s...

Kelly Crow is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering the ever-changing contemporary art market since 2006. Her work includes reports on sales at auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's and analyses of the funding and buying practices of the world's leading arts institutions, artists, and collectors. Extending her expertise beyond the newsroom, Crow has assisted in teaching...

Jeffrey Deitch has been a prominent player in contemporary art for over fifty years. Born in 1952 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Deitch went on to study at Wesleyan University, turning his primary attention from economics to art history. As a college student, he opened his first gallery in 1972 in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1978 Deitch received his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he au...

Angel Otero is an artist known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience. Otero is best known for the Oil Skin works he began in 2010, an ongoing series that dem...

With Episode 106 we have changed a few things up! First, our name, we have dropped the word conversations from the podcast title.  The podcast is “About Art” so that’s what we’re now calling it! Simple and elegant. Second, we added a new photo! The previous one was when OCMA/Orange County Museum of Art was under construction, the new one is from the opening press conference. And, third, this...

Dara Birnbaum is a groundbreaking figure in the emergence of media art. Among the earliest practitioners working in video, among the first women to adapt the medium, and the first to focus on TV specifically. Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, she has created a prescient body of work that in many ways prefigures our current digital realities, where anyone on social media can now “talk b...

This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, a curator who established the Foundation in 2009 as a catalyst and advocate for the arts, not only in Sharjah, UAE, but also in the region and across the world. With a passion for supporting experimentation and innovation in the arts, Al Qasimi has continuously expanded...

Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, co-founders of WORKac and principals of the firm. Wood has extensive experience leading large scale and complex US and international projects. Andraos is also the dean emeritus and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. WORKac creates architecture and strategic planning concepts at the intersection of the urban, the...

Ella Fontanals-Cisneros is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and collector of contemporary art. She began collecting art in the 1970s and her collection, which today has more than 2500 works, has an international profile with emblematic figures of modern and contemporary art with a focus on Latin American art. She is also cofounder of CIFO, a non-profit organization that fosters cultural exchange and...

Dr. Salah M. Hassan is founding Director of The Africa Institute. Hassan concurrently holds positions at Cornell University as the Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Africana Studies and Research Center; in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies; and as Director of the Institute for Compara...

Cristina Iglesias is a Spanish born artist who studied Chemical Sciences at the University of the Basque Country and Ceramics and Sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art in London. Her museum exhibitions include Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She additionally has been co...

This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” I spoke with Kate MccGwire, a British sculptor who spent her childhood growing up on the Norfolk Broads. Taking feathers as her primary medium, MccGwire goes through labour-intensive processes of collecting, sorting and cleaning her materials to create muscular, writhing forms reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology. Through...

Sandra Jackson-Dumont is the Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Tasked with leading the institution through its opening and beyond, she comes to the museum from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she has served as the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education and Public Programs since 2014. Throughout her career, Jackson-Dumont has developed prog...

Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. In 1964 he established his own firm to realize Habitat ’67, an adaptation of his undergraduate thesis and a turning point in modern architecture. Embracing a comprehensive and humane design philosophy, Safdie is committed to architecture that is informed by the geographic, social, and cultural elements that define a place...