Art Works Podcast

The 2022 National Heritage Fellows have been recently named and we’re celebrating that and kicking off our “Artful Lives” series by revisiting my interview with songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Louie Pérez whose music with Los Lobos has deep roots in his neighborhood of East LA. The interview is a wonderful snapshot of Los Lobos’ fifty year journey as well as the beauty and strength of culture...

Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) Shanta Thake talks about programming at the intersection of art that speaks to the needs of New York City at this pivotal moment, including bringing blood drives, food donations and health and wellness programs to the Lincoln Center’s campus—with live musical accompaniment. She also discusses the Summer for the City festival w...

Dr. Lisa Donovan discusses her work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) to increase access to arts education equitably in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Donovan talks about the success of the collective impact approach-- working across sectors to create lasting change--, the support of the  Arts Endowment through its Collective Impact Grant Program, the unique assets of Berkshire...

  Saheem Ali is Associate Artistic Director of The Public Theater as well as the director of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “ Fat Ham.”  In this podcast, Ali talks about working with Fat Ham playwright James Ijames, his ongoing work with plays that contemporize and expand Shakespeare (like Fat Ham which sets Hamlet in a Black Southern backyard barbeque with a Queer Hamlet figure at its center or...

We’re celebrating Black Music Appreciation Month by revisiting my 2021 interview with MacArthur Fellow and artistic director of Silkroad Rhiannon Giddens.   A classically-trained singer,  banjo and fiddle-player, and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music, particularly of African-Americans, into the present.  Giddens is a co-founder of the Grammy Award winning C...

Stella Abrera and Sonja Kostich share a background in dance, are Asian-American and now lead an important artistic center in the Hudson Valley Kaatsbaan Cultural Park . In this podcast, they talk about Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and its 30 year history, Kaatsbaan’s singular role as both an artistic incubator and an arts presenter, its unique position during Covid in having the space to create and pre...

We’re celebrating Pride Month and the Tony Awards by revisiting my 2020 interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson .   A Strange Loop ,  his play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer theater writer…, has wowed audiences and critics. Capturing some of 2020's most pr...

Modern Warrior LIVE is a unique and moving theatrical experience that mixes first-person narrative with music and multimedia to chronicle U.S. Army veteran Jaymes Poling’s story of his three deployments to Afghanistan and subsequent transition back home. In today’s podcast, I speak with its co-creators, Poling and jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci, about the conception of Modern Warrior LIVE and t...

You may know Daniel K. Isaac as Ben Kim from the television series “Billions,” but he’s also a committed and talented actor in theater and an accomplished playwright. In fact, his play “ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME”-- which was supported in part by the Arts Endowment-- is opening in New York in August. In this podcast, Daniel K. Isaac discusses his great love of theater, his new play “ONCE UPON A (ko...

Novelist and NEA Literature Fellow Peng Shepherd's latest book is the speculative mystery, The Cartographers. Those of us who love maps think they are magical; in Shepherd’s book, this magic isn’t metaphorical. The Cartographers has, at its heart, not only the wonder and possibilities of map-making, but a map that is actually magical and becomes a dangerous obsession for a group of cartographers....

We kicked off our celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by going into the archives for excerpts from two great podcasts with cultural powerhouses and 2011 National Heritage Fellows taiko drum leaders Roy and PJ Hirabayashi and slack key guitarist Ledward Kaapana. The Hirabayashis discuss founding San Jose Taiko, creating a distinctly Asian-American art...

This week, we're speaking with the first Latino and non-academic Poet Laureate of Kansas Huascar Medina. Medina, who is a member of the National Council on the Arts, brings a strong and vibrant voice to poetry with work that explore home, separation, place, and inclusion, and with his advocacy for grassroots artists. In this podcast, Medina reads from his recent collection Un Mango Grows in Kansas...

Bassist, composer, and 2022 NEA Jazz Master Stanley Clarke discusses his long and storied career in this tuneful podcast.  He had hoped to become a classical musician, but along the way discovered jazz. Equally adept on the acoustic and electronic bass, Clarke was a successful soloist, and his tune “School Days” is considered a bass anthem. He’s worked with many musicians across genres, founding w...

This week, the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject—poetry. Part 1 is excerpts from my 2018 interview with poet Melissa Range. Her collection Scriptorium mingles history with the personal as Range explores how language is used and abused—who speaks with authority? Whose language is dismissed? What do we preserve and how? From medieval illuminations to Appalachian slang, Range discuss...

We're celebrating Jazz Appreciation month with an in-depth conversation with composer and jazz musician Terence Blanchard.  Terence Blanchard has a long list of exceptional jazz credentials, but  most recently he’s found acclaim as the first Black composer to compose an opera— Fire Shut Up in My Bones —presented by the Metropolitan Opera . In this podcast, he discusses how he came to write Fire Sh...

Meet Cassandra Wilson—singer, songwriter, musician, and 2022 NEA Jazz Master Fellow. In this tuneful podcast, the Grammy Award winner takes us through her career in music, her influences, her approach to singing, how she works with other musicians, her ideas about songwriting, and the centrality of the blues and Mississippi’s rich musical heritage to her work. Wilson is as insightful as she is tal...

Photojournalist Lynsey Addario has been making news herself lately: she recently took what many consider to be a war defining photograph--that of a church worker, a mother and her children killed by a mortar as they tried to flee the Russian bombardment outside Kyiv. It’s a photograph that resonated around the world, showing clearly the cost civilians are paying for the war in Ukraine.  Working re...

Novelist and 2022 NEA Literature Fellow Marjan Kamali talks about her recent novel The Stationery Shop a story that begins in 1953 in Iran and spans 60 years. It’s a book that is steeped in Persian culture, poetry and food even as its protagonist spends the majority of her life in the United States. Marjan discusses her decision to write about a lost love but a life fully lived, the balancing act...

We’re marking Women’s history month by replaying my in-depth interview with the late Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed “Wrapped in Rainbows: the Biography of Zora Neale Hurston.”   Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized one of America’s great authors whose work opened doors for writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. When we heard that Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed biography of Hursto...

Violist Ashleigh Gordon and pianist Anthony R. Green were students at the New England Conservatory of Music and were frustrated by the lack of representation of Black voices in classical music. So, in 2013, they co-founded Castle of our Skins —a music initiative in Boston focused on celebrating Black artistry in music. Ashleigh Gordon is the organization’s artistic and executive director as well a...

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson , the 13th chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the Arts Endowment having had a great deal of first-hand experience with the agency as she has served on the National Council on the Arts since 2013.  She comes to the position of chair with years of experience in comprehensive community building that focuses on the centrality of the arts, culture,...

Photo Credit: Photo by Tom Pich/tompich.com¸ To celebrate Black History Month, we decided to mine the archives and revisit my interview with pianist, NEA Jazz Master and National Medal of Arts recipient Hank Jones. Born in 1918, Jones began performing by the time he was 13, and he continued performing and recording until his death in 2010. His career contains much of jazz history—with 60 solo albu...

Donald Harrison, Jr. may have been named a 2022 NEA Jazz Master for his advocacy work, but this hard-swinging improvisational saxophonist is also a brilliant player as evidenced by his performances and recordings with musicians like Ron Carter Terence Blanchard,  Miles Davis Lena Horne,  Eddie Palmieri the Notorious B.I.G., and the powerhouse jazz group the Cookers.  Yet, Harrison’s passion for pr...

Sade Lythcott, CEO of National Black Theatre (NBT) , is carrying on the legacy of her mother, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, who founded NBT back in 1968. Based in Harlem and born out of the Black Arts Movement, NBT has spent the last five decades presenting stories by and about Black people with an aim is "to produce transformational theater…by telling authentic stories of the Black experience.” It has do...

Educator and advocate Joel Snyder is one of the pioneers of audio description which makes the visual verbal for people who are blind or have low vision. Just as captioning or signing gives people who are deaf or hard of hearing access to media and performing arts, audio description provides a similar service to people who are blind or have low vision.  It’s a specialized skill: AD must provide a n...