Art Works Podcast

Mohegan theater artist  Madeline Sayet  believes that stories have power; they can do harm or they can heal. And her aim is to use story medicine: to serve people by sharing stories in ways that heal communities. Sayet is an award-winning director whose many honors include a TED Fellowship, an MIT Media Labs Directors Fellowship, and a White House Champion for Change Award. She is a playwright, a...

Maestro William Henry Curry is a man of incredible talent, tenacity, and enthusiasm. His love of music is infectious and informs his rigorous approach to conducting as well as his ongoing outreach to community members. He grew up in Pittsburgh in an African-American working class family, and both he and his brother went on to become professional classical musicians. There was a musical lineage, ev...

Celebrate Juneteenth with this conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of the novel Libertie .  An historical novel, Libertie  was inspired in part by the true story of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York and then co-founded of a hospital for women in Brooklyn.  Greenidge shifts the timeline to before, during, and after the Civil War an...

We’re celebrating Pride month with a conversation with poet, 2011 NEA Literature Fellow, and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown .  Drawing on biography, history, and mythology, Brown’s acclaimed collection The Tradition bears witness to personal and public violence, love, anger, and vulnerability. It challenges and forces a reckoning with tradition, even it seeks to enlarge its possibilities...

We’re kicking off Pride Month by revisiting my interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson.  A Strange Loop,  his play about a Black queer musical theater writer, has wowed audiences and critics, capturing some of 2020's most prestigious awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  A Strange...

Jenny Koons is a director on the cutting edge of immersive theater. She specializes in bringing diverse artists together to create original cross-disciplinary work through a collaborative process.  Central to her ideas is work that’s both site-specific and in a reciprocal relationship with its audience.  It’s of a piece that Jenny Koons has been a facilitator and educator in creating anti-racist s...

If you think opera is staid and calcified, then let me introduce you to the work of Heartbeat Opera—a small and radically innovative company. The brain-child of co-artistic directors Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, Heartbeat Opera came into being about seven years ago. Heard and Proske loved the power and beauty of opera and wanted to create work that would speak to contemporary audiences, particul...

Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.”  But the...

Painter Mequitta Ahuja has been re-visioning self-portraiture. While her large colorful canvasses have centrally positioned her own African-American and Indian-American identity, she also claims her own authority as the artist. She emphasizes the work of painting:  depicting multiple genres of painting in pictures within the paintings themselves. The result gestures to history, collapses time. and...

Born in Panama and currently based in New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnes   is equally at home in poetry and theater.  A former  I Am Soul  Resident Playwright at the Black National Theater, Holnes is known for his research-based work in theater, spending hours in interviews with people whose stories unfold on the stage. A celebrated poet, Holnes’s work has appeared in many publications includi...

Drummer, producer, educator and 2021 NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington is not only a virtuoso musician, she’s also a strong advocate for social justice and gender equity. She has spent her life in jazz. Coming from a musical family, she had her first professional gig at the age of ten (with Clark Terry, no less!). By the time she 11, she was a part-time student of the Berklee College of Music....

Award-winning writer and two-time NEA Literature Fellow Camille T. Dungy is one of the significant voices in ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a challenge to classic nature poetry, which was often written by poets who observed nature rather than seeing themselves as part of the natural world. Ecopoetry dispels this illusion: “outside of nature” doesn’t exist. Ecopoetry probes the complexities and interconne...

The Heath Brothers are jazz legends—2002 NEA Jazz master Percy was a bassist, 2003 NEA Jazz Master Jimmy was saxophonist, composer, and arranger and now their youngest brother Albert, known to all as Tootie, a virtuosic percussionist, has now joined them as a 2021 NEA Jazz Master.  Tootie Heath’s talent was apparent a young age—he was still in high school when he performed with Thelonious Monk. In...

2021 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellow for Jazz Advocacy Phil Schaap is an original—a legendary radio host since 1970 at WKCR, an award-winning audio engineer with a facility for remastering jazz classics, a renowned teacher of jazz, a virtuoso of jazz history in general and Charlie Parker in particular, and, as you will hear in this podcast, one of the great storytellers. Schaap has won six G...

Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poetry Oculus has gotten a great deal of well-deserved attention. The word Oculus comes from the Latin; it means “eye.”  It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome.  In her poetry, Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings as she examines the violence of spectacle....

Tana French reigns over Irish crime fiction. She pushes the genre with descriptive lyrical language in novels that are character-driven and densely atmospheric. Her first six books center on the Dublin Murder Squad, an imaginary branch of the Dublin police force. But French defies convention—instead of a single narrator for the series, each book is narrated by a different member of the squad. So,...

When Nataki Garrett was named the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Spring 2019, people took notice for multiple reasons: Garrett is only OSF’s sixth artistic director and its first woman of color to hold that position. She also became one of few women of color in the country to lead a major theater. Because of OSF’s history, reach, prestige, and $44 million budget, and Gar...

In July, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens was named as the new artistic director of Silkroad.  A classically-trained singer, MacArthur Fellow, banjo and fiddle-player and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music forward. Giddens is co-founder of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming  a central and hist...

Henry Threadgill remains one of music’s great innovators—as a composer and as a musician. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016 for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound , becoming only the third jazz artist to receive the award.  A multi-instrumentalist, throughout his career he has led ensembles of varying sizes—experimenting with instrumentation and creating new compositional t...

In The Office of Historical Corrections. , Danielle Evans weaves themes of race, memory, and history throughout her finely-crafted stories.  With extraordinary artistry, she complicates these issues with sensitivity, imagination, and wit. “You know how white people love their history right up until it’s true,” observes a character in the title story who works for a fictional government agency whos...

Here’s a conversation with Tracy K. Smith about poetry, history, memory, and wonder. Smith collects awards and prizes the way the rest of us collect traffic tickets (only hers are well-deserved!) She served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of four prize-winning poetry collections, including  Wade in the Water  and  Life on Mars , which won the Pulitzer Pri...

Amanda Morgan is in the corps of the prestigious Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) based in Seattle. PNB is one of the largest and best-regarded companies in the United States with a deep commitment to racial diversity. Although people of color comprise 26 percent of its dancers, Morgan is its only black female ballet dancer—add to that her height of five foot ten inches, and you have someone who sta...

A conversation with Duke Dang—he’s the general manager of Works & Process the performing arts series at the Guggenheim Museum. Since 1984, Works & Process has been bringing audiences into the creative process of performing artists. Serving as a laboratory of sorts for artists to test their ideas, Works & Process has produced approximately 60 performances annually.  Each performance wou...

Aaron Dworkin is a man of many talents: he’s a violinist, social entrepreneur, professor, author, MacArthur Fellow and member of the National Council on the Arts. In this time of a long overdue racial reckoning, many organizations are answering the challenge to interrogate how their own systems address diversity and inclusion. Aaron Dworkin is singularly positioned to speak to this moment: he has...

2020 National Heritage Fellow singer and songwriter Suni Paz is part of the progressive Latin American music movement known as nueva canción  (new song).  For decades,  Paz has been guided by twin passions which are reflected in her music: a commitment to social justice and a creative approach to education.  In fact, Paz is a pioneer in the use of music to teach Spanish-language curricula. Born in...