Art Works Podcast

To honor the Winter Solstice, (more specifically, that the days are getting longer from here on in), as well as Jupiter and Saturn having their closest visible alignment in 800 years and to celebrate her recent appointment to a third term in the position, we’re reposting my interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek).  I interviewed her in early Spring, soon after the pandemic, an...

Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) Lora Bottinelli joins me to talk about the central place of traditional art and traditional artists in the American experience.  The many cultures and traditions that shape us a people are a strength that we can lean on as we get to the other side of the pandemic.  This is a bedrock belief of the NCTA--the nation’s oldest p...

Theaters (and all live performance) are struggling to get through the pandemic. Most have been closed since March, and artistic directors are kept up at night with a host of questions: when people will be willing to gather indoors to watch a play together? What will that room even look like? How will theaters keep their actors, crew and audiences safe? How can theaters survive until that moment we...

Teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig recently published her first book Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body . Rebekah, who has a Ph. D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, has been working through the ideas that appear in her book on Instagram @sitting_pretty. She grew up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and 2000s and searched to find a story—any story—that re...

Culture-bearer and 2020 National Heritage Fellow Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) is one of a handful of birch bark canoe builders left in the United States. The Ojibwe is a nation and cultural community that has a deep connection to waterways, and the birch bark canoe was commonly used for transportation, fishing, harvesting wild rice, and hunting. The tradition of building these canoes ha...

Scott Yoo is a wonderful guide to the music and the influences of some of the great composers of western classical music.  [Now Hear This]( https://www.thirteen.org/search-results/?q=Now+Hear+This#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Now%20Hear%20This&gsc.ref=more%3Afull episodes&gsc.sort=) is in its second season—it’s a four-part mini-series from  Great Performances . Yoo describes it as influenced by Ant...

In this podcast, we’re marking Halloween by revisiting interviews with authors who have created work that focus on monsters. We hit all the major horror figures with NEA literature fellow Ben Percy (werewolves), Max Brooks (zombies and vampires) and Kiersten White (the Frankenstein monster). All of the writers are entranced by the creatures they explore—but they also find them oddly safe, non-pole...

The exhibit Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle is an American epic--depicting moments in early American history from 1775 thru 1817--some well-known, others not-- often seen through the eyes of marginalized peoples. Struggle consists of 30 panels painted by Lawrence during the early 1950s during Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Lawrence is well-known f...

Poet, novelist and essayist Erika L. Sánchez may have been a National Book Award Finalist, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow,  a 2019 NEA Literature Fellow and currently the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University, but she takes nothing for granted. Growing up in Chicago the child of Mexican immigrant factory workers, she understood...

Maria Manuela Goyanes, artistic director of  Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is a theatrical force of nature.  She arrived from New York City’s Public Theater in 2018 where she had been Director of Producing and Artistic Planning. Her role there included planning and supervising programming at all of the Public’s five main stages, as well as Shakespeare in the Park and Joe’s Pub. ...

In Through the Night documentary filmmaker Loira Limbal looks at a home-based 24-hour day care center run by Deloris and Patrick Hogan. Deloris, known to all as Nunu, is at the heart of this film as she steps up to give working mothers—primarily women of color—the flexibility they need as they work multiple jobs and/or night shifts. Filmed over a two-year period, it becomes clear as we see the Hog...

Poet Jose Marti wrote “With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot.” 2020 National Heritage Fellow and Founder and Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe Hugo Morales could well write the same. A Mixtec, born in Oaxaca, he came to California with his mother and siblings when he was nine and joined his father working in the fields in the central valley. Growing up in a farm labor camp, Hu...

This week, the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turned 90 years old. To celebrate, we’re revisiting my 2017 interview with this 1983 NEA Jazz Master and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. Sonny Rollins has been the jazz player’s jazz player and acknowledged as jazz’s greatest living improviser. He’s always been an adventurous musician-- unafraid to change or to embrace the sounds of calyp...

Many women won a political victory 100 years ago with the passage of the 19 th amendment which declares that the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.". The Brandywine Museum of Art is commemorating its passage and the long struggle leading to it with the exhibit Votes for Women: A Visual History funded in part by the Nat...

Dorthaan Kirk has been named a 2020 NEA Jazz Master for her jazz advocacy…and it’s easy to see why. For more than 40 years, Dorthaan has been a major force at WBGO, Newark Public Radio—the only full-time jazz station in the New York/New Jersey area. She had been married to the brilliant jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk who died tragically young. After his death, Dorthaan wondered wha...

2020 National Heritage Fellow Singer/Songwriter William Bell was the first male solo artist signed by the legendary Stax record label in the early 1960s. With his great sense of melody, rhythm, and lyrics as well as one of the best voices in the business, Bell played a pivotal role in creating a new genre of music known as Southern soul or the Memphis sound. In this podcast, William Bell discusses...

2020 NEA National Heritage Fellow and Haudenosaunee Raised Beadworker, Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) creates contemporary art that is deeply rooted in the past. Haudenosaunee raised beadwork is unique to the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the Oneida. Its hallmark is beads sewn in a such a way that they arch above the fabric creating stunning dimension...

Last December, the Office of Accessibility held a webinar in which three successful artists discussed how they navigated their careers working with a disability. To no one’s surprise, one of the invited artists was Gordon Sasaki. For nearly 40 years, visual artist Gordon Sasaki has been working to increase accessibility to the arts for both practitioners and audiences. Believing in the fundamental...

What do a playwright and a director do when the theaters are closed, a pandemic is raging, and they want to be useful? Well, if they’re playwright Catya McMullen and director Jenna Worsham, they bring playwrights, actors, and directors together virtually to create The Homebound Project ,  an online series of short original plays that each actor performs on-camera in isolation. The Homebound Projec...

Founder and executive artistic director of SFJAZZ Randall Kline takes us behind the scenes of Fridays at Five—a weekly digital series which offers hour-long concerts filmed at the SFJAZZ Center over the past six-plus years. It’s another example of performing artists and presenters stepping up during the pandemic in creative and innovative ways to share the art that keeps us all going. And—to no on...

In this podcast, Clifford Murphy, National Endowment for the Arts Director of Folk and Traditional Arts, introduces the recently announced 2020 NEA National Heritage Fellows. This is the country’s highest honor—a lifetime achievement award—for folk and traditional artists whose life’s work includes both artistic excellence and efforts to sustain cultural traditions for future generations. As Murph...

Jack Johnson is an unlikely subject for a book of poetry. But that’s exactly what poet and NEA Big Read author Adrian Matejka did when he wrote The Big Smoke -- a collection of 52 poems about Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight world champion. He held the title from 1908 to 1915 when Jim Crow ruled and white America was outraged—by Johnson’s holding the title, certainly; but, also by h...

Playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson's play A Strange Loop had an extraordinary year--it has won Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama becoming the first musical to win a Pulitzer for drama without a Broadway run, the first time it was awarded to an African-American for a musical and only the second time an African A...

Today, we re-visit a discussion with two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward about her memoir Men We Reaped . In her memoir, Jesmyn attempts to understand the death of five young black men, including her beloved brother Joshua. But more broadly, her subject is what it means to be a black man in the south. Jesmyn uses her formidable literary skill to give voice and texture to poor, rural, b...

Brent Benjamin is the director of The St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). And so we take a close look at one museum through its closing to its transition as it works to reopen; and, a wider, more general view of the concerns of art museums across the country as they deal with financial short-falls and traverse the various roads to reopening....