Hyperallergic

Last year, editor Elisa Wouk Almino relocated from Hyperallergic’s New York-based office to Los Angeles to help expand coverage along the West Coast. In this podcast, she chats with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian about her initial impressions of the city, where artists have been increasingly flocking to. We then speak with Catherine G. Wagley, a veteran Los Angeles art critic and reporter who has...

When news that Michael Rakowitz withdrew from the 2019 Whitney Biennial was published by the New York Times on February 25, people wondered why the Iraqi-American artist decided to sit out the biannual art event. Later, in April, when the Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything opened at the Jewish Museum, many people noticed that Rakowitz's work about the renowned Canadian crooner’s relationship wit...

The business of artists's estates is becoming a big business, but the realities facing artists today aren't always as glamorous as some might think. For every multi-millionaire dollar Robert Rauschenberg estate, there are thousands of lesser-known talents whose families have to confront the tough decisions about what to do with hundreds of artworks and archives. To sort out the realities facing ar...

A business and financial literacy conference, the Art World Conference is gathering together 50 speakers for panel discussions, conversations, and in-depth workshops addressing many of the challenges faced by visual artists and arts professionals who work closely with artists. The multi-day event is the brainchild of Dexter Wimberly and Heather Bhandari, two veterans of the art field who bring dec...

What if artists were invited into institutions of higher learning to lead conversations about safety, community, and change? Artist Shaun Leonardo was invited to be the visiting fellow at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and he's been organizing a series of events that are trying to break down the barriers between various aspects of the Pratt community. I invited him, along with Jane South, who is...

In Canada, an incredible new program allows doctors to prescribe museum visits to their patients. Hyperallergic's Zachary Small visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to talk with Stephen Legari, the first full-time art therapist on staff at a North American museum (he sees 1,200 patients a year), about his work in the city's encyclopedic museum and what role art can plan in healing. It's a fasc...

He launched into the screens of the internet savvy almost a decade ago, as a lively and unconventional Twitter commentator about the Arab Spring, but Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is now known as one of the most passionate champions of Middle Eastern art. Founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Al Qassemi joins us to talk about the state of Middle Eastern art and discusses some of his favorite artists fr...

In 2002, artist Lisa Ross found herself in China. She decided to venture to the far western regions of the country, which she heard were home to a predominantly Uyghur population. She would return numerous times after that to document many aspect of a community that was about to change forever. Her photos are haunting, since they represent a world that is no longer there, as the Chinese authoritie...

It was a snowy week in Brooklyn, so some of us decided to gather in the podcast studio to talk about the world of art, giving you a small window into the conversations that happen in our office every day. Hyperallergic editor and critic Seph Rodney and news editor Jasmine Weber join me to talk about what they’re excited about right now: Burger King’s Warhol commercial for the Superbowl, Venice’s n...

There are many illuminating moment’s in Hal Foster’s Conversations about Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2018) with Richard Serra, including the discussion of the infamous “ Tilted Arc ” sculpture, Serra's formative years as he battled with Minimalism and Conceptual Art, his idea’s around site-specific art, and the role of text and image in his oeuvre. This podcast begins with Serra’s own voice...

Memes are the street art of the social web, and they are becoming more central to the political and cultural conversations we have. In her new book, Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, An Xiao Mina helps us understand how memes influenced the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Women’s Marches around th...

Last year, we invited artist, writer, and Queens College professor Chloë Bass to talk with curator, art historian, and museum veteran Lowery Stokes Sims to have a conversation of their choosing. It took me a year to publish this podcast, but I’m happy to say their words are more relevant today than ever, as the two art world figures discuss the imagined publics of contemporary art, public and priv...

It’s rare for an artist to have two concurrent solo shows in the same city, but Didier William accomplished that with his Curtains, Stages, and Shadows, Act 1 & Act 2 . The two-part exhibition explores the formal and narrative possibilities of painting. In his review of Act 1, critic Seph Rodney focuses on the figures that can appear as elusive as they are powerful, writing: These are all figu...

Sir Sargent, as he’s known on social media, represents a new wave of art writers and critics focused on Black contemporary art and its evolving role in an international African diasporic consciousness. He was born in Chicago as Antwaun Sargent, and has called New York home since 2011. When he first arrived in New York City, he was a kindergarten teacher, but he soon discovered his interest in tell...

Tyler Green may be best known as the journalist and art writer behind the Modern Art Notes podcast, but for the last six years, he’s also been working on a major book about a photographer who helped establish the sublime visual record of the American West for viewers around the world. In his new book, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American , Green writes a very readable story about a figure wh...

Artist Dayanita Singh wasn’t happy taking photographs in the traditional way, preferring to create what she calls “book objects,” mini-exhibitions to showcase her work. Singh  plays with the conventional language of art, and even calls herself an “off-set artist” to denote her preferred way to display her images. She is currently exhibiting in the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, a...

The world of art has become more complicated as copyright, appropriation, and other issues force artists, dealers, collectors, and others to turn to lawyers for help. As foibles around the sale and maintenance of luxury art objects grab media headlines, you might be fooled into believing the future of art is in litigation. I invited Sergio Sarmiento to join me to talk about the evolving world of a...

On October 29, 2017, the world lost its first feminist art historian. That title, of course, describes Linda Nochlin, a leading academic who changed the world of art after she published her important essay, “ Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ” In 2016, I had the honor of interviewing her for the Women of Abstract Expressionism podcast and only used a few minutes of our interview. In thi...

After decades in the art world, Deborah Kass has a hit. A major one. The type of beloved public artwork that you see endlessly on your social feeds, and brings a smile to your face whenever you encounter it. I'm talking about "OY/YO" (2015), the eight-foot-tall yellow sculpture that just landed at the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibition titled Something to Say . I took the opportunity to invite Kass...

September has become the #MeToo movement’s defining month. Bill Cosby recently received a sentence of 3 to 10 years in prison for the drugging and sexual assault of Andrea Constand. And as I write this, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her allegations of sexual misconduct and attempted rape against the Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh....

Faced with the ubiquity of white supremacy in US culture, some are seeking new, radical ways to shift the conversation to center Black consciousness as a way to combat the poison of White supremacy. Two artists and educators, Shanti Peters and Joseph Cullier, founded The Black School to confront such realities. Hyperallergic editor Jasmine Weber spoke to the pair about the role of radical Black ed...

McMansions are the houses many of us love to hate. They're big, gaudy, and often they're accumulations of traditionally mismatched architectural elements. Whatever they are, they're everywhere in suburbia. We invited Kate Wagner, aka McMansion Hell , to talk oversized buildings of wealth and status, including the McMansion that is US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's house in Holland, Michigan. As...

The stories of trailblazing women continue to inspire but many of these figures, who occur throughout history, have been written out of the history books or relegated to accounts of their time and ignored by historians. Now, curator Marcela Micucci talks to use about these figures who had a big impact on all aspects of city life, including the so-called "Witch of Wall Street," Hetty Green. It's an...

This week's we talk to Abou Farman, artist and anthropologist at the New School, and Raquel de Anda, director of public engagement at No Longer Empty, about their recent efforts to educate New York City cultural leaders about the needs of immigrant communities. Then I invite Hyperallergic staff writer Zachary Small to tell us about the latest news in the #MeToo movement, particularly in light of t...

Last month, a dozen activists gathered at the Whitney Museum of Art to condemn the institution's lack of modern context about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in relation to Wojnarowicz's artwork. Their action was noticed by the art world and the museum, which is continuing to talk to the protesters after changing some of the labels to reflect on the fact that the AIDS crisis is not over. In this episode we...