The Lonely Palette

“I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” - Norman Rockwell Whether arguing for soft versus hard taco shells or the Neo-Nazi right to march in Skokie, freedom of speech is a fundamental right we all enjoy as Americans. But it turns out that telling people that is pretty complicated, actually. Thank goodness we have Norman Rockwell, virtuosic photorealist...

“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? M...

"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She send...

"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the...

“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his pr...

"My line does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." - Cy Twombly Critics have described the work of consummate scribbler Cy Twombly as at once "barely there" and overly academic, but what about us art civilians? What is it about these half-baked scraps, scratch, and scrawl that speaks to our own creative impulses, our own inner children dying to grab the crayon and crush the...

**Update! Norovirus has entered the chat. The episode will be released on Monday, January 27. Thank you for your patience! Mark your calendars! The new season of The Lonely Palette drops Thursday, January 23rd! This season, we've got a stellar line-up: Cy Twombly, Lawren Harris, Käthe Kollwitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name just a few. We've got interviews with the Washington Post's Sebastian...

Tamar is alive! The Lonely Palette is alive! But in the year since we last spoke, she's been elbow-deep in audio projects galore - good for the pocketbook, but bad for independent art history podcast productivity. But your patience will be rewarded! And in the meantime, a few announcements: - Join me and my fellow H&S colleagues at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allson, MA on Wednesday, November 6 for...

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going. This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to...

The Lonely Palette, as you've heard so often, is an enormously proud founding member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a group of fiercely independent, story-driven, mind-expanding podcasts. Since 2017, we've supported each other while forging our own paths, prioritizing craft and humane storytelling above all else. Now, if you haven't noticed, media in general, and podcasting in particular, is...

Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation. Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photo...

In the 1950s and 60s, Coenties Slip—an obscure street on the lower tip of Manhattan overlooking the East River—was home to some of the most iconic artists in history, and who would define American Art during their time there: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, these artist...

Taking a break from writing about astronauts, Tom Wolfe donned his white suit and strolled to the art museums of New York City, letting the incomprehensible literary works of the movement wash over him like a warm bath of clam broth, and producing what, in the words of art critic Rosalind Krauss, "hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch." For you, dear listeners,...

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) may have gone down in history as the very first Western art historian, but he is also a messy bench who loves drama, and we are here for it. Listen to his take on Sandro Botticelli from “The Lives of the Artists” (Bondanella trans., 1991), particularly his practical jokes, from which no friend or neighbor escaped unscathed. This is a free edition of The Lonely Palette Read...

The neoplatonic ideal of beauty, the girl on the half-shell, the naked chick riding a clam. Her tilted head and fluttery hair are recognized by everyone and their grandma, but no one - experts included - can explain just why in the heck this painting is so iconic. Shell we take on the challenge? See the images: https://bit.ly/3LeIwxu Music used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” Joan Baez, “Diamo...

In April 1989, Barbara Kruger - an artist, activist, and former magazine layout editor - created a flyer for a pro-choice women’s march in Washington, DC to protest the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe vs. Wade. But this flyer was never meant to be a picket sign. Instead, it has become a timeless artwork all its own: directly addressing any viewer from any era, demanding they confront...

Whether for his critics, his friends (...?), or his canvases, the Victorian-era, Gilded-age Aesthetic ex-pat painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler had one motto: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. See the Images: https://bit.ly/3PMpK3o Music Used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" The Blue Dot Sessions, “Slate Tracker,” “Laser Focus,” “The Grif...

Splotches, spills, and stains. They can evoke shapes, moods, energy, even music. Yet no one seemed to appreciate their very beauty with the same intuitive, delicate flair as Helen Frankenthaler, who created something fiercely new "between cocktails and dinner," or, more accurately, between the broad shoulders of a relentlessly masculine movement. Not bad for a saddle-shoed girl a year out of Benni...

The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums. Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate i...

The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums. Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate i...

Happy 7th birthday, The Lonely Palette! We're ringing in our itch with an quick update on next season, which starts in June, and a recording of our live show at On Air Fest, which was held in Brooklyn this past February. Please enjoy this revamped and refreshed episode of Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document," smash that subscribe button, and we'll see you next month. See the episode images: https:/...

We're in THE HOME STRETCH of our Patreon Listener Challenge! This is indeed the time to pull up your socks and start supporting the show, all to the dulcet tones of a re-release of our second and most lauded Patreon listener-supported episode from 2019 on the Ecce Homo restoration fiasco, wherein a well-intentioned, though, uh, untrained parishioner in a small Spanish town decided to take it upon...

Our Patreon Listener Challenge is ongoing! And if you're on the fence about supporting the show, why not sit back with a re-release of our first-ever Patreon listener-supported episode from 2018 on C.M. Coolidge's "Dogs Playing Poker," where we dive into the trials and tribulations of kitsch, the battle between the Sams and Dianes of the world, and what it means to appreciate art at a frequency th...

A number of years ago, my Twitter pinged. Then it pinged again. All of a sudden, a whole host of people were following the show, and when I giddily found the source, it was the soulful and stylish Avery Trufelman, longtime 99% Invisible producer, currently of Articles of Interest, and fashionista tastemaker, who had pronounced The Lonely Palette her favorite art history podcast. Bestill my heart!...

They say that those who can do and those who can’t teach. But “they” don’t seem to have ever met a proper teacher. In honor of the Norwegian town of Bodø’s recognition as a 2024 European Capital of Culture, we dive into Bodø’s most famous artist, Adelsteen Normann, the teacher you’ve never heard of, the picture-postcard modernist who introduced us to the scream that is Edvard Munch, and, eclipsed...