The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 741 features curator  Ed Schad and critic Gabriella Nugent. Schad is the curator of "Robert Therrien: This is a Story" at The Broad in Los Angeles. The retrospective presents Therrien's meditations on scale and material, while revealing Therrien's repeatedly mined vocabulary of forms and symbols. The exhibition is on view through April 5. The Broad published a fine catalogue to accompa...

Episode No. 740 features artist  Firelei Báez and curators Charlene Foggie-Barnett and Dan Leers. The MCA Chicago is presenting "Firelei Báez," the first North American mid-career survey of the artist's paintings and installations. Báez's work often explores the legacies of colonialism across the American and the African diaspora, in the Caribbean, and beyond. Her works are often explosively color...

Episode No. 739 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist  Dara Birnbaum. Birnbaum, a pioneering titan of video art, passed away this year at 78. "Her work is now displayed in museum collections around the world as the example of feminist video art," wrote curator and critic Karen Archey in an Artforum obituary. Birnbaum's work often included pointedly feminist critiques of mass media, including...

Episode No. 738 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist  Wafaa Bilal. Earlier this year the MCA Chicago presented "Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me," the first major survey of Bilal's work. Across his genres-busting career, the Iraqi-American Bilal has made performances, sculptures and related digital presentations that have interrogated the United States' relationship with and conduct within Iraq, the...

Episode No. 737 features curators  Beverly Adams and Jamillah James. With Christophe Cherix, Adams is the co-curator of "Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition includes more than 130 works made between the 1920s and 1970s, making it the most extensive Lam retrospective presented in the United States. "When I Don't Sleep, I Dream" argues that...

Episode No. 736 features artist  Dyani White Hawk. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is presenting "Dyani White Hawk: Love Language," a 15-year survey of White Hawk's career. The exhibition spotlights how White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) has foregrounded Lakota forms and motifs to challenge prevailing histories and practices around abstract art. The exhibition was curated by Siri Engberg and Tarah H...

Episode No. 735 features curators  Dan Nadel and Laura Phipps , and curator Alexander J. Noelle. With Elizabeth Sussman and Scott Rothkopf, Nadel and Phipps are the co-curators of "Sixties Surreal" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition works to complicate the march of -isms which, outside the academy and too few art museums, has too often ossified into the the era's US ar...

Episode No. 734 is a Thanksgiving weekend clips program featuring artist  Aliza Nisenbaum. The Des Moines Art Center is presenting "Aliza Nisenbaum: Día de los Muertos" through January 11, 2026. For the latest iteration of DMAC's annual Día de los Muertos celebration, and as the museum's Toni and Tim Urban International Artist-in-Residence, Nisenbaum created five paintings. The presentation was cu...

Episode No. 733 features curators  Diana Seave Greenwald and Megan Fontanella. With Christina Michelon, Greenwald is the co-curator of "Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Boston Athenaeum. Both presentations are on view through January 19, 2026. (Theodore Landsmark co-curated the ISGM presentation.) The exhibition surveys the career of Boston-based Crite...

Episode No. 732 features artist  Igshaan Adams and curator and Jenkintown, Penn. school board-electee Laura Igoe. The Hill Art Foundation, New York is presenting "Igshaan Adams: I've been here all along, I've been waiting " through December 20, 2025. The exhibition features work from the last 15 years of Adams' practice, and emphasizes how his work engages and serves his community. Adams tapestrie...

Episode No. 731 features artist  Hew Locke. The Yale Center for British Art is presenting  "Hew Locke: Passages," the first US survey of Locke's career. Across sculpture, painting, photography and installations, Locke's work considers colonialism, its power, and the ways in which we respond to colonialism and its impacts. Locke, who is Guyanese-British, particularly focuses on British imperialism...

Episode No. 730 features author  Amy Newman. Newman is the author of Barnett Newman: Here   a biography out this week from Princeton University Press. The book presents Newman as devoted to art but initially unsure of what a Newman would be, as a dedicated, almost blindered New Yorker, and as an artist intensely interested in what US art had to contribute to the US national and global project. Ama...

Episode No. 729 features artists  Justin Favela and David-Jeremiah. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery is presenting a commission from Favela titled Capilla de Maíz (Maize Chapel) through a not-yet determined date. The Favela makes the Renwick's grand salon gallery a fantastical space, complete with shimmering gold-fringed walls and piñata corncobs that highlight the role of mai...

Episode No. 728 features curators  Anna Lovatt and Kelly Montana , and artist/curator Pablo Helguera. Lovatt and Montana are the curators of "Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video" at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston. The exhibition examines the intersection of drawing, television, and video from the late 1950s into the 1980s. "Lines of Resolution" features the wor...

Episode No. 727 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist  Andrea Carlson. The Denver Art Museum just opened "Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky," a mid-career survey. The exhibition spotlights how Carlson, who is Ojibwe and of European settler descent, creates works that challenge the colonial narratives presented by modern artists, museum collections, and cannibal genre horror films, all i...

Episode No. 726 features artist  Danielle Joy Mckinney. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is presenting "Danille Mckinney: Tell Me More" through January 4, 2026. The exhibition, Mckinney's first solo presentation in a US museum, spotlights Mckinney's introspective explorations of Black womanhood. It was curated by Gannit Ankori. Concurrently, Galerie Max Hetzler is presenting Mckinney's w...

Episode No. 725 features curators  Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis (and a cameo, of sorts, from artist Anthony Barboza ). Brookman and Willis are the co-curators of "Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-85" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition considers photography's engagement with the post-war cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identi...

Episode No. 724 features artist  Antony Gormley. It was taped before a live audience at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. The Nasher is showing "SURVEY: Antony Gormley" through January 4, 2026. The exhibition is the first major museum survey of Gormley's work in the United States. Across sculptures, models, and notebooks, "SURVEY" spans Gormley's career from the 1980s to today. The exhibition e...

Episode No. 723 features curator  Michelle White and artist Nanette Carter. White is the curator of "Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s" at The Menil Collection, Houston. The exhibition considers Rauschenberg's conceptual, expressive use of fabric as a medium through a focus on three groups of works from the 1970s: Venetians (1972-73), Jammers (1975-76), and Hoarfrosts (1974-76). It is...

Episode No. 722 features museum director and human rights activist  Ann Burroughs , and curator Cory Korkow. Burroughs is the director of the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, which has led the museum sector in resisting Trumpism and the rise of fascism in the United States. Even as many US institutions capitulated when the Trump administration demanded a return to racist and white s...

Episode No. 721 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Saif Azzuz. The Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, is presenting "Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa' (the water is rising)," which interrogates the privatization of land, water, and natural resources within settler-colonial systems. Across the exhibition, Azzuz and family members Lulu Thrower, Eliza...

Episode No. 720 is a summer clips episode featuring artist  Tidawhitney Lek. Lek is among the 30+ artists featured in "Spirit House" at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. The exhibition considers how 33 contemporary artists of Asian descent challenge the boundary between life and death through art, including how the spiritual relates to diaspora, connections to ancestral homela...

Episode No. 719 features curator  Laura Katzman. Katzman is the curator of "Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity" at the Jewish Museum, New York. Shahn's first US retrospective in nearly 50 years. The exhibition examines Shahn's progressive commitment to the major issues between the Great Depression and the Vietnam War, as well as his exploration of spirituality and Jewish texts. The exhibition features 17...

Episode No. 718 features artist  Masako Miki and artist/curator Katherine Simóne Reynolds. The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco is presenting "Midnight March," a far-ranging presentation of Miki's two-dimensional and three-dimensional practice. The Japanese-born Miki's paintings, sculptures, and installations live between the sacred and the secular. Her often exuberant sculptures are ro...

Episode No. 717 features artist  Erin Shirreff , curator Davide Gasparotto , and conservator Ulrich Birkmaier. The Milwaukee Art Museum is presenting "Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts" through September 1. Across 40 recent collages, photographs, sculptures, and videos, the exhibition reveals Shirreff's interest in the space between images and the objects they picture. The exhibition was curated by...