The MoMA Magazine Podcast

A maker of multisensory artworks reflects on the importance of listening to our surroundings. In 2014, Nigerian-born artist  Emeka Ogboh  moved from Lagos to Berlin. This experience marked not only a shift in his surroundings, but also a shift in his artwork. “Shuttling between two places,” Ogboh explains, “your brain has to do this switch. And that fusion of two places started occurring to me.” H...

The winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars reflects on how drag changes us for the better. For this month’s Ten Minutes podcast , we spoke to the award-winning opera singer and drag queen Monét X Change  about the  anti-drag movement , which has led to protests across the country in response to the growing popularity of drag. “With all these legislations and bills to try to keep drag away from cer...

For many, a trip to MoMA means confronting questions of access: Does this space welcome people like me? Will I be given what I need in order to feel safe and included? At the core of this month’s Ten Minutes podcast is the question, What does access look like? According to Laura Aguilar’s work  Access + Opportunity = Success , access includes, among other things, “the right to enter or use.” But D...

What do video games reveal about our reality? In this Ten Minutes podcast , hear from gamer and content creator Amira Virgil, developer of the Melanin Pack for The Sims 4, about her vision to create a more accurate and inclusive version of the game.   Access a transcript of the conversation here: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/778

In Bangladesh, a garment worker barely makes enough money to cover the cost of rent. Discover the truth about the unfair labor practices behind many of the clothes we wear. In this Ten Minutes podcast episode, Kalpona Akter, founder of the  Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity  (BCWS), describes the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and some of the ways we can advocate for fair labor prac...

What is the relationship between literature and modern art?  Join Adam F. Bradley, English professor and co-editor of Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, for a discussion about race and invisibility on the written page and beyond. Discover Ellison's iconic book Invisible Man and the ways it continues to resonate with readers (and artists) 70 years after its original publication.   Access a tr...

Hear how a publisher decided to “create the world that we want to see” by founding the first natural-hair magazine. In this Ten Minutes podcast episode, we talk to Lindsey Farrar, who cofounded CRWNMAG in 2016 with Nkrumah Farrar. The print and digital publication is dedicated to celebrating the diversity of Black women and the beauty of their natural hair textures. Hear Farrar talk about about CR...

Listen to the acclaimed writer talk about Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture Mother and Child, and its connections to rest, intimacy, and reproductive justice. In this Ten Minutes podcast episode, Hall reflects on a childhood wrapped in the embrace of Black community and an adulthood of “relearning how to hold” three generations of women in her family. Through tender descriptions of this sculpture and...

A tech ethnographer explains some key terms and ideas behind the future of the Internet. In  Unsupervised , Refik Anadol’s new installation at MoMA, the artist makes use of a core part of the Web3 technology: blockchain. What is blockchain technology and how does it relate to Web3? More importantly, why should we care about any of this? In this Ten Minutes podcast , we explore these questions with...

Discover how architecture can unite communities divided by an international border. Political theorist Fonna Forman and architect and visual artist Teddy Cruz talk about Manufactured Sites, an architectural project based on the flow of material waste between border cities in the United States and Mexico. Tires, garage doors, and even entire homes make their way from San Diego to Tijuana, where mig...

Can junk be transformed into art? Discover the life and work of John Outterbridge, an artist who combined discarded objects and found materials into complex works of art. Hear from architect Mabel O. Wilson about her uncle's salvaging practice and the ways it brought him closer to his family, community, and visions for a better future.

The artist and writer  David Wojnarowicz , who died in 1992 at age of 37 from complications of AIDS, is best remembered for his political activism and his vibrant, confrontational paintings. Yet in her 2016 book The Lonely City, author  Olivia Laing writes movingly about Wojnarowicz as a figure haunted by loneliness, a condition that inspired to him to fashion his work into a vehicle for visibilit...

What does it mean for bodies of water, animals, and all of nature to be granted legal rights? In this episode of the Broken Nature series, host Paola Antonelli explores how the law can help us conceive of nature differently, and maybe even curb our destructive instincts. Author Nathaniel Rich tells the story "Dark Waters" about how environmental regulations in the United States have fallen short,...

Humans depend on certain conditions to survive on Earth: oxygen, water, food, and the atmosphere’s protection from the sun’s most dangerous rays. But what happens when these conditions begin to change? Host Paola Antonelli is joined by Sarah Henderson, Scientific Director of Environmental Health Services at the British Columbia Center for Disease Control, geneticist Christopher Mason, and Nathalie...

This episode of The MoMA Magazine Podcast's Broken Nature series explores the global secondhand clothing landscape: who participates in it, who benefits from it, who suffers because of it, and whether it is in fact a sustainable alternative to the excessive consumption encouraged by the fashion industry. Host Paola Antonelli is joined by Andrew Brooks, the author of Clothing Poverty: The Hidden Wo...

Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, medicine, and even the air we breathe, corn has become one of the most ubiquitous presences in our lives. In this episode of The Broken Nature Series, host Paola Antonelli talked to Bex, who runs the blog Corn Allergy Girl, cultural anthropologist Alyshia Galvez, and community organizers Yira Vallejo and Jonathan Barbieri about the proliferation of corn and its...

What are some of the most urgent challenges facing our planet? And how can design help us meet them? Join Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, for Broken Nature, a four-episode podcast series in conjunction with MoMA’s  current exhibition , that explores our fragile but fundamental ties to the rest of nature and the world around us. Antonelli and her guests—bloggers,...

MoMA PS1’s new exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration features artists who were incarcerated or impacted by the US prison system, and who address these issues in their work. In this episode, Dr. Nicole Fleetwood speaks with artists James Hough, Rowan Renee, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter aka Isis tha Saviour, and Halim Flowers about the relationship between art and freedom, the...

On June 14, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID 19 pandemic, more than 15,000 people gathered in front of the Brooklyn Museum in New York City to protest the violence, harassment, and discrimination faced by Black trans people in the United States. The Brooklyn Liberation march, the brainchild of drag queen West Dakota, turned out to be the largest event for Black trans r...

Harry Belafonte once wrote that artist Charles White's work “is a testimony to the vitality of American culture.” In this conversation with WQXR host Terrance McKnight, who worked with curator Esther Adler to select music and other audio for  Charles White: A Retrospective , Belafonte describes his relationship with White and their commitment to celebrating and advancing black culture.

Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash recently created a playlist to accompany  Taking a Thread for a Walk , an exhibition of textiles and fiber art from MoMA’s collection. We spoke with her about her thoughts in choosing these songs and about the connections between weaving, making art, and writing music.

Across her long career, pioneering photographer  Dorothea Lange  grappled with the relationship between words and pictures, the subject of MoMA’s  recent exhibition . The Creative Team’s Prudence Peiffer sat down with poet Tess Taylor to discuss Taylor’s engagement with Lange and words in her book,  Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange .

Love can be complicated, messy, and inspiring—and has shaped the history of art more than we knew. In this episode of the Magazine podcast, we’re bringing love stories to light. From Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, who “felt magnified” by one another as struggling young artists in New York; to a recent love story sparked at the Museum; to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who found that love could conqu...

After 50 years of making music, singer, songwriter, and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland's genre-bending compositions are finally being celebrated. When he left New York in the early 1960s, he believed the future he was fixated on could not exist for him in the US. Copeland, a transgender black man whose obscure electronic sound and non-binary beliefs were ahead of their time, continued to create m...

Many mysteries surround Florine Stettheimer’s Four Panel Screen: its title, the date it was made, and even how it should be displayed. In the latest episode of the Magazine podcast, we spoke to the team that rediscovered this work in MoMA’s storage facility, including senior curator Anne Umland, curatorial assistant Jenny Harris, and curatorial fellow Charmaine Branch. Senior conservator Anny Avir...