Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

Grant Wood was the American regionalist painter who rose to prominence almost overnight with his 1930 painting, American Gothic. In this episode, I spoke with Mike Divelbiss about Wood, his biography and his iconic work. Grant Wood was born in rural Iowa in 1891. His mother moved the family to the more urban Cedar Rapids in 1901 after his father passed away. Grant Wood showed a proclivity for the...

Last week I began a series of mini episodes exploring color. For this week's episode, I share some interesting bits about the color red. The color red is associated with both love and anger. While many mistakenly believe red will anger a bull, people looking at the color red have been known to experience an increase in their heart rate. Listen to this mini episode to find out a little more about t...

The Impressionist movement has been appealing to art lovers for about 150 years. While Claude Monet was not the sole inventor of the style, the movement was actually named after one of his paintings. Claude Monet was born in 1840. The 19th century brought us innovations that drastically changed how artists saw their role and their process. The advent of photography allowed artists to shift their f...

For this week's mini episode, I wanted to take a little time to explain what color is and how we perceive color. This is going to be the first in a series of mini episodes about colors. I wanted to get some of the initial science out of the way before going into deeper dives about the histories and interesting facts behind individual colors and how artists have created those colors throughout hist...

Not a lot of great painters were also professional football players. Ernie Barnes was an American artist who grew up in the South during the Jim Crowe era. Despite the numerous challenges, he worked hard, her persisted and he succeeded. As a teenager, a coach mentored Barnes helping him to become captain of the football team and a state champion at shot put. He attended a historically black univer...

The art world is full of interesting characters. In so many ways, the artist‘s biography can be as important as their work. Nat Tate was an interesting character introduced to critics and tastemakers in 1998 when David Bowie hosted a dinner party to help launch a new book Nat Tate: Am American Artist 1928-1960. While the book has the sleepy title of a non-fiction book, it was actually a novel fram...

I wanted to start 2021 with something fun, so I decided to do an episode about a classic episode of The Simpsons. In season 10 episode 19 titled Mom and Pop Art, Homer becomes an outsider artist. While much of the humor is derived from the premise that Homer Simpson is inept and could never be a decent artist, but I thought it would be fun to consider what kind of an artist Homer really is. His fi...

This is a second mini episode recapping the takeaways from the artists covered thus far in season 2. In this episode, I share my takeaways from the episodes about Phil Hansen, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charuvi Agrawal, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.  The second half of season 2 will start on Monday, January 18th.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

I will be taking a bit of a break. This week and next week will be the podcast equivalent of a clip show as I will rundown just the main takeaways I had from each artist I discussed throughout this season. In this episode I talked about the first five episodes which were about Marcel Duchamp, Burton Morris, Yayoi Kusama, Alexander Calder, and Barbara Kruger. Next week, I will run down the rest of...

Few people know this, but Art used to be an Olympic event. Starting in the 1912 games, artists could win Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals in five categories of art.  For more information and resources, check out the website www. WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this episode, I talked to Janet Taylor, art teacher and writer for the Art of Education. She actually taught be about Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the contemporary Nigerian/American painter. Njiedeka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria. Her father was a surgeon and mother was a professor of pharmacology. Her mother won the green card lottery allowing Njideka to come to the U.S. to s...

Michelangelo is one of the most celebrated artists in history. He is known for having created some of the finest masterpieces in the world including the painting on the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David. As talented people become historical figures over the centuries, a lot of their humanity can be lost in historical accounts that feature only their highlights. I generally believe in giving p...

Charuvi Agrawal is a contemporary artist from India. She is tremendously talented as a painter, sculptor and animator. She is probably best known for two incredible works based on Hanuman. Shortly after finishing her Masters in computer animation, she opened her own studio Charuvi Design Labs and spent 3 years developing a 3D animated film about Hanuman which gained widespread critical acclaim. Fo...

For this week‘s fun fact friday, learn about how Robert Rauschenberg created a famous work of art simply by erasing another artist‘s drawing. The piece is called ”Erased de Kooning Drawing” from 1953.  This work is often misunderstood as an act of aggression or disrespect as Rauschenberg figuratively and quite literally erases Willem de Kooning‘s work, but actually this work was meant to be a cele...

Jean-Michel Basquiat became a star of the art world in the 1980s. He grew up in New York and started making a name for himself through his collaborative graffiti project SAMO. In 1980, SAMO was dead and a young Basquiat was poised to take the art world by storm. His biography is the kind of story one would find hard to believe if laid out as the plot to a book or movie. He showed tremendous promis...

To be accurate, this one is a little more of a ”Fun Speculation Friday” as we will never know for a fact whether he had ADHD. He was not diagnosed in his lifetime and no credible diagnostician would pretend that they definitively prove someone had a disorder 500 years after they died. Still to consider him as an artist with a disability makes Leonardo da Vinci even more inspiring. Leonardo da Vinc...

Pablo Picasso is arguable one of the most talented and influential artists of the 20th century. He is certainly one of the most famous and successful. The name Picasso has become synonymous with artistic greatness, but the reality is not always quite as great as the myth. For all of his undeniable skill and talent, Pablo Picasso was a deeply flawed human being. His legacy is tarnished to some exte...

The history of photography has some really interesting and surprising facts. For example, the camera is about 2000 years older than photography. The earliest known camera obscuras were documented as far back as the 4th century BCE in China, while photography didn‘t really come about until the 18th Century. In the early 19th century, Louis Daguerre was working hard to improve the photographic metho...

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian artist and art theorist. He is known as one of the early pioneers of abstract art. Learn a bit about Kandinsky‘s background, his personal journey from a teacher of Law and Economics to one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Wassily Kandinsky is said to have had a condition known as synesthesia in which sound and color were linked sensory experience...

For this week‘s Fun Fact Friday, I wanted to share a little bit about the Primary Colors. In Art class, we are traditionally taught that all the colors we see are a combination of just red, yellow and blue. This is true to some extent, but teaching that there are just three primary colors and that you can make any color you want using red, yellow and blue gives people an incomplete picture. The fa...

For images and resources, go to www. WhoArtEdPodcast.com For this week's episode I spoke with Kelly Beach about the contemporary American artist, Phil Hansen. The specific work being discussed was Hansen's piece Cobain, from his Goodbye Art 2 series. Hansen's work focuses largely on the creative process and overcoming obstacles. Hansen himself struggled with a tremor that hindered his artistic car...

For more information and resources, go to www. WhoArtEdPodcast.com  Pablo Picasso is credited with numerous quotes including, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." Interestingly, he may have stolen that idea from T.S. Elliot. It is not entirely clear whether Picasso ever did actually say the oft quoted line, but Elliot is definitely documented to have said "Immature poets imitate; mature poets...

For images and more to explore, go to www. WhoArtEdPodcast.com  For this episode, we talked about the Barabara Kruger. She is known for her collages using text often on top of found images in a way that confronts the viewer raising questions about the conduct of our culture. Her work is often political without being prescriptive. She raises questions and poses problems for the viewer to think abou...

As always you can find more information and resources on my website WhoARTedPodcast.com I thought it would be fun to do a bonus episode this Halloween focusing on the artistry behind the spooky, fun Lego Hidden Side collection. For those who are unfamiliar, the Hidden Side is Lego's augmented reality theme with delightful transformational elements. The sets focus on the paranormal and there are ph...

For more information and resources check my website www. WhoARTedPodcast.com  This week's fun fact Friday episode focuses on Scheele's green which was a popular green pigment in the victorian era. Unfortunately, while the green was beautiful, it was also deadly because Scheele's green was derived from arsenic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices