Helga
Artist, performer, and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity and love of people to the podcast Helga, where she talks about the intimate lives of creative people as they share the steps they’ve taken along their path. She draws listeners into these discussions with cultural change-makers, whether already famous or rising talents, whose sensibilities expand our imaginations as we explore what we think we know about each other. The new season of Helga is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, and Death, Sex & Money. The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University is a new university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community.
Episodes
Black people know this: There’s a difference between what you say and what you mean. It’s been a matter of survival for us.
For over 30 years, American visual artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa has captured the histories and experiences of Black Americans with projects that exemplify both the universal and partic...
I don't want to be the prisoner in a box, even if it's a box I made.
For over 30 years, American visual artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa has captured the histories and experiences of Black Americans with projects that exemplify both the universal and particular facets of Black life.
In this mastercl...
This [term] 'femme' becomes more possible to me as a figure for not just embodiment, but for thought, action, engagement, connection.
Macarena Goméz-Barris is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, founder of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, an organization which supports artists...
There are whole histories of African American artists wrestling with stereotypical depictions and minstrelsy - and it seemed worthy anyway to me as an artist to consider them as some kind of artwork.
American painter and silhouettist Kara Walker rose to international acclaim at the age of 28 as one of the youngest-ever ...
I like to say we're living in a precedent time, not an unprecedented one. How do we understand that? Being at the museum or writing histories both in poetry and in non-fiction are ways of trying to understand that.
“Gatekeepers” hold an essential role in our culture as those in positions of power who determine what ...
It’s hard when you try to talk across racial groups about race ... I do believe that there's a better chance of them getting further if we can create spaces of both accountability and connection.
Tricia Rose is a pioneering scholar in the field of hip-hop, Chancellor's Professor of African...
Within seriousness, there's little room for play, but within play there's tremendous room for seriousness. It's through the act of serious play that wonderful ideas are born.
Carrie Mae Weems is one of today’s most influential and generous contemporary American artists, as devoted to her own craft as sh...
I knew that there was a power I had when I stripped off my shirt and looked you in the eye as I moved my hips. But I also knew the other side of that attraction to me was the impulse to kill me.
Legendary dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones has made a career of engaging his audience with brutal, unapologetic honesty...
Once I could feel grounded in an East African context and value who I am in an American context - suddenly it was so apparent that music was where I was supposed to be.
The dynamic, ascendant jazz singer Somi has been celebrated for her artistry as much as her activism. She became the first African woman ever nominated in any of t...
I was making it for the people who feel like they don't really get a shot or are not seen, talked about, or cared about at all.
Even with his surging popularity in indie and rock scenes, Bartees Strange strives to bring his music to unexpected audiences and to tease apart t...
Usually the things that are the farthest out — that look the least like art to me — are the things that become the most important.
American painter Glenn Ligon is one of the most recognizable figures in the contemporary art scene. His distinctive, political work uses repetition and transformation to abstract the texts of 20th-ce...
There are times in life when you need to be able to live in the vision, where you are making a leap of faith into something unknowable.
Claudia Rankine is a professor of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, and National Endowment of the Arts, and one of the...
'Safe' also has another connotation of being not willing to take risks or to push a boundary.
Michael R. Jackson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Strange Loop, a play into which he poured almost 20 years of self-investigation. He’s also fresh from a Tony Award for Best New Musical as w...
Artist, performer, and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity and love of people to the podcast Helga, where she talks about the intimate lives of creative people as they share the steps they’ve taken along their path. She draws listeners into these discussions with cultural change-makers, whether already famous or rising talents, whose sensibilities expand our imaginations as we explo...
"We’re struggling. Our generation is trying to cope. Life is crazy."
On this final episode of Helga: The Armory Conversations, I look to this next generation of artists. Three participants in Park Avenue Armory’s Youth Corps program, playwright Wilson Castro, visual artist Raven Garcia, and photographer Biviana Sanchez, sat d...
"I want to push those limitations. Push them."
Researcher, writer and critic K. Anthony Jones discusses what it means to make your own way and how to carve a path where one does not exist.
K. Anthony Jones researches and writes on the history, theory, and criticism of late modern art and arch...
“There’s a real potential in art making to have someone reassess everything that they had thought about a history.”
Curator, critic and writer, Antwaun Sargent engages Helga in a discussion around the motivations behind his work as a curator and the circuitous path that led him to a life in and around art.
Antwa...
“It was so important to be apart of community. To find strength in each other. To know that on the days when I can’t move forward, someone is going to take up the baton and move forward for me. “
Professor, Lawyer and ACLU President Deborah Archer sat down to speak with me about some of her earliest moments and how they shaped her d...
“That's been one of the hardest things to really heal from. Has been the grief of knowing that my choices and the way that I live my life, which I love means that I am isolated from my community.”
Liliana Maria Percy Ruíz, radio producer and founding member of On Being with Krista Tippett sat down to talk about identity...
"The positioning of being kind of on the edge of the room looking in? That's the position of a journalist."
Jad Abumrad, co-Host and creator of Radiolab, joined Helga to talk about the beginnings of his career, the impact of family and how he works with doubt.
The son of a scientist and a doctor, Jad Abumrad did most of hi...
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