The Modern Art Notes Podcast

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, Elizabeth Azzuz, Viola Azzuz, Moya Azzuz...

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 homelands, and the experience of feeling p...

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 175 paintings, mural studies, prints,...

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 rooted in the blending of Japanese and...

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 Kristen Gaylord. Among the museums tha...

Episode No. 716 features curator Eleanor Nairne and artist Francesca Fuchs.

With Wells Fray-Smith, Nairne is the co-curator of "Noah Davis," an eponymous retrospective at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles. Davis, who passed away from a rare cancer in 2015 at age 32, was a painter whose work addressed current affairs, every day life, family histories, and architecture. Davis often addressed the subjects that i...

Episode No. 715 features artist Kandis Williams.

The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis is presenting "Kandis Williams: A Surface," the first survey of Williams' career. The exhibition spotlights how Williams has used collage as a tool of Black feminist resistance, to dismantle entrenched histories and power structures, and to rebuild dominant narratives. The exhibition, which was curated by Taylor Jasper with Laurel Rand-Lewis, is on ...

Episode No. 714 features curator and art historian Jonathan D. Katz and curators Allison Kemmerer and Gordon Wilkins.

With Johnny Willis, Katz is the co-curator of "The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939" at Wrightwood 659, Chicago. The exhibition details the emergence of a significant change in how societies around the world regarded homosexuality in the wake of the coining of the term 'homosexual' in 1869,...

Episode No. 713 is a Fourth of July weekend clips episode featuring artist Carmen Winant.

This episode was taped in 2023 on the occasion of the Minneapolis Institute of Art's presentation of Winant’s “The last safe abortion” through December 31. It features Winant’s assemblages of historical photographs gathered from across the Midwest that detail the work of providing health care to women. That work includes answering phones, pres...

Episode No. 712 features artist Julian Hoeber and curator María Elena Ortiz.

Hoeber is included in "Generations: 150 Years of Sculpture" at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. The exhibition offers a new selection of works from the Nasher collection that offers conversations between works from the past and present.

Hoeber's practice centers perception and searches for ways to exceed and reconcile limits set by binary ideas such a...

Episode No. 711 is a summer clips episode featuring artist Patrick Martinez.

Martinez is among the artists showing in the Boston Public Art Triennial, which was developed by Pedro Alonzo, Tess Lukey, and a(n unspecified) curatorial advisory group. Martinez's 2025 Cost of Living may be seen at Boston's Downtown Crossing.

Martinez is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work investigates socio-economic position, immigration, police viol...

Episode No. 710 features curator Timothy Anglin Burgard and artist Tony Lewis.

Burgard is the curator of "Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art" at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The exhibition details how Thiebaud drew ideas from and reimagined European and US artworks both old and new. It is on view through August 17. A superb catalogue was published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with University of ...

Episode No. 709 features author Adrienne L. Childs and curator Iris Moon.

Childs is the author of "Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts." The book, which was published by Yale University Press, examines the role decorative arts played in the representation of Black people within European visual and material culture. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $44-78.

From the show:

• The exhibition guide to...

Episode No. 708 features artist Paul Pfeiffer.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is showing the retrospective "Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom." For over 25 years, Pfeiffer has investigated spectacle and mass culture, especially sport, and has found within it the power to create and extend political narratives. Included within the exhibition is only the second US presentation of Pfeiffer's landmar...

Episode No. 707 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Lorna Simpson.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is presenting "Lorna Simpson: Source Notes," a survey that focuses on paintings that Simpson has made over the last decade. Across more than 30 works, "Simpson" spotlights the artist's explorations of gender, race, identity, representation, and history. The exhibition, which is ...

Episode No. 706 features curators Leslie King-Hammond and Edward Saywell, and curator Jared Ledesma.

Along with Patrick Murphy and Jennifer Farrell, Hammond and Saywell are the co-curators of "Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibition surveys Wilson's 60-year career, spotlighting the ways in which Wilson addressed anti-Black violence, the civil rights movement, labor, family li...

Episode No. 705 features curators Dalila Scruggs and Catherine Morris, and artist Beatriz Cortez.

With Mary Lee Corlett, Scruggs and Morris are the co-curators of "Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition surveys Catlett's career across over 150 sculptures, prints, paintings, and drawings. The exhibition is on view through July 6. An exceptional exhibition catalogu...

Episode No. 704 features artist Wafaa Bilal.

The MCA Chicago is presenting "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 Middle East, and broader geopolitics. Bilal's work also investigates the noti...

Episode No. 703 features artist Dakota Mace and curator Claire Howard.

SITE Santa Fe is showing "Dakota Mace: DAHODIYINII—SACRED PLACES," an investigation of an atrocity during which the United States expelled the Diné people from Dinétah, their ancestral homeland, and forced them to march as many as 400 miles to the Bosque Redondo in central-eastern New Mexico, where they were forced to remain in a concentration camp from 1864-68....