The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 762 features artist John Akomfrah.

The Menil Collection, Houston is showing "John Akomfrah: The Hour of The Dog" through October 11. The work, co-commissioned by the Menil and the Baltimore Museum of Art, explores the history of the US civil rights movement between 1954 and 1963. The presentation was curated by Michelle White and Cecilia Wichmann.

Akomfrah is one of the world's most celebrated film-based artists. ...

Episode No. 761 features artists Denzil Forrester and William Wylie.

Forrester is featured in "Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 20. The exhibition explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art produced in the Caribbean, New York, London, and beyond. It was curated by Car...

Episode No. 760 features curators Marko Daniel and Elsa Smithgall, and curator Rachel Vogel.

With Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Daniel and Smithgall are the co-curators of "Miró and the United States" at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. The exhibition explores the exchanges between Joan Miró and the mid-twentieth-century US art scene. Not only did Miró have retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New Yor...

Episode No. 759 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Sarah Humphreville.

With Eric Crosby, Humphreville is the co-curator of "Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery." The exhibition surveys Abercrombie's synthesis of surrealism, landscape, portraiture and still-life, and is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date. It is at the Milwaukee Art Museum through July 19. An excellent catalo...

Episode No. 758 features artists Leasho Johnson and Laura Facey.

Both artists are featured in "Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 20. The exhibition explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art produced in the Caribbean, New York, London, and beyond. It was curated by Carla Ac...

Episode No. 757 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historian and curator Yve-Alain Bois.

Bois is the curator of "Matisse in Vence: The Stations of the Cross," at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition presents about 80 of the drawings Matisse made for the painted ceramic mural of the Stations of the Cross at the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. The exhibition reveals how Matisse worked through each of the Stations to ...

Episode No. 756 features author Victoria Johnson and curator Emily A. Beeny.

Johnson is the author of "Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World," the first major biography of the most important and influential painter in the US nineteenth century. The book will be published by Scribner next week. Johnson's book tells the story of Church's life, and especially his t...

Episode No. 755 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Jess T. Dugan and author D.B. Dowd.

Radius Books is publishing "Jess T. Dugan & Charlotte Cotton: Love Pictures," a collaboration featuring Dugan's photographs and conversations with Cotton and members of Cotton's and Dugan's communities, such as Dawoud Bey, Kate Palmer Albers, and Michelle Millar Fisher. Radius, Amazon, and Bookshop offer the two-volume publicati...

Episode No. 754 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features author Andrew Graham-Dixon and artist Rachel Burgess.

Graham-Dixon is the author of "Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found," which was just published by WW Norton. The book, a biography-ish of one of the most famous and elusive artists of the Dutch seventeenth century, offers exciting new ideas about Vermeer's life and presents new arguments about why and for whom Vermeer made most ...

Episode No. 753 features artist Delilah Montoya and author Mario T. García.

Montoya's work is featured in three major exhibitions around the US this season. The Albuquerque Museum is featuring "Delilah Montoya: Activating Chicana Resistance," the first retrospective of Montoya's forty-year career. The exhibition, which was curated by Josie Lopez, is on view through May 3. A valuable catalogue was published by University of Ne...

Episode No. 752 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Melvin Edwards.

Edwards, one of the most important and influential sculptors of his generation, the rare artist whose work simultaneously addressed the past, the present, and the future, died on March 30. He was 88.

This program was taped in 2015 when the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas opened the major retrospective "Melvin Edwards: Five Decades." It was the first E...

Episode No. 751 features artist Kahlil Robert Irving and curator Rebecca Head Trautmann.

Irving is included in "Monuments," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition juxtaposes decommissioned Lost Cause monuments with artworks that address the histories the Lost Cause aimed to whitewash. "Monuments" features two Irvings: New Nation (States)

Episode No. 750 (!!!) is a clips episode featuring artist Jo Ann Callis.

Starting in the early 1970s, Callis has constructed both black-and-white and color photographs that consider, sex, sexuality, pleasure and more pleasure. This program was taped in 2014 when Aperture published "Other Rooms," a book of Callis' investigations of the nude body and sexuality, mostly from the mid-1970s. Last year Luhz Press published "Jo Ann Callis ...

Episode No. 749 features curator Mari Carmen Ramírez and Isabelle Frances McGuire.

Ramírez is the curator of "Frida: The Making of an Icon" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition reveals how Frida Kahlo went from virtually unknown to mainstream audiences at the time of her death in 1954 to becoming famed as both an artist and as a kind of celebrity icon. Among the factors it identifies are North American geopoliti...

Episode No. 748 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Shawnya L. Harris and Jeffrey Richmond-Moll.

Harris and Richmond-Moll are the curators of "Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone" at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The exhibition presents the life and work of nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis in the context of her contemporaries and artists she may have influenced. The exhibition is on v...

Episode No. 747 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Bethany Collins and curator Edouard Kopp.

Collins is included in "Monuments," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition juxtaposes decommissioned Lost Cause monuments with commissioned artworks that address the histories the Lost Cause aimed to whitewash. Collins' contribution to the project is Love is dangerous (2024-25), a sculptural installation...

Episode No. 746 features artist Brian Rochefort and curator Catherine Craft.

Rochefort is among the artists included in "Made in L.A. 2025," the biennial at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles. The exhibition was curated by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow and is on view through March 1.

Rochefort's ceramic sculptures are informed by abstract painting, the earth's geology...

Episode No. 745 is a holiday weekend clips show featuring artist Christina Fernandez.

Fernandez is included in "Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966-2026" at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside (Calif.) Art Museum. The exhibition explores the evolution of Chicana/o/x lens-based practices through over 150 pictures made across six decades. The exhibition is on view at both RAM l...

Episode No. 744 features artist Blas Isasi and curators Larissa Grollemond and Elizabeth Morrison, and artist Harmonia Rosales.

Tomorrow, February 6, the Saint Louis Art Museum opens "Currents 125: Blas Isasi." The exhibition presents sculptures informed by ancient Andean cosmology and the Peruvian desert landscape, as well as the violent collision between Indigenous Andeans and colonizing Europeans. The exhibition was curated...