Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

A conversation between two dynamic artists and good friends, Patrick Staff and Julie Tolentino, whose work feels especially urgent now. Staff, who recently had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London, uses video and other mediums to comment on body politics from a queer and trans perspective. Tolentino also addresses issues facing marginalized groups, through performance that combines her dance background with socia...

A conversation with the acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin that transports us to two of her favorite cities, Venice and Rome, in a celebration of Italy as the country begins to loosen the longest coronavirus-related lockdown in Europe. The episode features evocative readings from her forthcoming book,Two Cities, which captures the meditative yet constantly surprising nature of travel from a deeply personal point of ...

A timely conversation with the art critic Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, on how minimalism went from radical 1960s art movement to, ironically, a hyper-commercialized lifestyle adopted by luxury brands and millennials everywhere—and where Marie Kondo and Agnes Martin overlap, if at all.  During this time, we’re evolving to give you even more to listen to, with one-on-one episodes with the peop...

A special episode dedicated to the late artist Noah Davis, with some of the the people who knew him best. The curator Helen Molesworth, his brother, the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, remember Davis, whose legacy continues to grow—through his paintings, which depict everyday life with emotional and formal ambition; The Underground Museum, the space he founded in Los Angeles that combines many differe...

A rare conversation between artists who have stayed together for over three decades. The Swedish artist Karin “Mamma” Andersson and her husband Jockum Nordström’s story—of two young artists leaning on each other as their family grew; of uncertainty and insecurity and figuring out how to be different but together; of the pleasure of getting completely lost in one’s work—feels especially potent in these uncertain times. Andersson’s ...

In this episode, the artists Doug Wheeler and Vija Celmins revisit their years in Venice Beach, California in the late 1960s, a scene crowded with figures like Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. Wheeler and Celmins—old friends and visionaries of their medium—gossip, rehash, map, and even correct this vital piece of art history, while tackling a central question of art along the way: How to impress yo...

This episode pairs artist Oscar Murillo with the editor Charles Henry Rowell for a conversation about class, race, art, and the African cultural diaspora that is one part history lesson and one part personal history.  Murillo is short-listed for the 2019 Turner Prize and Rowell is the founder and editor of Callalloo, the longest continuously running African-American literary journal.  The Turner Prize exhibition runs through Janu...

This episode is all about Yayoi Kusama and art in the Instagram age. JiaJia Fei, a digital guru for institutions like the Jewish Museum and the Guggenheim, and Christian Luiten, founder of the popular digital art platform Avant Arte, come together to talk authenticity vs. influence, high vs. low, art vs. accessibility, narrative vs. myth—and to diagnose the unabating online fanaticism for all things Kusama, an Instagram icon who is...

When the artist Alex Da Corte and the writer Charlie Fox talk about Edward Scissorhands, Frankenstein, Hercules, Michael Myers, A Clockwork Orange, Scar from The Lion King, they’re also talking about beauty and body anxiety and disability and sexual attraction and queerness—the anxieties of existing physically in the world every day. Da Corte, whose elaborate videos, sculptures, and installations critically re-stage pop culture, ar...

When the artist Jordan Wolfson and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris get together, sparks fly. Wolfson’s art confronts intimacy, violence, and desire with sometimes shocking honesty. Likewise, O. Harris, whose buzzed-about and radical Slave Play comes to Broadway this fall, uses music and bodies to complicate themes of violence and sex—and perhaps most powerfully of all, race and history. O. Harris is able to dip in and out of absurd...

A revealing conversation about the life and teachings of James Baldwin that draws on Beauford Delaney, the pivotal role of invested teachers, and how the writer shaped the racial and cultural landscape in America. In this episode of Dialogues, Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic Hilton Als is joined in conversation by friend, collaborator, and thought partner Thelma Golden of The Studio Museum in Harlem for a conversation on Bal...

A conversation about clothing, instinct, and finding high art in everyday life that touches on Jackie O, Kandinsky, and the Bauhaus. In this episode of Dialogues,Nicholas Fox Weber—cultural historian and executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation—is paired with acclaimed British fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. The two are brought together on the occasion of a major retrospective of Anni Albers’s work, currently on ...