Episode No. 592 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Amalia Mesa-Bains and curator Michael Duncan.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting "Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory," the first retrospective of the pioneering Chicana artist. The exhibition includes nearly 60 works including fourteen of Mesa-Bains' major installations. It was curated by María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez and is on view through July 23. The outstanding catalogue was published by the Berkeley Art Museum in association with University of California Press. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $50.

Across a half-century, Mesa-Bains has foregrounded Chicana forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) into contemporary art. Her work often spotlights domestic spaces and the construction of landscape in ways that highlight colonial erasure. Among the museums which have presented solo exhibitions of Mesa-Bains' work are the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As promised on the program:

• Sandy Rodriguez on Episode No. 532.

On the second segment, curator Michael Duncan discusses "Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-45," which is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 19.  The exhibition presents a group of mostly northern New Mexico-based artists, including Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton, who built a spiritually-informed abstraction with a painterly language that included symbols and images drawn from the collective unconscious. The show's catalogue was published by the Crocker Art Museum and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $60.

Episode No. 591 features artists Kahlil Robert Irving and Rogelio Báez Vega.

Kahlil Robert Irving is included in "I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen" at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Across more than 25,000 square feet, the exhibition examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. It was curated by Alison Hearst and remains on view through April 30. Irving will deliver a lecture at MAMFW on March 7 at 6 pm.

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has just opened "Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present", a presentation of new Irving sculptures, video, and found objects. Irving has situated his sculptures and other items within a large plywood platform, resembling a stage. Viewers can move onto the structure to encounter both artworks and manufactured objects alike. The show, which was curated by William Hernández Luege, will be on view through January 21, 2024.

Irving's assemblages of images and replicas of every day objects challenge constructions of Western identity and culture. His ceramic sculptures incorporate neglected objects that represent a historical moment, as do his room-sized, image-driven installations. Irving has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis; he's been featured in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and more.

Rogelio Báez Vega is included in "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria" at the Whitney. The exhibition, organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Maria, explores how artists have responded to the years since that event. It includes 15 artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. It was curated by Marcela Guerrero with Angelica Arbelaez, and will be on view through April 23.

Báez Vega's paintings often portray modernist buildings dating from Puerto Rico's post-war boom. While his pictures sometimes show the island's rich vegetation overtaking physical structures, they imply both a dystopian future and nature's promise.

Instagram: Kahlil Robert Irving, Rogelio Báez Vega, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 590 features artist Monique Verdin. It was taped live at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Verdin is included in the Nasher's "Spirit in the Land," an exhibition that considers today’s ecological concerns and demonstrates how our identities and natural environments are intertwined. The show particularly focuses on the relationship between the mainland United States and the Caribbean. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, it will be on view through July 9. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which, as of the show posting date, is available only at the Nasher.

Verdin's work is also on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in "The Float Lab: The Heartbeat of Invisible Rivers." It is a project of Verdin's The Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro and Jeff Becker that uses music, theater, visual art, and boat-building to respond to Louisiana's interconnected struggles against land loss, environmental racism, and displacement. "The Float Lab" is on view through Oct. 1.

Verdin's photography, filmmaking and collages most often examine how climate change and industry are impacting traditional lifeways in a part of southwest Louisiana known to the Houma people as Yakni Chitto. Among her many exhibition credits is Prospect Four in New Orleans. Verdin is also the director of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, a former member of the United Houma Nation Tribal Council and is part of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative core leadership circle of brown (indigenous, latinx and desi) women, from Texas to Florida, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities and sustainable ecologies.

Instagram: Monique Verdin, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 589 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist Rose B. Simpson.

Rose B. Simpson is included in two ongoing presentations in New England: her Counterculture is installed at Field Farm, a Trustees property in Williamstown, Mass.; and in "Ceramics in the Expanded Field," at MASS MoCA through April 10. Counterculture was organized by Jamilee Lacy and will be on view through April 30, 2023. "Ceramics," which is up until April 10, was curated by Susan Cross.

Elsewhere, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is featuring "Rose B. Simpson: Dream House" through May 7, and Simpson is included with in "Thick as Mud" at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. The exhibition examines how eight artists use mud as material or subject. Curated by Nina Bozicnik, it's on view through May 7.

Across ceramic sculpture, performance, installation, and more, Simpson's work addresses ideas as far ranging as resistance, apocalypse, spirituality, and automobile design. Museums such as the University of New Mexico Art Museum (Simpson lives in Santa Clara Pueblo), Nevada Museum of Art, the Savannah College of Art and Design's SCAD Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art have all presented solo exhibitions of her work, and Simpson has been in group shows at the Henry Art Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, and plenty more.

The program was taped on the occasion of these shows and the ICA Boston exhibition "Rose B. Simpson: Legacies." 

From the program:

• Video from Simpson's 2013 Denver Art Museum performance.

For images, see Episode No. 567.

Air date: February 16, 2023.

Episode No. 588 features author Jennifer Van Horn and curator Elizabeth Kornhauser.

Van Horn is the author of "Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery," which was recently published by Yale University Press. The book investigates American portraiture, a discipline which until recently was dominated by European-American artists and their wealthy, self-image-creating clients. The book discovers within some of these portraits and the artists who made them histories of Black resistance, agency, viewership, and even iconoclasm. While the book primarily focuses on the era before the Civil War, it also reaches well into the twentieth century. Amazon and Indiebound offer "Portraits of Resistance" for about $60.

Kornhauser discusses a new installation of portraiture miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American galleries. Portrait miniatures -- often tiny watercolor pictures on ivory -- were popular in the US in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The production of portrait miniatures was one form of production particularly open to women artists.

Episode No. 587 features curators Jed Morse and Perrin Lathrop.

Morse is the curator of "Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper" at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The exhibition surveys di Suvero's career with a special focus on di Suvero's in-studio practice, such as his drawings and his little-considered modestly scaled sculptures (which make up the vast majority of his oeuvre). It is the most extensive survey of di Suvero's work in over 30 years, and the largest museum exhibition of such since 1975. "di Suvero" is on view through August 27. The excellent catalogue was published by the museum.

Along with Nikoo Paydar and Jamaal Sheats, Lathrop is a co-curator of "African Modernism in America, 1947-67" at the Fisk University Galleries in Nashville. The exhibition investigates the connections between African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations such as the Harmon Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and HBCUs during the early Cold War. It also features The Politics of Selection, a commission from Lagos-based sculptor Ndidi Dike that interrogates the collecting histories presented in the exhibition. "African Modernism" is on view through February 12, after which it will travel to the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University, Saint Louis; the Phillips Collection in Washington; and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. The outstanding catalogue was published by the American Federation of Arts. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $45.

Episode No. 586 features artist Justine Kurland.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford recently acquired a complete vintage set of Kurland's 69-picture "Girl Pictures" suite (1997-2002) and has installed it in the museum's 1934 Avery Court. (The building is known for having the first international style spaces of any American art museum.) The exhibition is on view through August.

Kurland's series presents a fictional semi-narrative of an empowered, self-sufficient, ever-traveling community of young women. It is a feminist recasting of the long tradition of adolescent and vagabond narratives that foreground boys and young men. Aperture published the entire series in a book that includes a story by Rebecca Bengal. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $47.

Instagram: Justine Kurland, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 585 features artist Matthew Ritchie.

The Frist Art Museum in Nashville is presenting "Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood," a survey of the last 20 years of Matthew Ritchie's career. The exhibition shows how Ritchie has brought together biology, physics, creation stories, epic poetry and history across painting, sculpture, video and installation. At the core of the exhibition is a new Ritchie video work featuring composer Hanna Benn in collaboration with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their late music director Dr. Paul T. Kwami. The exhibition was curated by Mark Scala and is on view through March 5. An exhibition catalogue was published by DelMonico Books in association with the Frist. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $50.

Ritchie's most recent institutional solo exhibitions have been at the CVAD Galleries at the University of North Texas, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, and the ICA Boston.

Instagram: Matthew Ritchie, Tyler Green.

Air date: January 19, 2023.

Episode No. 584 features curators Gretchen Hirschauer and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington is presenting "Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice," through February 12. The exhibition was curated by Peter Humfrey in collaboration with Andrea Bellieni and Hirschauer. It presents Carpaccio, a Venetian master who worked in the period between Bellini and the rise of Tintoretto, as the producer of spectacular narrative pictures that brought storytelling more fully into the practice of Venetian painters. The exhibition includes 45 paintings and 30 drawings. The NGA and Yale University Press copublished an excellent catalogue. It is available from Indiebound and Amazon for $51-65.

• For Carpaccio's Scuola degli Albanesi 'Life of the Virgin' cycle, see here.

Alexander discusses "East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art" at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center. The exhibition engages an American art history centered on transpacific migration and discourse rather than the traditional transatlantic address. It features roughly chronological sections that highlight key narratives in Asian American art between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. "East of the Pacific" is one of the three inaugural Asian American Art Initiative exhibitions at the Cantor. It is on view through February 12.

• In addition to the images below, see the Cantor's collection site for Henry Sugimoto's linocuts, and Sarah Kim's Bernice Bing zine Bingo!.

After a brief introduction, this episode is a re-air of host Tyler Green's 2014 conversation with artist Michael Snow.

Snow died on January 5. He was 94.