The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 567 features artist Rose B. Simpson and author Brent Martin.

The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston is showing "Rose B. Simpson: Legacies," an exhibition of 14 sculptures Simpson has made over the last eight years. It was curated by Jeffrey De Blois and is on view through January 29, 2023.

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

This fall The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia will feature "Rose B. Simpson: Dream House." The exhibition opens October 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.

Martin discusses his new book "George Masa's Wild Vision," which was recently published by Hub City Press. Masa was an Asheville, North Carolina-based photographer who had a significant impact on the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on determining the Southern route of the Appalachian Trail, the two crown jewels of the eastern United States' natural infrastructure. Amazon and Indiebound offer the book for around $25.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtySeven.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 4:57pm EDT

Audio from Session One of The Darkwater Project's 2022 digital colloquium, "Historical American Art, Whiteness, and the Idea of the American Nation." 

Watch the session on YouTube.

Follow The Darkwater Project on Instagram. 

Sign up for Session Two (September 22, 3:30 pm ET).

Direct download: Darkwater_fall_2022_colloq_1.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 9:25am EDT

Episode No. 566 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist B. Ingrid Olson and curator Idurre Alonso.

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is presenting two concurrent B. Ingrid Olson exhibitions, "History Mother," and "Little Sister" through December 23. Each exhibition is on a separate floor of CCVA's building. Olson's exhibitions feature site-specific presentations that engage with doubling and mirroring, gendered forms, the interplay between photography and sculpture, and between the body and the built environment. The exhibitions were curated by Dan Byers. A catalogue will be available.

This week, the Secession in Vienna closed an exhibition of Olson's work titled "Elastic X." In addition, Olson's work has previously been featured in solo presentations at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY and at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Alonso discusses her new exhibition "Reinventing the Américas: Construct. Erase. Repeat" at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The exhibition considers the ways in which artists have helped construct ideas about the Western Hemisphere, particularly in the decades after the arrival of Europeans. It is on view through January 8, 2023.

Instagram: B. Ingrid Olson, Idurre Alonso, Tyler Green.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtySix.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:25pm EDT

Episode No. 565 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a summer clips episode featuring artist Sandy Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is included in "Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche," which is at the Albuquerque Museum through September 4. The exhibition examines the historical and cultural legacy of the Indigenous woman at the heart of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico (1519-1521) known colloquially as La Malinche. The show originated at the Denver Art Museum and was curated by Victoria I. Lyall and independent curator Terezita Romo. This fall it travels to the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Sandy Rodriguez’s work remains on view in “Borderlands” at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. 

Rodriguez’s work explores the methods and materials of painting in works that address Native and colonial histories, memory, and contemporary events. Among her exhibition credits are the recent triennial at El Museo del Barrio, LACMA, the Riverside Art Museum, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, and more.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtyFive.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:31pm EDT

Episode No. 487 is a summer clips episode featuring curators Marshall N. Price and Elizabeth Finch.

Price and Finch are the co-curators of "Roy Lichtenstein:  History in the Making, 1948-60." The exhibition examines Lichtenstein's early work, with particular attention to Lichtenstein's synthesis of European modernism, American painting and contemporary vernacular sources. The exhibition is on view at the Colby Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University through January 8, 2023. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by Rizzoli Electa. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for about $33. From Waterville, Maine, the exhibition will travel to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Price and Finch are curators at the Nasher and Colby, which originated the show, respectively.

For images see Episode No. 487. 

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtyFour.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:25am EDT

Episode No. 563 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander and artist Katherine Bradford.

Alexander is the curator of "The Faces of Ruth Asawa," a new permanent installation at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University featuring Asawa's Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks). Wall of Masks is made up of ceramic face masks Asawa made with the cooperation of friends and visitors. The masks once hung on the exterior of the Asawa family's home. The artwork was the first acquisition made by Stanford's Asian American Art Initiative, which Alexander founded with Stanford professor Marci Kwon, and which she co-leads.

"Faces" also includes three vessels by Asawa’s son Paul Lanier. Each was made with clay mixed with the ashes of Asawa, her husband Albert, and their late son, Adam. Upon Asawa’s death, by her request, Lanier threw these materials into a set of vessels, one for each surviving sibling.

The second segment is a re-air of painter Katherine Bradford's 2018 appearance on the program. This summer, the Portland (Me.) Museum of Art is presenting "Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford," the first solo museum survey of Bradford's career. It was curated by Jaime DeSimone and is on view through September 11. The segment was taped on the occasion of “FOCUS: Katherine Bradford” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtyThree.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:00pm EDT

Episode No. 562 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Sarah Chasse and Karen Kramer, and artist Jason Garcia (Okuu Pin).

Chasse and Kramer are the co-curators of a new installation of the Peabody Essex Museum's Native American and American collections titled "On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America." The installation joins two separate institutional collections in a way that joins art to 10,000 years of North American history. "On This Ground" often suggests and reveals how art influenced and extended ideas core to the continental story. The installation is on view indefinitely.

Garcia's work -- specifically artworks from his Tewa Tales of Suspense! series -- is included in the PEM's collection and in "On This Ground." Garcia's work often examines and interprets American and Pueblo history in ways that revise old, whites-centering narratives. His work is in the collection of museums such as the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtyTwo.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:30pm EDT

Episode No. 561 features author Helen Langdon and curator Erin Garcia.

Langdon is the author of "Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance," a new biography of the Renaissance painter and actor. The book explains Rosa's thirst for fame, his philosophical pursuits and how they melded with his painting, his acting career, and the ways in which his desire to be a celebrity often interfered with his ability to accomplish his career goals. The book was published by Reaktion and is distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for $25.

Garcia discusses "Chinese Pioneers: Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs," which is at the California Historical Society in San Francisco through August 13. The exhibition offers a CHS collection-driven visual history of the social, political, and judicial disenfranchisement of Chinese Californians -- as well as portrayals of Chinese agency and resilience -- during the Chinese exclusion era.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixtyOne.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 4:38pm EDT

Episode No. 560 features artist Kiyan Williams and historian Paul M. Farber.

The Hammer Museum is presenting "Hammer Projects: Kiyan Williams", the artist's first solo museum presentation, through August 28. The show features Williams' 2022 installation Between Starshine and Clay, a work that features earth taken from sites that are familial or that hold Black American histories, and sculptural forms that reveal or refer to the human body. "Williams" was curated by Erin Christovale.

Williams is also included in "Black Atlantic," a Public Art Fund exhibition at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. The exhibition, which was curated by Hugh Hayden and Daniel S. Palmer, was motivated by an exploration of transatlantic diaspora. It includes Williams' 2022 Ruins of Empire, a reimagining of Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom, which was installed atop the US Capitol dome in 1863. (The full-size plaster model for Freedom is in the Capitol Visitor Center.) "Black Atlantic" is on view through November 27.

In addition, they are also in "52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone" at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. The exhibition, which was curated by Amy Smith-Stewart and is on view through January 8, 2023, showcases work by artists in the Aldrich's 1971 "Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists" show, augmented by work by 26 female identifying or nonbinary emerging artists.

On the second segment, a re-air of an October 2021 conversation with Monument Lab director Paul M. Farber on Monument Lab's National Monument Audit, which Farber co-directed with Laurie Allen and Sue Mobley. In addition to the project website, Monument Lab offers a free PDF of the audit. This week, Monument Lab's Future Memory podcast returned. Click here for information and here to subscribe.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredSixty.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:47pm EDT

Episode No. 559 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Jess T. Dugan.

The Momentary in Bentonville, Ark. is presenting "Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Let Earth Breathe" through September 25. Across the exhibition, Cabeza de Baca deconstructs the colonial European-American landscape tradition by re-considering painting and sculpture as a collaboration with nature. It was curated by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas with Taylor Jasper. Cabeza de Baca's work is also included in "Plein Air" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. The exhibition was curated by Aurora Tang and will be on view through February 5, 2023.

Cabeza de Baca's work has been shown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, The Drawing Center, New York City.

Jess T. Dugan's work is included within "Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births," which is at the MassArt Art Museum through December 18. This conversation previously aired on Episode No. 468 when photographs from Dugan‘s “To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults” project were at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Dugan produced “To Survive on This Shore” with their partner, Vanessa Fabbre, a social worker and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The book related to the project was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2018. It is available from Amazon and from Indiebound.

Instagram: Cabeza de Baca, Dugan, Tyler Green.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeFiveHundredFiftyNine.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 4:14pm EDT