Episode No. 551 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist Allison Janae Hamilton.

Allison Janae Hamilton is included in “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration” at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. The exhibition, which was curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Jessica Bell Brown, features newly commissioned work from 12 Black artists that addresses the Great Migration. The Great Migration was the movement of more than six million Black Americans from the South to cities across the United States. The exhibition is in Jackson through September 11, when it will travel to Baltimore.

This program was taped on the occasion of Hamilton's inclusion in “Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” which was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and which is at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. through July 25.

Hamilton’s work investigates and reveals the South’s history and landscape and their influence on the American story across photographs, sculpture, video and installation. She has had solo exhibitions at Recess in New York, the Atlanta Contemporary and at MASS MoCA, and New York’s Times Square Arts and Creative Time have presented her work.

Episode No. 550 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features historian and author Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and curator Edith Devaney.

Gilmore is the author of "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination," which was just published by the University of North Carolina Press. The book examines how Bearden's address of his native South -- he was born and was initially raised in the Charlotte, NC area before his family was effectively forced to leave the South -- was informed by the vagaries of memory and even imagination. Gilmore is the Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita of History at Yale University. Her previous books include "Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920," and "Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950." Indiebound and Amazon offer "Bearden" for $26-40.

Devaney discusses “Milton Avery,” a survey of the artist’s career now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The exhibition debuted at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and is in Hartford through June 5. The exhibition features about 70 paintings Avery made between the 1910s and the mid-1960s and emphasizes Avery’s interest in color. It’s on view at the Wadsworth through June 5. “Avery” was co-organized by the Royal Academy, London, the Wadsworth and MAMFW. Its catalogue was published by the Royal Academy. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for about $45.

Episode No. 549 features artists Aubrey Levinthal and Doron Langberg.

Levinthal and Langberg are included in "A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The exhibition, which was curated by Ruth Erickson, spotlights painters who are particularly interested in depicting what is near and dear to them, including friends, lovers, family, studio spaces, and their homes. "A Place for Me" is at the ICA through September 5.

Aubrey Levinthal is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work explores the everyday in ways that engage with painting's history. She's shown her work in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Philadelphia. In addition to the ICA Boston exhibition, Levinthal's work is in "Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity" at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas. It was curated by Clare Milliken and Bailey Summers, and is on view through May 15.

Doron Langberg is a New York-based artist whose often large-scale works explore intimacy, color and touch. Langberg has been included in group shows at the RISD Museum, the Frick Madison, and the LSU Museum. His work is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the RISD Museum.

Episode No. 548 features curators Ann Temkin and Stephanie Weissberg.

Along with Dorthe Aagesen, Temkin is the co-curate of "Matisse: The Red Studio," an exhibition that investigates Matisse's making of his famed 1911 The Red Studio. The exhibition, which is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through September 10, features each of the surviving works Matisse portrayed in The Red Studio, as well as related archival photographs, correspondence and related paintings and drawings. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by MoMA. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for $55.

Weissberg discusses her exhibition "Assembly Required," which is at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis through July 31. The show features eight artists -- Francis Alÿs, Rasheed Araeen, Siah Armajani, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Lygia Pape, and Franz Erhard Walther -- who believed that public action is vital to transform society. The work Weissberg has selected for the exhibition invites a viewer's physical participation.

Episode No. 547 features artists Leslie Hewitt and Cornell Watson.

Hewitt is included in "A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration" at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. The exhibition, which was curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Jessica Bell Brown, features newly commissioned work from 12 Black artists that addresses the Great Migration. The Great Migration was the movement of more than six million Black Americans from the South to cities across the United States. The exhibition is in Jackson through September 11, when it will travel to Baltimore.

Hewitt's photography and sculpture revisit art historical forms such as the still-life and minimalist sculpture through the lens of personal history, biography and America's past. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the MCA Chicago, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Des Moines Art Center and the Menil Collection are among the institutions that have presented solo or two-person exhibitions of her work.

Cornell Watson's work is included in “Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now” at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition features over 100 works by 30 artists working across North Carolina. It features work from Watson's "Behind the Mask" series, a visual consideration of Black life in present-day America.

Instagram: Leslie Hewitt, Cornell Watson, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 546 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Natalie Dupêcher and Laura de Becker. 

Along with Anne Umland and Nina Zimmer, Dupêcher is the co-curator of "Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition," a retrospective that spans the Swiss artists' 1930s work in Paris, her engagements with surrealism, and her broad post-war synthesis of nouveau réalisme, pop, abstraction and addresses of nature. The exhibition is at the Menil Collection, Houston, through September 18 before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It debuted at the Kunstmuseum Bern last fall. (The Kunstmuseum Bern created a "digitorial" for the exhibition.) "Oppenheim" is accompanied by a catalogue published by MoMA. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for $27-45.

de Becker is the curator of "Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution" at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The exhibition takes a unique approach to an examination of eleven objects from the museum's African collection: instead of researching their provenances' relationship to the era of colonization in private, the museum is conducting its research into those objects publicly and in near-real time via a gallery exhibition. Both the exhibition and the website UMMA has launched for the project are models of transparency. de Becker is UMMA's curator for African art and interim chief curator. She is assisted in the project by Timnet Gedar, Bridget Grier, Caitlyn Webster and Ozi Uduma. 

Episode No. 545 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Charles Ray.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is showing "Charles Ray: Figure Ground" through June 5. The exhibition surveys Ray's career beginning with photographs from the early 1970s and continuing through the sculptures he's made over the last several decades. The exhibition was organized by Kelly Baum and Brinda Kumar.

Ray came on the program in 2014 when he showed two new works at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles: Baled Truck, a sculpture of a truck that’s been crushed into a rectangular block junkyard-style, and Mime, a sculpture of a reclining male figure on a cot.

In 1998, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles presented a Paul Schimmel-curated retrospective of Ray’s work that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the MCA Chicago. In 2014 the Kunstmuseum Basel presented an exhibition of 15 Ray sculptures made since 1997. An expanded version of that show will opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

Images are available here.

Episode No. 545 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Charles Ray.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is showing "Charles Ray: Figure Ground" through June 5. The exhibition surveys Ray's career beginning with photographs from the early 1970s and continuing through the sculptures he's made over the last several decades. The exhibition was organized by Kelly Baum and Brinda Kumar.

Ray came on the program in 2014 when he showed two new works at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles: Baled Truck, a sculpture of a truck that’s been crushed into a rectangular block junkyard-style, and Mime, a sculpture of a reclining male figure on a cot.

In 1998, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles presented a Paul Schimmel-curated retrospective of Ray’s work that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the MCA Chicago. In 2014 the Kunstmuseum Basel presented an exhibition of 15 Ray sculptures made since 1997. An expanded version of that show will opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

Images are available here.

Episode No. 544 features curators Perrin Stein and Frederick Ilchman.

Stein is the curator of "Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met says it's the first exhibition devoted to David's works on paper. "David" features over 80 drawings, preparatory studies and oil sketches related to significant paintings that helped shape public understandings of major events in the years before, during and after the French Revolution. The exhibition is on view through May 15. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by the Met. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for about $54-65.

Ilchman organized the MFA Boston presentation of "Turner's Modern World" with Julia Welch and Cara Wolahan. (The exhibition, which originated at the Tate, was curated David Brown, Amy Concannon, James Finch, and Sam Smiles with Hattie Spires.) "Turner's Modern World" features about 100 Turners, including paintings, watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks, and argues for the present sociopolitical relevance of Turner's work. In Boston, the presentation centers one of Turner's most important works, Slave Ship (1840), a dramatic indictment of the transatlantic slave trade. "Turner's Modern World" is on view through July 10. The catalogue was published by the Tate. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for $42-55.

Images will post on Saturday, April 9.

Episode No. 543 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Elyse Nelson.

Along with Wendy S. Walters, Nelson is the co-curator of "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition interrogates French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's 1868/73 marble bust Why Born Enslaved! and places the sculpture in the context of French history, racialization, and in the representation of Black men and women by sculptors in Europe and the US during and after the nineteenth century. It's on view through March 5, 2023.

The Met has published an excellent catalogue for the project. It includes contributions from Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris Moon, Caitlin Meehye Beach, Rachel Hunter Himes, James Smalls, Adrienne Childs, Nelson, and Walters. It is available from Indiebound and Amazon for about $25.

Instagram: Elyse Nelson, Tyler Green.