The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 636 features curators Furio Rinaldi and Jonathan Stuhlman.

Rinaldi is the curator of "Botticelli Drawings" at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Legion of Honor, the first exhibition dedicated to the drawings of Sandro Botticelli. The show follows Botticelli from his time with Fra Filippo Lippi to the establishment of his own workshop in Florence. The exhibition is on view through February 11. The exhibition catalogue was published by FAMSF in association with Yale University Press. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for about $55-70.

Stuhlman is the curator of “Southern/Modern,” a survey of modernism from artists who were from, worked in, or visited the American South. The exhibition opens arrives at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville on January 26, and will remain on view through April 28. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent catalogue published by University of North Carolina Press. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for about $30-75. For images, see Episode No. 606.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:11pm EDT

Episode No. 635 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Leslie Martinez and curator Anthony Graham.

MoMA PS1 in Queens is presenting "Leslie Martinez: The Fault of Formation," through April 8. The exhibition features paintings built with paint, folds, pools, and collaged materials such as rags and dried acrylics. Martinez's way of making paintings both mines the history of abstraction, but also a no-waste approach informed by methodologies of rasquachismo, a term coined by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Fausto to describe a Chicano "attitude rooted in resourcefulness yet mindful of stance and style." The show was curated by Elena Ketelsen González.

Martinez was previously featured in a solo show at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston. Their work is in the collection of museums such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville is showing Martinez's work in "Current Speed: Angel Otero/Leslie Martinez" through March 24. The exhibition features works by the two artists that are new to the Speed's collection. The presentation was organized by Tyler Blackwell.

On the second segment, a re-presentation of curator Anthony Graham on the Alexis Smith retrospective he organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2022. Smith died earlier this week. She was 74. For images, see Episode No. 568.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:00pm EDT

Episode No. 634 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. 

The Phoenix Art Museum 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 in Phoenix through February 25, 2024. The exhibition originated at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. The outstanding catalogue was published by BAMPFA 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) within 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:

For more images, see Episode No. 592.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

Episode No. 633 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Gary Simmons.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami is presenting “Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,” a survey of Simmons’ 35-year career. The exhibition reveals how Simmons has addressed race, class and US history in ways that have remained persistently au courant. It was curated by René Morales and Jadine Collingwood, with Jack Schneider. It's on view in Miami through April 28, 2024. The exhibition originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The MCA and DelMonico Books have published an outstanding catalogue. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for $56-60.

For images of artworks discussed on the program, see Episode No. 613. 

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

Episode No. 632 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Philip Brookman and Julian Brooks.

Brookman is the curator of "Dorothea Lange: Seeing People," at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition presents Lange's decades-long portraiture practice in over 100 photographs, pictures that range from the Great Depression through the 1960s. "Seeing People" is on view through March 31, 2024. The exhibition catalogue was published by the NGA in association with Yale University Press. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $43-51.

With Edina Adam, Brooks is the co-curator of "William Blake: Visionary," at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Blake was a printmaker and painter who built an unconventional, fantastical, often narrative world view that he presented across both poetry and art. The presentation includes a colored copy of Blake's illuminated book America a Prophecy, a mindfully careful telling of the story of the American Revolution. "Blake" is at the Getty through January 14, 2024. The Getty-published exhibition catalogue is available from Bookshop and Amazon for $29-33.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

Episode No. 631 features curators Anne Umland and Kelly Montana. 

Umland is the curator of "Picasso in Fontainebleau" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition examines work Pablo Picasso made during the summer of 1921 in Fontainebleau, an exurb of Paris. It reunites four major works on canvas, both versions of Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring. The exhibition is on view through February 17, 2024. Umland was assisted by Alexandra Morrison and Francesca Ferrari. The excellent catalogue was published by MoMA. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for $55-60.

Montana is the curator of "Hanne Darboven -- Writing Time" at the Menil Collection in Houston. The exhibition explores three kinds of work Darboven produced -- abstract drawings, date calculations, and monumental installations -- and explains how they were informed by Darboven's involvement in New York's embrace of conceptualism in the 1960s. The exhibition is on view through February 11, 2024. A fine exhibition catalogue was published by the Menil. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for about $35.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

Episode No. 630 features curators Stephan Wolohojian and Lisa Volpe.

With Ashley Dunn and in collaboration with Laurence des Cars, Isolde Pludermacher, and Stéphane Guégan, Wolohojian is the co-curator of "Manet/Degas" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition explores the artistic dialogue between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas and considers their work in the context of their shared family relationships, friendships, and intellectual circles. It is on view through January 7, 2024. The exhibition catalogue was published by the Met. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for $32-60.

Volpe is the curator of "Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition presents the work the famed Frank and the enormously less-well-known Webb made as they traveled the United States on Guggenheim fellowships in 1955. It is on view through January 7, 2024. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by the MFAH in association with Yale University Press. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $25-47.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

Episode No. 629 features artist Alexandro Segade of My Barbarian, and a re-air of a 2013 conversation with artist Eleanor Antin.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is presenting "Eleanor Antin and My Barbarian," a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Antin's landmark 100 Boots (1973). The exhibition also includes work featuring Antin's alter ego, the King of Solana Beach, and My Barbarian's Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse (2013), a feminist performance work that centers matrilineal creative inheritance. The work's title references the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was co-authored by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, and Melanie Klein's 1929 essay "Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse." Performers include Segade and his My Barbarian mates Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon, as well as artists Mary Kelly and Antin. "Eleanor Antin and My Barbarian is on view through February 18, 2024.

My Barbarian's work has been presented at museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a 2021-22 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

This Bomb magazine interview between My Barbarian and Andrea Fraser was referenced on the program. 

For Antin images, see Episode No. 104.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 3:00pm EDT

Episode No. 628 features artist Lyle Ashton Harris and curator Scott Allan. 

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is presenting "Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love," a survey of Harris' career featuring photographs, collage, archival material, and more. It's on view through January 7. 2024. Harris' work engages transatlantic social and political dialogues even has he foregrounds personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. The exhibition was co-curated by Caitlin Julia Rubin and Lauren Haynes. A catalogue is forthcoming. 

Harris' work is also included in "Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility," at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition, which was curated by Ashley James with Faith Hunter, presents works of art that feature partially obscured or hidden figures, works that conceal the body to explore a key tension in contemporary society: the desire to be seen, and the desire to be hidden from sight. It's on view through April 7, 2004. A catalogue was published by the museum. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $60-65.  

With Nii Obodai, Harris is the co-editor of the latest issue of Aperture magazine, which considers the Ghanaian capital of Accra as a site of dynamic photographic voices and histories that connect visual culture in West Africa to the world. It's available from Aperture for $25.

Allan curated "Reckoning with Millet's Man with a Hoe," at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition is an intensive look at arguably the most historically significant painting in the JPGM's collection of nineteenth-century European art. Man with a Hoe debuted in Paris in 1863, where it was attacked for its depiction and glorification of peasant labor. The exhibition is on view through December 10. The Getty-published catalogue is available from Amazon and Indiebound for about $27-30.

Instagram: Lyle Ashton Harris, Scott Allan, Tyler Green. 

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 8:00pm EDT

Episode No. 627 features artists Erica Mahinay and Teresa Baker.

Mahinay and Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) are both included in "Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living," the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum's biennial. The exhibition, which is on view through December 31, was curated by Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, with Ashton Cooper. This is the second of two MAN Podcast episodes that will feature artists from the program. The first featured artists Melissa Cody and Roksana Pirouzmand.

Mahinay is a painter and sculptor whose work references and updates modernism in address of the body. She has had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Rome.

Baker's mixed-media works combine artificial and natural materials to make abstracted landscapes that explore space and movement. She has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, and in group exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kan., and Marin MOCA, Novato, Calif. 

Instagram: Erica Mahinay, Teresa Baker, Tyler Green.

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Category:visual art -- posted at: 9:15pm EDT