Episode No. 395 features curator Kirk Nickel and artist Alicia McCarthy.

The Legion of Honor in San Francisco is presenting "Early Rubens," an examination of the first phase of Rubens's career. With about 30 paintings and 20 drawings, the exhibition examines work Rubens made from 1609, when he was in his early 30s, until 1621. It was curated by National Gallery of Canada director Sasha Suda, and this week's guest, Kirk Nickel of the Legion of Honor. The exhibition is on view in San Francisco through September 8, when it will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario (where Suda was previously the curator of European art). The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by Delmonico Prestel. Amazon offers it for just $31.

On the second segment, Alicia McCarthy discusses "Alicia McCarthy: No Straight Lines," a major commissioned mural at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The exhibition was curated by Lucy I. Zimmerman and will be on view through August 1. The Oakland-based McCarthy was the winner of the 2017 SFMOMA SECA Award. Her recent projects have included a 2018 show at the Berkeley Art Museum with Ruby Neri and a building-side mural in downtown San Francisco.

Episode No. 394 is a holiday weekend clips program featuring John Akomfrah. It was recorded in April, 2018.

The ICA Boston is presenting the U.S. debut of John Akomfrah's Purple. It opens today to East Boston residents and ICA members, to the general public on May 26, and will remain on view through September 2. Purple is a six-channel video installation that addresses climate change and its effect on human communities, biodiversity and the wilderness. The work is installed at the new ICA Watershed.

The interview was taped on the occasion of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University's presentation of Precarity, (2017-18), a work that it commissioned for its collection and that debuted at the Ogden Museum as part of the recent Prospect 4 triennial in New Orleans.

Episode No. 393 features artists Suzanne Lacy and Thomas Nozkowski.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts are jointly presenting the retrospective "Suzanne Lacy: We are Here." The exhibition explores Lacy's roots in early conceptualism and her emergence as a pioneer of what has become known as social practice, the use of community organizing and media-focused strategies to prompt events and discussions. The exhibitions are on view in San Francisco through August 4.

On the second segment, a clip from host Tyler Green's 2013 conversation with painter Thomas Nozkowski, who died last week. He was 75. Nozkowski was a painter's painter. He had over seventy solo shows around the world and his work is in almost every major museum collection you can think of, all to little fanfare. His last retrospective was a decade ago, at the National Gallery of Canada.

Episode No. 392 features artist and curator Julie Ault and curator Linda S. Ferber.

Ault is the curator of "Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror" at MoMA PS1 through June 23. Spero was a pioneering feminist artist whose work often addressed contemporary events and archetypal representations of women across cultures, all in an attempt to present histories in which women were protagonists. "Paper Mirror" includes over 100 works Spero made over six decades. It is the first major exhibition of her work in the U.S. since her death in 2009.

Julie Ault is an artist whose work frequently consists of curatorial activity as artistic practice. She was a co-founder of the art collective Group Material (1979-1996), and her work has been exhibited in the Sao Paulo and Whitney Biennials. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur 'genius' fellowship.

On the second segment, historian and curator Linda S. Ferber discusses "The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists" at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition examines a group of artists who Ferber and artist Nancy K. Anderson argue coalesced around the ideas of John Ruskin around and after the American Civil War. Their work frequently used nature and landscape to address contemporary politics via metaphor. The exhibition is on view in Washington through July 21.

Episode No. 391 looks at art and its relationship to monuments and memorials in the United States and features art historian Sarah Beetham, activist Julia Pulawski and artist Ebony G. Patterson.

Sarah Beetham (Twitter) is an assistant professor of art history at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She's working on a book titled "Monumental Crisis: Accident, Vandalism and the Civil War Citizen Soldier," a look at how monuments have become central to a range of American discourses in the many decades since the Civil War.

Julia Pulawski is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and along with artist Annie Simpson is part of an ad hoc group of Chapel Hill activists that erected guerilla monuments to James Cates and an anonymized Negro Wench in Chapel Hill. 

Ebony G. Patterson is an artist whose work updates the memorial form and expands it to include people and groups typically excluded from the American memorial and monument tradition. The Perez Art Museum Miami is presenting a solo exhibition of Patterson's work titled ... while the dew is still on the roses... through May 5.

Episode No. 390 features critic and author Barry Schwabsky and artist Shara Hughes.

Distributed Art Publishers has just published "Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism," a look at how painters from all over the world are addressing landscape in their work. It features more than 80 artists and over 400 artworks. Amazon offers it for $43.

The book was edited by Todd Bradway. The text is by Barry Schwabsky, with contributions from Susan A. Van Scoy, Robert R. Shane, and Louise Sørensen.

Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and the coeditor of international reviews for Artforum, a New York art magazine.

Shara Hughes is a New York-based painter. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MASS MoCA and at the Katonah (NY) Art Museum, In 2020 La Consortium in Dijon, France will host a solo exhibition of Hughes's work. Her paintings address both landscape and elements of landscape assembled in sometimes fantastical ways.

Episode No. 389 is a holiday clips episode featuring a previously aired conversation with artist Rachel Whiteread.

After originating at the Tate Britain and traveling to the National Gallery of Art, the 30-year-retrospective "Rachel Whiteread" is at its final stop, the Saint Louis Art Museum. Curated by Molly Donovan and Ann Gallagher, it is on view through June 9. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by the Tate, which originated the exhibition. Amazon offers it starting at $34.

Whiteread’s work has long explored domestic spaces and objects through casting and the presentation of negative space. Her sculptures have given us new ways to look at familiar places and spaces, and nudge us toward new understandings of the familiar.

Episode No. 388 features artists Sonya Clark and Analia Saban.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is exhibiting "Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know" through August 4. The exhibition considers a common dishcloth that was used as the flag of surrender by General Robert E. Lee's Army of the Potomac at Appomattox. Sonya Clark's address of the surrender flag asks why we know the infamous Confederate battle flag instead of the South's most prominent surrender flag? The exhibition includes five installations on two of FWM's floors. Clark's work is informed by the original surrender flag, now in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Clark teaches at Amherst College. She is the recipient of a United States Artist fellowship and many other major grants, including a Pollock Krasner Award, the Anonymous was a Woman Award and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.  She was a guest on Episode No. 150.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's latest "Focus" exhibition features Analia Saban. It includes new work, both tapestry and painting-referencing objects, that address abstraction and the grid via circuit boards and computer chips. As is typical in her work, Saban addresses her subjects through the playful subversion of her materials, in this case copper wire and acrylic paint woven into place. The exhibition is on view through May 12.

Saban has exhibited in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, LACMA, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and more.

Episode No. 387 features curator Melissa Ho.

Ho is the curator of "Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-75" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition examines how artists responded to the war, and reveals the impact the war had on pushing artists into greater engagement with their world. "Artists Respond" is on view through August 18. The exceptional exhibition catalogue was published by Princeton University Press. Amazon offers it for $45.

Episode No. 386 features curators George Shackelford and Vesela Sretenović.

Shackelford is the curator of "Monet: The Late Years" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition includes canvases Monet made at the end of the nineteenth century and in the mid-1900s, but primarily considers the paintings Monet made between 1913 and his death in 1926. Shackelford is the deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum, to which the exhibition travels from San Francisco. "Monet" remains on view at the de Young through May 7. The Kimbell published the catalogue, which Amazon offers for $40.

Shackelford discussed "Early Monet" on Episode No. 265. The series of paintings Monet finished just before his death and gave to the French state, now installed in the Orangerie, are presented on this website.

On the second segment, Phillips Collection curator Vesela Sretenović discusses "Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I am an Island)." The exhibition surveys the work Sánchez, a Puerto-Rico based Cuban artist, has made since the 1950s. It is on view at the Phillips through May 19. The exhibition's catalogue, the go-to publication on Sánchez's work, was published by Yale University Press. Amazon offers it for $40.