This week's Modern Art Notes Podcast features Huntington curator Jennifer A. Watts, a leading expert on Carleton Watkins. Watts contributed two essays to "Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs," which was recently published by the Getty. I reviewed the book here and included it in my 2011 top ten list here.

Watts's essays address two of Watkins's lesser-known series: his California missions photographs and his pictures of southern California and Kern County. The Huntington has over 300 Watkins mammoth-plate pictures and hundreds of other Watkinses, making it the second-largest repository of Watkins' art.

In this week's draft, The Stranger art critic Jen Graves and I burrow into "Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs" to pick some favorite individual artworks.

This week’s program is a very special, seasonal episode, a show that focuses on what the holidays are all about: Shopping!

My guest is artist Brian Ulrich, whose work examines American consumerism. His work is the subject of “Brian Ulrich: Copia — Retail, Thrift and Dark Stores, 2001-2011,” a solo exhibition on view now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Aperture just published his new book, “Is This Place Great or What,” which features works from the “Copia” series.

For this week's draft, I'm joined by Andrew Russeth, who writes about art for the New York Observer and who edits the paper's visual art website, GalleristNY. His personal website is the fantastic 16 Miles of String. On the occasion of the Frick Collection opening a new space, Andrew and I will discuss our favorite single galleries in American museums.

This week's Modern Art Notes Podcast features biographer and critic Mark Stevens, one of the top experts on the life and art of Willem de Kooning. Along with co-author Annalyn Swan, Stevens wrote "de Kooning: An American Master," which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Prior to writing "de Kooning," Stevens was the art critic for New York magazine.

In this week's draft, Charlotte Eyerman joins me to discuss her Pacific Standard Time exhibition"Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County." Eyerman is the American director of the French Regional and American Museum Exchange and also works as an independent curator. She and I talk about how a many important artists, including Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and more, showed early works at the annual exhibitions of what is now the Natural History Museum, and how that work presages their more well-known art.

This week's Modern Art Notes Podcast features MoMA curator Leah Dickerman, who has organized "Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art." The exhibition is on view until May 14. Rivera was a staunch communist and his murals include scathing critiques of American-style capitalism during The Great Depression -- and of the Rockefeller family, which lavishly supported both MoMA and Rivera himself. The show -- and the conversation I have with Dickerman -- resounds with echoes of today's American economic situation.

In this week's draft, Indianapolis Museum of Art curator Lisa Freiman joins me to discuss which artists might represent the United States at the next Venice Biennale. The State Department is currently reviewing nominations for 2013. Freiman was the commissioner of the 2011 pavilion, at which the U.S. exhibited Allora and Calzadilla.

Jennifer Steinkamp was the subject of a 2006 mid-career survey organized by the San Jose Museum of Art and she's exhibited all over the world, including in the Corcoran, SITE Santa Fe, Gwangju and Istanbul Biennials. Her work is on view now at the New Orleans Museum of Art as part of Prospect 2, the New Orleans-based biennial organized by curator Dan Cameron. A commission that she created for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is on view at museum's downtown Jacobs Building.

In this week's draft, School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor and chair of art history, theory and criticism David Raskin and I discuss artworks in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago exhibition "The Language of Less (Then and Now)." Raskin wrote an essay for the show's catalogue.