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.