Episode No. 460 features critic Nzinga Simmons and curator Elizabeth Turner.

Simmons joins host Tyler Green to discuss the Vanity Fair cover featuring an Amy Sherald painting of Breonna Taylor. Simmons is a PhD candidate in art history and visual culture at Duke University. She was also the inaugural Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellow in American Art at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University. 

Along with Austen Barron Bailly, Turner is the co-curator of “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle.” The exhibition, which debuted at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York today (to members), and on August 29 (to the general public). It will be at the Met through November 1. The Metropolitan presentation was led by Randall Griffey and Sylvia Yount.

"The American Struggle" presents Lawrence’s 1954-56 series “Struggle: From the History of the American People.” The paintings offer a revisionist and pictorial history of the first five decades of the American republic, or what Lawrence called “the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.” The exhibition marks the first time in more than 60 years that the paintings have been together. The excellent catalogue was published by University of Washington Press.

Episode No. 459 is a listener Q&A episode with critic and journalist Catherine Wagley.

Wagley is a Los Angeles-based critic who writes for a range of publications, including Artnet, Momus, CARLA, and Artnews.

Episode No. 458 features curators John Rohrbach and Mary Morton.

Rohrbach is the curator of "Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and Modern Photography," which opens on Tuesday, August 18 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth. The exhibition examines how cabinet cards became the primary format for photographic portraiture between roughly the end of the Civil War and 1900. It shows how photography studios and their customers used photography as a means of personal and individual expression, as well as how cabinet cards reflected celebrity culture. It will be on view through November 1. The exhibition catalogue was published by the Amon Carter in association with University of California Press. It is available from Amazon and through Indiebound for $45.

On the second segment, Mary Morton discusses “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870,” which is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through November 29.

Episode No. 457 features art historian Michael W. Cole and historian John Edwin Mason.

Cole is the author of "Sofonisba's Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work" which was recently published by Princeton University Press. Cole considers Sofonisba Anguissola's art, how her background, teaching and learning were important to her career and art, and how her relationships with her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, Michelangelo and a series of royals and royal courts resulted in her work -- and in work attributed to her. The book also includes a complete illustrated catalogue of the more than 200 paintings and drawings that have been associated with Sofonisba, and 256 color illustrations in all. Cole is a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. Amazon offers the book for $40; it is also available through Indiebound.

On the second segment, John Edwin Mason discusses his 2018 examination of National Geographic's presentation of race in its flagship magazine and the potential applicability of such an institutional audit to the art museum sector. Mason is a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia.

Mason and host Tyler Green discuss National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg's letter to readers from March 2018.