Episode No. 464 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Torkwase Dyson and historian Dennis Reed.

The New Orleans Museum of Art is showing "Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought, 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene," a series of works made for the museum. These new paintings were inspired by Dyson's interest in the systems that underlay water delivery, energy infrastructure and by the physical impacts of climate change. Through this and other work, Dyson investigates the legacy of agriculture enabled by slave economies and its relationship to the environmental and infrastructural issues of the present, a relationship known as the “plantationocene.” The exhibition is on view through December 31, 2020.

Dyson is an artist-in-residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. She is preparing work that will be included in "Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment," which is scheduled to debut at the Wexner on January 30, 2021.

Dyson's previous solo museum exhibitions have been at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union, at the Colby College Museum of Art, The Drawing Center, Eyebeam, and more. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smith College Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

On the second segment, historian and curator Dennis Reed discusses the J. Paul Getty Museum's acquisition of 79 pictures made by Japanese-American photographers between 1919 and 1940. Reed's collection and the Getty's acquisition of it is a result of 35 years of work Reed and his students at Los Angeles Valley College did to learn about Japanese-American photographers who made work before the war. Reed and his students built a list of 186 names from photography catalogues at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library and painstakingly cold-called the photographers and their relatives in an effort to build knowledge related to an art-making community that was disappeared by the illegal American internment of Japanese-Americans.

Reed's collection -- which includes the only surviving work by several of the artists -- has been exhibited in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.

The Getty, which remains closed due to the pandemic, will be exhibiting work from the acquisition at a date to be announced. In addition to the images below, the Getty and Google created this slideshow.

Episode No. 463 features curator Shirley Reece-Hughes and artist Barry X Ball.

Reece-Hughes is the curator of "Texas Made Modern: The Art of Everett Spruce" at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. The exhibition will be on view through November 1. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by Texas A&M University Press. It is available from Amazon and from Indiebound for $35.

The exhibition includes nearly 50 works Spruce made between 1929 and 1977. Spruce was an Arkansas-born painter who lived and worked in Dallas. Across his career, Spruce applied lessons learned from early Renaissance painting and early modernism to the Texas landscape. He exhibited widely was collected by institutions across the United States, including those in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York. As the American art world began to narrowly focus on the coasts in the 1960s and beyond, Spruce's work and career were substantially neglected.

On the second segment, sculptor Barry X Ball discusses his work on the occasion of a career-spanning survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. That exhibition, “Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture,” has been extended through January 3, 2021. It was curated by Jed Morse.

Ball’s sculptures are typically created out of rare stones with the assistance of 3-D scanning and printing technology and CNC milling machines. His work typically addresses and often updates mostly European major work from sculpture’s history, such as Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta or Medardo Rossos. This is Ball’s first survey exhibition in the United States; previous exhibitions of his work have been at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and the Villa Panza in Varese. The fine exhibition catalogue was published by the Nasher.

Episode No. 462 features author Janis A. Tomlinson and Stuart Collection director and author Mary Beebe.

Tomlinson is the author of "Goya: A Portrait of the Artist," which Princeton University Press will publish this week. It is just the second English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes.

Beebe discusses "Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego," which was just published by University of California Press. The Stuart Collection is one of the leading public collections of contemporary sculpture.

Episode No. 461 is a holiday clips episode featuring curator Ann Temkin.

Less than two weeks after opening on March 1, the Museum of Modern Art, New York's exhibition "Judd" was temporarily shuttered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both MoMA and "Judd" have re-opened. The museum has extended "Judd," the first posthumous retrospective of Donald Judd's work in the United States, through January 9, 2021.

“Judd” was curated by Temkin along with Yasmil Raymond, Tamar Margalit and Erica Cooke.