Episode No. 482 features curator Shawnya L. Harris and artist Marie Watt.

Harris is the curator of "Emma Amos: Color Odyssey," a retrospective of Amos's career that opens Saturday, Jan. 30 at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. Amos was important in bringing second-wave feminism into American art, in addressing many American and art histories within her work, and in making work that synthesized her interest in printmaking, weaving and painting. "Emma Amos" will remain on view in Athens through April 25, when it will travel to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show features about 60 paintings, prints and woven works.

The show's outstanding catalogue, which features essays by Lisa Farrington, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Laurel Garber, Kay Walkingstick, and Phoebe Wolfskill, was published by the Georgia Museum of Art. It's available from GMOA for $40, and should be on Indiebound and Amazon soon.

On the second segment, Marie Watt discusses her work on the occasion of  "Companion Species" at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Museum of Native American History, both in Bentonville, Ark. (As of show-posting, Crystal Bridges is open; "Companion Species" will be on view there through May 24. MONAH has yet to announce its re-opening plans.) The exhibition spotlights and builds upon Watt's Companion Species (Speech Bubble), which Crystal Bridges recently acquired.

Watt is a citizen of the Seneca Nation whose work often explores ideas related to community, history, storytelling. She often works in textile, including in works that are partially sewed by community-embracing sewing circles. She has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Boise Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Missoula Art Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University. She sits on the board of the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum.

Episode No. 481 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Michael Rakowitz and curator Julie Aronson.

Rakowitz is the winner of the 2020 Nasher Prize, given by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The Nasher is showing an exhibition of Rakowitz's work through April 18. It includes work from Rakowitz's series The invisible enemy should not exist, a 2007-and-after engagement with the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in the wake of the United States-led invasion. The series includes placeholders for many of the 15,000 artifacts that were stolen or lost in the museum's partial dissolution. The Nasher exhibition also includes Rakowitz's stop-motion film The Ballad of Special Ops Cody.

The Wellin Museum at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY is presenting "Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud" through June 18. As of the publishing of this episode, the exhibition is open only to members of the Hamilton College community.

On the second segment, curator Julie Aronson discusses "Frank Duveneck: American Master," a retrospective of the Gilded Age, Cincinnati-based painter whose teaching and work was also influential in the American northeast and in Europe. The exhibition is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through March 28.

Episode No. 480 features artists Jill Mulleady and Umar Rashid.

Mulleady and Rashid are included in "Made in L.A. 2020: A Vision" the Hammer Museum's biennial that has been installed -- but is not yet on public view because of the pandemic -- at the Hammer and The Huntington Library. The exhibition was scheduled to open last year; its opening date is dependent upon Los Angeles County guidance. (As of the publishing of this episode, COVID rates in LA County are nearly double the national average.) Online and offsite MinLA projects by Larry Johnson and Kahlil Joseph, and Ligia Lewis are on view now. Late last year, a small number of critics and journalists received a preview of the exhibition; The MAN Podcast is airing MinLA-oriented episodes last week and this week in an effort to support the artists in the exhibition while we wait.

Mulleady's paintings, often or present-day scenes, are built from specific geographies and often from additions pulled from art's history, including references to specific paintings, as well as to familiar metaphors and allegories. Mulleady was born in Uruguay, schooled in London and lives in Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute in New York and the Kunsthalle Bern, and she was included in curator Ralph Rugoff's 2019 Venice Biennale.

Rashid's paintings at the Hammer present the fictional Battle of Malibu, an exploration of the maritime exploits of the Tongva and Chumash peoples native to the southern California coast. At the Huntington, Rashid critiques the Spanish dominion over indigenous Californians, including through the mission-and-presidio system and related colonial agricultural practices.

Rashid has had solo exhibitions at the art museums at the University of Arizona and the University of Memphis, and at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

Episode No. 479 features artists Monica Majoli and Mario Ayala.

Majoli and Ayala are included in "Made in L.A. 2020: A Vision" the Hammer Museum's biennial that has been installed -- but is not yet on public view because of the pandemic -- at the Hammer and The Huntington Library. Its opening date is dependent upon Los Angeles County guidance. 

Majoli is primarily a painter whose work has explored subjects related to sex, sexuality, and power. She has been included in group exhibitions at museums such as SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art; her work is in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum.

Ayala is a painter who mines Latinx material culture and the Western painting tradition in ways that foreground Chicano culture. He's had solo exhibitions at galleries in the U.S., Sweden and Belgium. MinLA is his first museum group show.