Episode No. 495 features curators Chris Oliver and Corey Piper.

Oliver is the curator of "Virginia Arcadia: The Natural Bridge in American Art" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The exhibition, which is on view through August 1, examines how artists portrayed the Natural Bridge, the famed landscape feature in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Despite being in the South, a region rarely visited by artists who tended to focus their work on the northeast, the Natural Bridge attracted artists such as Frederic Church and David Johnson who were interested in its geology, its association with Thomas Jefferson (who owned the land that contains the Natural Bridge), how it could be used to address American republicanism and Union, and more. The exhibition is accompanied by a small catalogue published by VMFA, which offers it for $20.

Along with Brandon Ruud, Corey Piper is the co-curator of "Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820-1920" at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. It looks at a period when both American artists and Europeans rushed into Spain to chronicle its scenic landscapes and cities and to learn from painters such as Velasquez, and considers how Spain and Spanish art informed America's art. The exhibition is at the Chrysler through May 16; it will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The fine exhibition catalogue is available from Indiebound and Amazon for about $60.

Episode No. 494 features art historian Jennifer Roberts and master printer and author Phil Sanders.

Beginning this Sunday, April 25, Roberts will deliver the 2021 Mellon Lectures, America's leading series of annual lectures about art. Typically delivered at the National Gallery of Art each year over six consecutive Sundays in the early spring, the pandemic has required an adjustment. Roberts will deliver this year's Mellons digitally. As ever they will be presented weekly and on Sundays. You can watch them on the NGA's website, where they will remain available for viewing. (No registration is required.)

Roberts's lectures are titled "Contact: Art and the Pull of the Print." Roberts will consider printmaking as a physical experience, and will point to how artists have used the physicality inherent in printmaking as metaphors for the themes and topics they address in their work. Roberts's lectures will primarily focus on American and European contemporary art, and will address work by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hammons, Christiane Baumgartner and Glenn Ligon.

Roberts is a professor at Harvard University.

On the second segment, Phil Sanders discusses his new book "Prints and their Makers," which was published by Princeton University Press.

Episode No. 493 features artist Buck Ellison and curator Lewis Tanner Moore.

Buck Ellison is included in "Made in LA 2020: a vision," the fifth iteration of the Hammer Museum's biennial. The exhibition, curated by Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, opens to the general public on April 17 at both the Hammer and The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Gardens. Online and offsite projects by Larry Johnson and Kahlil Joseph, Ligia Lewis, and Justen LeRoy on view now.

Ellison is a photographer whose work often engages the social codes (and excesses) of whiteness. "Living Trust," his first monograph, investigates the presentation of white privilege, often through staged and performed pictures. It won the 2020 Paris Photo-Aperture First Photobook of the Year Award.

Five Made in L.A. 2020 artists have been featured on The MAN Podcast: Monica Majoli and Mario Ayala; Jill Mulleady and Umar Rashid; and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork.

On the second segment, Lewis Tanner Moore discusses painter Louis Sloan, whose work is on view in "Barriers and Disparities: Housing in America" at the Sheldon Museum of Art. Sloan had a long, celebrated career as a painter, teacher and conservator in Philadelphia. Moore curated a survey of Sloan's work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2008.

Episode No. 492 features curators Allison Glenn and Jeffrey Richmond-Moll.

Glenn is the curator of "Promise, Witness, Remembrance," at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. The exhibition reflects on the life of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician who was killed by Louisville police, and the subsequent year of protests and remembrance. The exhibition is on view through June 6. Glenn is a curator at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Artists in "Promise, Witness, Remembrance" who have been guests on The MAN Podcast include Bethany Collins, Kerry James Marshall (twice), Lorna Simpson and Amy Sherald; artists whose work has been the subject of MAN Podcast episodes include: Terry Adkins (with Stephaine Weissberg) and Sherald (on the Vanity Fair cover with Nzinga Simmons). A clip from Jon-Sesrie Goff's 2016 A Site of Reckoning: Battlefield is here.

On the second segment Jeffrey Richmond-Moll discusses "Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Art" at the Georgia Museum of Art. The exhibition surveys American artists who rejected abstraction to make representational, often hyper-real paintings that addressed the strangeness of changing, churning American life. The exhibition is on view through June 13. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by GMOA. Amazon offers it for about $50.

Episode No. 491 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Torkwase Dyson.

Dyson is included in “Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment” at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio through May 9. The exhibition looks at how artists engage with social issues and how they may shape institutions at a time when both racism and a global pandemic have caused many institutions to re-consider their construction and practices. The exhibition was curated by Lucy I. Zimmerman. “Climate Changing” features nine artworks commissioned by the Wexner, including work Torkwase Dyson discussed on the program last September, when this conversation first aired.

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is exhibiting paintings from Dyson's "Bird and Lava" series, an exploration of spaces of geographic, architectural, and infrastructural liberation, in "Stories of Resistance." Dyson developed "Bird and Lava" during a residency at the Wexner. Curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi with Misa Jeffereis, "Stories" looks at artistic forms of resistance in the U.S. and abroad. It's on view through August 15.