Episode No. 590 features artist Monique Verdin. It was taped live at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Verdin is included in the Nasher's "Spirit in the Land," an exhibition that considers today’s ecological concerns and demonstrates how our identities and natural environments are intertwined. The show particularly focuses on the relationship between the mainland United States and the Caribbean. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, it will be on view through July 9. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which, as of the show posting date, is available only at the Nasher.

Verdin's work is also on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in "The Float Lab: The Heartbeat of Invisible Rivers." It is a project of Verdin's The Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro and Jeff Becker that uses music, theater, visual art, and boat-building to respond to Louisiana's interconnected struggles against land loss, environmental racism, and displacement. "The Float Lab" is on view through Oct. 1.

Verdin's photography, filmmaking and collages most often examine how climate change and industry are impacting traditional lifeways in a part of southwest Louisiana known to the Houma people as Yakni Chitto. Among her many exhibition credits is Prospect Four in New Orleans. Verdin is also the director of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, a former member of the United Houma Nation Tribal Council and is part of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative core leadership circle of brown (indigenous, latinx and desi) women, from Texas to Florida, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities and sustainable ecologies.

Instagram: Monique Verdin, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 589 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist Rose B. Simpson.

Rose B. Simpson is included in two ongoing presentations in New England: her Counterculture is installed at Field Farm, a Trustees property in Williamstown, Mass.; and in "Ceramics in the Expanded Field," at MASS MoCA through April 10. Counterculture was organized by Jamilee Lacy and will be on view through April 30, 2023. "Ceramics," which is up until April 10, was curated by Susan Cross.

Elsewhere, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is featuring "Rose B. Simpson: Dream House" through May 7, and Simpson is included with in "Thick as Mud" at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. The exhibition examines how eight artists use mud as material or subject. Curated by Nina Bozicnik, it's on view through May 7.

Across ceramic sculpture, performance, installation, and more, Simpson's work addresses ideas as far ranging as resistance, apocalypse, spirituality, and automobile design. Museums such as the University of New Mexico Art Museum (Simpson lives in Santa Clara Pueblo), Nevada Museum of Art, the Savannah College of Art and Design's SCAD Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art have all presented solo exhibitions of her work, and Simpson has been in group shows at the Henry Art Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, and plenty more.

The program was taped on the occasion of these shows and the ICA Boston exhibition "Rose B. Simpson: Legacies." 

From the program:

• Video from Simpson's 2013 Denver Art Museum performance.

For images, see Episode No. 567.

Air date: February 16, 2023.

Episode No. 588 features author Jennifer Van Horn and curator Elizabeth Kornhauser.

Van Horn is the author of "Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery," which was recently published by Yale University Press. The book investigates American portraiture, a discipline which until recently was dominated by European-American artists and their wealthy, self-image-creating clients. The book discovers within some of these portraits and the artists who made them histories of Black resistance, agency, viewership, and even iconoclasm. While the book primarily focuses on the era before the Civil War, it also reaches well into the twentieth century. Amazon and Indiebound offer "Portraits of Resistance" for about $60.

Kornhauser discusses a new installation of portraiture miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American galleries. Portrait miniatures -- often tiny watercolor pictures on ivory -- were popular in the US in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The production of portrait miniatures was one form of production particularly open to women artists.

Episode No. 587 features curators Jed Morse and Perrin Lathrop.

Morse is the curator of "Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper" at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The exhibition surveys di Suvero's career with a special focus on di Suvero's in-studio practice, such as his drawings and his little-considered modestly scaled sculptures (which make up the vast majority of his oeuvre). It is the most extensive survey of di Suvero's work in over 30 years, and the largest museum exhibition of such since 1975. "di Suvero" is on view through August 27. The excellent catalogue was published by the museum.

Along with Nikoo Paydar and Jamaal Sheats, Lathrop is a co-curator of "African Modernism in America, 1947-67" at the Fisk University Galleries in Nashville. The exhibition investigates the connections between African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations such as the Harmon Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and HBCUs during the early Cold War. It also features The Politics of Selection, a commission from Lagos-based sculptor Ndidi Dike that interrogates the collecting histories presented in the exhibition. "African Modernism" is on view through February 12, after which it will travel to the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University, Saint Louis; the Phillips Collection in Washington; and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. The outstanding catalogue was published by the American Federation of Arts. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $45.