Episode No. 595 features curators JR Henneman and Stephanie Tung.

Henneman is the curator of "Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism" at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition explores how the style and substance of French Orientalism -- art inspired by French colonial expansion into North Africa and the Islamic world -- informed United States artists and their representations of lands the US acquired as part of its imperial expansion. The exhibition is on view through May 29. Its superb catalogue was published by the Denver Art Museum. Amazon offers it for about $65.

Along with Karina H. Corrigan, Tung is the curator of "Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China" at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The exhibition reveals how photographers helped determine how the world viewed nineteenth-century China. The exhibition features 130 photographs, as well as paintings, decorative arts, and prints. It is on view through April 2. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by the museum. Amazon offers it for about $60.

Episode No. 594 features curators Stephanie Mayer Heydt and Isabel Casso.

With Audrey Lewis, Heydt is the co-curator of "Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature," a survey of the American modernist's nature-based artworks at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. While Stella is best known today for his futurism-informed studies of urbanity, most especially for his paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lewis and Heydt's exhibition reveals him to be every bit as much as interested in re-making America's century-long Emersonian landscape and nature traditions as his Precisionist colleagues were. The exhibition features over 100 paintings and works on paper. It's on view through May 21. A fine catalogue was published by the High Museum of Art and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $55.

With Kate Green, Casso is the curator of "Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding," the artist's first retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The exhibition features over 40 of Muñoz's large-scale installations, book projects, and shows how Muñoz built a witty, often funny style built from conceptualist puns even as she styled herself as an "artivist" who engaged issues informed by her experiences living along the US-Mexico borderlands. It's on view at MCASD's La Jolla location through August 13. A catalogue is forthcoming.

Episode No. 593 remembers artist Phyllida Barlow.

Barlow died this week. She was 78.

Barlow came from an illustrious British family, one thick with Huxleys and Wedgwoods, a royal physician, and one particularly famous Darwin. Instead of joining a parade of ancestors within the British establishment, she devoted her life and career to questioning, upturning, and reinventing. Her chosen profession was teaching, at University College London's Slade School of Fine Art, and sculpting, a medium which she seemed to reject and change in equal measure. She represented Britain in the Venice Biennale, and had had solo shows in at museums in Nuremberg, West Palm Beach, Des Moines, Munich, and Zurich, and in London at the Tate and the Royal Academy. Her first US shows were in Dallas, in 2003 and 2005.

This week's episode features Barlow's two visits to The MAN Podcast: in 2013 on the occasion of the Carnegie International (in which Barlow was the breakout star); and in 2015 when Barlow installed a spectacular solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Episode No. 592 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Amalia Mesa-Bains and curator Michael Duncan.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting "Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory," the first retrospective of the pioneering Chicana artist. The exhibition includes nearly 60 works including fourteen of Mesa-Bains' major installations. It was curated by María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez and is on view through July 23. The outstanding catalogue was published by the Berkeley Art Museum in association with University of California Press. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $50.

Across a half-century, Mesa-Bains has foregrounded Chicana forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) into contemporary art. Her work often spotlights domestic spaces and the construction of landscape in ways that highlight colonial erasure. Among the museums which have presented solo exhibitions of Mesa-Bains' work are the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As promised on the program:

• Sandy Rodriguez on Episode No. 532.

On the second segment, curator Michael Duncan discusses "Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-45," which is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 19.  The exhibition presents a group of mostly northern New Mexico-based artists, including Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton, who built a spiritually-informed abstraction with a painterly language that included symbols and images drawn from the collective unconscious. The show's catalogue was published by the Crocker Art Museum and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $60.

Episode No. 591 features artists Kahlil Robert Irving and Rogelio Báez Vega.

Kahlil Robert Irving is included in "I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen" at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Across more than 25,000 square feet, the exhibition examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. It was curated by Alison Hearst and remains on view through April 30. Irving will deliver a lecture at MAMFW on March 7 at 6 pm.

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has just opened "Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present", a presentation of new Irving sculptures, video, and found objects. Irving has situated his sculptures and other items within a large plywood platform, resembling a stage. Viewers can move onto the structure to encounter both artworks and manufactured objects alike. The show, which was curated by William Hernández Luege, will be on view through January 21, 2024.

Irving's assemblages of images and replicas of every day objects challenge constructions of Western identity and culture. His ceramic sculptures incorporate neglected objects that represent a historical moment, as do his room-sized, image-driven installations. Irving has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis; he's been featured in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and more.

Rogelio Báez Vega is included in "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria" at the Whitney. The exhibition, organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Maria, explores how artists have responded to the years since that event. It includes 15 artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. It was curated by Marcela Guerrero with Angelica Arbelaez, and will be on view through April 23.

Báez Vega's paintings often portray modernist buildings dating from Puerto Rico's post-war boom. While his pictures sometimes show the island's rich vegetation overtaking physical structures, they imply both a dystopian future and nature's promise.

Instagram: Kahlil Robert Irving, Rogelio Báez Vega, Tyler Green.