Episode No. 616 features artist Gary Simmons and curator Sarah L. Eckhardt.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is presenting "Gary Simmons: Public Enemy," a survey of Simmons' 35-year career. The exhibition reveals how Simmons has addressed race, class and US history in ways that have remained persistently au courant. It was curated by René Morales and Jadine Collingwood, with Jack Schneider. After closing on October 1, the exhibition will be on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami from December 5 through April 24, 2024. The MCA Chicago and DelMonico Books have published an outstanding catalogue. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for $56-60.

Along with Drew Thompson, Eckhardt is the co-curator of "Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village." It's at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond through September 10. The exhibition is a survey of Richmond-native Wigfall's work, and a historicization of Communications Village, the interdisciplinary artist-run project that Wigfall instigated while teaching at the State University of New York, New Paltz in the early 1970s, as the instigator of what we now call social practice. The excellent catalogue was published by the VMFA, which offers it for $40.

Instagram: Gary Simmons, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 615 features historian and author David Bindman, and artist Nicki Green.

Bindman's new book is 'Race Is Everything': Art and Human Difference. It examines nineteenth and early twentieth-century racializing science (sometimes referred to as pseudoscience) and how European art both influenced it, and was itself influenced by it. The book pays special attention to the racialization of people of African and Jewish descent. It considers the skull as a racializing marker, Darwin and Darwinism, the construction of the Mediterranean 'race,' Anglo-Saxonism, the racializing debate over Egyptians, and plenty more. 'Race is Everything' was just published by Reaktion Books. Bookshop and Amazon offer it for about $37.

Bindman is an emeritus professor at University College London, and a fellow of the Hutchings Center, Harvard University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century.

Green's work is included in "What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection" which runs through July 7, 2024 at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley. The exhibition was curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm with Anthony Graham. Green is a transdisciplinary artist who works primarily in clay. Her work explores topics such as history preservation, conceptual ornamentation, and aesthetics of otherness. She has exhibited at the biennial in Lyon, France, at the New Museum, New York, and at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris. Next spring she'll be included in "New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Episode No. 614 features curator Kate Clarke Lemay and artist Maia Cruz Palileo.

With Taína Caragol, Lemay is the co-curator of "1898: US Imperial Visions and Revisions" at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington. (Carlina Maestre assisted them.) The exhibition examines late-nineteenth-century US imperialism, especially the War of 1898 (often called the Spanish-American War), the Congressional Joint Resolution to annex Hawai'i (which was passed in July 1898), the Philippine-American War (1899-1913) and the US extension of its sphere to include Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The exhibition particularly -- but not exclusively -- looks at how portraiture was used by the US in an attempt to define peoples, and by both the US and by the leaders of other countries to establish status within the community of nations, and to project power. "1898" is on view through February 25, 2024.

The forthcoming exhibition catalogue features an essay by Caragol that looks at how several contemporary artists are addressing the legacies of US imperialism in their work. Among the artists on whom Caragol focuses is Palileo, whose work often addresses their family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the colonial relationship between the two countries. (The other artists Caragol addresses in her essay are Stephanie Syjuco, Gisela McDaniel, and Miguel Luciano.)

Palileo's work often extends from research she conducted at the Newberry Library in 2017. The library holds significant research collections related to the US imperial project in the Philippines, including a watercolor album by Damián Domingo and photographs made by Dean C. Worcester, a US zoologist who worked in the Philippines. Worcester's work was influential in shaping US public opinion about Filipinos. Palileo's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Katzen Arts Center at Washington's American University and at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College for the Arts in San Francisco. They have been in group shows at institutions such as the Moderna Museet in Sweden, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Bemis Center, Omaha, and the NPG.

On September 8-9 the NPG will convene over 40 scholars and artists from the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, Cuba, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the US for a two-day symposium. In addition to panel discussions and gallery talks, the event will feature a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ada Ferrer. All panels and the keynote address will take place in the McEvoy Auditorium in the Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington. RSVP here (it's free).

Instagram: Kate Lemay, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 613 features author Prudence Peiffer and museum director Timothy Potts.

Peiffer is the author of "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever." The book, out this week from Harper, is a group biography of seven artists -- Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman -- who worked on Coenties Slip in the 1950s and '60s. Coenties Slip was a street that overlooked the East River in lower Manhattan. Peiffer's book argues for not only the importance of the artists themselves, but for where and how they worked as being important to the development of post-war art in New York. Peiffer is director of content at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Amazon and Bookshop offer "The Slip" for $22-36.

Potts discusses the J. Paul Getty Museum's co-acquisition (with the National Portrait Gallery, London) of Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mai (ca. 1776). The painting, among Reynolds' finest works, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery. The first presentation at the Getty will be in 2026.

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