About Art

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173. Su Yu-Xin Jul 29, 2025

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Los Angeles-based artist Su Yu-Xin considers painting as a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Su Yu-Xin collects, studies, and processes the color substances scattered on the earth's crust. From there, she invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation. For her, such landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, organic and synthetic matter.

172. Casey Fremont Jul 15, 2025

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Casey Fremont is the Executive Director of the Art Production Fund, a non-profit dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious public art projects, reaching new audiences, and expanding awareness through contemporary art.

She and Zuckerman discuss creating experiences that support working mothers, growing up around artists, making art pilgrimages, Prada Marfa, what social media means to public art, and the role public art plays in making art accessible to many!

171. Lisa Yuskavage Jul 01, 2025

Show notes

Lisa Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements, in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, which was on view at the Aspen Art Museum in 2020 and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021. In 2015, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, presented Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, a major survey spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s work. The show traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2016. Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings just opened at The Morgan Library & Museum and is on view through January 4, 2026.

Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

She and Zuckerman discuss changing the world, vulnerability, why make art, using pushback as an opportunity, pushing against resistance, getting rid of self-doubt, and how Art makes you feel less alone!

170. Jonathan Lethem Jun 17, 2025

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Novelist Jonathan Lethem is the author of Girl In Landscape, Chronic City, and Brooklyn Crime Novel, as well as ten other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in seven volumes. His fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and he has been the recipient of The Berlin Prize and a Macarthur Fellowship among other honors. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.

He and Zuckerman discuss writing stories about Art, growing up as a child of a painter, where freedom is found, mirroring the world, doing his tricks, looking, kinship and generation, waiting and wondering, play, denial of independence, and memory and savoring!

169. Glenn Lowry Jun 03, 2025

Show notes

Glenn Lowry became the sixth director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) in 1995. He has overseen the physical transformation of the Museum’s campus through two building campaigns that have more than doubled the size of MoMA’s galleries, quintupled its endowment, created an education and research center, and inspired a new model for the presentation of modern and contemporary art. Lowry has championed innovation, both onsite and online, to grow MoMA’s annual visitation to nearly 3 million in the galleries and 35 million across moma.org. He expanded the Museum’s curatorial departments, with the addition of Media and Performance, and supported MoMA’s intellectual growth by creating new research programs like Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP).
In 2000, he led the merger of MoMA with the contemporary art center PS1, and in 2015, he worked with Thelma Golden to introduce a joint fellowship program with the Studio Museum in Harlem for rising professionals in the arts. Lowry is a strong advocate of contemporary artists and their work and he has lectured and written extensively in the support of contemporary art, on the role of museums in society, and on other topics related to his research interests. He currently serves on the boards of The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, the Art Bridges Foundation and The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, as well as on the advisory boards of the Istanbul Modern and the Mori Art Museum. Lowry is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a resident member of the American Philosophical Society.
He and Zuckerman discuss courting risk, creating the time to think, controlling the process, professional guidelines, the goal for museums to be independent and private enterprises, thinking that opens possibilities, being fearless, passion, and why art matters!

168. Jori Finkel May 27, 2025

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Cultural journalist Jori Finkel is based in Los Angeles and won the 2023 Rabkin Prize for excellence in the field. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the West Coast contributing editor of The Art Newspaper, covering artists and the art world with particular attention to gender issues. Previously, she was a senior editor of Art+Auction magazine in New York. She developed and co-produced the Emmy-nominated 2018 PBS documentary Artist and Mother, working to flip the script that devalues art made by parents and establish an art historical lineage for artist-mothers. She is also author of the critically acclaimed book It Speaks to Me: Art that Inspires Artists, called “an argument for why art museums matter” by New York magazine. She speaks at museums and art fairs and appears on broadcasts and podcasts as part of her larger project of making contemporary art more accessible.

She and Zuckerman discuss turning an advocation into a vocation, opening doors for people, realizing your mission, being in the wrong place, communicating with people, advocacy, following her curiosity, the consensus making machine of the art world, ways of resistance, motherhood, artworks you keep coming back to, not complaining, taboos, female genius, the germ of something, and art as a safe space for dangerous thinking!

167. Ricky Swallow May 13, 2025

Show notes

Los Angeles based, Australian artist Ricky Swallow uses ordinary materials to create precisely rendered objects that he then casts in bronze. The unique works that result are expressions not only of the objects’ constructed forms, but also of the process of transformation by which an inert grouping of things becomes a sculpture. Swallow is invested in equal measure in the making of things and the testing of concepts; in hands-on work with cardboard, tape, wood, and rope and the mediated potentials of the foundry; in the immediacy of craft and the austere elegance of geometric abstraction. He elicits a questioning state of mind by establishing geometries and juxtapositions that just manage to exceed what the eye perceives as possible. Like mysterious, hieroglyphic numbers or letters translated into three dimensions, his works are as indelible as they are evocative.
He and Zuckerman discuss how we see our own work, working against the logic of an object or image, when people remember your work, doing less, the availability of abstraction, meaning, conducting yourself with authenticity, sculptors as underdogs, being married to an artist, what makes him happy, space and order, meditation, the radical idea of doing nothing, figuring things out himself, a time-tested belief system, leaving your mark, not destroying anything, self-guided work, collecting, what is parallel to making!

166. Madeleine Haddon Apr 29, 2025

Show notes

Madeleine Haddon, Curator of V&A East, is a curator and writer whose work reexamines art historical narratives through contemporary lenses. Her interests and projects span both historical and contemporary art, from Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library to current commissions by contemporary artists for the new V&A East. Madeleine brings a critical and innovative perspective to the evolving role of museums for diverse audiences. She serves on advisory committees for Harvard Art Museums, Public Arts Trust of India, Photo London, CORA Foundation, and Athena Art Foundation.

The first building of V&A East, V&A East Storehouse, opens on May 31 and will house over 250,000 objects and 1,000 archives from the V&A’s collection. Through programs like “Order an Object,” visitors can request specific works and gain behind-the-scenes insight into how objects are stored and conserved. V&A East Storehouse will also feature the forthcoming David Bowie Centre, opening this September, showcasing the newly acquired archive of over 90,000 objects belonging to David Bowie.

She and Zuckerman discuss V&A East’s upcoming openings, including the phased development of a dynamic working museum store offering an innovative “order an object” service that reimagines public access to collections, the museum’s deep commitment to accessibility, community engagement, and inclusivity — as well as its new commissions program, designed to foster meaningful dialogues between historic collections and contemporary artistic practice, the evolving role of museums in the twenty-first century, and how institutions like V&A East are reshaping the ways audiences encounter, experience, and connect with art and culture.

165. Cecilia Alemani Apr 15, 2025

Show notes

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City who is currently at work curating the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, titled Once Within a Timeand opening in June 2025. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which received over 800,000 visitors. More recently, she has curated several exhibitions, including Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self, the Japanese painter’s first American retrospective, presented at Gagosian Gallery in New York (2023); Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection (New York, 2023; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2024); and Anu Põder: Space for My Body, Poder’s first solo exhibition presented outside of Estonia at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024). Alemani also served as Artistic Director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018 and was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for public space and unusual sites.

She and Zuckerman discuss the act of learning, not being curatorially snobby, the rhythm of nature, giving up control, objects having their own life, the realness of cultural uncertainty, the 1948 Venice Bienniale and moving between the past and the future, female voices, the artist as client, the land of enchantment, and that art matters because it is our life!

164. Jennifer McCabe Apr 01, 2025

Show notes

Jennifer McCabe is a distinguished curator, educator, and museum director with over 20 years of expertise in leading cultural institutions, fostering innovative curatorial practices, and supporting artists. Currently, she serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the SFO Museum, the only airport-based institution accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Under her leadership, the museum operates more than 25 exhibition sites throughout the San Francisco International Airport, engaging millions of visitors annually. Its acclaimed Aviation Museum and Library houses a permanent collection of over 160,000 artifacts documenting the history of commercial aviation.

Previously, McCabe served as Director and Chief Curator of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, where her eight-year tenure garnered significant acclaim, including consecutive "Best Museum" awards from the Phoenix New Times. Her curatorial vision and writing delve into themes of intersectional feminisms, site-responsive art commissions, and groundbreaking artist interventions.

She and Zuckerman discuss SFO, what one can do with all the time and headspace one had spent fundraising in a museum, bypass doors, how what she learns can be applied in other organizations, shaking up societal associations of craft, expanded perspectives, having an audience of millions, moments of pause, a journey through space, joy, incorporating breaks from art talk, being forever changed by parenting, seeing things through someone else’s lens, daily practice, the pause, and being your own support system!

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