About Art

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153. Mary Weatherford Oct 29, 2024

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Mary Weatherford is one of the leading painters of her generation, exploring and expanding the legacies of American abstraction. Over the last three decades, Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice: from early target paintings in the 1990s based on operatic heroines, to expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that have been a presence in her work since 2012. With a physically embodied approach to painting, Weatherford explores abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, personal mode of engagement with the world.
She and Zuckerman discuss making paintings for other people, failure and not showing for 5 years, paintings of nothing, how she invented the neon, the physicality of her process, pursuing pink, story telling, and the continuum of art history.

152. Shamim Momin Oct 15, 2024

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Shamim Momin is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington. In this role since 2018, she has overseen the Curatorial Department and organized numerous exhibitions, including the museum-wide group exhibition In Plain Sight, as well as major commissions by Tala Madani, Gary Simmons, Kelly Akashi, Donna Huanca, Diana Al-Hadid, and others. Prior to joining the Henry, she was director, curator, and co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a nonprofit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects. In that role, Momin organized over 100 exhibitions, projects, and programs with more than 300 artists, presented across the United States and internationally. Previously, Momin served for more than ten years at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) co-curating the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials and overseeing the Contemporary Projects series. In addition to her extensive publication history, she serves regularly as guest lecturer, panelist, and advisor for a wide array of organizations and events. Momin was Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art for Williams College for the 2007 and 2008 Semester in New York program, and is currently Affiliate Professor of Art at the School of Art, Art History and Design, University of Washington.
She and Zuckerman discuss life transformations, never not thinking about something, founder’s fatigue, regret, being useful, learning to listen, accepting the world, personal responsibility, purpose driven work, humanity, being a mom, mentorship, what the next generation sees, and art as a means to be human!

151. Ed Templeton Oct 01, 2024

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California-based artist Ed Templeton is known for his interdisciplinary practice, most notably of photographs documenting people and street life of Huntington Beach, California, intimate portraits of his wife, and paintings depicting the psychological complexity of American suburbia. He first gained recognition as a teenage skateboard prodigy in the late 1980s and taught himself to photograph on the fly while actively touring for competitions. All of Templeton’s subjects come from his own life: “Everything I’ve ever shot has just been on the path that I’ve been on, be it skating or travel or street photography.” Blurring portraiture and landscape, Templeton works across photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ugliness, banality, and beauty of the familiar everyday world.

He and Zuckerman discuss permission, looking at ourselves, what’s weird about Orange County, finding skateboarding, the absence of free will, seeing things before they happen, managing fear, the flow state, mining his own archives, hyper reality, and collaborating with his wife!

150. Heidi Zuckerman “Ask Me Anything” Part II Sep 17, 2024

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This is the second “Ask Me Anything” episode with our founder and host Heidi Zuckerman, a globally recognized leader in contemporary art, a prolific content generator, and a fierce advocate for Why Art Matters! In addition to being the first woman to build two art museums and raising nearly $200M dollars for museums, she has had hundreds of courageously authentic conversations with artists and other people she finds interesting that are featured on five years and 150 podcasts and in four volumes of her Conversations with Artists book series. She also recently authored Why Art Matters: The Bearable Lightness of Being “your bed-side table masterclass in how to find a way towards understanding ourselves thru art.”
In this episode she answers audience questions that range from those about the practices of the art world to who Heidi would love to have dinner with and on her podcast. It’s another deeply personal share from a woman who encourages us all to live our values and to connect with art to make our lives better!

149. Melissa Chiu Sep 03, 2024

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Melissa Chiu is Director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary art. Since her appointment in 2014, she has advocated for contemporary art through the Museum’s exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programs, with landmark exhibitions of work by some of today’s most important artists. A native of Australia, Chiu earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and criticism from the University of Western Sydney in 1992 and her master’s degree in arts administration in 1994 from the University of New South Wales. She completed her Ph.D. with a dissertation on contemporary Chinese art at the University of Western Sydney in 2005. Chiu has authored and edited several books and catalogues on contemporary art, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Museum of Modern Art, and other universities and museums.
She and Zuckerman discuss radical accessibility, running our nation’s Museum of modern and contemporary art, the difference between TV and museums, the humility of motherhood, and learning from artists.

148. Anne Radice Aug 20, 2024

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Art historian and curator Anne Radice. Radice previously served as Director of the Division of Public Programs at NEH. Prior to joining NEH in July 2018 she served as Executive Director of the American Folk Art Museum. From 2006 to 2010 Radice served as Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Her previous government positions include Acting Deputy Chairman for Programs and Special Advisor to the Chairman of NEH, Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Education, Acting Chairman and Senior Deputy Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Chief Arts Advisor for the U.S. Information Agency, and Curator for the Architect of the U.S. Capitol. Radice is a recipient of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal, the Forbes Medal, and the NEA’s Chairman’s Medal. She holds an MBA from American University, a PhD in art and architectural history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an MA from Villa Schifanoia School of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, and an AB from Wheaton College.
She and Zuckerman engage here in a deeply personal conversation about living a life of service, “the general public,” true leadership, listening, and leading with your heart.

147. Diedrick Brackens Aug 06, 2024

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Los-Angeles based artist Diedrick Brackens is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Bracken’s work the reasoning beast (2021)—currently installed in OCMA’s exhibition Color is the First Revelation of the World—exemplifies Bracken’s intimate use of color and material, where washed in hues of black, blue, and purple, a figure embraces a goat to soar through the night sky.
He and Zuckerman discuss his relationship to craft, weaving, and storytelling, how he starts, breaking rules, why cotton matters, Texas, his titles, abstraction and figuration, and what role hope and empathy play!

146. Andrea Bowers Jul 23, 2024

Show notes

Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers has made art that activates for more than 30 years. Bowers works in a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, and explores pressing national and international issues. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, operating as chronicler of contemporary history. A passionate ecofeminist, the symbiotic relationship between women and ecology is a recurring theme in her work, central in Femme Trans-Corporeal Fantasy (Victory to the Goddess) (2023), a monumental work on cardboard that entered OCMA’s collection in 2023.
She and Zuckerman discuss her relationship to craft and how it impacts her relationship to activism, feminism, her drawing practice, engaging with the public, what she most values, aging, doing less, And what questions art should be asking!

145. Tony Marsh Jul 09, 2024

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Tony Marsh is an artist and educator who earned his BFA in Ceramic Art at California State University Long Beach in 1978. After graduating he spent three years in Mashiko, Japan at the workshop of Tatsuzo Shimaoka. Marsh completed his MFA at Alfred University in 1988. He teaches in the Ceramic Arts Program at California State University Long Beach where he was the Program Chair for over 20 years. He is currently the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB. He was named a United States Artists Fellow in 2018, an honor awarded to outstanding contributors in American Arts and Letters. His work is the collections of museums across the globe including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of Art; Gardiner Museum of Art, Toronto; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Jose Museum of Art; ASU Art Museum Tempe; the Foshan Museum of Contemporary Art, Foshan, China; and the Orange County Museum of Art.
He and Zuckerman discuss being a teacher, making art, making a real impact, doing things with your whole heart, the influence of his mom, living and training in Japan, things that are encoded with success, how simple things are hard to make, marriage vessels, fertility vessels, and appropriate shapes, suspending time, magic, failure, craft, notions of taste, and taking no out of your vocabulary!

144. Stephen Reily Jun 25, 2024

Show notes

Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which seeks to promote innovation among art museums across the United States. An attorney and entrepreneur, Reily served as Director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky from 2017 to 2021 where he invigorated a newly renovated museum with a mission of public service and dramatically increased both contributed revenue and accessibility. Under his leadership, the Speed introduced a new “Speed for All” free family membership for anyone for whom cost is a barrier to entry; initiated its first paid internships; issued its first annual Racial Equity Report, specifying the museum’s standing and commitments on staffing, acquisitions and exhibitions, programming, and more. During his tenure, the Speed worked with Guest Curator Allison Glenn and Community Engagement Strategist Toya Northington to present the exhibition “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” cited as a model of relevance and innovation as the museum responded in real time to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. A longtime supporter of museums and the arts, Reily currently serves on the Boards of the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Federation of Arts.
He and Zuckerman discuss museums as legacy businesses, the unsustainable nature of the current economic model of museums, innovation, the Director’s role, artists and what we can learn from them, new ideas and initiatives, what’s working, and of course why art matters!

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