A man. A woman. A window. A pitchfork. It’s the most seemingly straightforward double portrait to come out of rural America - and certainly the most famous - yet it’s become synonymous with ambiguity and mystery, parody and polarization. Amazing how hungry we are to turn a portrait of an artist’s hometown spirit into a portrait of a larger American cultural moment, both then and now.

See the images:
https://bit.ly/2WuV2CQ

Music used:
Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger”
The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Long and Low Cloud,” “Hakodate Line,” “Cornicob,” “Sylvestor,” “Di Breun,” “The Silver Hatch,” “Speaker Joy”
Joe Dassin, “Les Champs-Elysees"

Support the show:
www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

Ep. 54 - Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930)

Welcome to The Lonely Palette, the podcast that returns art history to the masses, one painting at a time.  Each episode, host Tamar Avishai picks a painting du jour, interviews unsuspecting museum visitors in front of it, and then dives deeply into the object, the movement, the social context, and anything and everything else that will make it as neat to you as it is to her.  For more information, visit thelonelypalette.com | Twitter @lonelypalette | Instagram @thelonelypalette.

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going.

This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what if a monument was human-scaled? What if it made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold. 

This episode takes us to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to Shreveport, Louisiana, to the South Side of Chicago, to Navajo Nation in Arizona. It explores how many American monuments to slavery took inspiration from Holocaust memorials in Germany. And it looks at decentralized memorials that are using technology to help bring monuments to the past into the future.

See the images:
https://bit.ly/49FR3Ui

Support the show:
www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

Ep. 66 - Bringing Monuments Home (from PRX's Monumental)

The Lonely Palette, as you've heard so often, is an enormously proud founding member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a group of fiercely independent, story-driven, mind-expanding podcasts.  Since 2017, we've supported each other while forging our own paths, prioritizing craft and humane storytelling above all else.

Now, if you haven't noticed, media in general, and podcasting in particular, is in a space some may generously call post-apocalyptic. But an incredible silver lining is that the industry is now recognizing how important independence is. We've been here all along, and with your support, we're not going anywhere.

Please enjoy a bonus episode of the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, a tasty sampler of a few of our shows in a dapper audio package.  Today's theme is love.  As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, what is love? It turns out, love can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. Here at Hub & Spoke, we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all.

This episode is hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

Listen to the full episodes:
- Rumble Strip, “Forrest Foster Lays Karen to Rest”
- Mementos “Cherie’s Letters”
- Ministry of Ideas, “Consumed”
- The Lonely Palette, “Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Desired Moment (c. 1770)”

You can also share the love by supporting our Valentine’s Day fundraiser: www.hubspokeaudio.org/love

BonusEp. 17 - The Hub & Spoke Radio Hour

Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation.

Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photographs, drawings, relationships, grandchildren – is the subject of her new memoir, or, actually, what she calls “Stuff (Instead of a Memoir).”  She joined me to talk about the book, but also more than 60 years of writing about art in the way that centered life.  After all, “art,” she often quotes, “is what makes life more interesting than art.”  Art is the artists, the world they inhabit, their shared cultural references, their shared understanding of the art world and art history.  Their human experiences rendered in paint.  The stuff they leave behind.

Music Used:
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Lacquer Groove,” “Hardwood Lullaby”

Episode Webpage:
https://www.thelonelypalette.com/interview/2023/12/20/lucy-lippard-art-writer

BonusEp. 16: Tamar Avishai interviews Lucy R. Lippard, Art Writer

In the 1950s and 60s, Coenties Slip—an obscure street on the lower tip of Manhattan overlooking the East River—was home to some of the most iconic artists in history, and who would define American Art during their time there: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman.  As friends and inspirations to one another, these artists created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation.

Prudence Peiffer is the kind of art historian who understands the importance of context and place, and her book, “The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever” provides the kind of rich context and human detail that textbooks could only dream of.  She joined me to discuss the history of these artists, why we have such a hard time seeing artists as people, the friction between accessible artists and their inaccessible art, why watching Robert Indiana eat a mushroom for 39 minutes is actually totally beautiful, and what it means to authentically nudge art history towards inclusion.

Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, writer, and editor, specializing in modern and contemporary art.  She is Director of Content at MoMA, New York. She was a Senior Editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and Digital Content Director at David Zwirner in 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications.  Her book, “The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever” has been longlisted for the National Book Award.

See the images:
https://bit.ly/3rOM7vE

Music used:
The Blue Dot Session, “Skyforager”
Rufus Wainwright, “11:11”

Support the show:
www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

BonusEp. 15: Tamar Avishai interviews Prudence Peiffer, Author and Content Director, MoMA

Taking a break from writing about astronauts, Tom Wolfe donned his white suit and strolled to the art museums of New York City, letting the incomprehensible literary works of the movement wash over him like a warm bath of clam broth, and producing what, in the words of art critic Rosalind Krauss, "hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch."  

For you, dear listeners, here is the headache-inducing introduction to "The Painted Word," read aloud, as was always intended.

This free preview is available to all listeners, but the full chapter, and all future chapters, will be going to $2 (and above) per episode patrons, so pledge that support to find out just what in the heck Wolfe defines as an "apache dance."  It's so not what you think it is that it might just be what you think it is.

The next chapter will be released on Tuesday, October 17.  Don't miss a word, painted or otherwise, by becoming a patron.

www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

Music used:
Glenn Miller, “Tuxedo Junction”
The Blue Dot Sessions, "No Smoking," "Mercurial Vision"

Our website:
www.thelonelypalette.com

Ep. 54 - Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930)

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