Episode No. 588 features author Jennifer Van Horn and curator Elizabeth Kornhauser. Van Horn is the author of  "Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery," which was recently published by Yale University Press. The book investigates American portraiture, a discipline which until recently was dominated by European-American artists and their wealthy, self-image-creating clients. The book discovers within some of these portraits and the artists who made them histories of Black resistance, agency, viewership, and even iconoclasm. While the book primarily focuses on the era before the Civil War, it also reaches well into the twentieth century. Amazon and Indiebound offer "Portraits of Resistance" for about $60. Kornhauser discusses a new installation of portraiture miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American galleries. Portrait miniatures -- often tiny watercolor pictures on ivory -- were popular in the US in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The production of portrait miniatures was one form of production particularly open to women artists.

"Portraits of Resistance," portrait miniatures

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a weekly, hour-long interview program featuring artists, historians, authors, curators and conservators. Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee called The MAN Podcast “one of the great archives of the art of our time.” When the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics gave host Tyler Green one of its inaugural awards for criticism in 2014, it included a special citation for The MAN Podcast.

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Episode No. 654 features curator Karen Hellman and artist Myra Greene. With Carolyn Peter, Hellman is the curator of "Nineteenth-Century Photography Now" at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition examines how many of the conventions and processes established in photography's early years remain of interest to artists working today. Historical artists within the exhibition include Anna Atkins, Gustave Le Gray, Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Carleton Watkins. The exhibition is on view through July 7. Claire L’Heureux and Antares Wells assisted the co-curators. Greene is among the 21 contemporary artists on view. Her work uses photography and textiles to explore representations of the body and race. Core to her practice is an understanding that color is materially and culturally dependent on context, and historically has been. She has had solo exhibitions at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Atlanta, the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, and has been included in group exhibitions at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and more. Ten artists in the exhibition previously have been guests on The Modern Art Notes Podcast:   Andrea Chung;  Liz Deschenes;  Ken Gonzales-Day;  An-My Lê;  Lisa Oppenheim; Wendy Red Star;  Mark Ruwedel;  Paul Mpagi Sepuya (second visit);  Stephanie Syjuco (second visit); and  Carrie Mae Weems.  Instagram: Myra Greene, Tyler Green.

19thC Photography Now, Myra Greene

Episode No. 653 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features critic and author Deborah Solomon and host Tyler Green's 2016 conversation with Frank Stella.  Frank Stella died on May 4 at the age of 87. For two decades, from the late 1950s until the late 1970s or early 1980s, Stella was one of the United States' most important painters. The Museum of Modern Art, New York famously devoted two mid-career retrospectives to Stella's work, in 1970 and again in 1987. Solomon is a critic whose work can often be found in the New York Times, and the author of biographies of Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Norman Rockwell. Her biography of Jasper Johns is forthcoming. She wrote this critical obit of Stella for the NYT. The next segment is Stella's 2016 visit to the Modern Art Notes Podcast on the occasion of a Stella retrospective at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. The exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. 

Remembering Frank Stella

Episode No. 652 features curators Denise Murrell and Larisa Grollemond. Murrell is the curator of  "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition, which is on view through July 28, explores the ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday life and impacted art on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An outstanding exhibition catalogue was published by the Met. Amazon and  Bookshop offer it for $50-60. Grollemond curated "Blood: Medieval/Modern," which is at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles through May 19. The exhibition looks at how and why blood has been represented in medieval manuscripts and in some contemporary art too. Instagram: Denise Murrell, Larisa Grollemond, Tyler Green.

The Harlem Renaissance, Blood: Medieval/Modern

Episode No. 651 features art historian Richard Shiff, curator and art historian Michelle White, and a clip from Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 National Gallery of Art Mellon Lectures.  Serra died last month at age 85. He may be the most honored sculptor of the post-war era. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which holds the most important institutional collection of his art, has produced Serra retrospectives in 1986 and 2007. The Menil Collection organized a drawings retrospective in 2011; it traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Serra's hometown museum. The most extensive survey of Serra's films and videotapes was presented by the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2017. Serra was a guest on Episode No. 18 of this program. Shiff is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the director of the Center for the Study of Modernism. He has written or contributed to books on Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Donald Judd, and Serra, including "Forged Steel," which was published by Steidl and David Zwirner Books in 2016. White is a curator at the Menil Collection. With Bernice Rose and Gary Garrels she curated the 2011 Serra drawings retrospective.  Kirk Varnedoe was the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1988 to 2001. He delivered the 2003 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art on the subject "Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock." 

Remembering Richard Serra

Episode No. 650 features curator Anne-Lise Desmas and author Jim Moske. With Emerson Bowyer, Desmas is the co-curator of "Camille Claudel," a retrospective of the French modernist sculptor's career, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Until now, Claudel's work has often been under-considered as scholars have focused on her professional and personal relationship with Auguste Rodin; "Claudel" foregrounds the artist's work through a presentation of about 60 sculptures. The exhibition is on view through July 21. Getty Publications has published a excellent catalogue. Amazon and  Bookshop offer it for about $65-75. Moske is the author of "Deaths of Artists." The book uses two fragile scrapbooks in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York both to look at how newspapers in the early twentieth century covered the deaths of artists, and to jump off from that often sensational coverage to learn more about how artists were considered and remembered. The Met has  recently digitized the scrapbooks that instigated Moske's examination. Amazon and  Bookshop offer the book for about $37. Instagram: Jim Moske, Tyler Green.

"Portraits of Resistance," portrait miniatures

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