Art as Experience: Podcasts

The Art as Experience radio show returns to WOWD Takoma Radio after a haitus due to the COVID pandemic, and so does the podcast!  Sheila and Tom discuss the recent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Degas at the Opera.

Degas does something here that artists don’t try to do anymore:  create a world.

Edgar Degas, in these paintings, creates the world of the Paris Opera in the 1870’s and 80’s: its audience, its subscribers, its stars and sets. You can experience the enchantment that’s created on the stage, and view, as a voyeur, the young female dancers – training, rehearsing, and performing. Hanging around in the wings, you also see the men who, as subscribers, get the privilege of becoming part of the scene – meeting, chatting up, and propositioning the girls: dressed in black, with top hats, their feet showing under the curtains.

What surprised us in the show was that Degas was really experimental.  There’s a wide range: from super-realistic to wildly abstract.  That stretching and experimenting is there for you to see, and so are the flaws.  This is a rich field to explore.

…. Originally broadcast October 24, 2020.

 

After their last program on the artist Pat Steir, currently on exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, Sheila and Tom continue their discussion of the challenges facing women artists and the commercial strategy of “branding”.

Originally broadcast Mar 07, 2020.

We explore the current exhibition of American painter, Pat Steir, at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in Washington DC.  The exhibition is entitled Color Wheel, and consists of large paintings in a sequence of color combinations arrayed along the walls of the circular inner hallway.  Pat Steir uses chance processes, like John Cage, to produce complex vibrating colors in a monumental motif that recalls waterfalls.

 

We discuss the beautiful Romare Bearden exhibition at the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland College Park, and talk about his life and works.

On the occasion of six paintings by Sheila being included in a juried exhibition at the Strathmore Mansion, in Bethesda MD, Tom and Sheila decided to discuss juried shows in general, and also the specific exhibition, entitled, “Home”,  at the Strathmore Mansion through February 23.

https://www.strathmore.org/visual-arts/exhibitions/home

 

 

Sheila and Tom discuss the issue of appropriation in art.

Sheila and Tom discuss the American painter Edward Hopper. WOWD program manager Steve Hoffman joins them to talk about the current exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, entitled, Edward Hopper and the American Hotel.

Sheila and Tom visit the exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts:  Judy Chicago – The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.  They discuss Chicago’s work, her history, her ambition, and her place in the art world as a feminist artist.

Tom and Sheila discuss the new painting that was discovered by Vuillard and Bonnard in their Nabi phase, around the turn of the twentieth century in Paris. The Phillips Collection, in Washington DC, is currently exhibiting their new bequest, the collection of Vicki and Roger Sant, featuring Vuillard and Bonnard, along with several other painters in their circle.

Verrocchio opened his workshop in Florence in the late 1560’s. He was a great master and the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci.  The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC exhibit, with fifty works from the Bargello and other museums, is the first-ever monographic exhibit of Verrocchio in the US.  So if you didn’t get to see the celebration of Verrocchio at the Bargello in Florence earlier this year, you can see his work here in Washington. Sheila and Tom introduce us to his greatness.