A nervous woman glances over her shoulder. A lonely figure stares through a window. A young ingénue arrives in the city with a suitcase—and somehow, you already think you know what happens next.

Between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman created 69 black-and-white photographs inspired by the visual language of classic cinema. But these aren’t stills from real movies, and Sherman isn’t playing actual characters. She gives us costumes, poses, and familiar stereotypes—then lets our own cultural programming write the plots.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores how Untitled Film Stills turns the camera on Hollywood’s portrayals of women, the male gaze, and the audience itself. Sherman serves as photographer, director, stylist, performer, and subject—appearing in every image while somehow disappearing behind every role.

Long before Instagram taught us to pose, crop, filter, and manufacture our identities, Sherman understood that photographs don’t simply show us who people are. They can teach us who we expect them to be.

Cindy Sherman didn’t make the movies. She proved we’d already seen them.

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A revolution has overturned the government, the economy, and nearly every reliable plan for next Tuesday. The old world is gone. Now someone has to design the new one.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores Russian Constructivism—the radical movement that wanted art to leave the museum, enter everyday life, and get a job. Its artists traded precious masterpieces for industrial materials, photography, posters, clothing, theater sets, furniture, and the ambitious belief that design could help build a new society.

Meet Vladimir Tatlin and his spectacularly impractical rotating tower; Aleksandr Rodchenko, who declared painting finished and began photographing the world from startling new angles; and Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, whose groundbreaking work brought Constructivism into theater, textiles, fashion, and mass production.

It’s a story of revolutionary optimism, bold graphics, impossible architecture, and the dangerous moment when artists who set out to serve a revolution discover that the revolution gets to decide what “service” means. The Constructivists never built their perfect world—but they gave modernity one of its loudest visual identities.

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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Marcel Duchamp could paint. He understood perspective, composition, Cubism, and the rules of art history—and then he decided those rules were optional.

Inspired by MoMA’s sweeping Duchamp retrospective, James explores nearly six decades of work by one of modern art’s most disruptive figures. The exhibition moves from Duchamp’s early paintings and drawings through readymades, mechanical contraptions, optical experiments, wordplay, alter egos, and the mysterious installation he constructed in secret for roughly twenty years. Together, these works reveal that the infamous urinal was never the whole story. Duchamp’s real masterpiece may have been the question he left behind: What makes something art—and who gets to decide?

Along the way, we encounter Nude Descending a Staircase, a bicycle wheel, Mona Lisa’s mustache, the cracked and complicated Large Glass, Rrose Sélavy, chess, chance, desire, a unrinal, and an artist who made refusing expectations into an art form of its own.

If you want to spend more time with the urinal, be sure to listen to Season 1, Episode 13, our deep dive into Duchamp’s Fountain. You can follow this link: Marcel Duchamp The Fountain.

And, if you’ve ever stood in a museum and asked, “Why is that art?” congratulations: Marcel Duchamp is still messing with you.

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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—and walked out with thirteen works of art worth an estimated $500 million.

The haul included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, five works by Degas, a Manet, and, because apparently priceless masterpieces weren’t enough, the decorative top of a Napoleonic flagpole.

More than three decades later, the art is still missing. No one has been charged. And the empty frames still hang on the museum walls, waiting for paintings that may—or may not—ever come home.

In this episode of Art Happens, we unravel the largest art heist in American history: fake cops, restrained guards, 81 very strange minutes inside the museum, mob connections, dead ends, questionable suspects, and one enormous unanswered question:

Where the hell are the paintings?

Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History is produced by J-Squared Atelier, where art history gets a little messy—and that’s usually when things get interesting.

All photographic images are courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Ana Mendieta didn’t simply place the body in nature—she let it disappear into it.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore explores how Ana Mendieta transformed earth, fire, water, blood, flowers, photography, and film into a deeply personal language of exile, memory, ritual, and belonging. From her childhood departure from Cuba and years in Iowa to the haunting Silueta works that fused body and landscape, we trace the experiences that shaped one of the most distinctive practices of the 1970s.

We’ll look at the influence of Afro-Cuban, Catholic, and Indigenous traditions on her work, examine why documentation became essential to art designed to vanish, and confront the questions surrounding her 1985 death and the legacy that still shadows discussions of her career.

Mendieta’s work reminds us that a body can disappear and still leave a mark—and sometimes absence is the thing we see most clearly.

Presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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James William Moore
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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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In 1715, Amsterdam officials faced a decorating dilemma: Rembrandt’s monumental masterpiece The Night Watch didn’t fit between two doors. Their solution? Cut it down to size.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores how Rembrandt transformed a conventional militia portrait into a scene bursting with light, movement, muskets, and one mysteriously glowing girl—only for later generations to trim away figures, architecture, and nearly two feet of canvas.

Discover how a small seventeenth-century copy preserved evidence of the original composition, and how the Rijksmuseum used advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to reconstruct what the missing sections may have looked like.

It’s a story about artistic intention, changing attitudes toward preservation, and the expensive lesson Amsterdam learned three centuries too late: when a masterpiece doesn’t fit the room, the masterpiece isn’t the furnishing problem.

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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
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James William Moore
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📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Futurism wanted art to move at the speed of modern life—and it wasn’t interested in asking permission.

In this episode, James follows Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian Futurists as they transform speeding cars, factories, electric lights, experimental typography, and industrial noise into a new artistic language. Along the way, paintings learn to move, words escape their sentences, orchestras become factories, and performances erupt into confrontations.

But Futurism’s obsession with youth, aggression, destruction, and war carried it toward increasingly dangerous politics. Its artists helped reinvent modern art while confusing speed with progress—and innovation with wisdom.

Start your engines. Hide the museum collection. And perhaps take away Marinetti’s keys.

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James William Moore
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📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...

Alexander Calder didn’t just make sculpture move—he taught it how to dance.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore explores how a mechanically minded artist transformed gravity, air, balance, and motion into artistic materials. From Calder’s miniature, five-suitcase circus and his wire “drawings in space” to the encounter with Piet Mondrian that helped set abstraction in motion, we follow the experiments that led to his revolutionary mobiles and stabiles.

We’ll meet the avant-garde artists who helped name Calder’s inventions, discover why he abandoned predictable motors for the commitment-challenged behavior of air, and examine the careful engineering concealed inside sculptures that seem wonderfully effortless.

Calder’s work proves that playfulness can be rigorous, joy can be profound, and even gravity can earn a creative credit.

Presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
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James William Moore
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📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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On a stormy night in Palermo in 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo and sliced a priceless Caravaggio masterpiece from its frame. Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence hasn’t been seen since.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James follows the painting from Caravaggio’s turbulent life and revolutionary use of light and shadow into a decades-long mystery filled with Mafia informants, black-market collectors, contradictory confessions, and rumors of a masterpiece destroyed by rats and pigs.

Was the missing Caravaggio hidden, sold, buried—or lost forever? Explore how a sacred painting became criminal currency, why its disappearance continues to haunt the art world, and what we truly lose when a masterpiece vanishes.

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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
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James William Moore
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📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Museums, spectacle, velvet ropes, and the moment art became an event.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James looks at how museums went from quiet temples of culture to full-blown engines of anticipation, crowds, merch, timed tickets, and “limited engagement” panic. From the King Tut exhibition craze to Van Gogh posters, immersive rooms, gift-shop snow globes, and blockbuster shows marketed like superhero movies, this episode asks what happens when art history becomes an event experience.

Blockbusters brought millions of people into museums, sometimes for the first time. They created unforgettable encounters with masterpieces, expanded access, and made art feel exciting and public. But they also changed what museums value, what gets funded, and which artists get pushed aside when exhibitions have to sell tickets.

Because yes, art can be scholarly, moving, complicated, and transformative. It can also apparently come with a forty-eight-dollar tote bag.

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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
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James William Moore
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📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...