Vivian Li, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, joins us to discuss All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room now on view at the DMA.

In this conversation: the background to Kusama's work; its popularity with the viewing public; perspective on Kusama's biography and long career; smartphones and social media; Kusama's relation to Marisol and the postwar and contemporary collections at the DMA; and much more!

Christine Folch is the author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History (Princeton University Press).

In this conversation: the beverage's historical journey, cultural context and drinking experience; its economic and political context; the question of fair trade and ethical consumption; public interest; yaupon, the yerba mate of North America; and more!

Tessa Granowski is the owner and founder of Nature of Things, a new art gallery in Dallas. In this conversation: Tessa's background and influences; Lucretius and De rerum natura; reflections on the Dallas art world; the gallery's first show, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: an homage to Dave Hickey"; the importance of Dave Hickey's writing on art (see Julia Friedman on Daniel Oppenheimer on Hickey); what's next for the gallery, and much more!

Border Documents is a new photobook from Arturo Soto, a photographer, writer and educator. It is "a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces." Having grown up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in the twin cities of Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA), fascinated by how much things had changed in just a generation, Soto compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred.

In this conversation: the concept behind the book; the structure of the narrative; Georges Perec and the infra-ordinary; biography and personal experience; the new book in relation to Soto's other work; growing up, studying, working, and traveling in places from Mexico City to Oxford to Panama to Los Angeles; further reading on Ciudad Juárez and El Paso; and much more!

A few other interesting books about Juárez:

• Edmond Baudoin and Jean-Marc Troubet, Viva la Vida: Los sueños en Ciudad Juárez (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2011)
• Charles Bowden, et al, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture, 1998)
• Julián Cardona, Stardust: Memories of the Calle Mariscal (El Paso: Rubin Center for the Visual Arts), 2014
• Ricardo Ainslie, The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013) 
• Alfredo Corchado, Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into the Darkness (New York: Penguin, 2013)
  

A conversation with Dr. Leigh Arnold, curator of Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

In this conversation: war poems by Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and Siegfried Sassoon; Jonathan Shay's books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, how veterans view the representation of war in Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now; Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death; war and politicians from the Iliad and Thucydides to Henry Kissinger; and much more.

See also: Tom Palaima, "Writing on War"

Thomas G. Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is recipient of a MacArthur fellowship (1985-90) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

Correction: The two senators who stood tall opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that "‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.

In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!

Mai Wang is an assistant professor of literature at UT Dallas, where she teaches Asian American and Chinese diasporic literature. 

Her first book project, The Asian American Renaissance, examines the imaginative alliances formed between diasporic Asian American authors and their nineteenth-century American predecessors.

In this conversation: How Asian American authors have formed imaginative alliances with their 19th century predecessors; Eileen Chang and Emerson's concept of negative freedom; Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart; and much more!

Michael Thomas is curator of The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, as well as From Texas to the World: Common Ground at UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art.

In this conversation: What the Bourbons discovered in 18th-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the effect of the Grand Tour; 18th-century archaeological techniques; highlights of the exhibition; artists at the Spanish royal court, and more!