Acclaimed artist Amy Sillman and curator Donna De Salvo join Helen Molesworth for a deep dive into how an art exhibition comes to life.

Amy Sillman is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters of her generation. Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe, was presented at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2024, before traveling to Ludwig Forum Aachen the following year. Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) is currently on view at Dia Bridgehampton through June 2026.

Donna De Salvo is a senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation and previously served as the chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Recent projects include Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon, featuring the immersive installation Bass (2024), co-commissioned with the Laurenz Foundation, Basel; Roni Horn at Dia Beacon; Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience, Gagosian, Paris; and the forthcoming This Land: Considering the American Landscape, cocurated with Seph Rodney for The Church, Sag Harbor. 

Emmy Award–winning filmmaker and producer Matt Wolf joins Helen Molesworth to discuss his latest documentary series, Pee-wee as Himself, a revelatory documentary about the late Paul Reubens.  

The HBO original two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself is available to stream now on HBO Max. 

Every era has its own version of Leonardo da Vinci, according to art historian Stephen J. Campbell. Campbell joins Helen Molesworth to unpack the 21st century myth of the tech genius that surrounds the Renaissance artist. 

Stephen J. Campbell is the Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images and The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy.

Last week the Trump administration sharply escalated its impossible demands on the Smithsonian Institution. It's hard not to wonder when, rather than if this administration will come for the rest of our museums. With this in mind, Helen Molesworth invited Jill Medvedow, the former director of the ICA/Boston, for an explainer on how museums are funded, with the hopes of arming listeners with a deeper understanding of how it all works.

Jill Medvedow is director emerita at the ICA/Boston and a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. 

Helen Molesworth and Steve Locke sort through the many exhibitions of the last year to highlight their favorites, from Jack Whitten at MoMA and Stanley Whitney at the ICA/Boston, to Bo Bartlett and Lisa Yuskavage. 

Helen Molesworth invites curator Mark Godfrey and artists Arthur Jafa and Steve Locke to discuss the work of Kerry James Marshall on the occasion of his acclaimed survey exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is on view through January 18, 2026 and will travel next to the Kunsthaus Zürich in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris, France.

Mark Godfrey is the curator of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is co-director of New Curators, a one-year curatorial training program for international curators from lower socio-economic backgrounds. He was Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern from 2007-2021.

Arthur Jafa is an artist and filmmaker whose practice comprises films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. 

Steve Locke is a contemporary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York.

Helen is joined by writer Francine Prose, artist David Salle, and photographer Neil Selkirk for a conversation about Arbus’s singular importance.

Francine Prose’s new novel, Five Weeks in the Country, will be published in May.

David Salle is a painter and essayist living in New York.

Neil Selkirk is a photographer and filmmaker and the only person to print the photographs of Diane Arbus other than the photographer herself.

Visit two exhibitions of Arbus on view this fall: Diane Arbus: Konstellationen is on view at Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany through January 18, 2026 and Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum is on view at David Zwirner London through December 20, 2025. 

An episode dedicated to Yayoi Kusama: arguably the most famous artist in the world and yet among the most indefinable, elusive, and transformative. Helen Molesworth is joined by scholar Jennifer DeVere Brody, art critic Johanna Fateman, and curator Catherine Taft to unpack the many versions of Yayoi Kusama—and her singular importance in 20th and 21st century art.

A global travelling retrospective of Yayoi Kusama opens at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in October 2025; it will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in Spring 2026, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in Fall 2026.

Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater & Performance studies, and, by courtesy, African & African American Studies at Stanford University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts Research supported her forthcoming book, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (Duke UPress, 2026). 

Johanna Fateman is a writer, co-chief art critic at Cultured Mag, and a member of the band Le Tigre. 

Catherine Taft is a writer and curator and deputy director of The Brick, a non-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles.

Helen Molesworth speaks to art historian and culture critic Jonathan Crary, whose recent books Scorched Earth and 24/7 constitute both a polemic against what he calls the “internet complex”—and a diagnosis of where society is now.

Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding coeditor of Zone Books.

With higher education facing existential threat under the current administration, Helen Molesworth speaks to art historian, critic, and educator Darby English about the difficulties of understanding this precise moment and the importance of discourse, independent thought, and history.

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at University of Chicago and the author of numerous books, including Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016) and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007).