Episode No. 466 features curators Eleanor Jones Harvey and Adrienne L. Childs.

Harvey is the curator of “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It examines the impacts of Humboldt’s six-week 1804 visit to the United States. It is on view through January 3. 

Childs is the curator of “Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition” at the Phillips Collection, on view through January

Humboldt in the US, "Riffs and Relations"

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. 649 features artist Patrick Martinez and author Nell Irvin Painter. Dallas Contemporary is showing "Patrick Martinez: Histories" through September 1. The exhibition surveys work Martinez has made since 2016, including his Pee Chee folder-referencing paintings, cake paintings, neons, and his recent multi-media paintings which often feature stucco, paint, and neon. It was curated by Rafael Barrientos Martínez. Martinez is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work investigates socio-economic position, immigration, police violence, and civic and cultural loss. He's had solo shows at museums and kunsthalles such as the ICA San Francisco, the Tucson (Ariz.) Museum of Art, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Vincent Price Art Museums. He's been in recent group shows at the Riverside (Calif.) Art Museum, The Broad, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark., and El Museo del Barrio, New York. Painter's new book is "I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays." The book features essays on Painter's experience of art school, the construction of whiteness, and a sub-collection of essays on visual culture that addresses topics such as Alma Thomas' life and career, and the exhibition "Soul of a Nation." "I Just Keep Talking" is available from Amazon and  Bookshop for $30-35. Painter's previous books include "The History of White People," "Standing at Armageddon," "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol," and "Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over." The “starting over” of the title refers to Painter’s retirement after a career as a top Ivy League historian to return to college as a sixty-something student — first to take undergraduate studio art courses at Rutgers, then to pursue an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Instagram: Patrick Martinez, Nell Irvin Painter, Tyler Green.

Patrick Martinez, Nell Irvin Painter

Episode No. 648 features curator Dita Amory and artist Isabelle Frances McGuire. Along with Ann Dumas, Amory is the curator of "Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain and the Origins of Fauvism," which is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through May 27. The exhibition presents works Henri Matisse and André Derain made in Collioure, a fishing village in the south of France, in the summer of 1905. The work the two men made that summer was crucial to the development of fauvism, the first significant movement of twentieth-century art. The exhibition catalogue was published by the Met. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $42-47. McGuire's work is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in "Descending the Staircase." The exhibition, which considers artists' approaches to the human body, was curated by Jadine Collingwood and Jack Schneider. It is on view through August 25. McGuire is a Chicago-based artist whose work considers the body and how our understanding of it can be filtered by video games, film, animatronics, and other technologies. This is their first inclusion in a museum exhibition; they will also be on view at Artist's Space, New York, next month.

Matisse & Derain, Isabelle Frances McGuire

Episode No. 647 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Kahlil Robert Irving. The Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in Saint Louis is presenting  "Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present" through July 29. "Archaeology of the Present" is a presentation of new Irving sculptures, video, and found objects. Irving has situated his sculptures and other items within a large plywood platform, resembling a stage. Viewers can move onto the structure to encounter both artworks and manufactured objects alike. The episode was taped in 2023 when Irving was included in “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition was an examination of the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. It was curated by Alison Hearst. Concurrently, the exhibition now at the Kemper had just opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It was curated by William Hernández Luege. At the Kemper, the show was curated by Meredith Malone. Irving’s assemblages of images and replicas of every day objects challenge constructions of Western identity and culture. His ceramic sculptures incorporate neglected objects that represent a historical moment, as do his room-sized, image-driven installations. Irving has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis; he’s been featured in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and more.

Holiday clips: Kahlil Robert Irving

Episode No. 646 features curators Edouard Kopp and Shelley Langdale. With Kim Conaty, Kopp is the co-curator of "Ruth Asawa: Through Line," a survey of Asawa's lifelong drawing practice. (Kirsten Marples and Scout Hutchinson assisted Kopp and Conaty.) The exhibition, which is at Houston's Menil Collection through July 21, presents drawings, collages, watercolors, sketchbooks, paper-folds and other work. The show is accompanied by an excellent catalogue published by the Menil and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Amazon and  Bookshop offer it for $36-$46.  Langdale is the curator of  "The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy," an exhibition of German expressionist works on paper from the rich collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The show features a wide range of rarely exhibited (and little-known) drawings, as well as prints. It is on view through May 27.

Ruth Asawa's drawings, "The Anxious Eye"

Episode No. 645 features curator María Elena Ortiz and artist Kenny Rivero. Ortiz is the curator of  "Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition investigates the history of surrealism in the Caribbean and posits that Caribbean intellectuals were key to the development of surrealism in other sites, such as Europe. The exhibition also examines the relationship between Caribbean surrealism and the Afrosurreal in the United States. The exhibition is at MAMFW through July 28. An excellent exhibition catalogue was published by DelMonico Books. Amazon and  Bookshop offer it for about $50. Rivero is among the artists whose work is included in "Surrealism and Us." Rivero's work deconstructs histories and explores the construction of identity through paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture. His work is in the collections of museums such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark., the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Instagram: María Elena Ortiz, Kenny Rivero, Tyler Green.

Humboldt in the US, "Riffs and Relations"

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