There are many illuminating moment’s in Hal Foster’s Conversations about Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2018) with Richard Serra, including the discussion of the infamous “Tilted Arc” sculpture, Serra's formative years as he battled with Minimalism and Conceptual Art, his idea’s around site-specific art, and the role of text and image in his oeuvre.

This podcast begins with Serra’s own voice from a SFMOMA clip that asks the question, “Why Make Art?” and continues with a little adventure to see the artist’s first land artwork, “Shift” (1970), in King City, Ontario. Finally, I sit down with Foster, who talks about his own relationship with an artist who has reinvented himself a few times in his career.

Memes are the street art of the social web, and they are becoming more central to the political and cultural conversations we have. In her new book, Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, An Xiao Mina helps us understand how memes influenced the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Women’s Marches around the world. She explores how memes can help people express public dissent in environments where that can be downright dangerous.

As one of Hyperallergic's original contributors, An Xiao Mina is no stranger to Hyperallergic readers. In her latest project, she continues to challenge us to think critically about the online world and the role of art in the formation of this brave new social terrain. She also discusses her time working at Ai Weiwei’s studio, her internet research in Uganda, and her current job working in the Bay Area’s robust tech scene developing tools for journalists and other online citizens.

The music for this episode is “Grass-Mud Horse Cartoon and Rap (Cao Ni Ma),” which was one of the many versions of the Grass-Mud Horse song that emerged anonymously in China approximately a decade ago to protest internet censorship. This version, An Xiao Mina’s favorite, is featured in this episode. Also, a special thanks to Jason Li for allowing us to use his illustration for Memes to Movements as this week’s cover art.

Last year, we invited artist, writer, and Queens College professor Chloë Bassto talk with curator, art historian, and museum veteran Lowery Stokes Sims to have a conversation of their choosing. It took me a year to publish this podcast, but I’m happy to say their words are more relevant today than ever, as the two art world figures discuss the imagined publics of contemporary art, public and private education, and the challenges of empathy and identity in art.

Bass is no stranger to Hyperallergic readers, and she's known for her deep engagement with art and writing coupled with a solid understanding of the way art functions in the world and the emotional sophistication needed to outline those parameters.

Then there’s Lowery Stokes Sims, who has been a trailblazer throughout her career. She was on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1972 to 1999, during which time she specialized in modern and contemporary art. From 2000 to 2007, she was executive director and then president of The Studio Museum in Harlem, and served as Adjunct Curator for the Permanent Collection. Then from 2007 until 2015, she chief curator at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design.

I think you’ll agree that the following conversation offers useful insight into the worlds of two leading figures in New York’s art community.

A special thanks to Brooklyn-based musician SunSonfor providing the music to this episode. You can check out his website sunson.band and follow him on Facebookor Instagram.

It’s rare for an artist to have two concurrent solo shows in the same city, but Didier William accomplished that with his Curtains, Stages, and Shadows, Act 1 & Act 2. The two-part exhibition explores the formal and narrative possibilities of painting. In his review of Act 1, critic Seph Rodney focuses on the figures that can appear as elusive as they are powerful, writing:

These are all figures ready to enact real violence with the cutlasses, and they are also figures who are depicted as staging a rebellion. If one views the text in the back room, one can begin to understand why William believes it necessary to pictorially rehearse the action of insurrection.

I invited Rodney to continue the conversation with William in this episode of Art Movements, in which the two explore the visual language of revolution, specifically in the context of the Haitian revolution, which is one of the larger themes in the artist’s series.

A special thanks to Red Wedding for providing the music for this episode. You can check her out on Instagram.

Sir Sargent, as he’s known on social media, represents a new wave of art writers and critics focused on Black contemporary art and its evolving role in an international African diasporic consciousness. He was born in Chicago as Antwaun Sargent, and has called New York home since 2011.

When he first arrived in New York City, he was a kindergarten teacher, but he soon discovered his interest in telling the stories of Black artists and sharing his insights on into a contemporary art world often perceived as opaque and inaccessible. He’s since co-curated his first exhibition, spoken at countless events, and is now working on a book.

I invited our news editor, Jasmine Weber, to join me in this conversation to learn about Sargent’s thought on a scene that is getting more attention than ever.

A special thanks to Amani Fela for providing the music for this episode.

Tyler Green may be best known as the journalist and art writer behind the Modern Art Notes podcast, but for the last six years, he’s also been working on a major book about a photographer who helped establish the sublime visual record of the American West for viewers around the world.

In his new book, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, Green writes a very readable story about a figure who blended art and science, helped establish photography as an art, and whose images helped galvanize a citizenry that would eventually establish a national park system around the country. Green managed all of this despite being faced with a researchers nightmare: Watkins’s archive was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Then there's the twist, as Green discusses a very personal connection to Watkins that he discovered in the midst of his research. It’s a fascinating tale that shows us history is often more present than we know.

A special thanks to Mark Pritchard of Warp Records for providing the music for this episode.

Artist Dayanita Singh wasn’t happy taking photographs in the traditional way, preferring to create what she calls “book objects,” mini-exhibitions to showcase her work. Singh  plays with the conventional language of art, and even calls herself an “off-set artist” to denote her preferred way to display her images.

She is currently exhibiting in the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, and she has a small retrospective of her book objects at Callicoon Fine Art on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I talked to her about her love of images, a formative (and funny) experience she shared with Robert Frank, and the future of the artist book.

A special thanks to Flash Trading (flashtrading.bandcamp.com) for providing the music for this episode.

The world of art has become more complicated as copyright, appropriation, and other issues force artists, dealers, collectors, and others to turn to lawyers for help. As foibles around the sale and maintenance of luxury art objects grab media headlines, you might be fooled into believing the future of art is in litigation.

I invited Sergio Sarmiento to join me to talk about the evolving world of art law and discuss why he went to law school as an art project, what he thinks about some recent sensational cases (Richard Prince/Instagram, Sam Durant at the Walker Art Center, and the recent Banksy auction stunt) and his thoughts on how appropriate has changed from the 1970s.

On October 29, 2017, the world lost its first feminist art historian. That title, of course, describes Linda Nochlin, a leading academic who changed the world of art after she published her important essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

In 2016, I had the honor of interviewing her for the Women of Abstract Expressionism podcast and only used a few minutes of our interview. In this episode of Art Movements, we release the whole interview (leaving out some in-between bits) where she discusses the role of women in the arts, how oppression impacts culture, and her personal friendship with Joan Mitchell and others.

I also briefly interview one of her former students, art writer Aruna D'Souza, to explain what Nochlin was like as a person.

And the music this episode is “Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G, Movement I (Allegro)” one of the most renowned compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, who was Nochlin's favorite composer.

After decades in the art world, Deborah Kass has a hit. A major one. The type of beloved public artwork that you see endlessly on your social feeds, and brings a smile to your face whenever you encounter it. I'm talking about "OY/YO" (2015), the eight-foot-tall yellow sculpture that just landed at the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibition titled Something to Say.

I took the opportunity to invite Kass into the studio to talk about her work, her thoughts on the art world (she's a pessimist), the role of art today, and more. I also got to ask her something I've always wanted to ask her, particularly since she's so well known for her Warhol-inspired Barbra Streisand series: Does she have a favorite song by Streisand?

And a special thanks to sound artist Bradford Reed, who performed this past weekend as part of the 24-hour Sonic Transmission Archive event at the Newburgh Open Studios in Newburgh, New York. I was able to attend the Sunday portion of the event, which is a Wave Farm Partner Transmit project organized by Ethan Primason and Caroline Partamian, and got to hear and record his performance myself. Thanks to the artist and organizers for allowing us to use the sound work.