Kurt Andersen talks with Amy Sherald, who painted the official Michelle Obama portrait, about her strict religious upbringing, the surreal experience of interviewing with the Obamas and why she’ll only ever paint African Americans. Our latest American Icons feature: “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians, and how the band of Mexican American teens managed to top the charts and help fuel the growing Latin influence on pop music in the 1960s.
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Michelle Obama’s portraitist and ‘96 Tears’

The Peabody Award-winning Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, from PRI, is a smart and surprising guide to what's happening in pop culture and the arts. Each week, Kurt introduces the people who are creating and shaping our culture. Life is busy – so let Studio 360 steer you to the must-see movie this weekend, the next book for your nightstand, or the song that will change your life. Produced in association with Slate.

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For listeners of Studio 360, we’re featuring an episode from the new PRX podcast Monumental.

The landscape of public memory is shifting. As we re-examine the plaques in our parks and the sculptures on our streets, we grapple with what to do with them. Once we learn the stories these objects tell about who we are, will tearing down statues and renaming schools be enough?

Monumental interrogates the state of American monuments and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, host and author Ashley C Ford and a team of audio journalists from around the country will piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S

In this episode, we uncover the story of the only successful coup d’etat ever to happen on American soil. This act of racial violence was designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That suppression involved racist mobs, as well as historians, city planners, journalists and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community’s onetime prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable.

For more information about Monumental, visit our website at www.prx.org/monumental

Introducing: Monumental - Whispers in Wilmington

Hello Studio 360 fans!

We're sharing the first episode of a new podcast project, Nixon at War, hosted by Studio 360's Kurt Andersen. Nixon at War is a seven-episode history, a fresh new kind of chronicle about how Richard Nixon turned Vietnam into a war at home… that we’re still fighting today.

Most accounts of the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency begin with Watergate - the now iconic tale of a bungled break-in and the misbegotten cover-up that followed.  But what led to Watergate?  How - and more puzzlingly, why - did one of the shrewdest, most gifted political figures of his time become embroiled in so manifestly lunatic an enterprise in the first place?

Intrigued by that question, novelist and historian Kurt Andersen takes a deep dive into the vast archives at the Nixon Library and emerges with an answer he wasn’t expecting: While Watergate doubtless accelerated Nixon’s spectacular fall, it was the Vietnam War that led inexorably to the break-in, and from there to the sinking of his presidency.

At the heart of the series are hundreds of tape recordings from the time. Buried, never before heard, confidential conversations that play like dark drama. To listen to the new series, visit NixonAtWar.org, or search "Nixon at War" wherever you’re listening.

S360 Extra: Nixon at War - Ep 1 October Surprise

After 20 years, Studio 360 is switching off the ON AIR light one last time. Alec Baldwin conducts Kurt Andersen’s exit interview and they listen to some of Kurt’s favorite moments with guests. Since it’s this show’s finale, Kurt talks with TV showrunners David Mandel and Warren Leight about the art of writing a finale — and some of their favorites to watch. And finally — for real, finally — a longtime friend of Kurt whom he met when he first interviewed her for the show, Rosanne Cash, comes back one last time to say farewell with a song.
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The final episode

From 1910 to 1970, 6.6 million African Americans migrated from the rural south – a dramatic movement that would permanently change the social, political and cultural fabric of our nation. In 1941, Jacob Lawerence’s iconic series The Migration of the Negro (now generally referred to as The Great Migration) rocked the art world with its depictions of an active moment very much underway. Over the course of 60 panels, the hardships of the South, the disappointments of the North, and the first steps of the Civil Rights movement are masterfully displayed.
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Studio 360 Extra: American Icons: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence

Studio 360 broadcast its first episode on November 4, 2000, just before we elected George W. Bush as President and we all learned what a “hanging chad” was. Fittingly, that first program was an exploration of art and politics hosted by a newcomer to radio, author and journalist Kurt Andersen.
Originally produced out of WNYC Radio, and most recently a Slate podcast, Studio 360 looks at the cool, but complicated, and sometimes strange ways that art touches our lives. Two decades later that mission hasn’t changed even if the people making the show have come and gone. The show’s current Executive Producer Jocelyn Gonzales was a still-wet-behind-the-ears associate producer when the show debuted. As Studio 360 comes to a close after 20 years on the air, she turned to her colleagues from the earliest days of the show for their impressions.
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Michelle Obama’s portraitist and ‘96 Tears’

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