The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 778 features artist Celeste Rapone.

The MCA Chicago is presenting "Atrium Project: Celeste Rapone" in the museum's two-story entrance space through Jun 20, 2027. The presentation was organized by Jamillah James with Korina Hernandez.

Rapone's work centers domesticity, intimacy, and daily life, particularly as experienced by women. She has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and the Georgia Museum of Art; her work is in the collection of the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (promised).

Instagram: Celeste Rapone, Tyler Green.

Air date: October 1, 2026.

Episode No. 777 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Jitish Kallat.

The Menil Drawing Institute is presenting "Wall Drawing: Series: Jitish Kallat" through August 8, 2027. For the exhibition Kallat has produced a site-specific wall drawing that grows out of his years-long engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 1958 US Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. The drawing Kallat has made for the MDI, Wall Drawing / Redux: A119, presents enlarged images derived from Kallat's 2025 Accordion of Drawings / Project A119 / Early Intuitions, in which watercolors evoke an unrealized Cold War story of ambition, secrecy, and the exporting of global violence to the moon. The presentation was curated by Edouard Kopp.

Kallat's work often blends the intimate and specific and the immense, and references history, science, time, and philosophy. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Tate Modern, London, and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and he has participated in biennials in Venice, Gwangju, Havana, and more.

Works discussed on the program and extensively documented on Kallat's website include:

• Epilogue, 2011;
• Public Notice 3, 2010;
• Covering Letter (Terrum Nuncius), 2018-20;
• "I draw, therefore I think" (curatorial project); and
• Conjectures on a Paper Sky, 2025.

Instagram: Jitish Kallat, Tyler Green.

Air date: September 24, 2026.

Episode No. 776 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Mark Thomas Gibson and curator Ben Colman.

The Tang Museum at Skidmore College is presenting "Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation," a survey of Gibson's recent considerations of US history and the relationship between our past and our present. The exhibition was curated by Ian Berry in collaboration with the artist and is on view through January 3, 2027.

Gibson's work is also featured in "The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution" at the Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Penn. "The Crossing" looks at how artists have represented Continental Army commander-in-chief George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. "The Crossing" is particularly interested in how artists have built on and often 'refuted' Emanuel Leutze's famed 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition, which was curated by Laura Igoe, is up through January 10, 2027.

An exhibition of Gibson's recent work opens at Philadelphia's Fleisher/Ollman Gallery tomorrow, and remains on view through November 7.

Among the institutions that have presented solo shows of Gibson's work are the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Colman is the curator of "Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture" at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Across about 35 paintings, the exhibition examines O'Keeffe's career-long interest in buildings and the built environment. It's on view through January 3, 2007. The DIA has published a catalogue that is available from Amazon and Bookshop for $32-34.

Instagram: Mark Thomas Gibson, Ben Colman, Tyler Green.

Air date: September 17, 2026.

Episode No. 775 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historian Richard J. Powell and curator Danielle Canter.

Powell is the author of "Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect," which was just published by Princeton University Press. The book examines the historical and cultural work color does in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, Hervé Télémaque, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Nina Chanel Abney. The book builds on Powell's 2022 National Gallery of Art Mellon Lectures of the same title. Bookshop and Amazon offer "Colorstruck!" from $46-61.

As discussed on the program:

• Powell's Mellon Lectures may be viewed here;
• The Amistad Research Center, Tulane University collection of Jacob Lawrence works, including the Toussaint L'Ouverture series;
• Nina Chanel Abney, San Juan Heal (Lincoln Center wall); and
• "Matisse Alive" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Powell, a professor at Duke University, is the author of numerous books, including "Going There: Black Visual Satire," "Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture," and "Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson."

Canter is the curator of "Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions" at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition spotlights Redon's works on paper, including charcoal drawings, lithographs, and pastels. It particularly focuses on Redon's fantastical world of tonal and psychological darkness, and also his luminous color. It's on view through October 18. A Getty-published catalogue is available from Bookshop and Amazon for $25.

Instagram: Richard J. Powell, Tyler Green.

Air date: September 10, 2026.

Episode No. 774 is a summer clips episode featuring curators Shawnya L. Harris and Jeffrey Richmond-Moll.

Harris and Richmond-Moll are the curators of "Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone" at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. The exhibition presents the life and work of nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis in the context of her contemporaries and artists she may have influenced. It is on view through January 3, 2027. A valuable catalogue was published by the Peabody Essex Museum and Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $50-55.

As discussed on the program:

• Gisela Torres, Reverie and Slumber, 2020.

For images, please see Episode No. 748.

Episode No. 773 is a summer clips episode featuring artist Lotus L. Kang.

The Frye Art Museum, Seattle is showing "Lotus L. Kang: I hear the hollow boom of time" through September 27. The installation features large sheets of unfixed industrial film that have been exposed to light sources as part of a process Kang calls 'tanning,' a process that aligns film's surface to skin. Sculptures that include tatami mats as their base take up some of the space between the film sheets, which are suspended from above. The show also includes a kinetic sculpture that evokes the body. "I hear the hollow boom of time" was organized by Georgia Erger.

Kang's work often blends sculpture, photography and installation in address of bodies, memories, and histories that change over time. Kang has been featured in exhibitions at the MCA Chicago, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, and the 2021 triennial at New York's New Museum.

This conversation was recorded in 2023 on the occasion of Kang's presentation of a project in the MCA Chicago's atrium. For images, see Episode No. 604.

Instagram: Lotus L. Kang, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 772 features art historians Zanna Gilbert and Andrew Perchuk; and curator Meg Linton, museum director Taras Matla, and associate museum director Steve Comba.

Along with Emily Pugh, Gilbert and Perchuk are the project leads for "Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles," a Getty Research Institute project that has, among other things, digitized Ed Ruscha's five-decade-long photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles. The GRI project also considers Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles archive within a range of historical frameworks, spotlights what it tells us about modern and contemporary art, architecture, and the physical, social, and cultural geographies of Los Angeles.

GRI-produced websites include:

• "Artist, Image, Archive, City," a free digital book featuring visualizations, essays, images and more (the book is also available in free PDF and EPUB formats);
• "12 Sunsets," which features Ruscha's famed photos of the Sunset Strip, including how the street has changed over the last 50 years;
• The Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles Archive at the GRI;
• Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha's photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard;
• Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha's photographs of (other) Los Angeles streets;
• Digitized images from the collection.

On the second segment, we discuss the dispersal of artist Steve Roden's estate with curator Meg Linton, who has advised the estate, University of Maryland Art Gallery director Taras Matla, and Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College associate director Steve Comba. Roden was a Los Angeles-area-based artist who worked in sound, sculpture, painting, and other media, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 59. The Roden estate has recently dispersed works to museums all over the United States, including those represented on this week's program, as well as to the Grunwald Center at the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Ruby City, San Antonio, and more. Roden created sound for The MAN Podcast in 2011.

Air date: August 20, 2026.

Episode No. 771 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a summer clips episode featuring art historian Michael W. Cole.

Princeton University Press has just published Cole's Sofonisba's Lesson, New Edition: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work. The book updates Cole's 2020 edition of the book, an assessment of Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), a pathbreaking painter who substantially made it possible for women to be students of art. Bookshop and Amazon offers Sofonisba's Lesson for $63-68.

Cole's book considers Sofonisba Anguissola's art, how her background, teaching and learning were important to her career and art, and how her relationships with her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, Michelangelo and a series of royals and royal courts resulted in her work — and in work attributed to her.

This new, expanded volume offers new considerations of paintings whose status has been uncertain, and provides an up-to-date illustrated catalogue of over 200 known paintings and drawings that have been associated with Sofonisba. Cole is a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.

This episode was taped in 2020, when Princeton published the first edition of the book. For images, see Episode No. 457.

Air date: August 13, 2026.

Episode No. 770 features former museum director, former Association of Art Museum Directors president, and Souls Grown Deep president Maxwell L. Anderson, and Oakland Museum of California director Lori Fogarty.

With the Trump administration and its Congressional allies having threatened, diminished, or attacked national cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center, and increasingly the Smithsonian Institution, Anderson discusses whether the sector's response to government hostility has been appropriate. The first, and perhaps only museum to speak out after the most recent Trump administration attacks on Smithsonian museums and the directors was the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. (JANM will be hosting National Museum of American History director Anthea Hartig, the director the administration has most recently attacked, for a live program on August 22.) The Association of Art Museum Directors has not spoken about administration attacks on federal museum institutions since this December 2025 statement. The American Alliance of Museums "condemned" the Trump administrations attacks nearly two weeks after JANM issued its statement.

• Read and/or subscribe to Anderson's Art Scoping Substack.

Museums also do internal work to meet our moment. Fogarty joins the program to discuss how museums and their staffs best work within their community and in ways that advance their communities values, especially in ways that go beyond narrow, essentializing approaches to administration, exhibitions, and more.

• Read Fogarty's recent The Art Newspaper op-ed, "Museums are civic institutions. It's time we acted like it."

Air date: August 6, 2026.

Episode No. 769 features a conversation with Betye Saar recorded in 2016. Saar died on Sunday a few days short of her one hundredth birthday.

Saar, known especially for her use of assemblage and her often pioneering address of complicated and often troubling US, and diasporic African and Caribbean histories, was one of the most influential artists of the last 60 years. Generations of artists, including Saar's artist-daughters Lezley and Alison, have found Saar's work foundational.

Even though Saar was recognized around the world as among the most influential artists of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century United States, remarkably, shamefully, and revealingly, none of Saar's hometown art museums ever launched a retrospective of her work.

Saar was a guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast in 2016 on the occasion of a survey of her work organized by De Domijnen (which was formerly known as Museum Het Domein) in Sittard, the Netherlands in partnership with Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art. For images of artworks discussed in this conversation, see Episode No. 222.

Air date: July 30, 2026.