Art history has of late been more art and less history. University enrollment in pre-contemporary art is dwindling, and cost-intensive mega-exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are stilled as the pandemic roars on. For perspective we turn to one of the world’s leading experts in 19th century painting, Dr. George T.M. Shackelford, Deputy Director of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum. He shares anecdotes about our shared summer as interns at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after we graduated from Dartmouth, along with details about reopening the Kimbell, how training in art history is faring, his experience with debunking a would-be masterpiece, the urgency of recruiting students of color to the museum profession, and upcoming shows in Fort Worth.
Episode 26: Lola C. West
For truth-telling in the world of finance, we turn to Lola C. West, co-founder and partner of WestFuller Advisors, a boutique investment advisory firm in New York City that builds legacies of wealth for individuals, families and institutions. A trustee of Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership and Foundation, she shares insights on the intersections among social change, culture, and finance, and the alleviation of poverty in the Deep South, and lets us into the rarefied world of investing—leavened with the determination of a woman seeking a more progressive America.
Episode 25: Arnold Lehman
We’re lucky to have a chance to hear from Arnold Lehman, senior adviser to the chairman of Phillips auction house, and director emeritus of the Brooklyn Museum. We dive straight into some very timely topics, including the slow pace of change in art museums grappling with their responsibilities in furthering racial and social justice, how media coverage influences the field, if and how New York will bounce back after the pandemic recedes, and his forthcoming book on the exhibition Sensation. We even pull back the curtain to discuss the nominating committees of art museum boards—and close with the moving account of his enduring attachment to a particular work of art.
Episode 24: Carrie Rebora Barratt
We take a step outside into the world of horticulture, and then back into art museums, safely masked, for a conversation with Dr. Carrie Rebora Barratt, CEO and William C. Steere Sr. President of The New York Botanical Garden, and previously deputy director for collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We cover a lot of ground, from how cultural institutions began in New York City starting in 1870, to the social responsibilities of all kinds of cultural institutions, changing visitor experiences in compromised spaces, the disappearance of tourism, prevailing approaches to American art history, and her star turn a few years ago as a guest of the Colbert Report.
Episode 23: Elizabeth Easton
Art museum directors are challenged as never before, confronting the pandemic, demands for social and racial justice, low morale among staff who have survived layoffs, and evaporated earned revenue. The woman of the hour to sort it all out is Dr. Elizabeth Easton, former chair of the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, the first elected president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, and Co-Founder and current Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, who is preparing a new wave of hires to tackle these and other challenges. Our wide-ranging conversation includes the different challenges facing contemporary and encyclopedic museums, trends in scholarship, how boards think about hiring—and firing—directors, the search firms that elevate some candidates above others, and likely shifts in the articulation of art museum missions.
Episode 22: Sabiha Al Khemir
It’s safe to assume that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is unaware that America’s oldest treaty is with Morocco, the first nation to recognize the fledging United States in December 1777. The breadth of American ignorance about Islamic history, art, and culture is unfathomable, but fortunately we have Dr. Sabiha Al Khemir joining this episode, sharing details of her journey from Tunisia to a PhD from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, to becoming the founding director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. As a curator who has shaped and contributed to multiple exhibitions presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Dallas Museum of Art, and elsewhere, she is a writer, novelist, illustrator, and producer, and today serves as consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology.
Episode 21: Laura Callanan
Many of America’s art museums have been the target of blunt criticism for over a year, first for accepting funds derived from pharmaceutical manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, and arms merchants, and more recently for employment practices disadvantageous to people of color. While there is no single remedy for alleged shortcomings in governance and management, one option is available for these institutions to align their practices with stated values. An estimated $58 billion is under the management of cultural institutions in the United States. The founder of Upstart Co-Lab, Laura Callanan, joins the podcast, offering concrete advice on how mission-aligned investing can set cultural organizations onto a better path, putting their resources to work in furtherance of progressive goals, while not sacrificing financial return.
Episode 20: Kinshasha Holman Conwill
What can museums do to earn trust in their stated commitment to racial justice? For answers we turn to Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Deputy Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And hear about her childhood home in Atlanta, a hub for civil rights advocates from Julian Bond to Stokely Carmichael. A life spent leading cultural institutions devoted to African American creativity and history. Along the way we’re treated to richly textured anecdotes about her times with Congressman John Lewis, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and many others, her hopes that younger people will drive social change, displays in the NMAAHC that move her--and concrete advice on how museums can move from stated intentions to true equity and inclusion.
Episode 19: Julian Siggers
America is unique in harboring a sizable population of the scientifically disinclined—or more bluntly, climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers. Riding to the rescue on a motorcycle is our guest Dr. Julian Siggers. the Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 2012, and the newly appointed president and CEO of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. We delve into how, after receiving a PhD in human prehistory, he became the host of a series on the Discovery Channel and made his way into museums. He discusses the life of an archaeologist, ethical concerns facing museums, the impact of data science, how schooling differs between the UK and the US, why trade in dinosaur bones isn’t regulated, and multiple other topics.
Episode 18: Abbott Miller
Graphic identities abound in our media-saturated world—and in this episode we turn to a globally-renowned expert and practitioner to help us understand how he goes about inventing the typefaces, logos, and brand identities of leading art museums including the Guggenheim and the Whitney, the Barnes Foundation, and countless other cultural and commercial clients over many years. Abbott Miller has been a partner at Pentagram since 1999, and he has created multiple award-winning solutions worldwide. You’ll learn about the influences of his training at Cooper Union, the lasting impact of the Bauhaus in his field, the emotional underpinnings of the typefaces we take for granted, and his opinion of the graphic identities of the two competing presidential campaigns.
Episode 17: Richard Olcott
Designing museums and concert halls demands a blend of experience, talent, and vision. Richard Olcott, Design Partner at Ennead Architects in New York City, brings the right blend and a sense of play to a serious profession. In this episode we learn about whether, in the face of the pandemic, clients are still lining up (they are), museums will return to business as usual (they won’t), and how the Spanish Flu of 1918 was central to the birth of modernism and the International Style of architecture (wait, what?). We discuss digital tools, the blight of ‘supertalls’ casting shadows across New York’s Central Park, indoor vertical gardens and other moves towards sustainability, whether ‘open office’ designs are doomed, and multiple other topics.
Episode 16: Carol Mancusi-Ungaro
What do James Brown’s album Sex Machine and the Renaissance sculptor Donatello have to do with protecting the art of our time? Find out in this wide-ranging conversation with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and for over a decade the Founding Director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums. For nineteen years she served as Chief Conservator of The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, where she founded the Artists Documentation Program, consisting of interviews with artists about the technical nature of their art. The consummate artist whisperer, she has pioneered new forms of conservation treatment, is an influential mentor for the field, and presides over the care of a globally renowned collection of modern and contemporary art.
Episode 15: Alexander Bauer
An archaeologist who today digs on the northern coast of Turkey at the site of Sinop, Prof. Alexander Bauer of Queens College-CUNY reflects on ancient examples of sculptural desecration, and paints a vivid picture of the daily life of a scholar in a sun-drenched archaeological site revealing 4,000 year-old finds with trowel and brush in hand. We hear about the mechanics of archaeology as so-called controlled destruction, leading-edge technology in service of uncovering the past, the promise of well-preserved shipwrecks 2,000 meters below the surface of the mysterious Black Sea, and George Orwell’s sage assessments of the power of history in determining the future. Close observers will detect evidence of his exuberant young sons Finnegan, Felix, and Alex in the background, and all listeners will be repaid for time spent listening to his candid assessment of the future of archaeology.
Episode 14: Victoria S. Reed
Across the former Confederate states and around Europe, statues are being pulled down by cranes and crowds, as protests about symbols of racism and hate blanket the globe in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. For some context we turn to Dr. Victoria S. Reed, Sadler Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is one of a handful of full-time curators in the U.S. tasked with researching the ownership history of objects offered to and in the museum’s collections—and is an expert in sorting out the evidence informing legal, ethical, and moral claims on artworks. We discuss collections built from colonial plunder abroad, Nazi loot, objects caught up in the illicit trade in the U.S., and what it will mean for museums to decolonize both their holdings and their attitudes.
Episode 13: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
We turn to an artist for insight in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons shares powerful observations and draws us into her unique worldview, leavened in her Nigerian roots, her years in Cuba, and her life today as Professor of Fine Arts and Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. She has participated in the biennials of Venice, Dakar, and Johannesburg, in Documenta 14, and in multiple other major exhibitions worldwide, with works by her in over 30 museums, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
Episode 12: Janet Hicks
Why don’t American artists have the same rights as artists in Europe? This week we speak with Janet Hicks, Vice President and Director of Licensing of the Artists Rights Society, or ARS. We discuss what protections are in and not in current U.S. copyright law, the kinds of uses ARS licenses for reproduction, the premise of so-called moral rights, a prospective resale royalty that would compensate artists for works sold by later owners, why artists—unlike collectors--don’t get to deduct the fair market value of their works if they donate them to museums, and how that might change, the state of artist-endowed foundations, and how film and television rights to show artworks are negotiated.
Episode 11: Jennifer Crewe
Who’s responsible for the promulgation of human knowledge? If you answered Wikipedia, think again. Our guest this week is Jennifer Crewe, director of Columbia University Press, and immediate past president of the 150-member Association of University Presses. The first woman director of an Ivy League university press, she reveals the business model of academic publishing, trends in book-buying during the pandemic, the politics of subsidizing the public face of research, digital platforms, and much else
Episode 10: Melissa Chiu
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden provides a critical platform for contemporary artists in America’s capital. Leading the Hirshhorn since 2014, Dr. Melissa Chiu joins the podcast, sharing details about her early years in Australia, directing the Asia Society Museum in New York, the future expansion of the Hirshhorn, the likely fate of global art programming in the wake of the pandemic, performance art in an age of social distancing, and the U.S. model of cultural patronage.
Episode 9: David Lewis
Venture into the back room of one of New York’s most closely followed art galleries in this week’s episode. David Lewis, the principal and director of David Lewis Gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, shares his optimistic views on the roiling art market, reveals the fault lines among auction houses, mega-galleries, and the rest of the art world, and provides an indispensable primer on the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of contemporary art since the 1970s (bring a dictionary).
Episode 8: April Reynolds Mosolino
Award-winning novelist April Reynolds Mosolino joins the podcast, discussing growing up in South Dallas, her first novel titled Knee-Deep in Wonder (Henry Holt and Co.), and her responsibilities as the Michele Tolela Myers Chair in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. We delve into many topics, including life in New York City during the pandemic, the heroism of today’s previously unsung heroes risking illness in the service industry, and her forthcoming publications, including a second novel, The Preacher King.