Gertrude Abercrombie, The Monument's End

Episode No. 697 features curator Sarah Humphreville and author Marisa Anne Bass. With Eric Crosby, Humphreville is the co-curator of "Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery." The exhibition survey's Abercrombie's synthesis of surrealism, landscape, portraiture and still-life, and is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date. It is at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh through June 1 before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art. An excellent catalogue was published by the Carnegie and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $50-55. Bass is the author of The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic, which was recently released by Princeton University Press. The book finds the origin of many of today's questions around monuments and memory within the early modern Netherlands. Among the artists Bass discusses are Rembrandt, Dirck van Delen, Hendrick de Keyser, Spencer Finch, Thomas Hirschhorn, and more. Bass is a professor at Yale University. Her previous books include Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt and Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Amazon and Bookshop offer "The Monument's End" for $20-42. Instagram: Sarah Humphreville, Marisa Bass, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 696 features curators Natalie Dupêcher and Leigh Arnold. Dupêcher is the curator of "Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight" at the Menil Collection, Houston. "Taking Flight" offers work from three of Overstreet's abstract painting series: Flight Pattern (early 1970s), and related bodies of work from the 1960s and 1990s. While recent exhibitions such as "Now Dig This!" (Hammer Museum, 2011) and "Soul of a Nation" (Tate Modern, 2017) have included Overstreets, this is the first solo museum exhibition of his work in 30 years. The Menil's exhbition guide is available here. An exhibition catalogue will be available in the late spring. "Taking Flight" is on view through July 13. Arnold is the curator of "Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields" at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Across two floors, the exhibition reveals Yang's critique of the modernist project and its tendency toward singular Western domination. It is on view through April 27. Works discussed on the program include: Yang's Spring Sailors – Six Synecologies Aloft (2024) at 2024's Lahore Biennial. Instagram: Natalie Dupêcher, Leigh Arnold, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 695 features artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and curator Ken Myers. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is presenting "Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless," an examination of the complications of colonial histories from an Indigenous perspective. "Speechless" particularly focuses on how narratives, myths, and histories are constructed through the concept of the cargo cult, which developed as a result of Western military campaigns that delivered supplies to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples. These cults formed around the provisions that were delivered by the imperial forces (such as radios), the very groups that were colonizing Indigenous lands. The exhibition was curated by Apsara DiQuinzio and remains on view through July 6. Concurrently, Luger's work may be seen in the 16th Sharjah Biennial, "Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice" at the Moody Center, Rice University, and in "Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always" at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. His work, across a wide range of media, extends cultural awareness and enables action. His work has been presented in solo or two-person shows by the Public Art Fund, New York; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., and more. Works discussed on the program include: A single-channel version of Luger's Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth, 2021; Luger's extended Mirror Shield project; and Luger's Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta installation series, which celebrates the Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI), 2021-. Myers is the curator of "Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery" at the Detroit Institute of Arts. "Painted with Silk" looks at how US schoolgirl embroideries made from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries helped build and extend ideas around nation, gender, class, and religion. It also includes contemporary embroideries by Elaine Reichek that repurpose the form of earlier embroideries and investigate their constructions of gender, class, and race. The exhibition is on view through June 15. Instagram: Cannupa Hanska Luger, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 694 features artists Tacita Dean and Ilana Harris-Babou. The Menil Collection, Houston is presenting "Tacita Dean: Blind Folly," the first major museum survey of Dean's work in the United States. The exhibition examines a range of Dean's production, with a special emphasis on her drawing practice. "Blind Folly" includes new works informed by Dean's time in Houston, including her residency at (and in!) the Menil's Cy Twombly Gallery. It is on view through April 19. The Menil, MACK, and Dean have produced several books related to the Menil exhibition: Why Cy, an artist's book of images Dean produced during her residency in the Twombly Gallery. Within it is a small booklet of notes and drawings that Dean conceived during the same residency. Tacita Dean: Blind Folly, a book by exhibition curator Michelle White that addresses Dean's practice and oeuvre in a strikingly legible, almost narrative way. Why Cy is available from Amazon for about $95; White's Blind Folly is available from Amazon for about $28 - or just $10 on Kindle. Dean is one of Britain's most celebrated artists. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums such as the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 2011 Dean's work FILM was shown in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Harris-Babou's 2018 Reparation Hardware is included within "Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica" at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, which was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, survey's Pan-Africanism's cultural manifestations across 350 objects made over the last 100 or so years. It is on view through March 30. Reparation Hardware, which was made for DIS.ART, is streamed below. Harris-Babou has been included in group shows at the Wellcome Collection, London, Apex Art, New York, and at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn. Her work is in the collections of museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Episode No. 693 is a Presidents' Day weekend clips episode featuring artist John Edmonds.  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York recently announced the acquisition of Edmonds’s complete 2018 Untitled (Hood) series. The work was included in last year's Guggenheim exhibition "Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility." Edmonds discussed his Untitled (Hood) series in detail when he came onto the program in 2020 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Among the institutions that have collected Edmonds' work are the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and SFMOMA.   For images, see Episode No. 446.  Instagram: John Edmonds, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 692 features curators Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, and Danielle Canter.  Hokanson and Seidenstein are the co-curators of "Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature," which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend and is on view through May 11. It is the first retrospective of the German Romantic artist's work in the United States. Friedrich was a leader in German Romanticism, which offered new understandings of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of Friedrich's birth. The Met has published an excellent catalogue of the exhibition. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $45-50.  Canter is the curator of "A Brush with Nature: Romantic Landscape Drawings," which opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum on Feb. 18. The exhibition features dozens of drawings in which artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Théodore Géricault, and Friedrich respond to the natural world around them. "A Brush with Nature" will be on view through May 25.  Instagram: Alison Hokanson, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 691 features artists Kota Ezawa and Amy Pleasant.  The Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture is presenting "Kota Ezawa: Here and There - Now and Then," an investigation into the creation of memory in the Bay Area and nationally, through March 9. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, features Ezawa and Julian Brave NoiseCat's Alcatraz Is an Idea (2024), and Merzbau 1, 2, 3 (2021), and Ursonate (2022), which were among 11 Ezawas recently acquired by SFMOMA. "Ezawa" was curated by Frank Smigiel. Fort Mason will publish a catalogue on the closing weekend. SFMOMA is showing Ezawa's National Anthem (2018) in "Count Me In"  through April 27. Ezawa's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at many museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and the Saint Louis Art Museum. His work is in the collection most major US art museums, and in museums in seven other countries.  Pleasant is included in "Synchronicities: Intersecting Figuration with Abstraction" at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. The exhibition examines some of the ways in which nine artists have recently navigated the space between abstraction and figuration. "Synchronicities" was curated by Rachel Adams, and is on view through May 4. Pleasant's work is also on view at The Carnegie, Covington, KY in "Southern Democratic" through February 15, and in "Vivid: A Fresh Take" at the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN through June 1.  Pleasant has been included in exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Montgomery (Ala.) Museum of Fine Arts, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and more.  Instagram: Amy Pleasant, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 690 features curators Vivien Greene and Michael Hartman. With Tracey Bashkoff, Greene is the co-curator of "Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition surveys a transnational art movement that joined abstraction to dance, music, and poetry and that engaged with ideas of simultaneity across kaleidoscopic pictures and sculpture. Among the artists included in "Harmony & Dissonance" are Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. The exhibition is on view through March 9. The Guggenheim published an excellent catalogue for the exhibition. It's available from Amazon and Bookshop for about $60. Hartman is the curator of "Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art" at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The exhibition looks at how North American artists have made use of floral beauty. Instagram: Michael Hartman, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 689 is a holiday clips episode featuring artist B. Ingrid Olson. Olson's work is included in "Descending the Staircase" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. The exhibition is curated by Jadine Collingwood, Associate Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator and is on view through July 6. This episode was recorded in 2022 on the occasion of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University's presentation of two concurrent B. Ingrid Olson exhibitions, “History Mother,” and “Little Sister.” Each exhibition was on a separate floor of CCVA’s building. Olson’s exhibitions feature site-specific presentations that engage with doubling and mirroring, gendered forms, the interplay between photography and sculpture, and between the body and the built environment. The exhibitions were curated by Dan Byers. The week this show originally aired, the Secession in Vienna had just closed an exhibition of Olson’s work titled “Elastic X.” In addition, Olson’s work has previously been featured in solo presentations at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY and at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. For images please see Episode No. 566. Instagram: B. Ingrid Olson, Tyler Green.

Episode No. 688 features artist Sayre Gomez and curator Anna Katz.  Gomez is included in two of the season's major contemporary group shows: "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2000," at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and "Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.   Gomez is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work uses hyperrealism to address current events and representation and visuality in US society.   Katz is the curator of "Ordinary People," which is at MOCA through May 4. The exhibition's fine catalogue was published by the museum and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for about $65.  "The Living End" was curated by Jamillah James, who discussed her exhibition on Episode No. 683. It is on view through March 16. The exhibition catalogue is available from the MCA for under $20. Instagram: Sayre Gomez, Anna Katz, Tyler Green.