Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
92 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 172 ratingsWhat we talk about when we talk about art. Exceptional makers and thinkers across art, literature, film, fashion, music, and more come together to talk about what it means to make things today.
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Episodes
Episode 66 | R. Crumb’s Radio Music Hour
March 27, 2024 00:03 - 44 minutesIn this very special episode, artist and legendary record collector R. Crumb visits his friends and fellow rare music enthusiasts John Heneghan and Eden Brower to listen to 78 records from Heneghan’s sprawling collection. John Heneghan is a musician, podcast host, record collector. He and his wife, Eden R. Brower, play in Eden & John’s East River String Band with R. Crumb and Ernesto Gomez. Tune into John’s Old Time Radio Show to hear more 78 record collectors spin discs from their collectio...
Episode 65 | John McCracken and Minimalism Now with Cauleen Smith and Michael Govan
March 20, 2024 07:38 - 41 minutesArtist Cauleen Smith and Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, join Helen for a live conversation in the garden at David Zwirner Los Angeles. Held on the occasion of the exhibition John McCracken, they explore the influence of Minimalism, a quintessential and often negated 20th century art movement. John McCracken will be on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles through March 30, 2024. Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. Most recently...
John McCracken and Minimalism Now with Cauleen Smith and Michael Govan
March 20, 2024 07:38 - 41 minutesArtist Cauleen Smith and Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, join Helen for a live conversation in the garden at David Zwirner Los Angeles. Held on the occasion of the exhibition John McCracken, they explore the influence of Minimalism, a quintessential and often negated 20th century art movement. John McCracken will be on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles through March 30, 2024. Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. Most recently...
Episode 64 | On Hilma af Klint with Julia Voss and Briony Fer
March 06, 2024 01:27 - 44 minutesAn episode on the art and life of Hilma af Klint featuring art historian Briony Fer and af Klint’s biographer, Julia Voss. Briony Fer is an art historian and professor at University College, London, and curator of the 2023 exhibition Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. Julia Voss is a curator, art critic, and professor and author of Hilma af Klint: A Biography. She is the co-curator, along with Daniel Birnbaum, of Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky Dreams of the Future, on view ...
Episode 63 | Claire Messud and James Wood
February 28, 2024 01:27 - 37 minutesFor the third interview in her series with creative couples, Helen spoke to the first couple of American fiction: literary critic James Wood and award-winning novelist Claire Messud.
Episode 62 | Hua Hsu
February 21, 2024 01:24 - 32 minutesWriter and critic Hua Hsu received the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 memoir Stay True. Helen and Hua discuss the challenges of writing about the past as it was experienced as your younger self, and how writing itself is an act of remembering.
Episode 61 | Hank Willis Thomas and Rujeko Hockley
February 14, 2024 01:51 - 28 minutesIn the second episode in Helen’s interview series with creative couples, the artist Hank Willis Thomas and curator Rujeko Hockley get intimate about the unique challenges and rewards of being married and working in the same field.
Episode 60 | On Vermeer
February 07, 2024 00:48 - 35 minutesWas Vermeer really the artist behind some of his most well-known works? The question has lingered at the margins of art history for years and was resurfaced during the Dutch master's blockbuster retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in 2023. Helen invited writer Lawrence Weschler and art historian Claudia Swan to interrogate what is at stake—politically, financially, and art historically—in reattributing works by the old master. Claudia Swan is a scholar of northern European art, whose recent book...
Episode 59 | Ira Sachs
January 31, 2024 01:57 - 26 minutesIra Sachs's 2023 film Passages won wide acclaim for its portrayal of human desire. Helen goes deep with the filmmaker on the psychology of his finely wrought characters and the many influences that inform his work.
Episode 58 | Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham
January 24, 2024 01:26 - 40 minutesIn the first episode of Helen’s series of interviews with creative couples, artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham give an unvarnished look into nearly five decades of partnership. The veteran artworld pair share how they’ve managed it all, from raising a family together to maintaining independent creative practices.
Episode 57 | George Clinton and Lauren Halsey
January 17, 2024 01:05 - 28 minutesArtist Lauren Halsey and George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic open up about their friendship, from their first meeting to ongoing and fruitful collaborations since. They discuss metaphor, the collective, and of course, the power of the funk.
The Best Art of 2023
December 13, 2023 01:00 - 24 minutesHelen and Steve Locke discuss the best—and most unexpected-–art shows they saw in 2023, from global exhibitions to gallery shows in New York.
Manet's 'Olympia' Comes to New York
November 22, 2023 01:55 - 26 minutesWhat does it mean to a painter of modern life? Helen & Steve Locke discuss artistic rivalry, leisure, and labor politics in Manet/Degas, a historic exhibition pairing two giants of the 19th century, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 7, 2024.
Criticism for Difficult Times | With Helen Molesworth
November 08, 2023 11:11 - 24 minutesIn dark times, reading criticism can be a ballast. In this mini-episode, Helen and Steve Locke return to some of their favorite texts and writers, from Walter Benjamin to W.E.B. DuBois.
The Legacy of Ruth Asawa | Special Episode
September 27, 2023 00:00 - 46 minutesOn the occasion of Ruth Asawa’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, artists EJ Hill and Sarah Sze talk with Helen Molesworth about Asawa’s legacy. This episode features the late artist’s voice, courtesy of audio from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the California State University, Sacramento. Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was a sculptor, educator, and arts activist who challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness...
Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Helen Molesworth | Special Episode
September 13, 2023 10:54 - 40 minutesA special live episode hosted by Helen Molesworth, recorded in July at David Zwirner Los Angeles during Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, the presentation is now on view at David Zwirner New York through October 28th.
The Yayoi Kusama Phenomenon (Re-run from Season 2)
May 10, 2023 12:12 - 23 minutesOn the occasion of Yayoi Kusama’s new exhibition at David Zwirner New York, we revisit a conversation on the legendary artist’s effect on culture at large with two experts on art in the digital landscape: Jia Jia Fei, a digital strategist for the art world, and Christian Luiten, founder of the popular digital platform Avant Arte. I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers will be on view at 535 and 519 West 19th street through July 21st, 2023.
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Helen Molesworth on Gerhard Richter | Special Episode
April 24, 2023 01:01 - 1 hourIn this live episode, Helen and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh discuss his new book, Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History. This conversation was recorded in the exhibition Gerhard Richter, on view at David Zwirner through April 29th. Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History is now available wherever books are sold.
How Picasso Was Sold to America | Special Episode
April 12, 2023 00:10 - 39 minutesOn the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, Helen speaks to the writer Hugh Eakin about his new book, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, a behind-the-scenes look at the dealers, writers, and curators who helped bring the artist—and Modernism—into the mainstream.
Episode 56 | Barbara Smith and Meg Onli
March 22, 2023 00:32 - 1 hourHelen speaks to the legendary Black lesbian feminist scholar Barbara Smith and Meg Onli, co-curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, about identity politics in the art world today, the role of criticism, and questions of cultural appropriation. Barbara Smith is the 2022-23 Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College, and you can donate to her work at The Smith Caring Circle. Meg Onli is the curator of Carolyn Lazard: Long Take, on view at the ICA Philadelphia until July 9th, and the ...
Episode 55 | Nicholson Baker
March 15, 2023 00:35 - 49 minutesHelen talks to writer Nicholson Baker about how history is written, and the continued relevance of his World War II book Human Smoke (2008). Baker is the author of numerous books, including Vox (1992) and The Mezzanine (1988) and was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton (Re-run from Season 6)
March 08, 2023 00:54 - 46 minutesWe revisit one of the most popular episodes of Season 6, a conversation with the artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Petyon, on the occasion of their recently announced solo debuts with the gallery. Rirkrit’s show The Shop opens at David Zwirner Hong Kong March 20th, 2023, and Elizabeth’s show Angel opens at David Zwirner London on June 7th, 2023
Episode 54 | Jonathan Anderson
March 01, 2023 00:40 - 43 minutesCreative Director of LOEWE and founder of JW Anderson, Jonathan Anderson, speaks with Helen about his innovative approach to fashion, from collections that are equal parts cultural commentary and artistic play, to pushing gender boundaries and materiality, to redefining the word “luxury.” Jonathan and Helen sit down to break open the divisions between craft and art, creation and appropriation, and high and low culture.
Episode 53 | Cecilia Alemani
February 22, 2023 02:40 - 45 minutesA post-mortem on the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, with curator Cecilia Alemani. Cecilia and Helen Molesworth discuss the unique challenges of mounting an exhibition at scale in the COVID era and what it was like being the first Italian woman to curate a Biennale.
Episode 52 | Sarah Schulman
February 15, 2023 00:57 - 44 minutesThe novelist, playwright, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman discusses her most recent book, Let the Record Show, A Political History of ACT UP New York [1987-1993], a landmark document of the activist response to the AIDS crisis. Schulman describes the triumphs, challenges, and simultaneous histories of ACT UP, and what they teach us about movements in general.
Episode 51 | Jon Gray (Ghetto Gastro)
February 08, 2023 02:55 - 30 minutesJon Gray, co-founder of the Bronx-based collective Ghetto Gastro, talks to Helen Molesworth about the collective’s work at the intersection of the culinary world, hip-hop, fashion, art, activism, and community building.
Episode 50 | Why You Do What You Do with Brendan Dugan, Johanna Fateman and Ebony L. Haynes
February 01, 2023 00:39 - 42 minutesHost Helen Molesworth calls art writer Johanna Fateman (Le Tigre), gallerist Brendan Dugan (Karma Gallery) and the curator,and writer Ebony L. Haynes (Senior Director of 52 Walker) to discuss how they carved their unique paths in the art world and what continues to inspire them.
Episode 49 | Luca Guadagnino and Michaël Borremans
January 25, 2023 01:06 - 45 minutesA conversation between the Academy award-nominated writer, producer, and director Luca Guadagnino and the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans on the relationship between painting and film. They muse on the specificity of light to their mediums, the role of the uncanny, and paintings and films as a mirror of who we imagine ourselves to be. Guadagnino’s most recent film Bones and All debuted to critical acclaim last Fall. Michaël Borremans held his seventh solo exhibition at David Zwirner, The A...
Best of 2022 | With Helen Molesworth
December 14, 2022 14:15 - 51 minutesAs we close out the year, Helen calls up her dear friend Steve Locke to carry on the tried and true tradition of end-of-year lists. It turns out there was a lot to love in 2022. Mentions: -Lynne Tillman, Mothercare -Craig Drennen at Freight and Volume -Marlene Dumas at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice -Bob Thompson at Colby College and the Hammer Museum -Milk of Dreams (Venice Biennale) -Mira Schor's instagram account -Ruth Erickson’s A Place for Me at the ICA Boston -Cauleen Smith at Moran Mo...
What Does Art Have to Do with Climate Change? | With Helen Molesworth
December 07, 2022 12:22 - 35 minutesIn this episode, Helen Molesworth calls an old friend, the painter Alexis Rockman, to try and understand the art world’s reaction to recent acts of museum vandalism perpetrated by Just Stop Oil, putting them in context with theories on environmental activism and the harsh reality of the climate crisis. Alexis Rockman is a painter whose realist landscapes imagine the future effects of the anthropocene on the natural world, and was one of the first artists to investigate global warming in his ...
On Art and Poetics
November 30, 2022 15:17 - 41 minutesLucas Zwirner returns as host for a conversation with the MacArthur award-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and the renowned critic and scholar of avant-garde poetry, Marjorie Perloff. On the occasion of Peter’s new book of poetry, Draw Me After, which is inspired by the work of Terry Winters and Agnes Martin, they come together for a state of the union of art and poetry. Draw Me After: Poems is available now.
Let’s Talk About Appropriation | With Helen Molesworth
November 16, 2022 15:22 - 37 minutesFollowing recent controversies in the art and fashion worlds, host Helen Molesworth and the artist Steve Locke, a returning guest, sit down to talk about a subject that has been thorny for as long as there have been arguments about art. So, appropriation: When is it strategy and when is it theft? Who gets to claim authorship of what? And what is actually original nowadays?
Seeing the 90’s Everywhere Right Now | With Helen Molesworth
November 02, 2022 01:39 - 20 minutesIn the premiere episode of a new series hosted by Helen Molesworth, the curator and writer talks with her friend the artist Steve Locke about the re-emergence of art and culture of the 90’s, and why certain ideas, obsessions, and artists of the era—from Wolfgang Tillmans to Marlon Riggs to Friends—are bubbling back up into the mainstream now. This fall, Helen will be hosting regular episodes of the podcast that react to the shifting news and ideas in the art world and culture at large. Pleas...
Inside ‘The Red Studio’: Ann Temkin with 6 Artists on Matisse | Special Episode
October 25, 2022 12:02 - 1 hourIn this special episode produced and hosted by the painter Lisa Yuskavage, six artists—Joe Bradley, Carroll Dunham, Rashid Johnson, David Reed, Sarah Sze, and Charline von Heyl—give Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, their insights on Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and the elusive nature of creativity. It was inspired by the recent exhibition Matisse: The Red Studio at MoMA, now on view at the SMK Denmark through February 26, 2023. Dialog...
Death of an Artist: The Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre Story | Special Episode
September 23, 2022 12:40 - 11 minutesA special preview of a new podcast miniseries, Death of an Artist, hosted by the curator and art historian Helen Molesworth, who will also be hosting new episodes of Dialogues, coming very, very soon. For more than 35 years, accusations of murder shrouded one of the art world’s most storied couples: Was the famous sculptor Carl Andre involved in the death of his wife, the rising star artist Ana Mendieta? Helen revisits the question of Mendieta’s death, takes a closer look at the incident in ...
Episode 48 | Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton
March 30, 2022 00:25 - 46 minutesThe artists and former partners on what it means to be an artist now—and what it meant when they emerged in the New York art world of the 1990s. Tiravanija, who will have his first exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong later this year, is renowned for participatory installations that have a living, social dimension to them. Peyton is one of her generation’s best-known painters, recognized for her intimate paintings of people.
Episode 47 | Edwin Frank
March 24, 2022 14:47 - 31 minutesThe editorial director of New York Review Books and editor of NYRB Classics explains the origins and cult status of the incredibly popular series. Since its founding by Frank in 1999, NYRB Classics’s mission has been to reintroduce out-of-print gems to a new audience, everything from Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps to a Janet Malcolm work of journalism. Combined with a simple and magnetic design, this model inspired David Zwirner Books’s own ekphrasis series, which focuses on writing about art, and ...
Episode 46 | Jed Perl and Joshua Cohen
March 16, 2022 00:50 - 46 minutesA conversation that parses the nuances of the question: Does art have to be political to be important right now? With the art critic Jed Perl, who just published Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and the novelist Johsua Cohen, author of the acclaimed The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes the Israeli family in ways comic and serious.
Episode 45 | Jerry Saltz and Ellie Rines
March 09, 2022 11:50 - 53 minutesA conversation about the art of looking. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic and author Jerry Saltz, of New York magazine and the bestselling How to Be an Artist, and the influential young gallerist Ellie Rines, of New York’s 56 Henry, on doing their jobs in unorthodox ways—and how to look at the endlessly proliferating and increasingly uncategorizable art in the world today. And a warning to our listeners: This episode briefly mentions suicide, so please listen with caution or skip 44:34-4...
Episode 44 | Amy Sillman
March 02, 2022 13:22 - 35 minutesThe celebrated artist on the role of art criticism today, and how she probes and ultimately goes beyond the limitations of her painting in her other practice as a writer. This episode with Sillman, who in 2020 published Faux Pas, a new collection of her writings, is guest-hosted by Jarrett Earnest, and is the last of his three-part miniseries on serious artists who are also serious writers. Amy Sillman: Faux Pas is available here. Her work will be featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and w...
Episode 43 | A Scientific Theory of the Art World
February 23, 2022 01:33 - 44 minutesWhat does evolutionary science have to do with the art world? A fascinating conversation with Richard Prum, a leading thinker in evolutionary ornithology who has developed a theory that impacts how we think about artistic genius, radicality, and the art world at large.
Episode 42 | Amalia Ulman and Maggie Lee
February 16, 2022 01:33 - 26 minutesA conversation with two exciting artists taking their multimedia practices onto the movie screen. Ulman, whose work combines video, performance, and the Internet in fluid ways, recently released her critically-acclaimed first feature film, El Planeta. A hit at the Sundance Film Festival, it features Ulman and her mother as a pair of mother-and-daughter grifters in Gijon, Spain, their hometown. And Lee, who works across all manner of media, also made a standout film that draws from her own lif...
Episode 41 | Angela Davis and Hilton Als
February 02, 2022 01:48 - 48 minutesThe activist and author Angela Davis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als in conversation about one of their favorite subjects and dearest friends: Toni Morrison. Early on in her career, Morrison worked as a kind of activist editor at Random House, where she helped change the landscape of publishing—including her effort to bring Davis’s landmark political autobiography to the public in 1974. (It was just republished in its third edition.) Recently, Als curated Toni Mor...
Episode 40 | Luc Tuymans and Timothy Snyder
July 14, 2021 00:25 - 46 minutesA conversation about the slippery slope from Donald Trump’s lies to the extinction of American democracy—and art’s ability to break through fascist monoliths. The eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder is the author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and “The American Abyss,” a widely circulated New York Times essay published following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. The essay caught the eye of Luc Tuymans, himself a kind of historian. In the paintings he’s made throughout his career...
Episode 39 | David Byrne and Marcel Dzama
July 07, 2021 16:18 - 47 minutesTwo of the most playful, expressive artists we have on their creative process, trying new things, and the art of being a great collaborator. The former lead singer of the Talking Heads, Byrne is an artistic polymath, making stage plays, performances, films, and now even drawings, which he recently showed with Pace. His Broadway hit, American Utopia, also became a streaming hit when Spike Lee turned it into a film for HBO; it was also recently adapted by Byrne into a book with illustrations by...
Episode 38 | What Does Figuration Smell Like?
June 23, 2021 00:18 - 24 minutesA conversation about the art of scents with the perfumer Frederic Malle. The latest in a storied French fragrance family, Malle—whose grandfather launched Christian Dior’s fragrance line, and whose uncle is the great filmmaker Louis Malle—had ambitions of being an art dealer before he took up the family trade, and his unique brand of of scent-making combines science, psychology, marketing wizardry, and (most importantly) art history.
Episode 37 | Lorraine O’Grady
June 16, 2021 00:24 - 54 minutesThe 86-year-old legend gets personal about a lifetime translating her singular voice to the world. While the major retrospective of her work currently at the Brooklyn Museum has cemented her reputation, Lorraine O’Grady did not discover herself as an artist until her 40s. Here, she traces her unlikely journey to becoming a conceptual and performance artist with a pioneering Black feminist sensibility—including stints along the way as a rock critic, novelist, and translator. Guest-hosted by J...
Episode 36 | Kate Zambreno
June 09, 2021 00:24 - 33 minutesHow does an artwork change as the person looking at it does? Kate Zambreno, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and the author of the acclaimed 2020 novel Drifts, details the pleasures and discovery of returning to an artist or artwork over and over again—in her case, the likes of Sarah Charlesworth, Chantal Akerman, and Albrecht Durer. She speaks and writes about their lives and work with humor and personal insight born of longtime obsession. Drifts: A Novel, named a Best Book of the Yea...
Episode 35 | Simphiwe Ndzube and Zakes Mda
June 02, 2021 01:42 - 47 minutesA conversation about the art of telling stories with the South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube, who works between Cape Town and Los Angeles and whose first solo US museum exhibition opens this month at the Denver Art Museum, and the renowned writer Zakes Mda, whose novels are widely read throughout South Africa and beyond. The two dissect their magical realist stories of post-apartheid South Africa and their experiences of America on the page and on canvas—and try to locate the source of their...
Episode 34 | Rachel Kushner
May 26, 2021 01:38 - 43 minutesA conversation about life as art with the author of The Flamethrowers. Few merge writing about art and writing about life the way Rachel Kushner does. A former editor at Artforum and Bomb, she’s deeply interested in memorializing the culture around the art—the conversations, the characters, the tall tales. In her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, a National Book Award finalist, the New York art world of the 70s was brought to scintillating life; and in her new collection of essays, The Hard Crowd...