Episode 222: Art Actively Gives Meaning to the Toil of Existence | Lisa Edelstein & Robert Russell

This week on About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with actor, writer, and artist Lisa Edelstein and artist Robert Russell.Recorded as they celebrate their collaborative exhibition Palace in Time at the Skirball Cultural Center, this conversation explores partnership, artistic practice, Jewish ritual, memory, storytelling, and the ways we create meaning through the objects, relationships, and traditions that shape our lives.Lisa discusses her evolution from actor to painter, drawing on family photographs to create intimate works that explore narrative, memory, and the Jewish experience. Robert reflects on his paintings of everyday objects, the sacredness of attention, and how ordinary things become vessels for history, devotion, and remembrance.Together they speak about creativity, discipline, vulnerability, seeing, collecting, marriage, and the experience of building individual artistic practices while supporting one another's creative lives.Lisa Edelstein is an actor, writer, and artist whose paintings transform family photographs into deeply personal explorations of memory, identity, and storytelling. Her work has been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery, Anat Ebgi, GAVLAK, and is included in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Robert Russell is a conceptual painter whose work explores memory, mortality, iconography, and ritual through paintings of everyday objects. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Anat Ebgi Gallery.A conversation about attention, making meaning, and the ways art helps us understand ourselves and one another.