PODCAST · arts
Art as Experience: Podcasts
by Art as Experience: Podcasts
Sheila Blake and Tom Xenakis demystify art and guide listeners through the glittering pandemonium of current exhibitions.
Episodes
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Finale
This is our last regularly-scheduled episode for WOWD-LP Takoma Park, although we may, from time to time, present a special unscheduled episode. After almost 150 shows, we decided to take a break and figure out where we’re going from here. In this episode, Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the…
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Vermeer’s Secrets
The National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, has mounted a small exhibition showing three sublime Vermeer paintings and three false Vermeers. Our episode discusses: what makes Vermeer so good (a little art criticism/theory) the scientific research done by the museum’s conservation department…
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Sargent and Spain
Sargent, as revealed in Sargent and Spain, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, gives us visions that are full of desire and celebration – both documentary and dreamlike. John Singer Sargent was, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe; but his obituary in the…
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Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage
We explore the art of Robert Rauschenberg, the influence of John Cage, and two of Rauschenberg’s paintings, Factum 1 and Factum 2, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in their current exhibition, Then Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900. We find a lot of terrific...
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We are Made hof Stories: Self-Taught Artists at the SAAM
Hosts Sheila and Peter Blake visit the outsider/folk/self-taught art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: We are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection. This is perhaps our third show on folk art, and every time, we probe deeper into this rewarding art...
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The Double
Sheila and Peter Blake use the current exhibition, The Double, Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900, at the East Wing of the National Gallery, to explore art over many decades, mixing famous masters with contemporary artists, all creating with some aspect of visual doubling, reversal, or the...
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American Portraiture Today
Sheila Blake and Peter Blake discuss portraiture as a art form, and the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the finalaists of the Outwin 20221 competition. You can find images of the exhibition works here:...
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New Ways of Being Together: Laurie Anderson and John Cage
With insights from our recent episode on postmodernism, we reprise our conversation about the Laurie Anderson exhibit currently at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in DC. We draw out the connections between Anderson’s work and that of John Cage: even though their music is completely different, their...
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Postmodernism
Sheila and Peter Blake discuss postmodernism in the visual arts and architecture: what it is, in plain terms, and how it followed from and differs from modernism. Our facebook pages has pictures of what we’re talking about:
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Marsden Hartley
We’re posting a lightly edited rebroadcast of last year’s popular program on the American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley. Peter and Sheila are hosts, and take an excursion into discussions of Emerson and Transcedentalism. Pictures of what we”re talking about…
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Afro-Atlantic Histories
We visit the new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Afro-Atlantic Histories, an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the 17th century. More than 130 powerful works of art, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and...
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Learning to Draw
We examine the practice of learning to draw, the advantages to non-professionals in learning to draw, and some tips.
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Gregory Gillespie
Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) was a major American painter. Sheila was a friend of his, beginning in art school in NYC. Sheila and Tom recollect his life and his art. [LBS id=xx]
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The Camera Never Lies
Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss the use of photography by painters.
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Guarding the Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art has just put up a show curated by the guards. The works repay long observation, as you might expect for the choices of the museum guards, who look at art for long periods of time. Tom, Sheila and Peter visit the exhibition, and discuss several interesting issues…
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Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss Abstract Expressionism.
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Picasso: Painting the Blue Period
We visit the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC: Picasso: Painting the Blue Period. We discuss the transition of Picasso, at the age of nineteen, from painting scenes of the Paris nightlife to the paintings known as the Blue Period, and then the Rose period. We explore…
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Picasso: The man and the artist
Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the dark side of Picasso’s life, and give an introduction to his innovations in art, and how the revelations of Picasso’s treatment of women might influence our understanding of his art. Along the way,we touch on Georges Braque, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.
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Legacies of the Harlem Renaissance
We discuss several major Black visual artists from before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance (with a nod to philosopher Alain Locke): Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles White, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Amy Sherald. Poems by Nikki...
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Charles Ray, Tacita Dean, Jeff Wall, and Vija Celmins at Glenstone
Our hosts, Sheila and Tom, with Peter Blake, visit Glenstone, discuss issues in contemporary art brought up by sculptures by Charles Ray, chalk drawings by Tacita Dean, large-scale photographs by Jeff Wall, and drawings by Vija Celmins.
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Laurie Anderson
After several visits to the Laurie Anderson Exhibit at the Hirschhorn Museum, in Washington DC, Sheila and Peter discuss this avant garde artist and her exhibit. Music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.
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Alma Thomas
Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful is the title of the retrospective of Alma Thomas at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC. Sheila and Tom respond to her brilliant color-field paintings to explore the topic of color. The exhibition at the Phillips traces her journey from semi-rural...
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David Driskell
Sheila, Tom, and guest Peter Blake discuss the David Driskell exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Driskell was a painter and the whirlwind center of energy and attention to established and emerging African American artists in the late Twentieth Century and into recent decades.
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The Puppet Lab at Rhizome DC, with Rachel Gates
We interview local puppeteer, Rachel Gates.
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Juan Gris, Color, and Cubism
Sheila and Tom discuss the Spanish painter, Juan Gris, a compatriot, contemporary, and rival of Picasso – on the occasion of a current exhibition of gorgeous cubist paintings by Gris at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Themes include cubism, modernism, John Dewey, color theory and more.
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Paul Cezanne Portraits
We have edited an earlier episode, from 2018, adding a new introduction to our show on Cezanne Portraits. This episode adds to and reinforces the content on our last episode, also on Paul Cezanne, the master at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Broadcast on WOWD-LP, Takoma Radio, 10/23/21
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Paul Cezanne Drawings
An exhibit of Paul Cezanne Drawings just closed at MOMA, in New York. Our visit there occasioned this discussion of one of the great progenitors of modernism. Sheila and Tom go inside the experience of viewing Cezanne, and give listeners a unique view of the experiences he provides, and the...
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Creativity, John Dewey, and Aesthetics
Sheila and Tom take on a special topic this week: Creativity. Sheila begins with a discussion of John Dewey’s anti-hierarchical formulation of the art experience, which establishes a continuum between “high art” and the esthetic perceptions of everyday life, then analyzes how these experiences…
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Tudor Place, Washington DC’s Historic House
We visit Tudor Place in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, the home for over two hundred years of descendants of Martha Washington. The family retained this house over this entire period, through the Civil War, the gilded age, the Roaring Twenties, until the last owner deeded it to the...
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Artists, the Garden, and Chuck Close
Before continuing in their series considering the relation between artists and their gardens, Tom and Sheila discuss the art of Chuck Close, who died last week. They turn then to Emil Nolde, Charles Burchfield, and Odilon Redon.
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A Portrait of East Baltimore
Sheila and Tom visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum – now-open – to see the new exhibit of documentary photography from East Baltimore in the late 1970’s: Welcome Home: Portrait of East Baltimore. Three women, Linda Rich, Joan Clark Netherwood and Elinor Cahn, were welcomed into the…
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Colors From the Earth
In a reprise of a popular episode from 2017, Sheila discusses the origin, history and use of pigments and other paint materials. Guest: Peter Blake
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The Painter’s Garden
Continuing to explore the theme of Gardens, Sheila and Tom explore how painters created gardens and painted them. The experience of the gardens, passionately created and tended, and the experience of viewing the painted gardens, now in museums, are related. Claude Monet, Stanley Spencer, and...
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Lynda Benglis and Sarah Cain at the East Wing
The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has re-opened, and we visit the exhibitions of Lynda Benglis and Sarah Cain.
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Marsden Hartley, Transcendentalist
In honor of Pride Week, we discuss the paintings, career, and struggles of the American Modernist painter, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943). We also examine Transcendentalism – the wild spiritual and artistic gift from Ralph Waldo Emerson – and its importance to Hartley’s life and to American art in...
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The Gardens of Greenbelt
Art as Experience continues her exploration of the links between art, society, and gardens with a look at the tiny gardens that can be walked among in the cooperative community of Greenbelt MD, set up as part of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s New Deal. The backstory of Greenbelt is a mirror of...
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Gardens in Spring
In a week where Sheila Blake is preparing her exhibition at the Foundry Gallery in Washington DC, we are updating a recording of an earlier show from May 2019, in which Tom and Sheila analyze the connections between gardens and art, with a special visit to the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington.
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Faith Ringgold at the Glenstone Museum
We visit again the great new modernist museum in Potomac Maryland, the Glenstone, and discuss the current retrospective exhibition of Faith Ringgold.
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Seeing Differently: the Phillips Collection Reopens
We visit the Phillips Collection, this country’s first modern art museum, which has reopened for its 100th anniversary with an exhibition highlighting the collection’s great diversity. After a year-long closing due to COVID precautions, the museum in Washington DC has reopened to visitors. In...
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Cross-Pollination in the Arts
Our second show about artists who create in areas other than the one that has made them a name. Tom and Sheila discuss the paintings and practices of Anthony Dominick Benedetto (better known as Tony Bennett), Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. Sheila looks into the art training of President George Bush.
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Artists and Their Mistresses
Sheila and Tom explore the professional, sexual, exploitative, inspirational, cooperative, and ambiguous relations between artists and their models, their lovers, wives, and allies. Discussed today are Pierre and Marthe Bonnard, August Rodin and Gwynn John, Picasso, Lucien Freud and Celia Paul,...
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Artist Couples: Program 101
Today, program 101, we discuss artist couples who have been working side by side, in partnership. We begin with two couples profiled in Intimate Collaborations, by Bibiana Obler: Wassily Kandinsky & Gabrielle Münter and Hans Arp & Sophie Taeuber. We then talk about mid-century American artist...
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African American Monuments
Sheila and Tom discuss monuments dedicated to African Americans – especially those created by African American Artists, many in Washington DC: among them: • The African American Civil War Memorial, with its sculpture titled The Spirit of Freedom, by Ed Hamilton, • the Martin Luther King Memorial,...
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Cross-Pollination in Painting
A number of musicians, poets, and even politicians have seriously developed as visual artists, usually painters. Today, Sheila and Tom discuss artists who straddle two worlds, such as poet Elizabeth Bishop, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet/novelist Henry Miller, and Winston Churchill. The...
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Late Careers of Artists
Sheila and Tom explore the late careers of William Turner, Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Miró, Giorgio De Chirico, Ivan Albright, and Larry Poons.
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Portraits in America
Sheila examines the history of American Portraiture, from the early colonial self-taught limners, through the virtuosos of the late nineteenth century. We focus on a family of portrait artists in Richmond, Virginia: Ellis Silvette and his children, and discuss Kehinde Wiley’s exciting and...
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Artists Who Lived Long Lives III
In this program we discuss the late careers of artists whose work evolved into something different, something new, and something beautiful. The artists discussed today are: Francisco Goya, Jasper Johns, Winslow Homer, Marc Chagall, Grandma Moses, and Louise Nevelson. This is the third in a series...
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Artists who Lived Long Lives II
Pierre Bonnard, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Al Held, and Hokusai: these are the artists whose late careers are discussed today by Tom and Sheila.
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Matisse, Monet, de Kooning, Martin, and Bourgeois: Artists Who Lived Long Lives
Sheila and Tom discuss the the careers and late paintings of artists who painted to the ends of their long lives: Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois. Originally broadcast November21, 2020.
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Philip Guston: Controversy, Censorship, and Conflict
Tom and Sheila discuss the artist Philip Guston, his work, and the controversy – due to the images in his work of hooded klansmen – that has erupted from the postponement of a major Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Art as Experience: Podcasts have?
Art as Experience: Podcasts currently has 60 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Art as Experience: Podcasts about?
Sheila Blake and Tom Xenakis demystify art and guide listeners through the glittering pandemonium of current exhibitions.
How often does Art as Experience: Podcasts release new episodes?
Art as Experience: Podcasts has 60 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Art as Experience: Podcasts?
You can listen to Art as Experience: Podcasts on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Art as Experience: Podcasts?
Art as Experience: Podcasts is created and hosted by Art as Experience: Podcasts.
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