Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

The international avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama has passed away at 97, but her work and extraordinary legacy will remain for posterity. As our own small remembrance, we revisit a 2025 episode exploring her unmatched influence, in which art historian Jennifer DeVere Brody, art critic Johanna Fateman, and curator Catherine Taft unpack the many versions of Yayoi Kusama—and her singular importance in 20th and 21st century art. A global travelling retrospective devoted to over seven decades of Kusama’s work will open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on September 11.  It was previously on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater & Performance studies, and, by courtesy, African & African American Studies at Stanford University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts Research supported her forthcoming book, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (Duke UPress, 2026).  Johanna Fateman is a writer, co-chief art critic at Cultured Mag, and a member of the band Le Tigre.  Catherine Taft is a writer and curator and deputy director of The Brick, a non-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles.

Curator Adrienne Edwards joins guest host Ebony L. Haynes to share their tips, tricks, and must-see shows from the 2026 Venice Biennale, the sixty-first iteration of the world’s largest and longest-running art biennale.  This year’s Venice Biennale opened to great acclaim in May, under especially poignant circumstances: its acclaimed curator, the Cape Town–based Koyo Kouoh, had passed away in 2025, just a few months into the planning. The two discuss the impact of her passing as they call out a number of their favorite presentations to help listeners sift through the many on view. A veteran of many Biennales and former juror, Edwards also explains how to navigate the city and make the most of your visit.  The Biennale Arte 2026 is now on view through November 22, 2026. Learn more here: https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026 Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and associate director of curatorial programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Ebony L. Haynes is a New York–based curator and is the global head of curatorial projects at David Zwirner. She is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw, opening at David Zwirner Los Angeles on September 19. Image: Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, Liquid Tongues, 2026 (video still) Presentations & Artists Mentioned: 8:45: Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys  10:04: Artist Issa Samb included in In Minor Keys  14:30:  Alfredo Jaar, The End of the World (2023–2024) 14:40: Rose Salane, Panorama 94   15:14: Denniston Hill 15:33: fierce pussy, organized by Jo-ey Tang: arms ache avid aeon: fierce pussy amplified, Chapter Nine20:30  Sumakshi Singh in India’s first pavilion ever 21:16 Ei Arakawa-Nash for the Japanese National Pavilion  23:33: The Austrian Pavilion 28:33 Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa at Fondazione Prada, curated by Nancy Spector 31:57: Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski at the Polish National Pavilion 36:39: Lorna Simpson at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection  37:38: Michael Armitage at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection 

Dialogues is pleased to present an episode podcast from our colleagues at The New York Review. Private Life is hosted by Jarrett Earnest and this episode features an interview with writer Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, criticism, and narrative empathy.  Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020).  Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.

In this bonus live episode, Lucas Zwirner returns to the mic for an interview with Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, to celebrate Weber’s new biography, titled Anni Albers: A Life. Over the course of the exchange, Weber opens up about the writing process behind this major new biography and shares some rare anecdotes from a lifetime spent working closely with the Alberses. Anni Albers: A Life is out now from Yale University Press. Learn more about the book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269376/anni-albers/

This special episode with Helen Molesworth and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was taped in front of a live audience at David Zwirner New York for a 2023 exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s final paintings. A new exhibition of Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften, is now on view at our 20th Street gallery in New York. The illuminating conversation draws on Buchloh’s decades of scholarly work on Richter, including a discussion of the art historian’s landmark 2022 study Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History.  Learn more about the exhibition Landschaften: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2026/gerhard-richter-landschaftenLearn more about Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543538/gerhard-richter/

An interview with Michael Armitage about his unique use of material and color, and his singular approach to narrative on the occasion of his major retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Titled The Promise of Change, the show is presented concurrently with the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and on view through January 10, 2027. Armitage is also the founder of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a non-profit visual art space dedicated to the growth and preservation of contemporary art in East Africa and a participant in In Minor Keys at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, on view through November 22, 2026. Learn more at the Palazzo Grassi website: https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/en/michael-armitage-promise-change Image: Michael Armitage, Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024 (detail) © Michael Armitage

A conversation with artist Rachel Harrison and art historian Alex Kitnick on the occasion of a once-in-a-generation retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Alex Kitnick teaches art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.  Rachel Harrison is a Brooklyn-based artist. Learn more about the exhibition at MoMA.org.

Art historian Lisa Saltzman discusses Walter Benjamin’s final days in Paris before his suicide in 1940 and the network of intellectuals who saved his most prized possessions from World War II, including the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.  The exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through July 26, 2026. It traces the Swiss-German artist’s departure from the Bauhaus and his experience throughout the political upheaval of the 1930s prior to his death in 1940, providing a new basis for understanding his sociopolitical perspective and commitment to artistic freedom.  Lisa Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her current book project, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores how one prescient passage from Walter Benjamin’s posthumously published writings came to transform his most cherished possession—an idiosyncratic little Paul Klee drawing of an angel—into the "angel of history," a postwar icon of impotent witness to historical catastrophe.

Helen speaks to Rachel Hunter Himes, author of the essay “Black Block” in Triple Canopy, about the long history of black artists underserved by white critics, museums’ moral and political responsibility to the public, and more. Rachel Hunter Himes is an art writer, museum educator, and PhD candidate at Columbia University. Read “Black Block” here: https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/black-block?ui.header=true

Award-winning filmaker Todd Haynes and his longtime collaborator, film producer Christine Vachon, discuss their thirty-year creative partnership, from the emergence of the new queer cinema to the culture wars of the nineties.  In 1987, Haynes directed the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. His first feature film, Poison, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. After Safe, which featured Julianne Moore in a breakthrough role, he conjured David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine, then paid homage to German director Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven. Haynes had six actors play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. He directed the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce, then returned to feature films with Carol, Wonderstruck, Dark Waters, and the documentary The Velvet Underground, followed by the feature film May December.  Christine Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award winner who co-founded the powerhouse Killer Films with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over three decades, the company has produced more than one hundred films, including some of the most celebrated and important American independent features. Recent releases include Todd Haynes’s May December (Netflix), starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and Celine Song’s Past Lives (A24), which marks her first Oscar nomination in the Best Picture category.

We revisit a conversation from the first season of Dialogues with critically acclaimed painter Rose Wylie, OBE RA, and actor Russell Tovey. Rose Wylie is the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on view from February 28–April 19, 2026.Wylie, an admirer of cinema, and Tovey, a fan and collector of Wylie’s work, en

Acclaimed artist Amy Sillman and curator Donna De Salvo join Helen Molesworth for a deep dive into how an art exhibition comes to life. Amy Sillman is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters of her generation. Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe, was presented at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2024, before traveling to Ludwig Forum Aachen the following year. Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) is currently on view at Dia Bridgehampton through June 2026. Donna De Salvo is a senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation and previously served as the chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Recent projects include Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon, featuring the immersive installation Bass (2024), co-commissioned with the Laurenz Foundation, Basel; Roni Horn at Dia Beacon; Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience, Gagosian, Paris; and the forthcoming This Land: Considering the American Landscape, cocurated with Seph Rodney for The Church, Sag Harbor.

Emmy Award–winning filmmaker and producer Matt Wolf joins Helen Molesworth to discuss his latest documentary series, Pee-wee as Himself, a revelatory documentary about the late Paul Reubens.   The HBO original two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself is available to stream now on HBO Max.

Every era has its own version of Leonardo da Vinci, according to art historian Stephen J. Campbell. Campbell joins Helen Molesworth to unpack the 21st century myth of the tech genius that surrounds the Renaissance artist.  Stephen J. Campbell is the Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images and The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy.

Last week the Trump administration sharply escalated its impossible demands on the Smithsonian Institution. It's hard not to wonder when, rather than if this administration will come for the rest of our museums. With this in mind, Helen Molesworth invited Jill Medvedow, the former director of the ICA/Boston, for an explainer on how museums are funded, with the hopes of arming listeners with a deeper understanding of how it all works. Jill Medvedow is director emerita at the ICA/Boston and a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School.

Helen Molesworth and Steve Locke sort through the many exhibitions of the last year to highlight their favorites, from Jack Whitten at MoMA and Stanley Whitney at the ICA/Boston, to Bo Bartlett and Lisa Yuskavage.

Helen Molesworth invites curator Mark Godfrey and artists Arthur Jafa and Steve Locke to discuss the work of Kerry James Marshall on the occasion of his acclaimed survey exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is on view through January 18, 2026 and will travel next to the Kunsthaus Zürich in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris, France. Mark Godfrey is the curator of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is co-director of New Curators, a one-year curatorial training program for international curators from lower socio-economic backgrounds. He was Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern from 2007-2021. Arthur Jafa is an artist and filmmaker whose practice comprises films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being.  Steve Locke is a contemporary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York.

Helen is joined by writer Francine Prose, artist David Salle, and photographer Neil Selkirk for a conversation about Arbus’s singular importance. Francine Prose’s new novel, Five Weeks in the Country, will be published in May. David Salle is a painter and essayist living in New York. Neil Selkirk is a photographer and filmmaker and the only person to print the photographs of Diane Arbus other than the photographer herself. Visit two exhibitions of Arbus on view this fall: Diane Arbus: Konstellationen is on view at Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany through January 18, 2026 and Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum is on view at David Zwirner London through December 20, 2025.

An episode dedicated to Yayoi Kusama: arguably the most famous artist in the world and yet among the most indefinable, elusive, and transformative. Helen Molesworth is joined by scholar Jennifer DeVere Brody, art critic Johanna Fateman, and curator Catherine Taft to unpack the many versions of Yayoi Kusama—and her singular importance in 20th and 21st century art. A global travelling retrospective of Yayoi Kusama opens at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in October 2025; it will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in Spring 2026, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in Fall 2026. Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater & Performance studies, and, by courtesy, African & African American Studies at Stanford University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts Research supported her forthcoming book, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (Duke UPress, 2026).  Johanna Fateman is a writer, co-chief art critic at Cultured Mag, and a member of the band Le Tigre.  Catherine Taft is a writer and curator and deputy director of The Brick, a non-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles.

Helen Molesworth speaks to art historian and culture critic Jonathan Crary, whose recent books Scorched Earth and 24/7 constitute both a polemic against what he calls the “internet complex”—and a diagnosis of where society is now. Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding coeditor of Zone Books.

With higher education facing existential threat under the current administration, Helen Molesworth speaks to art historian, critic, and educator Darby English about the difficulties of understanding this precise moment and the importance of discourse, independent thought, and history. Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at University of Chicago and the author of numerous books, including Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016) and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007).

On the occasion of Joan Mitchell’s centennial year, Helen Molesworth speaks to artist Julie Mehretu and poet Eileen Myles about what Mitchell’s life and work means to them.  Julie Mehretu, (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Mehretu is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2025, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, and the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts Award in 2015. Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature (anthology) and a “Working Life” (poems) are their most recent books. They live in New York & in Marfa, Texas. Visit the Joan Mitchell Foundation to learn more about their global centennial programming.  Corrections:  At 17:21 Helen Molesworth mentions the writer Jen Quilter; the correct name is Jenni Quitler. At 22:53, it should note that Joan Mitchell used a device she called a "diminishing glass" to get a visual sense of works as if seen from a greater distance. Explore Joan Mitchell (Yale University Press, 2021) for further research and reference.

Academy award-winning actor and writer Julianne Moore goes in depth on her craft, the art of filmmaking, and passion for design.  Julianne Moore has starred in numerous award-winning films since the 1990s, most recently in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door.

Celebrated architect Annabelle Selldorf on her life and work, which includes numerous cultural spaces, from commercial galleries to major museums.  Selldorf Architects's most recent project, a critically acclaimed expansion of the Frick Collection in New York, opens to the public on April 17, 2025. David Zwirner’s new Chelsea building at 533 West 19th Street, also designed by Selldorf Architects, will open May 8 with a solo exhibition by Michael Armitage.

Helen Molesworth invited artists EJ Hill and Sarah Sze to listen to archival audio interviews with Ruth Asawa and discuss her ideas and art. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, the first major posthumous retrospective of the artist, will be on view at SFMOMA from April 5–September 2, 2025 before travelling on to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, and to the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was a sculptor, educator, and arts activist who challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the world since the early 1950s. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is on view at SFMOMA from April 5, 2025-September 2, 2025. EJ Hill is a visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His show Brake Run Helix is on view at MASS MoCA through January 2024. Sarah Sze is an artist based in New York. Her solo exhibition Timelapse just closed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and her show Metronome will open in November at OGR Torino, and at Aarhus, Denmark in 2024; she also has a forthcoming solo show opening at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2024.

A revealing look into the real life behind the icon and Warhol Superstar Candy Darling. Cynthia Carr, author of the acclaimed Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz discusses her newest biography: Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. Carr is joined by MacArthur Fellow, singer-songwriter, and actor Vivian Bond, who narrated the audiobook. Cynthia Carr is a New York-based writer and author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz and Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar.  Vivian Bond is the recipient of an Obie, a Bessie, The Lambda Literary award for best transgender non-fiction for their memoir “Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels,” a Tony nomination for “Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway,”and was recently awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. Bond has a series of upcoming shows May 6-11 at Joe’s Pub.

The history of a radical cooperative farm at Black Mountain College that defined both daily life and pedagogy at the birthplace of American art education. David Silver, an expert on the farm at Black Mountain college, tells the story of how Black Mountain students collaborated in order to survive.  David Silver is a professor of environmental studies and urban agriculture at the University of San Francisco and the author of the newly released book, The Farm at Black Mountain College.

Helen Molesworth explores the life and work of Anni Albers in the artist’s own words, with rare archival interviews with Albers and insights from artists Kristine Woods and Diedrick Bracken and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson.   Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, a group show curated by Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, will be on view at David Zwirner 20th street gallery in New York from March 13–April 19. Weber is also the author of a biography on Anni Albers, forthcoming from Yale University Press in early 2026. Kirstine Woods is an artist based in Brooklyn and professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Diedrick Brackens is an artist based in Los Angeles, known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, and American history. Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Art History and LGBTQ Studies at Columbia University.  She is organizing an exhibition called GUTSY: On Feminist Infrastructure that will open in November 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland.

A conversation about the late artist Noah Davis, the sounds he left behind, and the ones he imagined.  Join podcaster and curator Helen Molesworth, professor and writer Tina M. Campt, pianist and artist Jason Moran, and director and curator Paola Malavassi for a mix of sound, music, and ideas inspired by Davis’s paintings. The Sound of Noah Davis was commissioned by DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam and produced by Besyv and FilmTone on the occasion of the exhibition Noah Davis. Special thanks to Karon Davis and the Estate of Noah Davis. The exhibition Noah Davis, originally on view at DAS MINSK, Potsdam in Fall 2024, is currently on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Credits:  With: Helen Molesworth, Tina M. Campt, Jason Moran, and Paola Malavassi A podcast commissioned by DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam on the occasion of the exhibition Noah Davis, 2024–25 Idea: Paola Malavassi and Helen Molesworth Production: Besyv and FilmTone, Denmark Producer: Mathilde Schytz Marvit Interviews: Mathilde Schytz Marvit, Alexandra Kristjansen, and Bobby Salomon Hess Editor: Alexandra Kristjansen Sound Design: Bobby Salomon Hess Music: Sofia Rønde Storck, Jonas Yagoubi, and Laurits Quist Bilén Archival Audio: Noah Davis, lecture at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, 2011 Piano: Jason Moran live in his studio Thanks to: Karon Davis and the Estate of Noah Davis

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times critic Wesley Morris comes on the podcast to unpack the long history and current state of artistic rivalries, from Leonardo daVinci and Michelangelo to Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

Helen Molesworth hosts a special episode, starting with a conversation with leading ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and followed by an interview with artist Laurie Simmons and activist Maryhope Howland. Chase Strangio is the Co-Director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).  Laurie Simmons is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Connecticut and New York City and a member of Families United for Trans Rights. Maryhope Howland is a social psychologist, design researcher, and co-founder of Families United for Trans Rights. Families United for Trans Rights (FUTR, www.ourfutr.org) is a volunteer-run organization dedicated to securing the rights of trans Americans.

As we turn the page on a quarter century, Helen Molesworth and the artist Steve Locke look back with a highly opinionated list of their favorite art shows of the last 25 years.

Helen Molesworth speaks to Dean Kissick, author of The Painted Protest, a polemic piece on the state of contemporary art in this month’s Harper’s Magazine that has had a lot in the art world talking. Dean Kissick is a writer, contributing editor of Spike Art Magazine, and a director of Earth.

Art historian and critic Hal Foster joins Helen for a live conversation on Richard Serra (1938–2024) at David Zwirner New York. They discuss Foster’s decades-long engagement with Serra’s work and the artist’s enduring legacy. This conversation was taped in Every Which Way, a major Richard Serra installation from 2015, on view at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery in New York from November 8–December 14, 2024.

We revisit an episode from Season 5, a conversation between artist Luc Tuymans and the eminent Yale Historian Timothy Snyder. The two discuss history, truth, and lies, and art’s singular ability to live between them all. Timothy Snyder is the author of the books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom, among others, and Luc Tuymans is an artist who has been interrogating the power of images for decades. Tuymans is also the subject of a major solo retrospective, called The Past, on view at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing through February 16, 2025.

Writer, curator, and editor Jarrett Earnest joins Helen to discuss his most recent edited volume of writings by the iconoclastic, enduring art critic Dave Hickey, titled Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982-2002. Out now from David Zwirner Books, wherever books are sold.

New Yorker critic Hilton Als joins Helen to discuss his exhibition, Alice Neel in the Queer World, on view at our Los Angeles Gallery through November 2nd, 2024. Alice Neel in the Queer World is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited and with a text by Als, as well as newly commissioned scholarship by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

A 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. Luca Guadagnino's latest film, Challengers (2024) is currently in theaters. Michaël Borremans's eighth solo exhibition with David Zwirner gallery, The Monkey, will be on view at our London location through July 26, 2024.

Acclaimed fashion designer and curator Grace Wales Bonner is joined by the scholar and curator Horace D. Ballard. In a wide ranging conversation on art and fashion, they unpack the nuances of style, medium, and intentionality in art. In addition to her brand Wales Bonner, Grace Wales Bonner’s curatorial exhibitions include A Time For New Dreams, Serpentine Galleries London (2019) and Artist’s Choice - Spirit Movers at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023) with accompanying publication Dream in the Rhythm: Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection (2023). Grace is currently leading a four-year research project, titled Between Critique and Hope, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.  Horace D. Ballard is the Theodore E. Stebbins Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, where their work investigates the art, ideas, and visual cultures of the United States and the Americas. They are the author of numerous publications, most recently Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone (Williams College Museum of Art, 2022), and “Wet-into-Wet: Passages of Time and Tradition before 1880,” in Into the Light: American Watercolors, 1880-1990 (2023) edited by Hoffman, Grasselli, and Stewart for Harvard Art Museums.

In 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 collections  For over four decades, R. Crumb has used the popular medium of the comic book to address the absurdity of social conventions, political disillusionment, irony, racial and gender stereotypes, sexual fantasies, and fetishes. Explore his available titles at David Zwirner books.

Artist 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, her exhibition, The Wanda Coleman Songbook, was on view at 52 Walker, York, from January 19–March 16, 2024. Michael Govan is the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

An 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 at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from March 16–August 11, 2024.

For 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.

Writer 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.

In 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.

Was 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 books include Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic and of Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. Lawrence Weschler is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, including the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. His recent writings can be found at Wondercabinet.

Ira 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.

In 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.

Artist 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.

Helen and Steve Locke discuss the best—and most unexpected-–art shows they saw in 2023, from global exhibitions to gallery shows in New York.