Momus: The Podcast
by Momus
Momus: The Podcast presents lively conversations on art writing and criticism. Hosts Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore speak with leading writers, publishers, editors, journalists, scholars, curators, and artists about the expanded field of art writing—why and how it is vital, difficult, political, and pleasurable. Episodes often begin with a guest reading a chosen text that has been meaningful to their own creative practice. Since launching in 2017, Momus: The Podcast has produced more than 60 episodes. All episodes are freely available on the Momus website and through platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop on the third Tuesday of each month.If you would like to advertise on Momus: The Podcast, please contact Chris Andrews, Sales Director, at [email protected].
Episodes
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Cait McKinney – Season 10, Episode 1
In the first episode of Season 10 of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks with scholar and writer Cait McKinney about Dodie Bellamy's “Barf Manifesto,” an essay McKinney returns to often with love and a sense of irresolution. Written in response to Eileen Myles's poem “Everyday Barf,”...
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To Build and Sustain: Publishing Roundtable – Season 9, Episode 8
The final episode of season 9 features a live recording from Momus’s To Build and Sustain Publishing Roundtable, held at PHI in Montreal on June 26. Bringing together leaders of independent publishing initiatives across Canada and the US, the conversation asks how platforms for art writing are...
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Lisa Robertson – Season 9, Episode 7
The latest episode of Momus: The Podcast features Lisa Robertson speaking about her newest publication, Riverwork (Coach House Books, 2026), in conversation with Lauren Wetmore. Robertson reads from the book and discusses writing as a process of refusal, questioning ideas of artistic "practice"…
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M. Neelika Jayawardane – Season 9, Episode 6
This episode features M. Neelika Jayawardane, a writer and scholar whose work is informed by Southern Africa’s history, and by contemporary artists and their visual worlds. Jayawardane speaks to Sky Goodden about her recent Momus feature on artist Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy (2015–ongoing), a work…
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Abbas Akhavan – Season 9, Episode 5
This episode features Abbas Akhavan, a Tehran-born artist based between Montreal and Berlin, who is representing Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale. In a conversation recorded a few days before the opening, Akhavan discusses art as an ethics of encounter, the limits of language and...
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Camille Bacon – Season 9, Episode 4
This episode features Camille Bacon, a Chicago-based writer, editor, and the co-founder of Jupiter Magazine. In a far-ranging conversation with Sky Goodden, Bacon discusses the potential and power of a “criticism in the commons,” the Black feminist constellations she’s participating in more...
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Line Ajan – Season 9, Episode 3
In this episode of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks with Line Ajan, a Franco-Syrian curator and translator and member of the editorial, artistic, and curatorial collective Qalqalah. The conversation unfolds through a reading of Iranian artist Ashkan Sepahvand’s text “Showing Without...
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Jeneen Frei Njootli – Season 9, Episode 2
Jeneen Frei Njootli joins this episode of Momus: The Podcast from their ancestral homelands in Old Crow, Yukon, a Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation community north of the Arctic Circle. Frei Njootli reflects on how life in Old Crow has shaped their artistic practice, which is deeply intertwined with...
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Luther Konadu – Season 9, Episode 1
Season 9 of Momus: The Podcast launches with Luther Konadu, an artist and publisher based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Reading from an influential book in his practice—The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press, 2016), subtitled “A Memoir of Friendship,” by Paul Lisicky—Konadu speaks with Sky Goodden about the...
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Minh Nguyen and Tiana Reid – Season 8, Bonus Episode
Tune in to a special bonus episode of Momus: The Podcast featuring a live recording from the launch of writer and critic Minh Nguyen’s new book Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam (Art Metropole & Wendy’s Subway, 2025). This event, co-presented by Art Metropole and Momus as part of the Momus Talks...
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Lucy Sante – Season 8, Episode 8
Lucy Sante joins us for the finale of Season 8. The Belgian-born American critic, writer, and artist talks about her lifelong textual engagement with an extraordinary miscellany of culture and history. Sante shares the figures that have shaped her work, from a grade-school report on Nostradamus…
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Andrii Ushytskyi – Season 8, Episode 7
In the season’s penultimate episode, we feature Andrii Ushytskyi, a Kyiv-based writer, dancer, and co-editor of Solomiya, an independent magazine founded in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ushytskyi begins by reading a short essay by Natalia Ginzburg, “The Son of Man” (Unita,...
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Re’al Christian, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Diana SeoHyung – Season 8, Episode 6
This special summer episode includes a live recording of the Spring issue of Post/doc, co-published by Momus and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The collaborative issue of the VLC’s biannual publishing series for discursive, speculative, experimental writing, and artistic practices...
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Paul Chan – Season 8, Episode 5
Paul Chan is an artist, writer, and former publisher. For this episode of Momus: The Podcast, Chan’s self-made automated doppelganger reads “Sade Today (after Judith Butler),” a piece he wrote for Evergreen (Spring/Summer 2025). He speaks to Sky Goodden about the implications of AI on writers...
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Meghan O'Rourke – Season 8, Episode 4
In this episode, Meghan O'Rourke, poet, author and editor of The Yale Review, speaks frankly about pursuing a creative and professional life with chronic illness. Joining Lauren Wetmore in conversation, and following a reading from Susan Sontag's pivotal text "Illness as a Metaphor" (The New York...
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Legacy Russell – Season 8, Episode 3
In this episode, we feature Legacy Russell, the writer, curator, and Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, an artist-driven non-profit space in New York City. As a cultural critic she has published the books Glitch Feminism (Verso Books, 2020) and Black Meme: A History of the…
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Nizan Shaked – Season 8, Episode 2
Nizan Shaked is our guest this month! Shaked is Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum, and Curatorial Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and most recently the author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022). She speaks to…
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Ajay Kurian – Season 8, Episode 1
Season 8 of Momus: The Podcast launches with Ajay Kurian, an artist, critic, and co-founder of New Crits, a platform for artist mentorship. Kurian speaks with Sky Goodden about a text by Robert Pogue Harrison on the art of the zen garden (Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, University of...
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Tiana Reid – Season 7, Episode 8
Momus: The Podcast’s Season 07 finale features Tiana Reid, a Toronto-based critic and assistant professor of English at York University. Reid is a former editor at The New Inquiry and her writing has been featured in Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among...
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Claudia La Rocco – Season 7, Episode 7
Esteemed critic and writer Claudia La Rocco speaks to Lauren Wetmore about being a “dance partisan” and how “language can nail things down in a way that dance doesn’t.” This wide-ranging conversation touches on artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Simone Forti, and Moriah Evans, through critics...
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Niela Orr – Season 7, Episode 6
Niela Orr is a culture writer and editor who has published in The Baffler, The Believer, and The Organist, among others. Since 2022 she has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine. In conversation with Sky Goodden, Orr discusses her editing as being rooted in service, and her abiding...
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Joshua Schwebel – Season 7, Episode 5
Joshua Schwebel speaks to long-time collaborator Lauren Wetmore about their shared interest in closing the gap between how art is discursively framed and what it actually does. Schwebel’s artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world, coupled with an allergy to authority. “Art…
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Carolina A. Miranda – Season 7, Episode 4
Carolina A. Miranda, a longtime L.A. Times staff culture writer who has recently returned to the wilds of freelance, speaks to Sky Goodden about looking at things from both sides now. In working on a book proposal about the year she spent in Chile following the fall of Pinochet’s dictatorship…
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Fargo Nissim Tbakhi – Season 7, Episode 3
Palestinian-American artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi speaks with Lauren Wetmore about the political implication of form through two texts: Tbakhi’s own piece "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide" (Protean Magazine, 2023), and Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near...
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An Inflection Point in Art Publishing – Season 7, Episode 2
Earlier this year, the Momus editorial team gathered for a talk at Plural Art Fair in Montreal. It marked the first time Sky Goodden, Catherine G. Wagley, Jessica Lynne, and Merray Gerges were all together IRL. The lively conversation touched on how we’ve shifted from a discourse of “crisis” in…
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Elvia Wilk – Season 7, Episode 1
Launching Season 7, Elvia Wilk, an essayist, critic, and novelist, talks to Sky Goodden about the decision to quit writing—if only to be able to start again. In discussing rejection, the changing conditions of the field, and the denuding of successful female writers, Wilk also touches on the...
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Lara Khaldi – Season 6, Episode 8
Lara Khaldi is our final guest on Season 6 of Momus: The Podcast. A curator, artist, writer, and educator, Khaldi was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and currently lives in Amsterdam, where she has been newly appointed as director of de Appel. In this episode, Khaldi speaks to Lauren Wetmore about...
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Nasrin Himada – Season 6, Episode 7
For the 50th (!) episode of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks to Nasrin Himada, a Palestinian curator and writer who is currently associate curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. "I write for my people. I write for Palestinians, and I write...
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Jessica Lynne and Catherine G. Wagley – Season 6, Episode 6
In this episode, Jessica Lynne speaks with Catherine G. Wagley about their shared love for Barbara Christian’s iconically confrontational essay, “The Race for Theory” (1987, Cultural Critique). Christian, a ground-laying literary academic who introduced writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker...
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Kate Wolf - Season 6, Episode 5
This episode features Kate Wolf, one of the founding editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a critic whose work has appeared in publications including The Nation, n+1, Art in America, and Frieze. Wolf is currently an Editor at Large of the LARB and a co-host and producer of its weekly…
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Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick - Season 6, Episode 4
Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) joins Lauren Wetmore in conversation about Māhealani Dudoit’s fundamental text, “Carving a Hawaiian Aesthetic,” published in the first issue of ‘Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal – He ‘oia mau nō kākou’, which Dudoit co-founded in 1998. Broderick, an artist,...
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Sháńdíín Brown - Season 6, Episode 3
This episode features an interview with Sháńdíín Brown (Diné), continuing our series talking to participants in the Momus residency "Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency" co-hosted with Forge Project. Lauren Wetmore talks to Sháńdíín Brown, a citizen of the Navajo Nation...
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Megan Tamati-Quennell - Season 6, Episode 2
Throughout the season, Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden will speak with participants of the Momus residency, “Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency,” created with Forge Project and led by Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa) and Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish). To launch this…
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Sky Goodden – Season 6, Episode 1
To launch our sixth season, Lauren Wetmore interviews Sky Goodden on a book that has recently got her all "twirled up." They discuss Art Writing in Crisis (Sternberg Press, 2021) which sits adjacent to an exhausting list of books on art criticism in crisis and points instead to the emancipatory...
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Jessica Lynne and Kemi Adeyemi - Season 5, Episode 10
The season finale for Momus: The Podcast’s fifth season features a conversation between writer, art critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, Jessica Lynne, and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi, an “art-adjacent academic” and Director of The Black Embodiment Studio at the University of Washington. Adeyemi talks…
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Cecilia Alemani - Season 5, Episode 9
For the penultimate episode of Season 5, Sky Goodden interviews Cecilia Alemani, the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale. After three years of research and commissioning (an extended period of preparation, due to the pandemic) and 7 months of The Milk of Dreams being open to an immense...
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Meeka Walsh and Jarrett Earnest - Season 5, Episode 8
On the occasion of her first book of collected art writings, Malleable Forms (ARP Books), Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings magazine, speaks to guest-host Jarrett Earnest about geographic isolation, the eroticism of art writing, her connection with an emerging spiritual lineage, and about a...
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Ben Davis - Season 5, Episode 7
In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects that “the only thing that has grown faster than the demands on art has been doubt that art can respond adequately to those demands.” In a...
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Arushi Vats - Season 5, Episode 6
"We are post-purity," observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded through poetics, Vat's text Exit the Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi, published by Runway Journal, is a precise yet capacious...
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Rahel Aima – Season 5, Episode 5
This month, Sky Goodden speaks with Rahel Aima, a prolific critic, art writer, and Associate Editor at Momus. We focus on a text Aima published in Momus, “Depleting Felix Gonzales-Torres” (July 2020), that takes aim at “a mammoth exhibition” of the late Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 work Untitled…
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Raimundas Malašauskas – Season 5, Episode 4
Days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Lithuanian curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas resigned as curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Bienniale, along with participating artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, citing the war as “politically and emotionally...
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Dana Kopel – Season 5, Episode 3
In this episode Lauren Wetmore speaks with writer and organizer Dana Kopel about her widely-read article “Against Artspolitation: Unionizing the New Museum,” published in September 2021 by The Baffler. In conversation, Kopel expands on “the personal and messy dimensions” of unionizing work, and...
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Harry Dodge – Season 5, Episode 2
In this episode, artist and writer Harry Dodge reads from My Meteorite, or Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Press, 2020). Perhaps best known as a sculptor, Dodge writes from inside the artist’s life and the sometimes inchoate density of a studio practice. Tracking us through...
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Emmanuel Iduma – Season 5, Episode 1
In the first episode of Season 5, Lauren Wetmore speaks with Nigerian art writer Emmanuel Iduma, who reads from “Mileage from Here: Nine Narratives.” Known for his travel and photography writing, and for establishing what he calls “a third, or shared, space between images and text,” the selection...
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Kristian Vistrup Madsen - Season 4, Episode 9
In the penultimate episode of Season 4 – across which Momus: The Podcast has been engaging writers on the genesis and reception of a particular piece of criticism – Sky Goodden speaks with Kristian Vistrup Madsen about writing Artforum Diary through the pandemic, and bringing the historic column…
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Muna Mire & Tourmaline – Season 4, Episode 8
This episode gets a jump on summer with artist and filmmaker Tourmaline and writer and producer Muna Mire. In conversation, they discuss Mire’s profile of Toumaline in Frieze (October 2020) and elaborate on Tourmaline's celebration of trans histories, queer joy, community organizing, Black…
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Nora N. Khan on “Within, Below, and Alongside” – Season 4, Episode 7
“A school will change you, and it teaches you as much about how people will interpret you, misunderstand and dismiss you, as it will teach you about a creative life.” Critic, curator, and educator Nora N. Khan reads from "Dark Study: Within, Below, and Alongside," a feature text published in the...
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Alexandra Stock on “The Privileged, Violent Stunt” – Season 4, Episode 6
Lauren Wetmore interviews Swiss American curator and writer Alexandra Stock about her scathing critique of Christophe Büchel’s 2019 Venice Biennale project Barca Nostra. Published that same year by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, Stock’s "The Privileged, Violent Stunt That is...
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Rianna Jade Parker on “Letter from London” – Season 4, Episode 5
Rianna Jade Parker reads "Letter from London: What is the Status of Black Artists in England Today?" published in ARTnews (June 2020), and engages Sky Goodden on issues of artworld access, stature, masculinity, precariousness, deference to sovereignty, and duty to one another, for Black British...
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Léuli Eshrāghi on tagatavāsā – Season 4, Episode 4
In episode 4, Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi discusses "tagatavāsā," a text centered on Eshrāghi's grandmother's art practice that interweaves Indigenous language with the vernacular of contemporary art. Eshrāghi works across visual arts, curatorial practice, and university research, "intervening in display...
About this show
Momus: The Podcast presents lively conversations on art writing and criticism. Hosts Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore speak with leading writers, publishers, editors, journalists, scholars, curators, and artists about the expanded field of art writing—why and how it is vital, difficult, political, and pleasurable. Episodes often begin with a guest reading a chosen text that has been meaningful to their own creative practice. Since launching in 2017, Momus: The Podcast has produced more than 60 episodes. All episodes are freely available on the Momus website and through platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop on the third Tuesday of each month.If you would like to advertise on Momus: The Podcast, please contact Chris Andrews, Sales Director, at [email protected].
Hosted by
Momus