Art as Experience: Podcasts

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 split or doubled self.

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: https://portraitcompetition.si.edu/exhibition/2022-outwin-boochever-portrait-competition/

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 ethical purposes are in alignment.

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:

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…

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 time-based media by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the […]

We examine the practice of learning to draw, the advantages to non-professionals in learning to draw, and some tips.

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]

Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss the use of photography by painters.

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 brought up on […]

Joan Mitchell at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss Abstract Expressionism.

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 our thesis that Picasso was […]

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.

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 Giovanni and Langston Hughes.

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.