The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 772 features art historians Zanna Gilbert and Andrew Perchuk; and curator Meg Linton, museum director Taras Matla, and associate museum director Steve Comba.
Along with Emily Pugh, Gilbert and Perchuk are the project leads for "Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles," a Getty Research Institute project that has, among other things, digitized Ed Ruscha's five-decade-long photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles. The GRI project also considers Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles archive within a range of historical frameworks, spotlights what it tells us about modern and contemporary art, architecture, and the physical, social, and cultural geographies of Los Angeles.
GRI-produced websites include:
"Artist, Image, Archive, City," a free digital book featuring visualizations, essays, images and more (the book is also available in free PDF and EPUB formats);
"12 Sunsets," which features Ruscha's famed photos of the Sunset Strip, including how the street has changed over the last 50 years;
The Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles Archive at the GRI;
Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha's photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard;
Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha's photographs of (other) Los Angeles streets;
Digitized images from the collection.
On the second segment, we discuss the dispersal of artist Steve Roden's estate with curator Meg Linton, who has advised the estate, University of Maryland Art Gallery director Taras Matla, and Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College associate director Steve Comba. Roden was a Los Angeles-area-based artist who worked in sound, sculpture, painting, and other media, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 59. The Roden estate has recently dispersed works to museums all over the United States, including those represented on this week's program, as well as to the Grunwald Center at the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Ruby City, San Antonio, and more. Roden created sound for The MAN Podcast in 2011.
Air date: August 20, 2026.

Episode No. 771 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a summer clips episode featuring art historian Michael W. Cole.
Princeton University Press has just published Cole's Sofonisba's Lesson, New Edition: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work. The book updates Cole's 2020 edition of the book, an assessment of Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), a pathbreaking painter who substantially made it possible for women to be students of art. Bookshop and Amazon offers Sofonisba's Lesson for $63-68.
Cole's book considers Sofonisba Anguissola's art, how her background, teaching and learning were important to her career and art, and how her relationships with her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, Michelangelo and a series of royals and royal courts resulted in her work — and in work attributed to her.
This new, expanded volume offers new considerations of paintings whose status has been uncertain, and provides an up-to-date illustrated catalogue of over 200 known paintings and drawings that have been associated with Sofonisba. Cole is a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.
This episode was taped in 2020, when Princeton published the first edition of the book. For images, see Episode No. 457.
Air date: August 13, 2026.

Episode No. 770 features former museum director,  former Association of Art Museum Directors president, and Souls Grown Deep president Maxwell L. Anderson, and Oakland Museum of California director Lori Fogarty.
With the Trump administration and its Congressional allies having threatened, diminished, or attacked national cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center, and increasingly the Smithsonian Institution, Anderson discusses whether the sector's response to government hostility has been appropriate. The first, and perhaps only museum to speak out after the most recent Trump administration attacks on Smithsonian museums and the directors was the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. (JANM will be hosting National Museum of American History director Anthea Hartig, the director the administration has most recently attacked, for a live program on August 22.) The Association of Art Museum Directors has not spoken about administration attacks on federal museum institutions since this December 2025 statement. The American Alliance of Museums "condemned" the Trump administrations attacks nearly two weeks after JANM issued its statement.
Read and/or subscribe to Anderson's Art Scoping Substack.
Museums also do internal work to meet our moment. Fogarty joins the program to discuss how museums and their staffs best work within their community and in ways that advance their communities values, especially in ways that go beyond narrow, essentializing approaches to administration, exhibitions, and more.
Read Fogarty's recent The Art Newspaper op-ed, "Museums are civic institutions. It's time we acted like it."
Air date: August 6, 2026.

Episode No. 769 features a conversation with Betye Saar recorded in 2016. Saar died on Sunday a few days short of her one hundredth birthday.
Saar, known especially for her use of assemblage and her often pioneering address of complicated and often troubling US, and diasporic African and Caribbean histories, was one of the most influential artists of the last 60 years. Generations of artists, including Saar's artist-daughters Lezley and Alison, have found Saar's work foundational.
Even though Saar was recognized around the world as among the most influential artists of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century United States, remarkably, shamefully, and revealingly, none of Saar's hometown art museums ever launched a retrospective of her work.
Saar was a guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast in 2016 on the occasion of a survey of her work organized by De Domijnen (which was formerly known as Museum Het Domein) in Sittard, the Netherlands in partnership with Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art. For images of artworks discussed in this conversation, see Episode No. 222.
Air date: July 30, 2026.

Episode No. 768 features artist Derrick Adams.
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston is presenting "Derrick Adams: View Master" through September 7. It is the first mid-career survey of Adams' twenty-year career. The exhibition was curated by Dexter Wimberly and Tessa Bachi Haas. An Adams monograph was published by Monacelli in association with Gagosian, an art dealership chain, last year in anticipation of the exhibition.
Adams' work celebrates contemporary Black Life in works that emphasize joy and leisure. Among the institutions presenting solo exhibitions of his work are the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. His work is in collection of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Adams' hometown Baltimore Museum of Art.
Series of Adams' work discussed on the program:
Floater;
Figure in the Urban Landscape;
Profile Pics; and
Family Portraits.
Instagram: Derrick Adams, Tyler Green.
Air date: July 23, 2026.