Episodes
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Return
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
After 50 years of making music, singer, songwriter, and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland's genre-bending compositions are finally being celebrated. When he left New York in the early 1960s, he believed the future he was fixated on could not exist for him in the US. Copeland, a transgender black man whose obscure electronic sound and non-binary beliefs were ahead of their time, continued to create music from abroad while acting on the Canadian children’s show Mr. Dressup and writing for Sesame Street. On this episode of MoMA’s Magazine Podcast, Taja Cheek, assistant curator at MoMA PS1, sat down with Copeland the day after his sold out VW Sunday Sessions performance at MoMA PS1, to discuss his first return to the US in over 50 years, his father’s piano, and why he considers himself a grandparent to young creatives.
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
From Storage to Gallery: Florine Stettheimer’s "Four Panel Screen"
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Many mysteries surround Florine Stettheimer’s Four Panel Screen: its title, the date it was made, and even how it should be displayed. In the latest episode of the Magazine podcast, we spoke to the team that rediscovered this work in MoMA’s storage facility, including senior curator Anne Umland, curatorial assistant Jenny Harris, and curatorial fellow Charmaine Branch. Senior conservator Anny Aviram joined the conversation to detail the extensive efforts made to restore the work after years in storage. Hear more about this work, the world of Stettheimer, and the journey to document and uncover the many lives of her Four Panel Screen.
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Declaration of Independents: John Cassavetes
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
In 1980, MoMA’s senior film curator Laurence Kardish organized a comprehensive retrospective of actor/director John Cassavetes’s career. The retrospective gave a second life to underseen films like Opening Night and offered a holistic overview of an artist that, as Kardish puts it, describes “the whole glorious arc of American cinema.” In this podcast episode, we spoke to Kardish and Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, about Cassavetes and his relationship with MoMA.
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Books that Matter: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
For our first installment of Books that Matter, we read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Hartman is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. For the last few decades, she’s been writing about and analyzing the afterlife of slavery in such books as Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Her most recent book, Wayward Lives, follows the lives of young black women at the beginning of the 20th century in New York and Philadelphia, and the ways that they tried to break free from imposed and invisible forms of servitude. It’s unlike any history book we’ve read before.
Wednesday Apr 15, 2020
Art in the Age of Putin with Masha Gessen
Wednesday Apr 15, 2020
Wednesday Apr 15, 2020
Being an artist or a writer in Russia has never been particularly easy, or free of risk—especially during the 19 years since Putin became the nation’s president. For this podcast episode, writer Alex Halberstadt spoke with Masha Gessen, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, including 2017’s National Book Award–winning The Future Is History. They talked about the legacies of the Soviet period, self-censorship, and what the experiences of Russia’s artists can teach us about the dangers of tyranny everywhere—a subject touched on in Gessen’s forthcoming book, Surviving Autocracy.