The MoMA Magazine Podcast

Harry Belafonte on Charles White

Harry Belafonte once wrote that artist Charles White's work “is a testimony to the vitality of American culture.” In this conversation with WQXR host Terrance McKnight, who worked with curator Esther Adler to select music and other audio for Charles White: A Retrospective, Belafonte describes his relationship with White and their commitment to celebrating and advancing black culture.

Rosanne Cash, the River, and the Thread

Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash recently created a playlist to accompany Taking a Thread for a Walk, an exhibition of textiles and fiber art from MoMA’s collection. We spoke with her about her thoughts in choosing these songs and about the connections between weaving, making art, and writing music.

Tess Taylor on Finding Poetry in Dorothea Lange

Across her long career, pioneering photographer Dorothea Lange grappled with the relationship between words and pictures, the subject of MoMA’s recent exhibition. The Creative Team’s Prudence Peiffer sat down with poet Tess Taylor to discuss Taylor’s engagement with Lange and words in her book, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.

Must Love Art

Love can be complicated, messy, and inspiring—and has shaped the history of art more than we knew. In this episode of the Magazine podcast, we’re bringing love stories to light. From Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, who “felt magnified” by one another as struggling young artists in New York; to a recent love story sparked at the Museum; to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who found that love could conquer fate and even death, these stories prove that love can mean many things, and each definition can affect the way we make, view, and understand art.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Return

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.

From Storage to Gallery: Florine Stettheimer’s "Four Panel Screen"

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.

Declaration of Independents: John Cassavetes

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.

Books that Matter: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

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.

Art in the Age of Putin with Masha Gessen

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.