Art as Experience: Podcasts

This is our last regularly-scheduled episode for WOWD-LP Takoma Park, although we may, from time to time, present a special unscheduled episode. After almost 150 shows, we decided to take a break and figure out where we're going from here.  In this episode, Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the history of the show, and what […]

The National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, has mounted a small exhibition showing three sublime Vermeer paintings and three false Vermeers. Our episode discusses: what makes Vermeer so good  (a little art criticism/theory) the scientific research done by the museum's conservation department, how forgeries are made, marketed, and detected, and more.

John Singer Sargent was, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe; but his obituary in the London Times described him as the exemplar of an age that had passed. He's always been easy to like, and for this reason, his reputation in the art world suffered for decades; but we argue […]

We explore the art of Robert Rauschenberg, the influence of John Cage, and two of Rauschenberg's paintings, Factum 1 and Factum 2, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in their current exhibition, Then Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900. We find a lot of terrific information in a new book […]

Hosts Sheila and Peter Blake visit the outsider/folk/self-taught art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: We are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection. This is perhaps our third show on folk art, and every time, we probe deeper into this rewarding art world.  Artists include Bil Traylor, Dan Miller, Judith […]

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.

After several visits to the Laurie Anderson Exhibit at the Hirschhorn Museum, in Washington DC, Sheila and Peter discuss this avant garde artist and her exhibit. Music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful    is the title of the retrospective of Alma Thomas at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC.  Sheila and Tom respond to her brilliant color-field paintings to explore the topic of color.  The exhibition at the Phillips traces her journey from semi-rural Georgia to Washington, DC, in 1907, then […]

Sheila, Tom, and guest Peter Blake discuss the David Driskell exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.  Driskell was a painter and the whirlwind center of energy and attention to established and emerging African American artists in the late Twentieth Century and into recent decades.

We interview local puppeteer, Rachel Gates.

Sheila and Tom discuss the Spanish painter, Juan Gris, a compatriot, contemporary, and rival of Picasso – on the occasion of a current exhibition of gorgeous cubist paintings by Gris at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Themes include cubism, modernism, John Dewey, color theory and more.

We have edited an earlier episode, from 2018, adding a new introduction to our show on Cezanne Portraits.  This episode adds to and reinforces the content on our last episode, also on Paul Cezanne, the master at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Broadcast on WOWD-LP, Takoma Radio, 10/23/21

An exhibit of Paul Cezanne Drawings just closed at MOMA, in New York.  Our visit there occasioned this discussion of one of the great progenitors of modernism.  Sheila and Tom go inside the experience of viewing Cezanne, and give listeners a unique view of the experiences he provides, and the technical innovations in his drawing […]

Sheila and Tom take on a special topic this week: Creativity.  Sheila begins with a discussion of John Dewey's anti-hierarchical formulation of the art experience, which establishes a continuum between “high art” and the esthetic perceptions of everyday life, then analyzes how these experiences are created, arranged, and orchestrated in the individual viewer's experience.  In […]

We visit Tudor Place in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, the home for over two hundred years of descendants of Martha Washington.  The family retained this house over this entire period, through the Civil War, the gilded age, the Roaring Twenties, until the last owner deeded it to the foundation that now runs it […]

Before continuing in their series considering the relation between artists and their gardens, Tom and Sheila discuss the art of Chuck Close, who died last week.  They turn then to Emil Nolde, Charles Burchfield, and Odilon Redon.

Sheila and Tom visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum – now-open – to see the new exhibit of documentary photography from East Baltimore in the late 1970's: Welcome Home: Portrait of East Baltimore. Three women, Linda Rich, Joan Clark Netherwood and Elinor Cahn, were welcomed into the churches, homes, and lives of the residents, in […]

In a reprise of a popular episode from 2017, Sheila discusses the origin, history and use of pigments and other paint materials. Guest:  Peter Blake

Continuing to explore the theme of Gardens, Sheila and Tom explore how painters created gardens and painted them.  The experience of the gardens, passionately created and tended, and the experience of viewing the painted gardens, now in museums, are related. Claude Monet, Stanley Spencer, and Gustave Klimt are the gardener-painters discussed, with a digression on […]

The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has re-opened, and we visit the exhibitions of Lynda Benglis and Sarah Cain.

In honor of Pride Week, we discuss the paintings, career, and struggles of the American Modernist painter, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943).  We also examine Transcendentalism – the wild spiritual and artistic gift from Ralph Waldo Emerson – and its importance to Hartley's life and to American art in general.

Art as Experience continues her exploration of the links between art, society, and gardens with a look at the tiny gardens that can be walked among in the cooperative community of Greenbelt MD, set up as part of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's New Deal.  The backstory of Greenbelt is a mirror of the political issues […]

In a week where Sheila Blake is preparing her exhibition at the Foundry Gallery in Washington DC, we are updating a recording of an earlier show from May 2019, in which Tom and Sheila analyze the connections between gardens and art, with a special visit to the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington.

We visit again the great new modernist museum in Potomac Maryland, the Glenstone, and discuss the current retrospective exhibition of Faith Ringgold.

We visit the Phillips Collection, this country’s first modern art museum, which has reopened for its 100th anniversary with an exhibition highlighting the collection’s great diversity. After a year-long closing due to COVID precautions, the museum in Washington DC has reopened to visitors.  In addition to great modernist masters Cezanne, Bonnard, De Kooning, Rothko, etc., […]

Our second show about artists who create in areas other than the one that has made them a name. Tom and Sheila discuss the paintings and practices of Anthony Dominick Benedetto (better known as Tony Bennett), Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. Sheila looks into the art training of President George Bush.

Sheila and Tom explore the professional, sexual, exploitative, inspirational, cooperative, and ambiguous relations between artists and their models, their lovers, wives, and allies. Discussed today are Pierre and Marthe Bonnard, August Rodin and Gwynn John, Picasso, Lucien Freud and Celia Paul, Francis Bacon and George Dyer, and Suzanne Valadon.

Today, program 101, we discuss artist couples who have been working side by side, in partnership. We begin with two couples profiled in Intimate Collaborations, by Bibiana Obler: Wassily Kandinsky & Gabrielle Münter and Hans Arp & Sophie Taeuber. We then talk about mid-century American artist couples like Kienholz: Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz; Cristo […]

Sheila and Tom discuss monuments dedicated to African Americans – especially those created by African American Artists, many in Washington DC: among them: • The African American Civil War Memorial, with its sculpture titled The Spirit of Freedom, by Ed Hamilton, • the Martin Luther King Memorial, in Washington DC, by Lei Yixin, • Public […]

A number of musicians, poets, and even politicians have seriously developed as visual artists, usually painters.  Today, Sheila and Tom discuss artists who straddle two worlds, such as poet Elizabeth Bishop, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet/novelist Henry Miller, and Winston Churchill. The poem, “The Moose”, by Elizabeth Bishop, is read.

Sheila and Tom explore the late careers of William Turner, Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Miró, Giorgio De Chirico, Ivan Albright, and Larry Poons.

Sheila examines the history of American Portraiture, from the early colonial self-taught limners, through the virtuosos of the late nineteenth century.  We focus on a family of portrait artists in Richmond, Virginia: Ellis Silvette and his children, and discuss Kehinde Wiley’s exciting and intriguing response to the Confederate monuments of that city.

In this program we discuss the late careers of artists whose work evolved into something different, something new, and something beautiful.  The artists discussed today are: Francisco Goya, Jasper Johns, Winslow Homer, Marc Chagall, Grandma Moses, and Louise Nevelson. This is the third in a series of programs on this topic, while COVID minimizes our […]

Pierre Bonnard, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Al Held, and Hokusai: these are the artists whose late careers are discussed today by Tom and Sheila.

Sheila and Tom discuss the the careers and late paintings of artists who painted to the ends of their long lives: Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois. Originally broadcast November21, 2020.

Tom and Sheila discuss the artist Philip Guston, his work, and the controversy – due to the images in his work of hooded klansmen – that has erupted from the postponement of a major Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, […]

The Art as Experience radio show returns to WOWD Takoma Radio after a haitus due to the COVID pandemic, and so does the podcast!  Sheila and Tom discuss the recent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Degas at the Opera. Degas does something here that artists don’t try to do anymore:  […]