Art Works Podcast

Anita Fields, a citizen of Osage Nation, is a renowned textile and clay artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her art reflects Osage philosophy with its connection to nature and emphasis on duality. Her work also gives a new visual language to the complexities of Native history and culture. While immensely talented in other media, Fields has been named a National Heritage Fellow for her outstanding ribbon work. Native-American ribbon work is colorful, precise, and complex. The style of Osage ribbon work is unique and Fields is an exemplar of the art form. An innovative artist, she honors the tradition while taking it to new places--for example, taking the designs of ribbon work and impressing it on her ceramic and clay pieces.  In this podcast, Fields talks about the centrality of Osage culture and philosophy in her art, her work in different media, her respect for and innovations of traditional textile and clay work, and her long and continuing artistic journey.

In 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four Confederate monuments from public grounds. Death threats, protests, lawsuits, and rallies ensued, and writer and comedian CJ Hunt thought the situation ripe for a short satirical YouTube video.  He was curious “why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.” He covered the hearings and protests, and a bigger story began to emerge—one with profound implications. The result of Hunt's exploration is a documentary called The Neutral Ground—a personal, disturbing, sometimes-funny, and informative exploration of the struggle over the monuments in New Orleans. But more broadly, the film, an official selection of the both the Tribeca Film Festival and AFI Docs, is an examination of collective memory, the myths of the Confederacy, how history was rewritten and reaffirmed, and the price paid, especially by Black people, to keep the story of “Lost Cause” alive.  In this podcast, Hunt talks about the film's journey from short funny video to a timely and scholarly documentary, his decision to insert himself as a central character in the film, the conversations Black people have been having about these monuments since Frederick Douglass, and how humor can be a great method to get people to examine uncomfortable truths.  

One of the most important public artists in New Orleans is Enrique Alférez who was born in rural Mexico of indigenous Nahua heritage.  His life spanned the 20th century, and his distinctive vision helped shape the look of the city. His figurative sculptures, fountains, architectural friezes, bas-reliefs and carvings can be found on buildings and streets throughout New Orleans from City Park to Lakefront Airport, from the Central Business District to Algiers Point. Alférez is the subject of a new biography by poet Katie Bowler Young called Enrique Alférez: Sculptor.  Young had unrestricted access to his private papers and his family's holdings; and, the result is a thoughtful, comprehensive, and visually-rich assessment of Enrique Alférez's life and work.  In this podcast, Young discusses the breadth of Alférez‘s work, his commitment to public art, his place in the New Orleans' visual landscape, his celebration of women and laborers, his time with Pancho Villa's revolutionary army (oh yes!) and why a poet would take on the task of writing a biography—even one of a great artist.

Mohegan theater artist Madeline Sayet believes that stories have power; they can do harm or they can heal. And her aim is to use story medicine: to serve people by sharing stories in ways that heal communities. Sayet is an award-winning director whose many honors include a TED Fellowship, an MIT Media Labs Directors Fellowship, and a White House Champion for Change Award. She is a playwright, a performer, and a director of new plays, classic work, and opera. First and foremost. Sayet is an advocate for and participant in Native theater, championing Native playwrights, directors, and performers. She grew up with traditional Mohegan stories and Shakespeare, and it's this intersection that informs her current exhilarating and intimate one-woman show Where We Belong. Sayet both wrote and performs in the play, which is presented by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library and is streaming through July 11. Where We Belong is Sayet's journey examining her time living in London while working on a PhD in Shakespeare and becoming increasingly uncomfortable in a country that doesn't recognize its colonial past. Yet, when she returns to the United States, to Mohegan in Connecticut where she lives, she's finds it difficult to feel grounded again. In this podcast, Sayet talks about the impulse behind Where We Belong, the challenges of performing a one-woman show during the pandemic, the enormous growth in Native theater and the possibilities it offers, and the centrality and potency of story to her life.   

Maestro William Henry Curry is a man of incredible talent, tenacity, and enthusiasm. His love of music is infectious and informs his rigorous approach to conducting as well as his ongoing outreach to community members. He grew up in Pittsburgh in an African-American working class family, and both he and his brother went on to become professional classical musicians. There was a musical lineage, even if it skipped a generation: his maternal grandfather organized and sang in a Black opera company while his paternal grandmother was an organ major at the New England Conservatory.  It's not easy for African-American classical musicians, and it's especially difficult for African-American conductors. And Maestro Curry has met numerous challenges even as he has found great success. In this podcast, the Maestro talks about some of those challenges and successes all of it filtered through his great love of music which has been a lodestar he's been following his entire life. He talks about his student days at the Oberlin Conservatory, his extraordinary twenty year run as resident conductor of the North Carolina Symphony, his working with jazz artists when he was resident conductor for the New Orleans Symphony, and his current position as the music director and conductor of the Durham Symphony Orchestra where he insists on robust programming of American composers. Maestro Curry is a passionate story-teller whose gusto is matched by his charm, wit, and humor.  

Celebrate Juneteenth with this conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of the novel Libertie.  An historical novel, Libertie  was inspired in part by the true story of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York and then co-founded of a hospital for women in Brooklyn.  Greenidge shifts the timeline to before, during, and after the Civil War and creates the character of Dr. Kathy Sampson—a widow who is raising her daughter Libertie to walk in her footsteps in a Black community in Brooklyn, regardless of the girl's wishes.  As she runs up against gender roles, class and parental expectations, and colorism, Libertie seeks to create the life she wants. Kaitlyn Greenidge parallels Libertie's struggles with autonomy to the ways Black people sought to enrich their lives and their communities in the aftermath of slavery, and she traces their ongoing discussions about what freedom would look like for Black people in America. In this podcast, Greenidge talks about writing an historical novel, the possibilities that Reconstruction offered Black people and the country as a whole, her decision to set her novel solely in Black communities and make white society peripheral to the story, and the pervasive and ongoing challenges of colorism.

We're celebrating Pride month with a conversation with poet, 2011 NEA Literature Fellow, and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown.  Drawing on biography, history, and mythology, Brown's acclaimed collection The Traditionbears witness to personal and public violence, love, anger, and vulnerability. It challenges and forces a reckoning with tradition, even it seeks to enlarge its possibilities. And it does so with language that is both dazzling and haunting. Brutality and tenderness are never far apart in Brown's work. In language that sings with lyrical intensity, Brown demands attention to the beauty of and damage done to the bodies of Black and queer people.  In this poetry-filled podcast, Brown walks us through his writing of The Tradition in particular and poetry in general.  When Brown writes a poem, he begins with sounds. He says, “Once you find the words that make those sounds, they tell you what you're saying.”  Brown gives us a close reading of a couple of his poems, explains the new poetic form he invented called “the duplex” (and gives us poetic examples of it,) and talks about the significance of Black queer poetry and its capacity to expand our concept of love.

We're kicking off Pride Month by revisiting my interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson.  A Strange Loop, his play about a Black queer musical theater writer, has wowed audiences and critics, capturing some of 2020's most prestigious awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A Strange Loop is the first musical to win a Pulitzer for drama without a Broadway run, and Michael R. Jackson is the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer for a musical. (The NEA funded the world premiere, which was produced by Playwrights Horizons.) The show is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny, and heartbreaking. The songs are often bouncy tunes that stay in your head while the lyrics can tear at your heart. Jackson has said he never thought the play would ever be produced, so he just wrote what he wanted. (There's a lesson here.) And his mission statement is "to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining." He succeeded. It was a pleasure to revisit this musical podcast: Jackson is smart, funny, and extraordinarily engaging. And I've been singing his fabulous music to myself all week. You will too!

Jenny Koons is a director on the cutting edge of immersive theater. She specializes in bringing diverse artists together to create original cross-disciplinary work through a collaborative process.  Central to her ideas is work that's both site-specific and in a reciprocal relationship with its audience.  It's of a piece that Jenny Koons has been a facilitator and educator in creating anti-racist spaces and engaging in conversations around race and equity for over a decade. One of her primary interests in theater or as an educator is making and reaffirming community. As she says,” directing is community organizing… Because it's guiding a group of strangers towards something that doesn't exist. Something that's invisible. And that, to me, feels like such an important exercise in this moment where we're all kind of careening towards something we don't really know what it is.”  In this podcast, we talk about making site-specific theater during a pandemic, immersive theater as we emerge from a pandemic, the ways organizing and theater intersect, AAPI representation both on stage and behind the curtain, and the magic of collectively making the imagined visible.  

If you think opera is staid and calcified, then let me introduce you to the work of Heartbeat Opera—a small and radically innovative company. The brain-child of co-artistic directors Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, Heartbeat Opera came into being about seven years ago. Heard and Proske loved the power and beauty of opera and wanted to create work that would speak to contemporary audiences, particularly younger listeners. To that, they focused on creating adaptations that spoke to the present, setting Carmen near a US/Mexico border-crossing, adapting Fidelio to tell a story of a Black Lives Matter activist, looking at Madama Butterfly through the eyes of her bi-racial son.  At the same time, Heartbeat presents opera in intimate spaces, so the audience can actually feel the vibration of the music which is frequently distilled into a smaller orchestra and  incorporates unusual instrumentation like electric guitar or jazz saxophone.  The results are stirring works and performances that are fresh, vital, and enlivening. In this podcast, Ethan Heard talks about Heartbeat Opera, its production of Fidelio and its incorporation of choruses of incarcerated men, the company's online pivot during the pandemic, its deepening commitment to providing a space for social justice issues, and the glorious possibilities that opera contains.

Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.”  But the series is a metauniverse, forever in production, dictating the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender and age.  Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own: he wants to be Kung Fu guy.  In this podcast, Charles Yu talks about writing Interior Chinatown as a screenplay, his desire to give a story to the “generic Asian man” we see in the background on TV series, the impact of Asian-American stereotypes in an omnipresent popular culture, and his own time spent in a writers’ room on a television series.

Painter Mequitta Ahuja has been re-visioning self-portraiture. While her large colorful canvasses have centrally positioned her own African-American and Indian-American identity, she also claims her own authority as the artist. She emphasizes the work of painting:  depicting multiple genres of painting in pictures within the paintings themselves. The result gestures to history, collapses time. and makes new meaning. Ahuja’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally,  including the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum,  Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Her many fellowships and awards include a 2009 residency to the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2014 residency to the Siena Art Institute and a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship award.  If you like to learn about the process of making a work of art, this is the podcast for you: Ahuja walks us through the making of her spectacular painting “Portrait of her Mother,” as well as her own evolution within the genre of self-portraiture, and the importance of her mentor Kerry James Marshall.

Born in Panama and currently based in New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnes is equally at home in poetry and theater.  A former I Am Soul Resident Playwright at the Black National Theater, Holnes is known for his research-based work in theater, spending hours in interviews with people whose stories unfold on the stage. A celebrated poet, Holnes’s work has appeared in many publications including Poetry Magazine, The Caribbean Writer and Callaloo. He is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a judge in the semi-finals of the 2021 Poetry Out Loud Competition. His recently released chapbook Migrant Psalms has been awarded the 2021 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry prize. His full-length collection of poetry Stepmotherland is due out in 2022. As the titles of both books indicate, Holnes poetry explores questions of belonging, bridging cultures, and building and rupturing communities. In this podcast, Holnes reflects on the different practices of writing poetry and of writing plays, the ethnographic research that inspires his work, the importance of acquiring the skill of listening both as a creator and as an agent for change, and the experience of judging the 2021 Poetry Out Loud semi-finals.  

Drummer, producer, educator and 2021 NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington is not only a virtuoso musician, she’s also a strong advocate for social justice and gender equity. She has spent her life in jazz. Coming from a musical family, she had her first professional gig at the age of ten (with Clark Terry, no less!). By the time she 11, she was a part-time student of the Berklee College of Music. And her career took off from there. In the 1980s, she worked with jazz luminaries like Pharaoh Saunders and Frank West; in the 1990s, she toured with jazz greats like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She went on the lead her own groups, and in 2014, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award as a leader for Best Jazz Instrumental Album with Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue. She brought together women instrumentalists and vocalists for The Mosaic Project tours and recordings. Her recent album Waiting Game with her group Social Science is the definition of artistic intersectionality in terms of race, gender, age, and style. And Carrington is deeply committed to empowering the next generation of musicians--founding and serving as the artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. In this podcast, we talk about her early mentors, her development as a drummer and as a bandleader, some of the great musicians she’s played with, and her advocacy for gender equity in jazz and society.  

Award-winning writer and two-time NEA Literature Fellow Camille T. Dungy is one of the significant voices in ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a challenge to classic nature poetry, which was often written by poets who observed nature rather than seeing themselves as part of the natural world. Ecopoetry dispels this illusion: “outside of nature” doesn’t exist. Ecopoetry probes the complexities and interconnections of all parts of the natural world. In a genre long been dominated by white voices, Dungy explores these entangled connections between humans and nature from her position as a Black woman in the United States. She does so with precise detail, rhythmic lyricism, and a broad inclusiveness. The author of four collections of poetry, Dungy is also the editor of the 2009 path-breaking anthology, Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African-American Nature Writing. The anthology insists that the place of Black nature poets be recognized on their own terms: as writers whose connection to nature is complicated by history. In other words, existing outside of history is as impossible as existing outside of nature. In this poetry-filled podcast, Dungy discusses the issues around the absence of Black voices in anthologies of environmental poetry, editing and organizing Black Nature, her own work as a poet, and the significance of environmental poetry.

The Heath Brothers are jazz legends—2002 NEA Jazz master Percy was a bassist, 2003 NEA Jazz Master Jimmy was saxophonist, composer, and arranger and now their youngest brother Albert, known to all as Tootie, a virtuosic percussionist, has now joined them as a 2021 NEA Jazz Master.  Tootie Heath’s talent was apparent a young age—he was still in high school when he performed with Thelonious Monk. In fact, the list of musicians who have sought him out reads like a who’s who in jazz: John Coltrane, Dexter Gordan, Yusef Lateef, Art Farmer, Anthony Braxton, Ethan Iverson. The list goes on and on; after all, Heath has performed on more than 100 recordings. But note the range of styles of these musicians. Heath is known for his extraordinary versatility as a drummer—eager to play various styles of jazz as well as immerse himself in the music and rhythms of other cultures. Yet, there’s never any mistaking Heath’s own distinctive musical voice. And it was a voice that was nurtured from an early age at his home in Philadelphia where he grew up surrounded by music. In this podcast, Tootie Heath talks about his musical roots, his talented brothers, some of the celebrated musicians he’s performed with, and his commitment to embracing different musical styles. He’s funny, irreverent, and a born story-teller with great stories to tell.

2021 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellow for Jazz Advocacy Phil Schaap is an original—a legendary radio host since 1970 at WKCR, an award-winning audio engineer with a facility for remastering jazz classics, a renowned teacher of jazz, a virtuoso of jazz history in general and Charlie Parker in particular, and, as you will hear in this podcast, one of the great storytellers. Schaap has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes, audio engineering, and production. He’s taught jazz at Columbia University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University, and currently teaches in the graduate school at Juilliard. In addition, he became curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center where he created Swing University--an educational program where he teaches classes that cultivate listening and a deeper appreciation for jazz.  From the mid-1970s until 1992, he booked musicians for Jazz at the West End a Manhattan club with nightly shows seven days a week. Phil Schaap literally grew up surrounded by jazz and in the company of extraordinary musicians who were close family friends—and he has funny, lovely, and appreciative stories about all of them.  This podcast is a great way to kick off Jazz Appreciation Month—it’s harder to find anyone who appreciates the music more than 2021 NEA Jazz Master Phil Schaap.  

Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poetry Oculus has gotten a great deal of well-deserved attention. The word Oculus comes from the Latin; it means “eye.”  It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome.  In her poetry, Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings as she examines the violence of spectacle. In Oculus, Mao presents the many ways in which Chinese people, most particularly women, have become spectacles for American audiences-- in life, in death, on film and online — objectified by a lens they don’t control.  Her poems excavate this history of spectacle beginning with Afong Moy the first Chinese woman to come to America and displayed to paying audiences as an oriental curio. In a series of persona poems starring Anna May Wong, Mao travels through time from silent films to the present day.  Mao also interrogates the culpability of current technology from an online suicide in 2014 to a murder that was a front page sensation and horror in 2012. Through them all, Sally Wen Mao makes clear the price these people paid and continue to pay as they hold the weight of our gaze, their visages a spectacle for others to consume, both visible and unknown. And the poet also intervenes—reanimating and resurrecting these women who have been flattened by history’s gaps and the narrowness of our stares.  Earlier this week, Sally Wen Mao spoke with me about Oculus, her attempt to create poetry that can speak through historical silences, the fluid line between image and spectacle, and the weight of representation.

Tana French reigns over Irish crime fiction. She pushes the genre with descriptive lyrical language in novels that are character-driven and densely atmospheric. Her first six books center on the Dublin Murder Squad, an imaginary branch of the Dublin police force. But French defies convention—instead of a single narrator for the series, each book is narrated by a different member of the squad. So, a supporting player in one book might be the narrator of another. These first-person narrations by various detectives, whose own issues color their observations, give readers a deeply personal and extremely partial perspective of colleagues, suspects, and the crimes. All of which results in the understanding that truth is elusive. Then in her seventh book, the stand-alone novel The Witch Elm, French turns this model upside down. Here, the narrator is a character who is the victim of one crime and a suspect in another. Not surprisingly, the detectives and their actions look very different from this perspective—manipulative and bullying rather than cops just trying to get the job done the best way they can. In her latest book The Searcher, another stand-alone, French moves to new territory entirely: she takes the framework of the American western and shifts it to a remote rural area of Ireland where a former Chicago cop settles by himself in a ramshackle cottage ready to begin a new life. It’s a familiar trope but French molds it into a story of her own. In this episode of the podcast, she joins us to talk about that new novel and her other books, as well as her determination not to keep writing the same book over and over, how her time as an actor informs her writing, and why she blames her entire career on Stephen King. As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.

When Nataki Garrett was named the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Spring 2019, people took notice for multiple reasons: Garrett is only OSF’s sixth artistic director and its first woman of color to hold that position. She also became one of few women of color in the country to lead a major theater. Because of OSF’s history, reach, prestige, and $44 million budget, and Garrett’s track record in developing new work and her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, her appointment seemed to herald an important moment in not-for-profit theater. But just as Garrett was launching her first full season as artistic director, OSF was forced to shutdown because of the pandemic—closing five productions only six days after opening. Since then Nataki Garrett has focused her efforts on keeping OSF vital, sustainable, and accessible to new and old audiences alike. In this podcast, she talks about OSF’s 2020 journey through the pandemic,  the country’s racial reckoning, and the challenges and opportunities presented by both, OSF’s 2021 season, and her vision of creating strategies to support artists. As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.

In July, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens was named as the new artistic director of Silkroad.  A classically-trained singer, MacArthur Fellow, banjo and fiddle-player and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music forward. Giddens is co-founder of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming  a central and historically-accurate place for black musicians in old-time music. She then went on to create solo albums of haunting beauty and power born of African-American struggles past and present. Giddens is, first and foremost, an artist determined to be of service and put her wide knowledge of different musical traditions to good use. She found a good match with Silkroad. Begun by Yo-Yo Ma in 2000, Silkroad brings musicians together from around the globe—not just to make music but to use art to have a positive impact across borders.  In this podcast, Rhiannon talks about the importance of fiddler National Heritage Fellow Joe Thompson to her musical lineage, her drive to be of service, her current projects (she just wrote an opera!), the centrality of history in her music, and her plan to have Silkroad explore the musical worlds within the US. As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.

Henry Threadgill remains one of music’s great innovators—as a composer and as a musician. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016 for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound, becoming only the third jazz artist to receive the award.  A multi-instrumentalist, throughout his career he has led ensembles of varying sizes—experimenting with instrumentation and creating new compositional techniques. In this podcast, Threadgill reflects on the vast musical legacy he found in his hometown of Chicago and the early influence of Muhal Richard Abrams and The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—a collective that encouraged musicians to compose and play their own music.  He looks back at his ensembles and the various musical languages he’s expressed with each as well as his overall philosophy of composing and making music—explaining why he believes the true test of music is in the live performance and why he eschews the word “jazz.”  Henry Threadgill is not just a musical seeker, he’s also a deeply thoughtful and funny storyteller.

In The Office of Historical Corrections., Danielle Evans weaves themes of race, memory, and history throughout her finely-crafted stories.  With extraordinary artistry, she complicates these issues with sensitivity, imagination, and wit. “You know how white people love their history right up until it’s true,” observes a character in the title story who works for a fictional government agency whose aim is to correct historical inaccuracies.  Well, Evans shows us in beautifully-realized stories with no easy answers-- only complicated questions. How do you make things right—either personally or collectively? Who gets that second chance? How do you find a past that’s been erased? How/where do you place yourself in it? These are just some of the questions animating her stories…and our conversation about The Office of Historical Corrections.    

Here’s a conversation with Tracy K. Smith about poetry, history, memory, and wonder. Smith collects awards and prizes the way the rest of us collect traffic tickets (only hers are well-deserved!) She served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of four prize-winning poetry collections, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2016 memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2018, she curated an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time—bringing together contemporary writers to create a poetic exploration of  21st century America. She’s also written the librettos for two operas and serves as the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton where she teaches creative writing.  Her writing sings from the page.  It is lyrical, accessible and crucial—combining honesty and imagination as she explores issues of race, family, and the infinite.  In this podcast, she reads and discusses some of her poems and delves into her belief that the language of poetry with its multiplicity of voices can create possibilities with wide and deep implications.  Tracy K. Smith is a voice for our time—both on the page and in this interview.  

Amanda Morgan is in the corps of the prestigious Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) based in Seattle. PNB is one of the largest and best-regarded companies in the United States with a deep commitment to racial diversity. Although people of color comprise 26 percent of its dancers, Morgan is its only black female ballet dancer—add to that her height of five foot ten inches, and you have someone who stands out rather than fits in.  But Morgan decided long ago that “if you don’t see what you want to see around you, create it." And so she has. Finding herself not picked by choreographers, she began to create dances herself; she co-founded a mentorship program between company dancers and students at Pacific Northwest Ballet School; she began the Seattle Project, an interdisciplinary artist collective that presents performing arts to the community; and she spoke at protests in Seattle about pervasive racism—calling out the ballet community at large for its lack of racial equity. Morgan is talented, determined, and outspoken. In this podcast we talk about her love of ballet—both as a dancer and a choreographer, her appreciation for being part of the PNB family, her belief that ballet has to change and embrace real inclusion from the studio to the boardroom in order to thrive, and the work she’s done to help bring that change about.

A conversation with Duke Dang—he’s the general manager of Works & Process the performing arts series at the Guggenheim Museum. Since 1984, Works & Process has been bringing audiences into the creative process of performing artists. Serving as a laboratory of sorts for artists to test their ideas, Works & Process has produced approximately 60 performances annually.  Each performance would begin with an excerpt of  a work in process, followed by a discussion with the artist. But this past year, because of the pandemic, Works & Process itself faced a shuttered theater. But the program made a remarkably quick pivot: it found a path for artists to safely gather, create and perform together again by establishing covid-free bubble residencies for artists in the Hudson Valley.  Over fifty artists have entered eight Works & Process bubble residencies following strict safety protocols, and Works & Process captured this journey in a four-part docuseries Isolation to Creation. Isolation to Creation gives audiences a rare opportunity to go into the bubbles and behind the scenes to witness the exhilaration faced by performers returning to the studio, to the stage and to each other. It’s also a chance to hear some great music and see some extraordinary dancing. I speak with Duke Dang about Works & Process and its recalibration in the face of the pandemic. Duke and I also talk about the struggles performing artists are experiencing creatively, emotionally and financially. (Isolation to Creationis streaming for free at allarts.org, and is also airing in the New York metro area on the All Arts TV channel)

Aaron Dworkin is a man of many talents: he’s a violinist, social entrepreneur, professor, author, MacArthur Fellow and member of the National Council on the Arts. In this time of a long overdue racial reckoning, many organizations are answering the challenge to interrogate how their own systems address diversity and inclusion. Aaron Dworkin is singularly positioned to speak to this moment: he has been shining a light and doing the work around inequity for decades.   A violinist from early childhood, Dworkin was an undergraduate when he grappled with the implications of the dearth of African-American and Latinx musicians in orchestras as well as  the lack of music by people of color in the repertoire of those same orchestras. Aaron Dworkin got to work and in 1997 founded the Sphinx Organization-- its goal was to address the underrepresentation of people of color in classical music on every level: on the stage, in the repertory, behind the stage, in the front office, and in the audience.  Beginning as a competition for African-American and Latinx string instrumentalists, Sphinx has grown into a force in classical music with its own symphony orchestra, and robust programming that reaches over 100,000 students and artists annually.  In this podcast, Aaron talks about diversity and classical music—what can be addressed immediately and what requires a complex and far-reaching overhaul. We also talk about his own very interesting biography and how it informed his love of music, the centrality of entrepreneurship to the arts today (he wrote a book called The Entrepreneurial Artist), and his public television show Arts Engines in which he talks to arts’ administrators from around the country.  It’s a great conversation with someone whose passion and conviction are matched by his humor.  

2020 National Heritage Fellow singer and songwriter Suni Paz is part of the progressive Latin American music movement known as nueva canción (new song).  For decades,  Paz has been guided by twin passions which are reflected in her music: a commitment to social justice and a creative approach to education.  In fact, Paz is a pioneer in the use of music to teach Spanish-language curricula. Born in Buenos Aires, Paz's was a large extended family of musicians, writers, and artists. Her grandmother painted, her doctor grandfather would play his violin to patients, and her father insisted that the family listen to opera each weekend.  Paz herself was singing and composing as a teenager. But when she heard the songs of Argentinian folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, who championed the music of indigenous people and songs about the poor, she became passionate about “music with a conscience.”  She came to the United States and began performing—alongside singers such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Don McClean, and Phil Ochs—in folk festivals, rallies, marches, festivals, and on concert stages around the world. In this podcast, we talk about her family, her belief in the power of music to inform and transform people, her commitment to children and education, and her years writing and performing “music with a conscience.”    

To honor the Winter Solstice, (more specifically, that the days are getting longer from here on in), as well as Jupiter and Saturn having their closest visible alignment in 800 years and to celebrate her recent appointment to a third term in the position, we’re reposting my interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek).  I interviewed her in early Spring, soon after the pandemic, and I find myself re-reading her work and appreciating how much Joy Harjo is a poet for this moment. Joy’s poetry is rooted in landscape and place yet is also transcendent.  In her recent collection “An American Sunrise,”  which is an NEA Big Read selection, Joy draws on Native myth and storytelling as she writes of tribal displacement, a trail of tears that sings of ancestral lands, of a history that remains present, and of a culture that’s essential.  The podcast is a far-reaching conversation about poetry and music (Joy plays a mean saxophone).  She reads some poems and talks about her deep love of poetry and language and her equally passionate relationship with jazz and music. She’s is a great thinker and lively conversationalist. So, enjoy the podcast as we say “good-bye” to 2020 and look forward to the new year!  

Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) Lora Bottinelli joins me to talk about the central place of traditional art and traditional artists in the American experience.  The many cultures and traditions that shape us a people are a strength that we can lean on as we get to the other side of the pandemic.  This is a bedrock belief of the NCTA--the nation’s oldest producing and presenting organization focused on folk and traditional arts.  As Lora notes, the grassroots nature of traditional arts—so deeply rooted in community— “can prove to be a powerful force to positive change for the country.”  Lora also discusses the ongoing work of the NCTA as it works closely with traditional artists across the country and the profound impact of the pandemic on traditional arts which thrive on community interaction. But, Lora also notes, these art forms and cultural practices have survived many upheavals in society, and she shares some interesting and creative pivots made by artists and organizations, including the NCTA, that speak to this moment.  

Theaters (and all live performance) are struggling to get through the pandemic. Most have been closed since March, and artistic directors are kept up at night with a host of questions: when people will be willing to gather indoors to watch a play together? What will that room even look like? How will theaters keep their actors, crew and audiences safe? How can theaters survive until that moment we can all come together again?  And how can theater speak to this moment? And artistic directors—along with many in the theater community—have answered these questions with wit and imagination. The artistic director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival Rick Dildine, for example, moved theater out-of-doors and gave its audience the chance to voice monologues from a diverse set of playwrights. The project is called “Speak the Speech. ” “Speak the Speech” is set along a self-guided trail throughout Blount Cultural Park. As you wander the trail, you’ll find 14 great monologues…one from Shakespeare, the others from American writers like August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry and Mary Kathryn Nagle (along with short bios of the writers and context for the speeches).  You’re invited to “speak the speech,” to feel the power of those words as you say them.  Rick and I talk about “Speak the Speech,” Alabama Shakes, and the challenges and possibilities this moment offers theater and what theater can give to this moment.   

Teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig recently published her first book Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. Rebekah, who has a Ph.D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, has been working through the ideas that appear in her book on Instagram @sitting_pretty. She grew up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and 2000s and searched to find a story—any story—that reflected her own. She didn’t, and so she wrote it into existence. Sitting Pretty is a memoir in essays in which—among other things-- Rebekah grapples with the myth of ableism which she maintains revolves around the idea of an idealized typical body that isn’t typical at all but exists only for the very few and only for a short time since we all age (if we’re lucky).  In a conversational tone that makes it feel as though you’re talking with a very smart, funny and thoughtful friend, Rebekah makes the argument that “we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.”

Culture-bearer and 2020 National Heritage Fellow Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) is one of a handful of birch bark canoe builders left in the United States. The Ojibwe is a nation and cultural community that has a deep connection to waterways, and the birch bark canoe was commonly used for transportation, fishing, harvesting wild rice, and hunting. The tradition of building these canoes had been handed down for millennia. The boats are as beautiful as they are functional; in fact, it is one of the most sophisticated inland watercrafts in the world.  Wayne Valliere is determined to keep this cultural knowledge alive and vibrant—ready to be passed down to the next generations.  In this podcast, Wayne Valliere explains how the boats are made “on nature’s time; “ he takes us through the steps of the boats’ creation and their profound cultural meaning as well as Anishinaabe ways of teaching, learning and being.  

Scott Yoo is a wonderful guide to the music and the influences of some of the great composers of western classical music. Now Hear Thisis in its second season—it’s a four-part mini-series from Great Performances. Yoo describes it as influenced by Anthony Bourdain but “substitute music for food.”  But it is a feast for the ears and for the eyes. Yoo travels to the places where composers like Vivaldi, Haydn, and Schubert lived and worked; digs into the cultures that shaped them, the food they ate, the music they heard, and of course, the glorious music that they created.  In a Covid-altered universe where performing art and traveling is out of reach, Now Hear This is a series that goes far in filling the breach for the classical music lover, the frustrated traveler, and the curious-minded.

In this podcast, we’re marking Halloween by revisiting interviews with authors who have created work that focus on monsters. We hit all the major horror figures with NEA literature fellow Ben Percy (werewolves), Max Brooks (zombies and vampires) and Kiersten White (the Frankenstein monster). All of the writers are entranced by the creatures they explore—but they also find them oddly safe, non-polemical images that inflame the imagination and  lend themselves to explorations of anxiety, stratification, privilege, sexism and yes, pandemics.

The exhibit Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle is an American epic--depicting moments in early American history from 1775 thru 1817--some well-known, others not-- often seen through the eyes of marginalized peoples. Struggle consists of 30 panels painted by Lawrence during the early 1950s during Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Lawrence is well-known for painting the everyday life as well as epic narratives of African-American history and historical figures—think of The Migration Series. But with Struggle, Jacob Lawrence presented a radically integrated view of early American history—one in which African-Americans and Native Americans were woven into heart of the nation’s story. Yet, Lawrence also incorporates their particular struggles into the work as he examines the messy work of making a democracy. The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle reunites most of the 30 panels in the series for the first times in over 60 years. Organized by and first exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, it is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–with support from the National Endowment for the Arts--where it was co-curated by Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing and Randall Griffey a Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Sylvia Yount and Randall Griffey join me for a deep-dive into the work of Jacob Lawrence in general and Struggle in particular, his great belief in the past as critical to the present, and the ways that the work of Jacob Lawrence continues to shed light on the moment we find ourselves.

Poet, novelist and essayist Erika L. Sánchez may have been a National Book Award Finalist, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow,  a 2019 NEA Literature Fellow and currently the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University, but she takes nothing for granted. Growing up in Chicago the child of Mexican immigrant factory workers, she understood early on that not everyone was able to realize their lives’ goals.  Erika, often feeling like the odd kid out, found new worlds through books and herself through writing.  And she was determined to make a place for herself in that world. After a long period of struggle, in 2017 Erika L. Sánchez had the year writers dream of: her debut collection of poetry Lessons on Expulsion was published to glowing reviews as was her YA novel I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter which became a finalist for the National Book Award. In this podcast, Erika talks about her traditional upbringing, her rebellion and her longing to see herself represented in literature (I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter was the book she wanted to read when she was 15) and the joy she finds in her first love—poetry.

Maria Manuela Goyanes, artistic director of  Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is a theatrical force of nature.  She arrived from New York City’s Public Theater in 2018 where she had been Director of Producing and Artistic Planning. Her role there included planning and supervising programming at all of the Public’s five main stages, as well as Shakespeare in the Park and Joe’s Pub.  She did all this in addition to teaching and mentoring theater artists as well as volunteering for the job of executive producer for 13P--a collective of mid-career playwrights who each wrote and directed one play which would get a full-scale production which Maria supervised. Did I mention that while she was at the Public she was also associate producer for Fun Home, Straight White Men and Hamilton?  A first-generation Latina-American, Maria Manuela Goyanes is an ideal fit for Woolly Mammoth which is known for producing new plays that are edgy, challenging, and thought-provoking.  It’s a mid-sized theater with large footprint that nurtures talent and takes chances. It’s adventurous theater—unafraid of making audiences uncomfortable and tackling social issues head-on--challenging both its artists and audiences in ways that are sometimes fun, sometimes difficult but always interesting.  In this podcast, Maria discusses what makes Woolly Woolly, how she brings the fullness to her background to her role as artistic director, and the challenges and opportunities this moment offers theater in general and Woolly in particular. Maria is a born raconteur—smart, engaging and engaged, with wonderful insights about theater. Itunes keywords: Maria Manuela Goyanes, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Pandemic, theater, equity

In Through the Night documentary filmmaker Loira Limbal looks at a home-based 24-hour day care center run by Deloris and Patrick Hogan. Deloris, known to all as Nunu, is at the heart of this film as she steps up to give working mothers—primarily women of color—the flexibility they need as they work multiple jobs and/or night shifts. Filmed over a two-year period, it becomes clear as we see the Hogans teach, feed, guide and love these children that Nunu provides not just child-care but a critical social safety net for mothers working long hours to keep their families afloat. Limbal, herself a single mom of two, also introduces us to two of the mothers: Marisol who works three part-time jobs to provide for her family, and Shanona a pediatric ER nurse whose shifts typically run 14 hours. Through the Night is an inditement of the current childcare system in which mothers are forced to make impossible choices and an affirmation of the ingenious ways people come together to support one another in the face of systemic challenges. It is a remarkable film, and Loira is a passionate advocate for the women who make do against all odds while observing a system that doesn’t work for them. Loira talks about her determination to make Through the Night, the women she met during filming, her own journey as a filmmaker, the challenges of making the film as a mother of two with a full-time job and bringing out a documentary during the pandemic.

Poet Jose Marti wrote “With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot.” 2020 National Heritage Fellow and Founder and Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe Hugo Morales could well write the same. A Mixtec, born in Oaxaca, he came to California with his mother and siblings when he was nine and joined his father working in the fields in the central valley. Growing up in a farm labor camp, Hugo quickly became aware of the dignity and poverty of the workers and of the sustenance provided by their traditional cultures, especially their music. Hugo’s musician father would often talk about the pride he had in Mixtec traditions and frequently played with other indigenous musicians for farmworkers’ fund-raisers, funerals or dances. Against most odds, Hugo went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School; but, he returned every summer to work in the fields and graduated with a determination to work for farmworkers and give voice to their culture. And so, in 1980, Radio Bilingüe was born. Based on “honest” culture by and for the people, Radio Bilingüe was the first Latino-controlled full-power FM radio station in the San Joaquín Valley. Now, 30 years later, Radio Bilingue is the leading Latino public radio network and content producer for the nation’s public broadcasting system with 24 stations and over 75 affiliates. Listen to the podcast to learn about Hugo’s and Radio Bilingüe’s extraordinary journey.

This week, the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turned 90 years old. To celebrate, we’re revisiting my 2017 interview with this 1983 NEA Jazz Master and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. Sonny Rollins has been the jazz player’s jazz player and acknowledged as jazz’s greatest living improviser. He’s always been an adventurous musician-- unafraid to change or to embrace the sounds of calypso, Latin, avant-garde, funk and R&B. His solo work is unsurpassed-- either playing solo gigs or when performing with his band launching into long, extemporaneous unaccompanied cadenzas. As he said in the interview, “I like to play by myself. And, I'd like to go out and play by the water, by the ocean. I go in the park, anyplace where I can be alone with my saxophone… I always like to put all the music in my head, create it myself, patterns, ideas, thoughts, passages, anything like that… the greatest thing in the world is to be playing your instrument… because it's you and the universe.” Sonny’s universe also included many legendary musicians including Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, and his closest friends John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. This is a thoughtful and insightful conversation with an American genius. Enjoy it.

Many women won a political victory 100 years ago with the passage of the 19th amendment which declares that the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.". The Brandywine Museum of Art is commemorating its passage and the long struggle leading to it with the exhibit Votes for Women: A Visual History funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Votes for Women shines a spotlight on the movement with over 200 hundred objects including drawings, illustrations as well as historic photographs of marches and rallies and examples of clothing and sashes worn by the suffragists. Significantly, Votes for Women works against what had been a dominant narrative: that the suffrage movement had been mainly white. It recognizes both the critical efforts of women of color and their community networks and the inability of the 19th to guarantee access to the ballot to women of color—primarily but not exclusively in the Jim Crow south. A companion exhibition Witness to History ”continues the story of the ongoing struggles marginalized communities faced when voting following the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment” featuring 55 photographs taken during the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Curator Amanda Burdan talks about creating an inclusive exhibit about suffrage, its challenges and rewards, as well as the determination, political sophistication and publicity savvy of the suffragists.  

Dorthaan Kirk has been named a 2020 NEA Jazz Master for her jazz advocacy…and it’s easy to see why. For more than 40 years, Dorthaan has been a major force at WBGO, Newark Public Radio—the only full-time jazz station in the New York/New Jersey area. She had been married to the brilliant jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk who died tragically young. After his death, Dorthaan wondered what her next step would be when a phone call changed everything: someone was starting a jazz radio station in Newark; would she interested in coming on-board? She was, and the rest is history. Dorthaan took on the role of special events and community relations coordinator at WBGO, bringing with her creativity, tenacity, a knowledge of the music business and firm friendships with many musicians. Among the programs she spearheaded at WBGO are its Jazzathons—a live 24 hour musical fund-raiser, the WBGO art gallery which supports local artists and opens the station to the community so they might enjoy the art, and, dearest to Dorthaan’s heart, the WBGO children’s concert series where musicians have been introducing children to jazz through two generations. Dorthaan is a great talker—as she will be the first one to tell you—so it’s a podcast filled with stories, memories and love for the people who make and support jazz.

2020 National Heritage Fellow Singer/Songwriter William Bell was the first male solo artist signed by the legendary Stax record label in the early 1960s. With his great sense of melody, rhythm, and lyrics as well as one of the best voices in the business, Bell played a pivotal role in creating a new genre of music known as Southern soul or the Memphis sound. In this podcast, William Bell discusses the pivotal role Stax played in his life and the lives of so many kids in Memphis. We talk and listen to some of his biggest hits like “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and “I Forgot to be Your Lover”, his collaboration with Booker T. Jones and his 2016 Grammy-Award winning album “This Is Where I Live” which he recorded under the newly revived Stax label. He is a born story-teller with a voice like velvet and a lifetime in music.

2020 NEA National Heritage Fellow and Haudenosaunee Raised Beadworker, Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) creates contemporary art that is deeply rooted in the past. Haudenosaunee raised beadwork is unique to the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the Oneida. Its hallmark is beads sewn in a such a way that they arch above the fabric creating stunning dimensionality. Hoffman has taken this art to new literal and figurative heights—creating large beaded urns for example. But while her work is deeply connected to the traditions and culture of the Haudenosaunee, her interest is in taking the form and “exploring, expanding and reimagining it against contemporary life.” Hoffman is not just an extraordinarily talented artist, she’s also, as you’ll hear, a passionate advocate for the art form and a fabulous storyteller.   ####

Last December, the Office of Accessibility held a webinar in which three successful artists discussed how they navigated their careers working with a disability. To no one’s surprise, one of the invited artists was Gordon Sasaki. For nearly 40 years, visual artist Gordon Sasaki has been working to increase accessibility to the arts for both practitioners and audiences. Believing in the fundamental power of art to advance disability rights, many of his paintings, sculptures and photographs reflect the body and how it is represented, the reality of living with a disability, and the diversity of disabilities, both obvious and subtle. Today’s podcast celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act with an interview with Gordon Sasaki about his work, navigating the art world and the streets of New York, the changes the ADA has brought to his life, the work left to be done and his service dog Maki.  

What do a playwright and a director do when the theaters are closed, a pandemic is raging, and they want to be useful? Well, if they’re playwright Catya McMullen and director Jenna Worsham, they bring playwrights, actors, and directors together virtually to create The Homebound Project, an online series of short original plays that each actor performs on-camera in isolation. The Homebound Project has been a success in every sense of the word. McMullen and Worsham have gathered some extraordinary talent—playwrights like C.A. Johnson, Michael R. Jackson, Migdalia Cruz and Sarah Ruhl have contributed new work and actors including Daveed Diggs, Diane Lane, Blair Underwood, Phillipa Soo, and Cherry Jones have brought that work to life online. The Homebound Project is currently presenting its fourth digital series (July 15-19) with its fifth and final edition scheduled to stream August 5–9. That amounts to more than 50 new plays written, directed, and performed in the past few months with everyone donating their services to support a great cause. (More on that in the podcast.) Join us as McMullen and Worsham talk about creating The Homebound Project, finding and matching actors with playwrights, directing theater virtually, how the pandemic has affected the theater sector, and the promise the art of theater holds in times like this when story-telling is essential.

Founder and executive artistic director of SFJAZZ Randall Kline takes us behind the scenes of Fridays at Five—a weekly digital series which offers hour-long concerts filmed at the SFJAZZ Center over the past six-plus years. It’s another example of performing artists and presenters stepping up during the pandemic in creative and innovative ways to share the art that keeps us all going. And—to no one’s surprise—SFJAZZ is leading the way. A national and international leader in jazz creation, presentation, and education, SFJAZZ is the biggest presenter of jazz on the West Coast—with over 200,000 customers and students going through the doors of the SFJAZZ Center each year. So, when the center had to close temporarily because of the pandemic, the organization went to work and quickly introduced Fridays at Five. For a nominal monthly fee, viewers can hear and see music performed by the likes of Terrance Blanchard, and NEA Jazz Masters Branford Marsalis and Dave Holland. Additionally, patrons still get to mingle with one another, as well as with SFJAZZ staff, board members, and musicians via a live chat. Back in April, I spoke with founder and the executive artistic director of SF Jazz Randall Kline about jazz, Fridays at Five, and the origins SFJAZZ itself, including the role the Arts Endowmen played in its growth.

In this podcast, Clifford Murphy, National Endowment for the Arts Director of Folk and Traditional Arts, introduces the recently announced 2020 NEA National Heritage Fellows. This is the country’s highest honor—a lifetime achievement award—for folk and traditional artists whose life’s work includes both artistic excellence and efforts to sustain cultural traditions for future generations. As Murphy says in the podcast, folk art has been described as “something learned knee-to-knee.” All nine recipients of the Heritage Award serve as exemplary mentors as well as inspired artists. Murphy doesn’t just discuss each artist, he also talks about each art form—whether it’s dance, song, beadwork, or canoe-building—and the culture in which it's embedded. We also talk about some of the ways the folk and traditional arts field has been impacted by the pandemic and creative adjustments that folk and traditional artists have made in response to the crisis. Murphy is not only enormously knowledgeable about the folk and traditional arts, but it's clear he holds a deep love for these arts and the people and communities that create them.

Jack Johnson is an unlikely subject for a book of poetry. But that’s exactly what poet and NEA Big Read author Adrian Matejka did when he wrote The Big Smoke-- a collection of 52 poems about Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight world champion. He held the title from 1908 to 1915 when Jim Crow ruled and white America was outraged—by Johnson’s holding the title, certainly; but, also by his propensity to live large and live large with a white wife. White America called for “a great white hope” to take the title from Johnson, and that “hope” emerged when boxer Jim Jeffries comes out of retirement to take up the challenge. The Big Smoke follows Johnson’s journey from the son of formerly-enslaved parents to the victor in the ”fight of the century” against Jeffries through the perspective of Johnson himself and occasional observations of three women who figure prominently in his life. In this podcast, Adrian Matejka takes us through his interest in Johnson and boxing (spoiler: it was his mother who introduced him to both!), reaching across a century to find Johnson’s voice and the music he finds in poetry.

Playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson's play A Strange Loop had an extraordinary year--it has won Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama becoming the first musical to win a Pulitzer for drama without a Broadway run, the first time it was awarded to an African-American for a musical and only the second time an African American received the award for drama.(The NEA funded the world premier which was produced by Playwrights Horizons.) A Strange Loop in the words of its author," about a Black queer musical theater writer who works as an usher at a Broadway show who is writing a musical about a Black queer musical theater writer who works as an usher at Broadway show who's writing a musical about a Black queer musical theater writer...as he cycles through his own self hatred." The show is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny and heart-breaking. The songs are often bouncy and hummable while the lyrics can tear at your heart. Michael R. Jackson has said he never thought the play would ever be produced, so he just wrote what he wanted. (There's a lesson here). And his mission statement is "is to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining." He succeeded. In this podcast, we learn about the strange loop A Strange Loop has taken from its beginning as a monologue to its recent full-scale production. Michael talks us through some of the songs, we learn how his career goal changed from writing for soaps to writing for musical theater and much more. Michael is smart, funny, and extraordinarily engaging. (And the music is great!) Enjoy!