Podcast appearances and mentions of Wendy S Walters

This week hear about some soon-to-close art shows around town. Today: Co-curators Wendy S. Walters, writer, poet, associate professor of writing and director of nonfiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, and Elyse Nelson, assistant curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, talk about "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast", closing March 5, the first exhibition at The Met organized around the themes of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. 

As an art critic and a museum staffer, Erin Langner was skeptical of what she would find when she visited the Las Vegas Strip for the first time in the mid-2000s. To her surprise, she returned whenever the opportunity arose, seeking to understand her attraction to this “escape” destination — and the personal histories it conjured. The architecture of the Mirage casino surfaced the vacations to Florida that bandaged her grieving family together in the wake of her mother's death. An encounter with a fake Venus de Milo during a bachelorette party shed light on her identity construction as a woman. An impersonator show evoked the rituals we create as we navigate loss. Together, the essays of Souvenirs from Paradise become a guide to holding fantasy and reality together in one glimpse, in order to better understand our impulses and ourselves. Souvenirs from Paradise was selected as the winner of Zone 3 Press's Creative Nonfiction Book Award by Wendy S. Walters. Erin Langner writes about art, architecture and identity. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and METROPOLIS magazines. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Fourth Genre, december, The Offing, The Normal School, Hobart, The Brooklyn Rail and Pidgeonholes. Langner is the recipient of a Jack Straw Writers fellowship (2022) and the Good Hart Artist Residency (2023). She earned her M.A. in Museology from the University of Washington and her B.A. in Humanities from the University of Colorado. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter and works on exhibitions and publications at the Frye Art Museum. Souvenirs is her debut essay collection. Jen Graves is a stepmother, a mother, a dog mother, a couples and family therapist, sometimes adjunct faculty, and — back when she had the honor of publishing Erin Langner's writing at The Stranger — a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Souvenirs from Paradise Phinney Books

Episode No. 571 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a holiday week clips episode featuring curator Elyse Nelson. Along with Wendy S. Walters, Nelson is the co-curator of "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition interrogates French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's 1868/73 marble bust Why Born Enslaved! and places the sculpture in the context of French history, racialization, and in the representation of Black men and women by sculptors in Europe and the US during and after the nineteenth century. It's on view through March 5, 2023. The Met has published an excellent catalogue for the project. It includes contributions from Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris Moon, Caitlin Meehye Beach, Rachel Hunter Himes, James Smalls, Adrienne Childs, Nelson, and Walters. It is available from Indiebound and Amazon for about $25. For images, see Episode No. 543. Instagram: Elyse Nelson, Tyler Green.

A conversation with Met curator Elyse Nelson and Columbia University assistant professor and writer Wendy S. Walters about Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's sculpture Why Born Enslaved!

Episode No. 543 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Elyse Nelson. Along with Wendy S. Walters, Nelson is the co-curator of "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition interrogates French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's 1868/73 marble bust Why Born Enslaved! and places the sculpture in the context of French history, racialization, and in the representation of Black men and women by sculptors in Europe and the US during and after the nineteenth century. It's on view through March 5, 2023. The Met has published an excellent catalogue for the project. It includes contributions from Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris Moon, Caitlin Meehye Beach, Rachel Hunter Himes, James Smalls, Adrienne Childs, Nelson, and Walters. It is available from Indiebound and Amazon for about $25. Instagram: Elyse Nelson, Tyler Green.

Vanessa and Alyssa discuss Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal by Wendy S. Walters (Sarabande Books). CN: Racism (anti-Black), enslavement, classicism, gentrification, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, violence (gang, gun, police), death Linktree: https://linktr.ee/dearlitpod Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Simon & Schuster) CN (so far): Racism (anti-Black, including use of slurs), enslavement, Jim Crow, murder, violence, spousal abuse, drug use (mostly meth and prescription drugs), child neglect, abandonment, incarceration, terminal illness (cancer), animal death Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions) CN: Anti-Asian racism The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw (Erewhon Books) CN: Death, suicide, violence (including gun violence), gore, medical trauma, manipulation and gaslighting, graphic language We Won't Move: A Living Archive "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway “Why Don't American Schools Value Creativity?” by Erin Crosby-Eckstine (Catapult) CN: Mention of emotional abuse in an intimate partner relationship, anti-Black racism, institutional oppression Imani Barbarin (Crutches&Spice) “Starting Testosterone During Ramadan Led Me to the Sacred in My Trans Self” by Zeyn Joukhadar (Catapult)

When writer Wendy S. Walters lived in LA in the early 2000s, she wrote a collection of poems about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. For one of her poems, she wanted to examine the idea of the Hollywood romance “and the ways in which people think that they're going to be walking into a movie

Wendy S. Walters is a non-fiction writer and poet, who holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School. Currently she serves as Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. While Walters was living in L.A. during the early 2000s, she wrote a chapbook, or short collection of poems, about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. A number of themes are woven through the collection, including the Iraq War, trying to make sense of images, how we treat the things and people we love, and the birds that caught her attention. Prophet as Slow Bird Hollywood Finches Either I Watch a War on TV You can read the poems in today's episode on our website

Wendy S. Walters is a writer and the Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: WENDY: Well, I think I'm used to being uncomfortable so I am very enthusiastic about other people being uncomfortable because it kind of makes you pay attention in a slightly different way than you would with others and, you know, I say this to my son all the time you know you have that moment of discomfort, uh, but generally you survive it. Like, usually 9.9 times out 10 you survive your discomfort. So, I think that the discomfort is a real gift in terms teaching you how to get past something that is completely internal. Other people may not recognize that you're uncomfortable but you feel it and you know when you stop being uncomfortable and the more resilience you can develop in terms of that discomfort, the more engaged I think you can be with other people who aren't like yourself. Many Americans...they associate being uncomfortable with being in danger. On the base level being uncomfortable is not having access to choosing the options that you would normally choose. And for many people that is experienced as catastrophe. That is experienced as damage and I think that is really, it's an overstatement and it in some ways reflects how much we become accustomed to being catered to. ZAK: So is this advice...make yourself uncomfortable? WENDY: Let's see, is it make yourself uncomfortable or is it if you find yourself in the space of being uncomfortable, embrace it as a moment for opportunity and reflection on who you are and what you value. ZAK: Wendy S. Walters is a writer and professor of writing at Columbia University. I want to hear your advice. Give me a call on the hotline at 844-935-BEST. That's 844-935-BEST. If you're finding this show valuable I hope you'll share it with your friends and family and maybe even write a review on Apple Podcasts if that's where you listen. That's gonna help this show sustain itself. Thank you in advance. I'll talk to you soon.

Wendy S. Walters' current projects address class and racial disquietude in the industrial Midwest; intersections between writing and design, and organic forms in the essay. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, Huffington Post, and others. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Walters is a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee in literary nonfiction. In 2018-19 she was artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for their opera, Golden Motors. Her work has been published in The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Full Bleed, Flavorwire, and Harper’s among many others.  Hosted by Jordan Kisner. Produced by Justin Alvarez and Drew Broussard. Music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud. Art by Kirstin Huber. Presented by Lit Hub Radio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices