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 […]

Art as Experience: Podcasts

Paul Cezanne Drawings

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 […]

Creativity, John Dewey, and Aesthetics

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 […]

Tudor Place, Washington DC’s Historic House

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.

Artists, the Garden, and Chuck Close

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 […]

A Portrait of East Baltimore

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

Colors From the Earth

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 Painter’s Garden

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.

Lynda Benglis and Sarah Cain at the East Wing

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.

Marsden Hartley, Transcendentalist

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 […]

The Gardens of Greenbelt

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.

Gardens in Spring

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

Faith Ringgold at the Glenstone Museum

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., […]

Seeing Differently: the Phillips Collection Reopens

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.

Cross-Pollination in the Arts

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.

Artists and Their Mistresses

from WOWD-LP Takoma Park, with Hosts Tom Xenakis and Sheila Blake: The more you look, the more you see – the more you love looking: and sometimes a little background helps.

hubhopper

Art as Experience: Podcasts

hubhopper