Podcast · Arts & Books

Hyperallergic

by Hyperallergic · English · Arts & Books

News, developments, and stirrings in the art world with host Hrag Vartanian, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic.

New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 58 min
Latest: 3 Jun 2025
Language: English

Latest episode

3 Jun 2025 · 52 min

Alan Michelson Talks Dinosaurs, Murderous US Presidents, and Platinum-Gilded Native “Knowledge Keepers”

As a child, Alan Michelson often rode the T past sculptor Cyrus Edward Dallin’s “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (1908) outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). He was riveted by the statue’s grand horse and the powerful yet melancholy figure wearing a striking Plains Indian war bonnet. It was only in his 20s that the artist learned that he had been separated through adoption from his own Native heritage and Mohawk birth family in the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. He soon learned that the Dallin sculpture he marveled at in childhood symbolized the nefarious “Vanishing…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E116 · 21 May 2025 · 42 min
The French Lesbian Curator & Spy Who Saved Art from the Nazis
When World War II broke out, museums across France took their most precious artworks off the walls and hid them away for safekeeping from bombing. But no one suspected the greatest threat to these treasures: the Nazis’ massive art looting scheme , wherein they sought to plunder museums to bolster the image of their own galleries, take modernist (or, in their words, “ degenerate ”) art down from view, and disenfranchise Jewish art collectors — while raking in money for themselves along the way. When Nazis began storing stolen pieces in the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, none of them realized…
E115 · 6 May 2025 · 49 min
Ancient Art, Wages, and Strikes: A 3000-Year-Old History of Labor
At Hyperallergic , we take pride in covering protesting museum workers who take to the streets. But few realize that these workers are taking part in a practice that’s as old as some of the ancient artifacts in their institutions. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, we’re joined by professor, public historian, and Hyperallergic contributor Sarah E. Bond, who shares her knowledge on labor organizing in the ancient world, which stretches back to the earliest recorded strike, which took place in 1157 BCE in the Ancient Egyptian artisan’s village of Deir el-Medina. We learn that it’s…
E114 · 22 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 35 min
Lady Pink, the Queen of New York City Graffiti
In 1971, a seven-year-old Sandra Fabara moved with her family from a city nestled in an Ecuadorian rainforest to the dense brick landscape of Brooklyn. By the time she was a teenager, she had gone from climbing trees to hopping the fences of the MTA train yards. Soon, she was known as the queen of New York City graffiti: the one and only Lady Pink. If you’re as mesmerized by the 1970s and ’80s world of New York City graffiti as we are, then you’ve seen her before, immortalized in classic photos by Martha Cooper and as one of the stars of Charlie Ahearn’s classic feature film Wild Style…
E113 · 10 Apr 2025 · 49 min
Street Stories: Graffiti and the Legacy of Martin Wong
The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) holds what is arguably the most important collection of early graffiti art and ephemera, amassed by Martin Wong, a queer Chinese-American self-taught painter who wore cowboy hats and, for a time, paid for his lodging in a dingy Lower East Side hotel room by working as a night porter. Drawn to the bustling art scene of late 1970s New York, Wong developed a tight network of friends in what may have seemed like an unexpected community at the time: graffiti writers, who would eventually be recognized as creating an entirely new style of art, emulated in…
E112 · 25 Mar 2025 · 38 min
Talking a Big Game: The Art of Sports and the Sport of Art
We’ve been taught by high school movies and pop culture at large that art and sports are diametrical opposites. You know the trope: The sporty jocks and the nerdy theater kids are all relegated to separate lunch tables, and never the twain shall meet, save the occasional High School Musical . But a recent exhibition, Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture , takes this stereotype to the mat. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Hrag Vartanian sits down with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) curator Jennnifer Dunlop Fletcher and independent curator and former Hyperallergic…
E111 · 11 Mar 2025 · 38 min
Nick Cave Is Serving You Everything
One of seven brothers, Nick Cave grew up watching his family create magic out of scraps. His aunts would cut paper bags into patterns, and in just one day, make an entire new outfit to wear that night. Since then, the artist has been dedicated to studying how to lay ornamental patterns on the body. Leading the way for a current groundswell of adornment in art, Cave is known for highly decorated, maximalist works, particularly in his “Soundsuits,” which are both unapologetically joyous and respond to the deep pain of police brutality against Black people. His newest body of work, on view in…
E110 · 25 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 4 min
The Boys in the (Klan) Hood: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston’s Legacy
Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, came from vastly different backgrounds. But a current show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their perspectives and sensibilities blend seamlessly. Both were maligned for their figurative, comic book-influenced styles: Guston by the elite art world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when his mother burned his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards and Dungeons and Dragons…
E109 · 17 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 33 min
Joyce Kozloff’s Patterns of Protest
In 1973, gallerist Tibor de Nagy gave Joyce Kozloff a call. His voice quivered as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a searing review of her latest work. Greenberg had scoffed at the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, and said that it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that was a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor freaked out” and asked her “to take it away.” Greenberg had unwittingly dismissed the first of the artist's paintings…
E108 · 10 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 31 min
Karen Wilkin: Critiquing the New Masters
In the late 1950s, a Manhattan-born college student was running from an art history course at Barnard to a George Balanchine ballet practice at the storied School of American Ballet on 82nd Street and Broadway. Soon, she began to make connections between the old-school Russian ballet instructors who taught her “ferocious point class” and were constantly “aspiring to an abstract ideal,” if a ruthless one, and the extending lines of Anthony Caro’s sculptures striving toward an arabesque. These rigorous studies in dance informed the work of the leading critic and curator of 20th-century…
E107 · 4 Dec 2024 · 2 hr 12 min
Guantánamo Bay and the Art of Resistance
This August, journalist Moustafa Bayoumi broke the story that the first photo of a detainee in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site had been declassified. It shows an emaciated Ammar al-Baluchi, standing shackled and naked in a starkly white room. Subjected to years of torture, according to CIA protocol, the photo of the Pakistani detainee was meant “to document his physical condition at the time of transfer.” In a recent Hyperallergic opinion piece , Bayoumi reflected on the dark history of various regimes’ use of similar “atrocity photography” — a genre of memories they create…
E106 · 26 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 11 min
Lucy Lippard’s Life on the Frontlines of Art
When Lucy Lippard left New York City for the tiny village of Galisteo, New Mexico, some were shocked: How could this giant of 20th-century art criticism, this leader in the fight for feminism and equitable representation in museums, leave the so-called “center of the art world” for such a rural area? Lippard is renowned not only for her strident activism but also for changing the game of art criticism itself. The author of a whopping 26 books, Lippard was a co-founder of both the standby press for artist books, Printed Matter, and the legendary feminist Heresies Collective. She broke down…
E105 · 19 Nov 2024 · 58 min
Robber Barons, Marcel Duchamp, and Big Museums’ Dirty Little Secrets
In 1915, Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel at a hardware store in New York City. He inscribed his signature and the date on its wooden handle. On the evening this episode is released, the fourth version of this classic “ready-made,” which he titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” will be auctioned off at Christie’s during their 20th Century Evening Sale . It’s estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million. How could a simple snow shovel be valued at such a steep price? Was Duchamp an unmatched genius, or a product of some of the biggest museums’ dirtiest little secrets: the results of…
E104 · 25 Jul 2024 · 43 min
Silver Skeleton Deities and Political Mind Games: What’s Happening at the Venice Biennale?
The sports world may be on the edge of their seats as we draw close to the 2024 Olympics in Paris. But the “Olympics of the art world” is already well underway in Italy: Hundreds of thousands of art lovers are flocking to the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 24. This massive exhibition has been held every two years with very few exceptions since 1895, when it was inaugurated as the world’s first art biennial. Visitors who devote a whole week of their time will still only be able to take in a sliver of the art on display, whether it’s at the central exhibition , the collateral…
E103 · 30 May 2024 · 1 hr 1 min
Shelley Niro's 500 Year Itch
Shelley Niro (Kanien’kehaka) grew up watching her father craft faux tomahawks to sell to tourists who flocked to her birthplace, Niagara Falls. In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, she reflects on how witnessing him create these objects planted the seeds for her brilliant multidisciplinary art practice spanning film, sculpture, beading, and photography. She joined us in our Brooklyn studio for an interview, where she reflected on growing up in the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Native artists she discovered on her dentist’s wall but rarely encountered in a museum before the…
E102 · 3 May 2024 · 58 min
Lee Quiñones: Graffiti and the Gallery
Anyone who remembers New York City’s “ golden age ” of graffiti in the late ’70s and early ’80s knows about the lion spray-painted on the handball court at Corlears Junior High School, roaring next to metallic blue letters spelling the word “Lee.” In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, we speak with its creator, Lee Quiñones, whose paintings of dragons, lions, and Howard the Duck on over 120 MTA train cars were part of the movement that brought light and color to the otherwise dingy, dark, and drastically underfunded subway system. Quiñones’s paintings caught the attention of art…
E101 · 4 Apr 2024 · 1 hr 7 min
From Blog to Book
Since 2009, Hyperallergic has published tens of thousands of articles about art. But who are the writers behind these posts? And what drives them to write about art of all things? Many of the authors who have passed through our virtual hallways have gone on to do incredible things, including publishing books on topics that they first wrote about or more fully developed through articles in Hyperallergic . In 2022, we held an event called “From Blog to Book” at Brooklyn’s pinkFrog cafe, where our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian asked three of our writers to tell us about the journeys that took…
E100 · 21 Mar 2024 · 1 hr 30 min
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: The Story of One of the Few Artists at the Stonewall Uprising
We are thrilled to be back with a new episode of the Hyperallergic podcast. For our one hundredth episode, we spoke with legendary collage and mixed media artist Tommy Lannigan-Schmidt. His works, made from crinkly saran wrap and tin foil, emulate the gleam of precious metals and jewels in Catholic iconography. They reference his upbringing as a working class kid and altar boy in a Catholic community in Linden, New Jersey, where tin foil was an expensive luxury they could rarely afford. But they also hold memories of where he found himself as a teenager: the LBGTQ+ street life and art…
E99 · 6 May 2022 · 1 hr 14 min
The Cartoonist the US Right-Wing Political Establishment Loves to Hate
Eli Valley is one of the best American cartoonists and the political elite can’t stand his viral comics that pack a punch.
E98 · 29 Apr 2022 · 1 hr 19 min
Artists Tali Hinkis and Daniel Temkin Discuss Digital Combines
Two new media-based artists have a conversation about the new energy in the contemporary art field and the limitations of categories for artists.
E97 · 21 Apr 2022 · 56 min
Tamara Lanier's Fight for the Photographs of Her Enslaved Ancestors at Harvard
In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, Lanier talks about her continuing quest for justice that includes the return of the daguerreotypes depicting her enslaved ancestors.
E96 · 21 Jul 2021 · 24 min
Understanding Why a Harvard Museum Will Return Standing Bear’s Tomahawk
Attorney Brett Chapman explains why this Ponca heirloom should be returned to Native Americans.
E95 · 16 Jul 2021 · 1 hr 36 min
Audrey Flack and the Last of the New York School
For over 70 years, Flack has been making art in New York and boy does she have stories to tell.
E94 · 31 May 2021 · 53 min
Collector Tim Kang Talks About His Love of NFTs
The founder of the Sevens Foundation, Kang calls himself a “NFT thought leader” who is advocating global and equal opportunities for artists.
E93 · 11 May 2021 · 44 min
Creative Time’s Diya Vij Helps Launch an Art World Think Tank
The unorthodox program will gather together a group of thought leaders for 10 months to reflect and advise on happenings in the art community.
E92 · 30 Mar 2021 · 49 min
After Decades of Selling New Media Art, Gallerist Steven Sacks Offers His Take on NFTs
Bitforms gallery has been on the cutting edge of digital art for decades, so what does its founder think about NFTs?
E91 · 9 Mar 2021 · 53 min
Lindsay Howard Talks About the Burgeoning Market for NFTs
As head of the Foundation, one of the prominent platforms selling NFTs today, Howard has taken a more curated approach to the emerging field.
E90 · 2 Mar 2021 · 48 min
The World of NFTs, Explained by Digital Artist Addie Wagenknecht
While media outlets suggest non-fungible tokens are a panacea for artists, we ask a veteran of the digital realm to offer a more tempered take.
E89 · 27 Feb 2021 · 1 hr 9 min
A Photographer Documents Post-war Artsakh
Scout Tufankjian spent a month in post-war Artsakh to witness the controversial ceasefire that would involve the removal of lands from the sovereignty of the Republic of Artsakh.
E88 · 8 Feb 2021 · 26 min
MoMA’s Leon Black Problem and Cuban Artists Under Siege
Hyperallergic’s news team gets together to go over the highlights of our coverage from the past week.

About Hyperallergic

News, developments, and stirrings in the art world with host Hrag Vartanian, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic.

Hyperallergic is a English arts & books podcast from Hyperallergic. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Hyperallergic
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 58 min
Latest episode: 3 Jun 2025
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1112233641

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