Vivian Li, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, joins us to discuss All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room now on view at the DMA.
In this conversation: the background to Kusama's work; its popularity with the viewing public; perspective on Kusama's biography and long career; smartphones and social media; Kusama's relation to Marisol and the postwar and contemporary collections at the DMA; and much more!
Christine Folch is the author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History (Princeton University Press).
In this conversation: the beverage's historical journey, cultural context and drinking experience; its economic and political context; the question of fair trade and ethical consumption; public interest; yaupon, the yerba mate of North America; and more!
Tessa Granowski is the owner and founder of Nature of Things, a new art gallery in Dallas. In this conversation: Tessa's background and influences; Lucretius and De rerum natura; reflections on the Dallas art world; the gallery's first show, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: an homage to Dave Hickey"; the importance of Dave Hickey's writing on art (see Julia Friedman on Daniel Oppenheimer on Hickey); what's next for the gallery, and much more!
Border Documents is a new photobook from Arturo Soto, a photographer, writer and educator. It is "a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces." Having grown up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in the twin cities of Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA), fascinated by how much things had changed in just a generation, Soto compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred.
In this conversation: the concept behind the book; the structure of the narrative; Georges Perec and the infra-ordinary; biography and personal experience; the new book in relation to Soto's other work; growing up, studying, working, and traveling in places from Mexico City to Oxford to Panama to Los Angeles; further reading on Ciudad Juárez and El Paso; and much more!
A conversation with Dr. Leigh Arnold, curator of Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
In this conversation: war poems by Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and Siegfried Sassoon; Jonathan Shay's books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, how veterans view the representation of war in Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now; Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death; war and politicians from the Iliad and Thucydides to Henry Kissinger; and much more.
See also: Tom Palaima, "Writing on War"
Thomas G. Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is recipient of a MacArthur fellowship (1985-90) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Correction: The two senators who stood tall opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.
Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that "‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."
Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.
In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!
Mai Wang is an assistant professor of literature at UT Dallas, where she teaches Asian American and Chinese diasporic literature.
Her first book project, The Asian American Renaissance, examines the imaginative alliances formed between diasporic Asian American authors and their nineteenth-century American predecessors.
In this conversation: How Asian American authors have formed imaginative alliances with their 19th century predecessors; Eileen Chang and Emerson's concept of negative freedom; Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart; and much more!
Michael Thomas is curator of The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, as well as From Texas to the World: Common Ground at UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art.
In this conversation: What the Bourbons discovered in 18th-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the effect of the Grand Tour; 18th-century archaeological techniques; highlights of the exhibition; artists at the Spanish royal court, and more!
Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play... sort of, by poet and translator A.M. Juster, is out now from Contubernales Publishing.
In this conversation: How Gerytades was lost and found; what makes for great comedy; timeliness and timelessness in human nature; how to approach a play that survives in fragments; the fate of light verse; literature, humor, and the underworld; approaches to translating Latin; and much more!
"Dragon Eye," Thomas Riccio's immersive video installation documenting the culture of the Miao people of China, was recently on view at the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas.
In this conversation: The process of visiting and doing research with the Miao people in remote mountain villages; cultural preservation in the face of modernity; "Form Fatigue"; an example of a healing ritual; the relationship between Indigenous rituals and Western performance; doing theater in Chicago, Alaska, and Dallas; anthropology and AI; Sophia Robot: Post Human Being; and more!
Thomas Locke Hobbs is a photographer whose books include L.A. Vedute, which was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook of the Year, and Rampitas.
In this conversation: Cities in the U.S., Peru and Colombia; domestic architecture, density and class division; negative space in the built environment; Eugène Atget and photo history; season, climate, and mood in Los Angeles; the photo book as object; and more!
Franklin Einspruch is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, by Walter Darby Bannard, and the proprietor of Dissident Muse Journal.
In this conversation: Why the aphorism?; the significance of abstract art and of Clement Greenberg; the place of commitment in art; how to teach art; the relationship between creativity, intuition, imagination, and habit; the practice of art criticism; and more!
Erika Doss is the author of Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (University of Chicago Press).
In this conversation: why art historians have often neglected the intersection of art and faith in modernism; the fluidity of religion in modernity; modern artists vs. religious artists; comparing Christian Science, Bahá’í, occultism, and Byzantine Catholicism; dominant and marginal American identities; and more!
Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty, is the author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, 2022). The journal Modern Theology recently devoted a forum to this book, with contributions from Cyril O'Regan, Kevin Hart, William Desmond, Ben Quash, and Anne M. Carpenter, and a response by the author.
In this conversation: The path from Minding the Modern to Incomprehensible Certainty; what is an image?; which figures were included in the book (and which were not but might have been); how the Renaissance and Baroque periods fit into the book's argument; the problem of disciplinarity and specialization; phenomenology in contrast to other critical theories; the relevance of Gerschom Scholem's Walter Benjamin; and more!
Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is the author of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press).
In this episode: How Russian literature differs from English or French literature; contrasting the 19th and 20th centuries; the role of revolutionary violence; the importance of small moments in shaping history; translation recommendations; suggestions on short Russian novels; and more!
Maryann Corbett's translations of three ballades by Christine de Pizan appear in the Winter 2024 issue of Athenaeum Review.
In this conversation: The poet's life and times amidst the Hundred Years' War, the Western Schism and the execution of Joan of Arc; the literary debate on the rights of women; the poet's representation of courtly love; the ballade as a poetic form; and much more!
Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Dark Horse, the New Statesman, the Hopkins Review online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award; has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website; and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. New work is forthcoming in Raritan, Image, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430) was the author of The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, among many other works.
Brian Allen, a senior fellow at National Review Institute and National Review’s art critic, is an art historian living in Arlington, Vermont and a frequent contributor to Athenaeum Review.
In this conversation: the transition from museum director to full-time art critic; the state of art criticism and the value of diverse points of view; how to cultivate a critical perspective; the state of art museums in America; curatorial trends in 2024; and more!
Bill Kristol is director of Defending Democracy Together, editor at large of The Bulwark, and the host of Conversations with Bill Kristol.
In this conversation: moving from academia to Washington, D.C.; changing perspectives over the course of a career in politics; the successes and failures of American conservatism; the most insightful political observers today; what to learn from the most successful political figures; liberalism vs. populism, and more!