Ann Burroughs, the museum director who stood up to Trump, Giambologna
Release Date: 09/04/2025
Allan Rohan Crite, Gabriele Münter
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 733 features curators Diana Seave Greenwald and Megan Fontanella. With Christina Michelon, Greenwald is the co-curator of "Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory" and the Boston Athenaeum. Both presentations are on view through January 19, 2026. (Theodore Landsmark co-curated the ISGM presentation.) The exhibition surveys the career of Boston-based Crite, whose work spotlighted Boston neighborhoods such as Lower Roxbury and the South End, the challenges they faced from gentrification and so-called urban renewal, and Christianity. A fine exhibition catalogue was published by the...
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Igshaan Adams, Laura Igoe
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 732 features artist Igshaan Adams and curator and Jenkintown, Penn. school board-electee Laura Igoe. The Hill Art Foundation, New York is presenting through December 20, 2025. The exhibition features work from the last 15 years of Adams' practice, and emphasizes how his work engages and serves his community. Adams tapestries and sculptures build from weaving traditions to make the routine, even mundane the subject of rich, detailed artworks. On the occasion of the exhibition, the Hill Art Foundation has published by Siddhartha Mitter. Adams grew up in a Muslim-Christian...
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Hew Locke
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 731 features artist Hew Locke. The Yale Center for British Art is presenting the first US survey of career. Across sculpture, painting, photography and installations, Locke's work considers colonialism, its power, and the ways in which we respond to colonialism and its impacts. Locke, who is Guyanese-British, particularly focuses on British imperialism and how it was constructed, including through monarchy, trade, and (sometimes forced) migration. The exhibition, which is on view through January 11, 2026, was curated by Martina Droth. The catalogue, which was edited by...
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Barnett Newman
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 730 features author Amy Newman. Newman is the author of a biography out this week from Princeton University Press. The book presents Newman as devoted to art but initially unsure of what a Newman would be, as a dedicated, almost blindered New Yorker, and as an artist intensely interested in what US art had to contribute to the US national and global project. and offer Newman for around $40. (It will be available in the UK in January 2026. Amy Newman and Barnett Newman are not related.) Newman is the author of the author of Challenging Art: “Artforum” 1962–1974...
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Justin Favela, David-Jeremiah
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 729 features artists Justin Favela and David-Jeremiah. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery from Favela titled Capilla de Maíz (Maize Chapel) through a not-yet determined date. The Favela makes the Renwick's grand salon gallery a fantastical space, complete with shimmering gold-fringed walls and piñata corncobs that highlight the role of maize in North American visual culture. It accompanies an exhibition that details artists' contribution to the US tradition of state fairs that is on view at the Renwick through September 7, 2026. (The Renwick is...
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Drawing and video, Pablo Helguera
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 728 features curators Anna Lovatt and Kelly Montana, and artist/curator Pablo Helguera. Lovatt and Montana are the curators of at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston. The exhibition examines the intersection of drawing, television, and video from the late 1950s into the 1980s. "Lines of Resolution" features the work of 25 artists, including Nam June Paik, Howardena Pindell, Sigmar Polke, and Joan Jonas. It is on view through February 8, 2026. A fascinating catalogue was published by the Menil. and offer it for about $35-40. In addition to the works shown below, works...
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Holiday clips: Andrea Carlson
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 727 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Andrea Carlson. The Denver Art Museum just opened a mid-career survey. The exhibition spotlights how Carlson, who is Ojibwe and of European settler descent, creates works that challenge the colonial narratives presented by modern artists, museum collections, and cannibal genre horror films, all in ways that challenge and depart from the US landscape tradition. The exhibition was curated by Dakota Hoska, and will remain on view through February 16, 2026. The exhibition catalogue was published by Scala, and offer it for...
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Danielle Joy Mckinney
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 726 features artist Danielle Joy Mckinney. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is presenting through January 4, 2026. The exhibition, Mckinney's first solo presentation in a US museum, spotlights Mckinney's introspective explorations of Black womanhood. It was curated by Gannit Ankori. Concurrently, Galerie Max Hetzler is presenting Mckinney's work in in London through November 1. Mckinney has been featured in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,...
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Photography & the Black Arts Movement
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 725 features curators Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis (and a cameo, of sorts, from artist Anthony Barboza). Brookman and Willis are the co-curators of at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition considers photography's engagement with the post-war cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty, and which often influenced the broader civil rights movement of which it was a part. The exhibition features 150 works from photographers and other artists who used photography in their work, such as in collage or assemblage. It is...
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Antony Gormley
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Episode No. 724 features artist Antony Gormley. It was taped before a live audience at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. The Nasher is showing through January 4, 2026. The exhibition is the first major museum survey of work in the United States. Across sculptures, models, and notebooks, "SURVEY" spans Gormley's career from the 1980s to today. The exhibition extends beyond the Nasher's galleries to include sculptures installed on the rooftops of both the Nasher and skyscrapers in and around downtown Dallas. It was curated by Jed Morse. Gormley is the UK's most honored living sculptor....
info_outlineEpisode No. 722 features museum director and human rights activist Ann Burroughs, and curator Cory Korkow.
Burroughs is the director of the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, which has led the museum sector in resisting Trumpism and the rise of fascism in the United States. Even as many US institutions capitulated when the Trump administration demanded a return to racist and white supremacist policies and practices, JANM stood by its diversity and equity foci and programs. Over the summer, armed and often masked Border Patrol agents conducted what appeared to be an operation aimed at intimidating speakers at a program at the museum's Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, including at a press conference held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The museum aggressively resisted the federal show of force, drawing lines between illegal federal actions in 1942 and the present.
JANM's mission is "to promote understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience." Its collections and programs feature art and art's history. The museum holds work by and the archives of artists such as Hisako Hibi, George Hoshida, Estelle Ishigo, Henry Sugimoto, Chikashi Tanaka, Kango Takamura, and Jack Iwata.
In addition to leading JANM, Burroughs is the two-time former chairperson of the board of Amnesty International USA, the chair of the Amnesty International Global Assembly, and presently sits on the board of Amnesty International.
As mentioned on the program:
- Burroughs' op-ed for the American Alliance of Museums; and
- JANM's "History Unpacked" program.
Korkow helped lead the Cleveland Museum of Art's acquisition and initial installation of Giambologna's Fata Morgana (ca. 1572), which had been the last of the roughly dozen marble sculptures made by the artist remaining in private hands. Giambologna made the sculpture for installation in a fountain at Bernardo Vecchietti's Villa il Reposo in Bagno a Ripoli, Italy.
Instagram: Cory Korkow, Tyler Green.
Air date: September 4, 2025.