Museum Confidential Philbrook Museum of Art

Acclaimed artist Chris Ramsay’s work deals with big, universal subjects: time, space, impermanence, what we discard, and what we choose to keep. Now, after receiving an incurable cancer diagnosis, Chris is confronting the biggest questions of all.

For this new installment in our Art Fair Diaries series, Philbrook Chief Curator (and occasional roving Museum Confidential correspondent) Kate Green reports from the biggest art fair in one of the world's biggest cities. Welcome to Mexico City.

Our guest is curator Allison Glenn; we previously spoke to Glenn a few years ago about her Breonna Taylor-inspired show, "Promise, Witness, Remembrance." Now Glenn is curating a multi-venue, multi-day, multi-focused convening titled Sovereign Futures, which runs April 4th through the 7th. Per the Sovereign Futures website, various "artist-led projects will explore themes of sovereignty through...food, land, speculative futures, and histories of the place that is now called Oklahoma."

Our guest is acclaimed journalist Bianca Bosker, who tells us that -- when it comes to which topics she chooses to investigate and cover -- she's "obsessed with obsession." Bosker's latest book is "Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See." She was a security guard at the Guggenheim. She worked in a commercial gallery. She was a studio assistant to an emerging artist. What Hunter S. Thompson did with the Hell's Angels, Bosker does with Art History majors.

A recent headline in The New York Times read: To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways. There’s no shortage of conversations about museum funding models. But after reading this one, arguing that museums should be thought of more like infrastructure, it was time for another. On this episode we speak to one of the piece’s co-writers, Laura Raicovich, former Executive Director of New York’s Queens Museum. 

The Nevada Museum of Art invited us out for a live show in Reno with acclaimed indigenous artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. Futurism and speculative fiction are just two of many terms that describe Luger’s unforgettable work and the special exhibition, SPEECHLESS. On this episode we chat with Luger and Apsara DiQuinzio, the Museum’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art.