About Art

Heidi Zuckerman
  • 4.8 (83)
  • VISUAL ARTS
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

Heidi Zuckerman is a globally recognized voice in contemporary art and a passionate believer in how art can make life more better. On her podcast About Art, she has real, inspiring conversations with people she finds interesting—artists, collectors, creatives, and more—about their lives, their values, and why art matters. It’s about living artfully, seeing differently, and finding joy and connection through art—wherever you are on your art journey.

  1. 6D AGO

    187. Marilyn Minter

    Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, USA) is an artist based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Marilyn Minter, Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, South Korea (2024). Marilyn Minter, LGDR, New York, NY (2023); Marilyn Minter, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, China (2021); All Wet, Montpellier Contemporary (Mo.Co), Montpellier, France (2021); Smash, MoCA Westport, Westport, CT (2021); Fierce Women, The Cube, Moss Arts Center, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA (2020); Nasty Woman, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah GA (2020); among others. From 2015 through 2017, her retrospective, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (TX); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (CO); the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (CA); and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (NY). Her video Green Pink Caviar was on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from 2010-2011. Minter is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (2006) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998). Minter’s work is in the collections of many museums globally, including the the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (CA); (MA); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Perez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Tate Modern, London (U.K); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (NY); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY), among many others. She and Zuckerman discussed shaming young and beautiful women, trust, how we take care of ourselves, making things her own, progress, the ability to copy anything, getting rid of narrative, finding out who we are, identifying people’s gifts, seeing joy and the love of making, making bad things, the reality of self-doubt, looking for things that bother you, piggy backing, and how hard it is to be alive!

    52 min

  2. OCT 28

    186. Nadya Tolokonnikova

    Conceptual performance artist and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova is the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist art movement. She was sentenced in 2012 to 2 years' imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance Punk Prayer. Punk Prayer was named by The Guardian among the best art pieces of the 21st century.  Tolokonnikova's Putin’s Ashes art installation at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in January 2023 propelled her into a new criminal case and put on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. In 2024 her debut museum exhibition RAGE, opened at OK Linz, Linz, Austria, and the eponymous performance piece performed at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 2025, Tolokonnikova has solo shows at Honor Fraser gallery (Los Angeles), Nagel Draxler (Berlin) and MOCA (Los Angeles).  She and I discuss memory, books, Environmental consciousness, young motherhood, Feminism, how to run from the police and protect yourself as an activist, equality, being a mom, survival mechanisms, freedom of thought, how criticism does not equal hate, making things better, how people are not even trying, spreading something good, how paradise is within you, radical activism, the minuscule audience for contemporary art, places of liberation, enchanted and magical art balanced with the raw, and not being dumber than AI, ideas first, thinking while walking, what’s the future of creativity, solidarity, moments of gratitude, making things beautiful, and imagining the impossible!

    1h 1m

  3. OCT 21

    185. Raina Lampkins-Fielder

    Raina Lampkins-Fielder is the Curator of Souls Grown Deep, a nonprofit that advocates for the artistic recognition and social and economic empowerment of Black artists from the American South. With a distinguished career as an art historian, museum educator, and curator of 20th century and contemporary American Art, focusing on African American creative expression, Lampkins-Fielder has worked for over 20 years in museums and cultural institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has curated and produced many exhibitions, served as a juror for artist residency programs, organized and participated in numerous academic conferences, and spoken widely on audience accessibility to the arts in the US and abroad. She holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge, England. She and Zuckerman discuss finding solace in museums, assumptions, play as fearlessness, stewardship of precious sharing, saying thank you, vulnerability, lines of life, how art saves lives—including hers, burdens of history, stories of abundance, using sound as a curatorial strategy, being a mom and how that influences her practice, how there is no sound bite for why art matters, how art speaks to the unspeakable, and overjoying in creation!

    1h 4m

  4. OCT 14

    184. Liza Lou

    Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou is widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Lou’s persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and helped to redefine previously marginalized terms such as craft, labor, the feminine, and the decorative. Reviewing her groundbreaking Kitchen (1991–1996) at the New Museum in New York, Roberta Smith wrote, “…this radiant piece effortlessly annihilates any barriers between art and craft, [and] proves unequivocally… that quality is where you find it and will not be denied.”¹ In the two and a half decades since Kitchen, Lou’s oeuvre has expanded to include numerous room size sculptures, including Back Yard (1996–1998), a 500-square-foot work comprised of 250,000 pieces of beaded grass; Trailer(1998–2000), a forty-foot-long mobile home with a glittering film noir interior; and Security Fence (2005), a chain link and razor wire fence enclosure covered in silver-lined glass beads that both attracts and repels, transforming a symbol of confinement. In 2002, Lou was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and moved to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she operated an art studio and women’s advocacy program from 2005–2020. There, Lou explored the capacity of beads to stand in for the paint medium in a body of Minimalist woven works. For example, The Waves (2013–2017) comprises an installation of over one thousand woven white cloths which cover gallery walls from floor to ceiling. Through the process of weaving, each cloth is “painted” with the residue of natural oils from the artist and her assistant’s hands. In 2020, Lou returned to her solo practice in Los Angeles and began a series of abstract, gestural oil paintings on woven, glass-beaded cloths.  Lou and Zuckerman discuss living in a state of wonder, meditating, bending the light, endurance, labor, repetition, focusing on beauty, God, the intersection between fine art and craft, suffering and pain, truth and who is “with you!”

    1h 1m

  5. OCT 7

    183. Brooke A. Minto

    Brooke A. Minto assumed the role of Executive Director and CEO of the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) in May 2023. With a career spanning over two decades, Minto has experience working for a range of museums and interdisciplinary arts organizations in the United States and abroad.   Before joining CMA, Minto served as the inaugural executive director of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (BTA). During her time with BTA, she grew the grant-funded pilot program into a robust nonprofit membership organization equipping Black trustees with the resources to bring meaningful and lasting change to their institutions.She and I discuss institutional memory, what draws us to a new community, football, belonging, stewardship, risk tolerance, audacious leadership, audience advocacy, and purpose!

    51 min

  6. SEP 30

    182. Pedro Reyes

    Pedro Reyes studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor although his works integrate elements of theater, psychology, and activism. His practice takes a variety of forms, from participatory sculptures to puppet productions. In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por Pistolas project in which 1,527 guns were collected in Mexico through a voluntary donation campaign to produce the same number of shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012), where 6,700 destroyed guns were transformed into a series of musical instruments. In 2011, Reyes started Sanatorium, a transient clinic offering brief unexpected treatments mixing art and psychology. Originally commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, Sanatorium has been in operation at Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014), and OCA, São Paulo (2015), among 10 other venues. In 2013, he presented the first edition of pUN: The People's United Nations at the Queens Museum in New York. pUN is an experimental conference in which ordinary citizens act as delegates from each of the UN countries and try to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art, and conflict resolution to geopolitics. Recently, Pedro Reyes was commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to raise awareness of the growing risk of nuclear conflict, for which he developed Atomic Amnesia to be presented in Times Square, New York City, May 2022. For his work on disarmament, Reyes received the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2021. At the same time, he inaugurated his largest exhibition to date in Mexico, at the Museo MARCO in Monterrey. In 2022, Reyes had his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Marta Herford Museum in Germany, where he presented a large body of his early work. Currently Reyes is participating in the first Macau Biennale in China, the International Art Biennial of Antioquia and Medellín in Colombia, and has a solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York. In a far ranging and deeply meaningful conversation Reyes and Zuckerman discuss relationships, accountability in art, change, the studio as a school or a guild, vicarious joy, the writer’s museum and the museum of life, hope, embracing the cringe, and understanding the world!

    53 min

  7. SEP 23

    181. Michi Jigarjian

    Michi Jigarjian is the CEO and founder of Work of Art Holdings (WOAH) and a Managing Partner at 7G Group, advancing art-led, socially responsible projects that strengthen communities. She helped shape the award-winning Rockaway Hotel’s arts-driven revitalization, led Baxter St at CCNY, serves on the Brooklyn Museum’s executive committee and the National YoungArts Foundation board (DEAI Chair), and has taught at Bard College. Jigarjian and Zuckerman discuss community building and designing platforms, interruptions, problem-solving, what the next step can be, ecosystems of athletes, perfect practice, flow, bringing the creative back into the game, what actually matters, how women lead differently, deserving to sit at the table, things that are bigger, who provides agency, how we do both, finding joy, loving to host, sport hobbies, letting things grow bigger than you, seeing actual change happen because of Art, and non-transactional conversations!

    52 min

  8. SEP 16

    180. Kate Bryan

    Kate Bryan is a British art historian She is Chief Art Director for Soho House and Co. globally where she curates and builds a collection of over 10,000 contemporary artworks on permanent display across 17 countries. She is an arts broadcaster and recently made a one hour special with the Guerilla Girls. She has been a judge on the popular TV show, Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year since its inception in 2013. She started her career at the British Museum and has run commercial galleries in both London and Hong Kong.  Her third book and first for a mainstream audience will be released in September. How to Art aims to demystify the artworld and help us all have a more joyful relationship with art.She and Zuckerman discuss art anxiety, our shared belief that “Art is for everybody,,” being helpful, cultivating taste, stress relieving impact of making art, why art is the ultimate art form, good and bad art, prioritizing the visitor, already knowing everything that you need to know, when things click, busting art out of where it is usually seen, making television about art, emphasizing the human connection, what makes artists interesting people, how there is no really conventional art career, having a great time, purposeful inclusivity, allowing art to be good for us, being honest, and being really excited to talk about art!

    55 min
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4.8
out of 5
83 Ratings

About

Heidi Zuckerman is a globally recognized voice in contemporary art and a passionate believer in how art can make life more better. On her podcast About Art, she has real, inspiring conversations with people she finds interesting—artists, collectors, creatives, and more—about their lives, their values, and why art matters. It’s about living artfully, seeing differently, and finding joy and connection through art—wherever you are on your art journey.

Information

  • Creator
    Heidi Zuckerman
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2025
  • Episodes
    186
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Heidi Zuckerman
  • Show Website
    About Art

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