Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
David Zwirner
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What we talk about when we talk about art. Exceptional makers and thinkers across art, literature, film, fashion, music, and more come together to talk about what it means to make things today.
Available episodes
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Nov 21, 2023
Olympia Comes to New York
What does it mean to a painter of modern life? Helen & Steve Locke discuss artistic rivalry, leisure, and labor politics in Manet/Degas, a historic exhibition pairing two giants of the 19th century, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 7, 2024.
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Nov 8, 2023
Criticism for Difficult Times | With Helen Molesworth
In dark times, reading criticism can be a ballast. In this mini-episode, Helen and Steve Locke return to some of their favorite texts and writers, from Walter Benjamin to W.E.B. DuBois.
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Sep 26, 2023
The Legacy of Ruth Asawa | Special Episode
On the occasion of Ruth Asawa’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, artists EJ Hill and Sarah Sze talk with Helen Molesworth about Asawa’s legacy. This episode features the late artist’s voice, courtesy of audio from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the California State University, Sacramento.
Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was a sculptor, educator, and arts activist who challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the world since the early 1950s.
Ruth Asawa Through Line is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through January 15, 2024.
EJ Hill is a visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His show Brake Run Helix is on view at MASS MoCA through January 2024.
Sarah Sze is an artist based in New York. Her solo exhibition Timelapse just closed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and her show Metronome will open in November at OGR Torino, and at Aarhus, Denmark in 2024; she also has a forthcoming solo show opening at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2024.
Featured audio: Oral history interview with Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier, 2002 June 21-July 5. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and Japanese American Archival Collection, JA 70 [Florin JACL Oral History Project.] Donald & Beverly Gerth Special Collections & University Archives. California State University, Sacramento.
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Sep 13, 2023
Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Helen Molesworth | Special Episode
A special live episode hosted by Helen Molesworth, recorded in July at David Zwirner Los Angeles during Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, the presentation is now on view at David Zwirner New York through October 28th.
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May 10, 2023
The Yayoi Kusama Phenomenon (Re-run from Season 2)
On the occasion of Yayoi Kusama’s new exhibition at David Zwirner New York, we revisit a conversation on the legendary artist’s effect on culture at large with two experts on art in the digital landscape: Jia Jia Fei, a digital strategist for the art world, and Christian Luiten, founder of the popular digital platform Avant Arte.
I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers will be on view at 535 and 519 West 19th street through July 21st, 2023.
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Apr 23, 2023
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Helen Molesworth on Gerhard Richter | Special Episode
In this live episode, Helen and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh discuss his new book, Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History. This conversation was recorded in the exhibition Gerhard Richter, on view at David Zwirner through April 29th.
Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History is now available wherever books are sold.
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Apr 11, 2023
How Picasso Was Sold to America | Special Episode
On the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, Helen speaks to the writer Hugh Eakin about his new book, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, a behind-the-scenes look at the dealers, writers, and curators who helped bring the artist—and Modernism—into the mainstream.
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Mar 21, 2023
Episode 56 | Barbara Smith and Meg Onli
Helen speaks to the legendary Black lesbian feminist scholar Barbara Smith and Meg Onli, co-curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, about identity politics in the art world today, the role of criticism, and questions of cultural appropriation.
Barbara Smith is the 2022-23 Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College, and you can donate to her work at The Smith Caring Circle.
Meg Onli is the curator of Carolyn Lazard: Long Take, on view at the ICA Philadelphia until July 9th, and the co-curator of Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, on view at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin through July 30th.
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Mar 14, 2023
Episode 55 | Nicholson Baker
Helen talks to writer Nicholson Baker about how history is written, and the continued relevance of his World War II book Human Smoke (2008). Baker is the author of numerous books, including Vox (1992) and The Mezzanine (1988) and was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
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Mar 7, 2023
Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton (Re-run from Season 6)
We revisit one of the most popular episodes of Season 6, a conversation with the artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Petyon, on the occasion of their recently announced solo debuts with the gallery. Rirkrit’s show The Shop opens at David Zwirner Hong Kong March 20th, 2023, and Elizabeth’s show Angel opens at David Zwirner London on June 7th, 2023
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Feb 28, 2023
Episode 54 | Jonathan Anderson
Creative Director of LOEWE and founder of JW Anderson, Jonathan Anderson, speaks with Helen about his innovative approach to fashion, from collections that are equal parts cultural commentary and artistic play, to pushing gender boundaries and materiality, to redefining the word “luxury.” Jonathan and Helen sit down to break open the divisions between craft and art, creation and appropriation, and high and low culture.
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Feb 21, 2023
Episode 53 | Cecilia Alemani
A post-mortem on the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, with curator Cecilia Alemani. Cecilia and Helen Molesworth discuss the unique challenges of mounting an exhibition at scale in the COVID era and what it was like being the first Italian woman to curate a Biennale.
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Feb 14, 2023
Episode 52 | Sarah Schulman
The novelist, playwright, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman discusses her most recent book, Let the Record Show, A Political History of ACT UP New York [1987-1993], a landmark document of the activist response to the AIDS crisis. Schulman describes the triumphs, challenges, and simultaneous histories of ACT UP, and what they teach us about movements in general.
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Feb 7, 2023
Episode 51 | Jon Gray (Ghetto Gastro)
Jon Gray, co-founder of the Bronx-based collective Ghetto Gastro, talks to Helen Molesworth about the collective’s work at the intersection of the culinary world, hip-hop, fashion, art, activism, and community building.
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Jan 31, 2023
Episode 50 | Why You Do What You Do with Brendan Dugan, Johanna Fateman and Ebony L. Haynes
Host Helen Molesworth calls art writer Johanna Fateman (Le Tigre), gallerist Brendan Dugan (Karma Gallery) and the curator,and writer Ebony L. Haynes (Senior Director of 52 Walker) to discuss how they carved their unique paths in the art world and what continues to inspire them.
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Jan 24, 2023
Episode 49 | Luca Guadagnino and Michaël Borremans
A conversation between the Academy award-nominated writer, producer, and director Luca Guadagnino and the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans on the relationship between painting and film. They muse on the specificity of light to their mediums, the role of the uncanny, and paintings and films as a mirror of who we imagine ourselves to be.
Guadagnino’s most recent film Bones and All debuted to critical acclaim last Fall. Michaël Borremans held his seventh solo exhibition at David Zwirner, The Acrobat, in Spring of 2022.
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Dec 14, 2022
Best of 2022 | With Helen Molesworth
As we close out the year, Helen calls up her dear friend Steve Locke to carry on the tried and true tradition of end-of-year lists. It turns out there was a lot to love in 2022.
Mentions:
-Lynne Tillman, Mothercare
-Craig Drennen at Freight and Volume
-Marlene Dumas at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice
-Bob Thompson at Colby College and the Hammer Museum
-Milk of Dreams (Venice Biennale)
-Mira Schor's instagram account
-Ruth Erickson’s A Place for Me at the ICA Boston
-Cauleen Smith at Moran Moran gallery in LA
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Dec 7, 2022
What Does Art Have to Do with Climate Change? | With Helen Molesworth
In this episode, Helen Molesworth calls an old friend, the painter Alexis Rockman, to try and understand the art world’s reaction to recent acts of museum vandalism perpetrated by Just Stop Oil, putting them in context with theories on environmental activism and the harsh reality of the climate crisis.
Alexis Rockman is a painter whose realist landscapes imagine the future effects of the anthropocene on the natural world, and was one of the first artists to investigate global warming in his work.
Stay tuned for Helen’s next episode, which takes stock of the very best art exhibitions of 2022.
Mentions:
-Just Stop Oil on Instagram
-Climate Emergency Fund
-Alexis Rockman, Manifest Destiny in the Smithsonian Museum
-Reluctant Radical by Ken Ward
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Nov 30, 2022
On Art and Poetics
Lucas Zwirner returns as host for a conversation with the MacArthur award-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and the renowned critic and scholar of avant-garde poetry, Marjorie Perloff. On the occasion of Peter’s new book of poetry, Draw Me After, which is inspired by the work of Terry Winters and Agnes Martin, they come together for a state of the union of art and poetry.
Draw Me After: Poems is available now.
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Nov 16, 2022
Let’s Talk About Appropriation | With Helen Molesworth
Following recent controversies in the art and fashion worlds, host Helen Molesworth and the artist Steve Locke, a returning guest, sit down to talk about a subject that has been thorny for as long as there have been arguments about art. So, appropriation: When is it strategy and when is it theft? Who gets to claim authorship of what? And what is actually original nowadays?
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Nov 1, 2022
Seeing the 90’s Everywhere Right Now | With Helen Molesworth
In the premiere episode of a new series hosted by Helen Molesworth, the curator and writer talks with her friend the artist Steve Locke about the re-emergence of art and culture of the 90’s, and why certain ideas, obsessions, and artists of the era—from Wolfgang Tillmans to Marlon Riggs to Friends—are bubbling back up into the mainstream now.
This fall, Helen will be hosting regular episodes of the podcast that react to the shifting news and ideas in the art world and culture at large. Please follow Dialogues so you don’t miss an episode.
This episode’s guest, the artist Steve Locke, currently has a solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, open through December 17, 2022.
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Oct 25, 2022
Inside ‘The Red Studio’: Ann Temkin with 6 Artists on Matisse | Special Episode
In this special episode produced and hosted by the painter Lisa Yuskavage, six artists—Joe Bradley, Carroll Dunham, Rashid Johnson, David Reed, Sarah Sze, and Charline von Heyl—give Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, their insights on Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and the elusive nature of creativity. It was inspired by the recent exhibition Matisse: The Red Studio at MoMA, now on view at the SMK Denmark through February 26, 2023.
Dialogues is returning soon with new episodes hosted by the writer and curator Helen Molesworth, please stay tuned to this feed.
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Sep 23, 2022
Death of an Artist: The Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre Story | Special Episode
A special preview of a new podcast miniseries, Death of an Artist, hosted by the curator and art historian Helen Molesworth, who will also be hosting new episodes of Dialogues, coming very, very soon.
For more than 35 years, accusations of murder shrouded one of the art world’s most storied couples: Was the famous sculptor Carl Andre involved in the death of his wife, the rising star artist Ana Mendieta? Helen revisits the question of Mendieta’s death, takes a closer look at the incident in which she fell from the window of their 34th floor New York apartment, and interrogates both the silence and protest that have followed this infamous story since 1985. You can hear the full episode and all of Death of an Artist here.
Stay tuned to Dialogues for new episodes hosted by Helen Molesworth coming next month.
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Mar 29, 2022
Episode 48 | Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton
The artists and former partners on what it means to be an artist now—and what it meant when they emerged in the New York art world of the 1990s. Tiravanija, who will have his first exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong later this year, is renowned for participatory installations that have a living, social dimension to them. Peyton is one of her generation’s best-known painters, recognized for her intimate paintings of people.
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Mar 24, 2022
Episode 47 | Edwin Frank
The editorial director of New York Review Books and editor of NYRB Classics explains the origins and cult status of the incredibly popular series. Since its founding by Frank in 1999, NYRB Classics’s mission has been to reintroduce out-of-print gems to a new audience, everything from Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps to a Janet Malcolm work of journalism. Combined with a simple and magnetic design, this model inspired David Zwirner Books’s own ekphrasis series, which focuses on writing about art, and which just celebrated its 20th edition with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Oh to Be a Painter!.
Oh to Be a Painter!, the most accessible collection of Woolf’s writing on art, is available through David Zwirner Books. The entire ekphrasis series is now available as a special collection.
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Mar 15, 2022
Episode 46 | Jed Perl and Joshua Cohen
A conversation that parses the nuances of the question: Does art have to be political to be important right now? With the art critic Jed Perl, who just published Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and the novelist Johsua Cohen, author of the acclaimed The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes the Israeli family in ways comic and serious.
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Mar 9, 2022
Episode 45 | Jerry Saltz and Ellie Rines
A conversation about the art of looking. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic and author Jerry Saltz, of New York magazine and the bestselling How to Be an Artist, and the influential young gallerist Ellie Rines, of New York’s 56 Henry, on doing their jobs in unorthodox ways—and how to look at the endlessly proliferating and increasingly uncategorizable art in the world today.
And a warning to our listeners: This episode briefly mentions suicide, so please listen with caution or skip 44:34-45:30.
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Mar 2, 2022
Episode 44 | Amy Sillman
The celebrated artist on the role of art criticism today, and how she probes and ultimately goes beyond the limitations of her painting in her other practice as a writer. This episode with Sillman, who in 2020 published Faux Pas, a new collection of her writings, is guest-hosted by Jarrett Earnest, and is the last of his three-part miniseries on serious artists who are also serious writers.
Amy Sillman: Faux Pas is available here. Her work will be featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and was recently on view in Toni Morrison’s Black Book, an exhibition curated by Hilton Als at David Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery in New York.
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Feb 22, 2022
Episode 43 | A Scientific Theory of the Art World
What does evolutionary science have to do with the art world? A fascinating conversation with Richard Prum, a leading thinker in evolutionary ornithology who has developed a theory that impacts how we think about artistic genius, radicality, and the art world at large.
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Feb 15, 2022
Episode 42 | Amalia Ulman and Maggie Lee
A conversation with two exciting artists taking their multimedia practices onto the movie screen. Ulman, whose work combines video, performance, and the Internet in fluid ways, recently released her critically-acclaimed first feature film, El Planeta. A hit at the Sundance Film Festival, it features Ulman and her mother as a pair of mother-and-daughter grifters in Gijon, Spain, their hometown. And Lee, who works across all manner of media, also made a standout film that draws from her own life: Mommy is a resonant profile of her mother following her devastating death that, like El Planeta, fuses the visual language of video and Net Art with that of Hollywood.
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Feb 1, 2022
Episode 41 | Angela Davis and Hilton Als
The activist and author Angela Davis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als in conversation about one of their favorite subjects and dearest friends: Toni Morrison. Early on in her career, Morrison worked as a kind of activist editor at Random House, where she helped change the landscape of publishing—including her effort to bring Davis’s landmark political autobiography to the public in 1974. (It was just republished in its third edition.) Recently, Als curated Toni Morrison’s Black Book at David Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery in New York, a group exhibition that draws astonishing connections between Morrison’s life and words and works by Beverly Buchanan, Robert Gober, Julie Mehretu, Kerry James Marshall, and many more.
Toni Morrison’s Black Book, curated by Hilton Als, is on view through February 26, 2022.
Angela Davis: An Autobiography was republished in its third edition in January 2022, featuring an expansive new introduction by the author.
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Jul 13, 2021
Episode 40 | Luc Tuymans and Timothy Snyder
A conversation about the slippery slope from Donald Trump’s lies to the extinction of American democracy—and art’s ability to break through fascist monoliths. The eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder is the author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and “The American Abyss,” a widely circulated New York Times essay published following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. The essay caught the eye of Luc Tuymans, himself a kind of historian. In the paintings he’s made throughout his career, Tuymans has examined the power of images in not only depicting historical trauma, but also their ability to cover up and reveal things about ourselves.
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Jul 7, 2021
Episode 39 | David Byrne and Marcel Dzama
Two of the most playful, expressive artists we have on their creative process, trying new things, and the art of being a great collaborator. The former lead singer of the Talking Heads, Byrne is an artistic polymath, making stage plays, performances, films, and now even drawings, which he recently showed with Pace. His Broadway hit, American Utopia, also became a streaming hit when Spike Lee turned it into a film for HBO; it was also recently adapted by Byrne into a book with illustrations by Maira Kalman. Marcel Dzama—who has been showing with the gallery for many years, and who has, like Byrne, worked on the stage (most notably with the New York City Ballet)—also just published a new book, an edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream full of his beautiful new drawings.
David Byrne is represented by Pace Gallery. American Utopia returns to Broadway in fall 2021; the film can be streamed on HBO Max; and the book is available now.
Marcel Dzama’s illustrated edition…
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Jun 22, 2021
Episode 38 | What Does Figuration Smell Like?
A conversation about the art of scents with the perfumer Frederic Malle. The latest in a storied French fragrance family, Malle—whose grandfather launched Christian Dior’s fragrance line, and whose uncle is the great filmmaker Louis Malle—had ambitions of being an art dealer before he took up the family trade, and his unique brand of of scent-making combines science, psychology, marketing wizardry, and (most importantly) art history.
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Jun 15, 2021
Episode 37 | Lorraine O’Grady
The 86-year-old legend gets personal about a lifetime translating her singular voice to the world. While the major retrospective of her work currently at the Brooklyn Museum has cemented her reputation, Lorraine O’Grady did not discover herself as an artist until her 40s. Here, she traces her unlikely journey to becoming a conceptual and performance artist with a pioneering Black feminist sensibility—including stints along the way as a rock critic, novelist, and translator.
Guest-hosted by Jarrett Earnest, this episode is the second of three on a topic the critic is deeply invested in: serious artists who are also serious writers.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through July 18, 2021. Her new anthology of writings, Writing in Space, 1973–2019, is available here.
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Jun 8, 2021
Episode 36 | Kate Zambreno
How does an artwork change as the person looking at it does? Kate Zambreno, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and the author of the acclaimed 2020 novel Drifts, details the pleasures and discovery of returning to an artist or artwork over and over again—in her case, the likes of Sarah Charlesworth, Chantal Akerman, and Albrecht Durer. She speaks and writes about their lives and work with humor and personal insight born of longtime obsession.
Drifts: A Novel, named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, is out now on paperback. Zambreno’s latest book, To Write as if Already Dead, was published in June 2021.
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Jun 1, 2021
Episode 35 | Simphiwe Ndzube and Zakes Mda
A conversation about the art of telling stories with the South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube, who works between Cape Town and Los Angeles and whose first solo US museum exhibition opens this month at the Denver Art Museum, and the renowned writer Zakes Mda, whose novels are widely read throughout South Africa and beyond. The two dissect their magical realist stories of post-apartheid South Africa and their experiences of America on the page and on canvas—and try to locate the source of their own magic.
This episode is guest-hosted by Kyla McMillan, a director at David Zwirner.
Ndzube’s solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, Oracles of the Pink Universe, runs from June 13 to October 10, 2021. Learn more about it here.
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May 25, 2021
Episode 34 | Rachel Kushner
A conversation about life as art with the author of The Flamethrowers. Few merge writing about art and writing about life the way Rachel Kushner does. A former editor at Artforum and Bomb, she’s deeply interested in memorializing the culture around the art—the conversations, the characters, the tall tales. In her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, a National Book Award finalist, the New York art world of the 70s was brought to scintillating life; and in her new collection of essays, The Hard Crowd, she writes about Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, and Jeff Koons as vividly as she writes about her deep personal passion for motorcycles and muscle cars.
You can order The Hard Crowd now.
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May 18, 2021
Episode 33 | The Queering of Ray Johnson feat. Nayland Blake
Guest hosted by Jarrett Earnest, this conversation with the artist, curator, and critic Nayland Blake reflects on Blake’s own coming-of-age as an artist and writer—and their shared obsession and long history with the great artist Ray Johnson. Prompted by an Johnson exhibition curated by Earnest at David Zwirner in New York that reexamines and reframes the artist’s life and work through a queer lens, this episode is the first of three hosted by Earnest on a topic the critic is deeply invested in: serious artists who are also serious writers.
Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, curated by Earnest, is on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery in New York through May 22, 2021.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake, a comprehensive survey of their art practice, recently closed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
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May 5, 2021
Episode 32 | Beeple and Jordan Wolfson
When Mike Winkelmann, now widely known as the digital artist Beeple, sold an artwork at Christie’s for $69 million in March 2021, it shocked the art world—and created an escalating interest in and market for NFTs, digital art using blockchain technology that allows the work of digital artists like Beeple to be collected for the very first time. But the high-stakes prices also brought two parallel art worlds—the traditional one of galleries and museums, and the growing online community of digital artists—crashing into each other. In this provocative conversation, Beeple and Jordan Wolfson hash out the relationship between the two and ask: Where do we go from here?
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Jan 6, 2021
Episode 31 | The Bauhaus Episode
A conversation about the influence of the Bauhaus today, and its evolution from a seminal early-twentieth-century school of thought into popular shorthand for an aesthetic style that—like minimalism—is used for everything from furniture to smartphones. With guest Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the author of iBauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design.
iBauhaus is available now in bookstores and online.
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Dec 30, 2020
On Noah Davis: Revisited
To close a tumultuous year, we’re revisiting one of its high points: a conversation that celebrates the life and work of the artist Noah Davis. With the curator Helen Molesworth, the filmmaker (and Noah’s brother) Kahlil Joseph, and the artist (and Noah’s wife) Karon Davis.
Dialogues will return with new episodes in 2021, please stay tuned.
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Dec 14, 2020
Episode 30 | Olivia Laing
A conversation about art criticism that is deeply engaged with the lives of the artists. Olivia Laing’s work regularly appears in The Guardian, Financial Times, and Frieze. Her latest book, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, examines the more complicated parts of life through the biographies and art of Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, among other artists. This acclaimed collection of essays presents art as an antidote to what ails us—loneliness, alcoholism, our bodies—and a fitting way to write about art right now.
Funny Weather is available now in bookstores and online.
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Dec 9, 2020
Episode 29 | David Levi Strauss and Michael Taussig
Is seeing believing? In an era of surveillance and “deepfakes” and camera phones, images are more powerful—and fraught—than they’ve ever been. The poet and writer David Levi Strauss, an authority on photography and its effect in society, and the renowned anthropologist Michael Taussig investigate this timely question, spurred by Strauss’s new book, Photography and Belief.
Photography and Belief is available now through David Zwirner Books.
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Dec 2, 2020
Episode 28 | Sofia Coppola and Rainer Judd
An intimate conversation between old friends who’ve leaned on each other creatively since they were teenagers. Rainer Judd, a filmmaker, artist, and president of Judd Foundation, and the Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola talk about growing up with larger-than-life fathers in Donald Judd and Francis Ford Coppola, the necessity of creative “puttering,” and Coppola’s new film On the Rocks, featuring an art world bon vivant played by Bill Murray.
You can watch On the Rocks now on Apple TV+. And you can visit Artworks: 1970–1994, a survey exhibition devoted to Donald Judd, at our 19th Street gallery in New York through December 12.
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Nov 24, 2020
Episode 27 | KAWS
The artist KAWS’s output has been both wide-ranging and radically democratic, from toys to fashion to street art to museum exhibitions. In this conversation, he explains the vision behind one of his latest ventures, an experiment in augmented reality art making in collaboration with the curator Daniel Birnbaum, which both brings his work to a wider public and offers ideas for an especially timely problem: how to present art virtually.
KAWS AR artworks are viewable through the Acute Art app.
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Nov 18, 2020
Episode 26 | Doon Arbus and Barbara Epler
A conversation about the power of editors and curators, and all that happens behind the scenes. Doon Arbus, the author of the new novel The Caretaker, and her editor Barbara Epler, the head of the famed publisher New Directions, tell the origin stories of Arbus’s debut novel about the caretaker of an eccentric museum, and the tiny literary house that became the first American publisher of Neruda, Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and many more.
The Caretaker is available now.
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Nov 11, 2020
Episode 25 | Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Tsitsi Dangarembga
A moving, complicated, and at times ecstatic conversation between two groundbreaking women. The artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who was raised in Nigeria and now lives in Los Angeles, and the Booker Prize-nominated writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was born in Zimbabwe and educated in England, examine their personal experiences with protest, government corruption, Trump’s America, the erosion of indigenous culture, and ongoing missions to center their African and immigrant stories in their art.
Dangarembga’s new novel, This Mournable Body, was recently shortlisted for a 2020 Booker Prize. In July, Dangarembga was arrested in Zimbabwe, protesting government corruption. She’s currently out on bail, but her trial is still pending.
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May 20, 2020
Episode 24 | R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman
Two icons of the comics world—and old friends—tell their cartoonist origin stories, from the psychedelics-fueled breakthroughs of the 1960s to finding their singular styles and the generational divide among the comics cognoscenti today. R. Crumb is one of the founding fathers of the alternative comics movement, and Art Spiegelman is equally influential, having authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.
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May 14, 2020
Episode 23 | Patrick Staff and Julie Tolentino
A conversation between two dynamic artists and good friends, Patrick Staff and Julie Tolentino, whose work feels especially urgent now. Staff, who recently had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London, uses video and other mediums to comment on body politics from a queer and trans perspective. Tolentino also addresses issues facing marginalized groups, through performance that combines her dance background with social exchange. Always integral to their practices, these concerns are only heightened in the current moment. Here, they discuss contagion, toxicity, anxiety, the “leaky body,” and art during the pandemic.
Patrick Staff’s work is currently on view as part of Platform: Los Angeles, an online exhibition featuring thirteen Los Angeles-based galleries hosted on David Zwirner Online. You can learn more about Julie Tolentino’s work via the gallery Commonwealth and Council.
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May 6, 2020
Episode 22 | To Venice and Rome
A conversation with the acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin that transports us to two of her favorite cities, Venice and Rome, in a celebration of Italy as the country begins to loosen the longest coronavirus-related lockdown in Europe. The episode features evocative readings from her forthcoming book,Two Cities, which captures the meditative yet constantly surprising nature of travel from a deeply personal point of view.
Learn more about Two Cities here.
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Apr 24, 2020
Episode 21 | Diana Thater and Rachel Rose
Artists Diana Thater, a leading pioneer of video and installation and major figure in the L.A. art community since the early 1990s, and Rachel Rose, a defining new voice of the medium, discuss the rapid evolution of video art and its limitless possibilities—including, for both of them, its ability to reckon with personal trauma and threats to the environment.
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Apr 14, 2020
Episode 20 | Minimalism Today
A timely conversation with the art critic Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, on how minimalism went from radical 1960s art movement to, ironically, a hyper-commercialized lifestyle adopted by luxury brands and millennials everywhere—and where Marie Kondo and Agnes Martin overlap, if at all.
During this time, we’re evolving to give you even more to listen to, with one-on-one episodes with the people—and on the subjects—we find compelling now. Please stay tuned.
You can buy Chayka’s book here.
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Apr 7, 2020
Episode 19 | Antwaun Sargent and Tyler Mitchell
Photographer Tyler Mitchell and critic/curator Antwaun Sargent on the radical power shift from gatekeepers to artists, the breakdown of barriers between fashion and art photography, cautionary tales of social media groupthink and overexposure, and historical artists who made the new black vanguard possible.
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Mar 31, 2020
Episode 18 | On Noah Davis: Helen Molesworth, Kahlil Joseph, and Karon Davis
A special episode dedicated to the late artist Noah Davis, with some of the the people who knew him best. The curator Helen Molesworth, his brother, the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, remember Davis, whose legacy continues to grow—through his paintings, which depict everyday life with emotional and formal ambition; The Underground Museum, the space he founded in Los Angeles that combines many different worlds; and the family, literal and figurative, that coalesced around the magnetism of his personality.
You can learn more about Davis here.
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Mar 24, 2020
Episode 17 | Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström
A rare conversation between artists who have stayed together for over three decades. The Swedish artist Karin “Mamma” Andersson and her husband Jockum Nordström’s story—of two young artists leaning on each other as their family grew; of uncertainty and insecurity and figuring out how to be different but together; of the pleasure of getting completely lost in one’s work—feels especially potent in these uncertain times.
Andersson’s recent exhibition at David Zwirner’s New York gallery, The Lost Paradise, was cut short due to the escalating spread of COVID-19, but you can explore the show here.
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Mar 18, 2020
Jeff Koons Redux
In uncertain and even scary times, host Lucas Zwirner revisits the first episode of Dialogues, in which Jeff Koons and the curator Luke Syson turn to art as a way of connecting and communicating through making something—an ethos that feels even more important now.
Soon Dialogues will return with even more episodes to stay in touch with our audience. Stay tuned for much more.
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Feb 25, 2020
Episode 16 | Doug Wheeler and Vija Celmins
In this episode, the artists Doug Wheeler and Vija Celmins revisit their years in Venice Beach, California in the late 1960s, a scene crowded with figures like Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. Wheeler and Celmins—old friends and visionaries of their medium—gossip, rehash, map, and even correct this vital piece of art history, while tackling a central question of art along the way: How to impress your sensibility upon the world through your work.
Vija Celmins was the subject of a recent, critically-beloved retrospective at the Met Breuer and SFMOMA. Doug Wheeler currently has an exhibition at David Zwirner in New York through March 21, 2020; a definitive monograph of his career was recently published.
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Feb 19, 2020
Dialogues Trailer
Dialogues is a podcast from David Zwirner Gallery and has included guests like Doug Wheeler, Vija Celmins, Tyler Mitchell, Helen Molesworth, Kahlil Joseph, R. Crumb, and Luc Tuymans.
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Dec 11, 2019
Episode 15 | Thom Browne and Michael Glover
The designer Thom Browne and the poet and critic Michael Glover talk about the history of the codpiece in art. Glover has written a book (Thrust) on the topic and Browne's collections often include codpieces.
Show Notes:
Thom Browne
Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art (Michael Glover, David Zwirner Books)
Attachments area
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Dec 3, 2019
Episode 14 | Eileen Myles and Flavin Judd
Eileen Myles talks to Flavin Judd about Marfa past and present, a "mammoth" new novel, and Donald Judd's life and work.
Show Notes
Donald Judd Interviews (David Zwirner Books, 2019, edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray)
"MoMA Announces Donald Judd Retrospective" (March 1 -July 11, 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art)
Judd Foundation
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Nov 19, 2019
Episode 13 | Oscar Murillo and Charles Henry Rowell
This episode pairs artist Oscar Murillo with the editor Charles Henry Rowell for a conversation about class, race, art, and the African cultural diaspora that is one part history lesson and one part personal history.
Murillo is short-listed for the 2019 Turner Prize and Rowell is the founder and editor of Callalloo, the longest continuously running African-American literary journal.
The Turner Prize exhibition runs through January 12, 2020, at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK. (The winner will be announced on December 3.) Read more about Callaloo here.
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Nov 6, 2019
Episode 12 | The Yayoi Kusama Phenomenon
This episode is all about Yayoi Kusama and art in the Instagram age. JiaJia Fei, a digital guru for institutions like the Jewish Museum and the Guggenheim, and Christian Luiten, founder of the popular digital art platform Avant Arte, come together to talk authenticity vs. influence, high vs. low, art vs. accessibility, narrative vs. myth—and to diagnose the unabating online fanaticism for all things Kusama, an Instagram icon who isn’t on Instagram.
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Oct 22, 2019
Episode 11 | Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson
An epic live episode of Dialogues. In journeying deep into Homer’s Odyssey in front of an audience at David Zwirner’s 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, lies. Featuring a live reading from Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow
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Oct 8, 2019
Episode 10 | Alex Da Corte and Charlie Fox
When the artist Alex Da Corte and the writer Charlie Fox talk about Edward Scissorhands, Frankenstein, Hercules, Michael Myers, A Clockwork Orange, Scar from The Lion King, they’re also talking about beauty and body anxiety and disability and sexual attraction and queerness—the anxieties of existing physically in the world every day. Da Corte, whose elaborate videos, sculptures, and installations critically re-stage pop culture, art history, and his own life, and Fox, whose recent book This Young Monster celebrates beautiful misfits and freaks across all walks of culture, go deep on how they live—in their minds and in their work—far from what they call normative behavior.
Visit Da Corte’s solo exhibition in New York at Karma through November 3 and his work at the Venice Biennale through November 24, in the main exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times. Buy Fox’s book This Young Monster here.
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Sep 24, 2019
Episode 9 | Jordan Wolfson and Jeremy O. Harris
When the artist Jordan Wolfson and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris get together, sparks fly. Wolfson’s art confronts intimacy, violence, and desire with sometimes shocking honesty. Likewise, O. Harris, whose buzzed-about and radical Slave Play comes to Broadway this fall, uses music and bodies to complicate themes of violence and sex—and perhaps most powerfully of all, race and history. O. Harris is able to dip in and out of absurdity even at his most serious, something that Wolfson has also mastered in his mysterious narratives. Here, they debate and cover everything from suppression and transgression, sexuality, Lady Gaga, porn, and more.
Get tickets to Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play at the Golden Theatre on Broadway here.
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Feb 14, 2019
Episode 8 | Hilton Als and Thelma Golden
A revealing conversation about the life and teachings of James Baldwin that draws on Beauford Delaney, the pivotal role of invested teachers, and how the writer shaped the racial and cultural landscape in America.
In this episode of Dialogues, Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic Hilton Als is joined in conversation by friend, collaborator, and thought partner Thelma Golden of The Studio Museum in Harlem for a conversation on Baldwin that traces back to their very first meeting at The Odeon. Brought together on the occasion of the exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin curated by Als, the duo examine the legacy of Baldwin and his impact on both their own work and today’s culture.
God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin is on view at David Zwirner, New York, through 2 PM Saturday, February 16, 2019.
For more of what’s to come on Dialogues, listen to our trailer or visit davidzwirner.com/podcast.
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Nov 14, 2018
Episode 7 | Nicholas Fox Weber and Paul Smith
A conversation about clothing, instinct, and finding high art in everyday life that touches on Jackie O, Kandinsky, and the Bauhaus.
In this episode of Dialogues,Nicholas Fox Weber—cultural historian and executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation—is paired with acclaimed British fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. The two are brought together on the occasion of a major retrospective of Anni Albers’s work, currently on view at Tate Modern, London, to discuss Smith’s new knitwear collection inspired by her textiles. Their shared admiration for the art of Anni and Josef Albers drives an eclectic conversation about abstraction, aesthetics, and the tactile nature of design.
Anni Albers is on view at Tate Modern, London, through January 27, 2019.
Listen to Paul Smith discuss his interest in the life and work of Anni Albers at Tate Modern on Saturday, November 17, at 3 PM. For more information, visit tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/anni-albers/paul-smith-on-an…
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Oct 17, 2018
Episode 6 | Jarrett Earnest and Peter Schjeldahl
A conversation about the intersection of art and language that grapples with loneliness, religion, and our visceral reactions in the presence of powerful art.
In the sixth episode of Dialogues, Jarrett Earnest—author of the unprecedented overview of American art writing, What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics, just out from David Zwirner Books—converses with Peter Schjeldahl, award-winning art critic and esteemed writer for The New Yorker. Touching on Piero della Francesca, Gatsby, and autodidacticism, the two examine the depths of language, the anxiety that accompanies writing, and the value of maintaining a lighthearted approach.
See Jarrett Earnest in conversation with Peter Schjeldahl and Paul Chaat Smith on What it Means to Write About Art at the Strand Book Store on Thursday, November 1, at 7:30 PM. For tickets and more information, visit strandbooks.com/event/jarrett-earnest-what-it-means.
For more of what’s to come on Dialogues, listen to our trai…
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Aug 29, 2018
Episode 5 | Marcel Dzama and Will Butler
A conversation about instinct in creative practice that nods to punk rock, fatherhood, and the ethics of artistic expression.
In the fifth episode of Dialogues, artist Marcel Dzama—known for his whimsical style, distinctive color palette, and varying mediums that include drawing, sculpture, film, and costume design—is paired with musician and composer Will Butler, a key member of the indie-rock band Arcade Fire. Recounting influences from their upbringings that range from Duchamp to biker culture, Vikings to variety shows, the duo discuss the role of art as a form of revolution in the current political climate.
See Dzama’s work in the exhibition Marcel Dzama: A Jester’s Dance on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor through September 23, 2018.
Watch Will Butler perform live in Arcade Fire, currently on tour through North America. Visit everythingnow.com for tour dates and more information.
For more of what’s to come on Dialogues, listen to our trailer…
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Aug 8, 2018
Episode 4 | Lisa Yuskavage and Tamara Jenkins
A conversation about giving a voice to untold stories that draws on Jane Campion, Philip Guston, and the raw authenticity of human emotion.
The fourth episode of Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast features painter Lisa Yuskavage—known for her masterful portraits of nude figures and her skillful control of color—in conversation with widely celebrated screenwriter and film director Tamara Jenkins. Counterparts and close friends, Yuskavage and Jenkins discuss how personal experiences inform their creativity—touching on dark comedy, eroticism, and the importance of trusting your own vision.
View new large-scale canvases and a survey of small-scale paintings by Lisa Yuskavage in her forthcoming exhibitions, opening this November, at David Zwirner’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations.
Watch Tamara Jenkins’s newest film, Private Life, in theaters this October.
This podcast is a partnership between David Zwirner and Slate Studios.
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Jul 25, 2018
Episode 3 | Stan Douglas and Jason Moran
A conversation about collaboration and the obsessive power of good music—touching on Netflix, Kendrick Lamar, and what it’s like to play with Miles Davis.
In the third episode of Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, photographer and multimedia artist Stan Douglas speaks with MacArthur Award–winning pianist and composer Jason Moran—currently Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center—about making and experiencing art. These longtime friends and collaborators discuss what it means to awaken ideas through the language of improvisation and exceed viewer expectations.
See Douglas’s work in Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London, and I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, both on view through October 14, 2018.
Watch Jason Moran perform with saxophonist Charles Lloyd on August 4 and 5 at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. For tickets and more information visit newportjazz.org.
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Jul 11, 2018
Episode 2 | Rose Wylie and Russell Tovey
A conversation about the importance of character, the value of mistakes, and painting from film.
In the second pairing in David Zwirner’s Dialogues series, the critically-acclaimed painter—and recent recipient of the Queen’s OBE award—Rose Wylie talks with the actor Russell Tovey from BBC’s Being Human and HBO’s Looking. Wylie, an admirer of cinema, and Tovey, a fan and collector of Wylie’s work, engage in a conversation about improvisation, instincts, and creative influences that T Magazine describes as “charmingly off-the-cuff.”
You can view Rose Wylie: Hullo, Hullo . . . at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga, Spain through September 9 and Rose Wylie: History Painting at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange through September 15, 2018.
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Jun 27, 2018
Episode 1 | Jeff Koons and Luke Syson
A conversation about Duchamp, Michael Jackson, the allure of the Renaissance in the age of Instagram, and more.
In the debut episode of David Zwirner’s new podcast, world-renowned artist Jeff Koons talks with Luke Syson, Chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their far-ranging exchange touches on creative impulse and resisting elitism; polychromy and Pop culture; Plato’s cave and the iPhone; evolution and reality TV.
View Koons’s work at the Met Breuer, New York in “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now),” curated by Syson and Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through July 22, 2018.
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