Art as Experience: Podcasts

This is our last regularly-scheduled episode for WOWD-LP Takoma Park, although we may, from time to time, present a special unscheduled episode. After almost 150 shows, we decided to take a break and figure out where we’re going from here. In this episode, Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the history of the show, and what […]

Sargent, as revealed in Sargent and Spain, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, gives us visions that are full of desire and celebration – both documentary and dreamlike. John Singer Sargent was, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe; but his obituary in the London Times described him […]

Hosts Sheila and Peter Blake visit the outsider/folk/self-taught art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: We are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection. This is perhaps our third show on folk art, and every time, we probe deeper into this rewarding art world. Artists include Bil Traylor, Dan Miller, Judith […]

Sheila Blake and Peter Blake discuss portraiture as a art form, and the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the finalaists of the Outwin 20221 competition. You can find images of the exhibition works here: https://portraitcompetition.si.edu/exhibition/2022-outwin-boochever-portrait-competition/

Sheila and Peter Blake discuss postmodernism in the visual arts and architecture: what it is, in plain terms, and how it followed from and differs from modernism. Our facebook pages has pictures of what we’re talking about:

We visit the new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Afro-Atlantic Histories, an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the 17th century. More than 130 powerful works of art, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and time-based media by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the […]

Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) was a major American painter. Sheila was a friend of his, beginning in art school in NYC. Sheila and Tom recollect his life and his art. [LBS id=xx]

The Baltimore Museum of Art has just put up a show curated by the guards. The works repay long observation, as you might expect for the choices of the museum guards, who look at art for long periods of time. Tom, Sheila and Peter visit the exhibition, and discuss several interesting issues brought up on […]

We visit the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC: Picasso: Painting the Blue Period. We discuss the transition of Picasso, at the age of nineteen, from painting scenes of the Paris nightlife to the paintings known as the Blue Period, and then the Rose period. We explore our thesis that Picasso was […]

We discuss several major Black visual artists from before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance (with a nod to philosopher Alain Locke): Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles White, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Amy Sherald. Poems by Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes.

After several visits to the Laurie Anderson Exhibit at the Hirschhorn Museum, in Washington DC, Sheila and Peter discuss this avant garde artist and her exhibit. Music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.

Sheila, Tom, and guest Peter Blake discuss the David Driskell exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Driskell was a painter and the whirlwind center of energy and attention to established and emerging African American artists in the late Twentieth Century and into recent decades.

Sheila and Tom discuss the Spanish painter, Juan Gris, a compatriot, contemporary, and rival of Picasso – on the occasion of a current exhibition of gorgeous cubist paintings by Gris at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Themes include cubism, modernism, John Dewey, color theory and more.