Art Works Podcast: Recent Episodes
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts podcast that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation’s great artists to explore how art works.
It’s a two-part podcast looking at one topic: exploring ways arts are being encouraged in communities. First up, philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. Arsht discusses her long-term support for the arts-- at The Kennedy Center, at Lincoln Center, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and reflecting upon her decision to make a sizable donation to sustain the performing arts center in Miami ---now the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami-Dade County which had been about close. Arsht also discusses the importance of having a performing arts center in every great city and highlights how Miami's diverse community was reflected in the center's programming from the beginning. Arsht also discusses her commitment to arts education through the flagship program "Learning Through the Arts" at the Adrian Arsht Center and her ground-breaking funding of paid internships at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Adrienne Arsht Center, emphasizing the importance of breaking down barriers that prevent talented individuals from pursuing internships and the positive impact of these programs.
Then we hear from Debbie Shapiro the artistic director of the Marie Rader Presenting Series at Rowan University. The series brings award-winning and emerging artists to South Jersey, emphasizing transformative engagement that goes beyond performances which includes direct interactions between world-class artists and students, as well as partnerships with community organizations in the region. Shapiro discusses the series and its curation which is unique in that it's integrated within the College of Performing Arts at Rowan University, allowing for close collaboration with faculty and a focus on aligning the artist selections with the educational offerings of the university. The programming reflects the diversity of the audience which comprises community members, Rowan students, university employees, faculty from various area colleges, and families of the students.
We are revisiting one of my favorite interviews—a 2013 conversation with Kati Texas about the Kinetic Sculpture Race.
The Kinetic Grand Champion Race is a one-of-a-kind, multi-day event that combines engineering, art, athleticism, and a strong sense of fun. It involves teams competing with human-powered, artistically-themed contraptions that are engineered to race over land, mud, sand, and water terrains. Originating in 1969, this quirky competition has grown to become a significant and anticipated event in Humboldt County, California, where the Kinetic Grand Championship is held each year.
As you will hear, one of the standout features of this event is its joyful and humorous atmosphere. Spectators line the streets to cheer on their favorite racers, and participants often dress in elaborate costumes, aligning with the theme of their sculpture. Furthermore, the race is characterized by unique and whimsical award categories, such as the "Golden Flipper" for sculptures that tip over or the "Poor, Pitiful Me" award for the racer perceived to whine or complain the most. And Kati herself is a Rutabaga Queen (a highly coveted title!)
It's hard to imagine a better guide for a behind-the-scenes look at this human-powered art race than Katie Texas. Aside from being a veteran racer herself, Katie has served the Kinetic Universe as president of its board of directors. The Kinetic Sculpture Race is not only a celebration of art and engineering but also of community spirit and the joy of taking on challenges with creativity and a smile. As you’ll hear in this podcast, participants and spectators alike are united in their love for this eccentric, innovative, and delightful event.
In this visit to our archives, we dive deep into the mind of the legendary late Stan Lee, the maestro behind Marvel Comics' most iconic characters. From the origins of Spider-Man's creation, inspired by a simple insect on a wall, to the inception of the Fantastic Four, Stan Lee recounts his journey of transforming the world of comics. He delves into the realism he injected into his characters, from Peter Parker's New York residence to the X-Men's mutant origins. While discussing his desire for characters to be relatable, Lee highlights the importance of infusing everyday, human elements into the grandeur of superhero tales. Whether you're a Marvel aficionado or just a casual fan, this episode offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of one of the most influential figures in the comic book industry.
The origin stories of our favorite characters are more grounded than one might think. The iconic Spider-Man, for instance, was born from Lee's observation of a mere spider scaling a wall. It made him wonder: what if a human had the abilities of a spider? Such simple, yet profound musings led to the birth of Peter Parker, a character whose human struggles resonated as much as his superhuman feats.
But the revelations don't stop there. The Fantastic Four, Marvel's first superhero team, weren't just an assemblage of abilities but a reflection of family dynamics, friendship, and human resilience. Lee's brilliance lay not just in creating superheroes but in giving them depth, layers, and a touch of realism. He shares his thought process behind anchoring his characters in real-world cities, like Peter Parker's residence in New York, a tangible place that readers could identify with.
In this episode, the late Stan Lee underscores a philosophy that became the hallmark of Marvel Comics: the marriage of the ordinary and the extraordinary. It wasn't just about capes, superpowers, or intergalactic wars. It was about heart, emotion, and the very human journey of self-discovery.
Emmett Phillips is a hip-hop artist, actor, poet, and teaching artist based in Des Moines, Iowa. In this podcast, Emmett shares his journey from his early days in hip-hop through his time in the military to becoming a teaching artist who empowers youth through the arts, specifically hip-hop. Emmett discusses hip-hop as a cultural movement that uplifts people, amplifies the voices of the oppressed, and expresses ideas and values with creativity and style. He talks about his personal growth through hip-hop and how it inspired him to become a teaching artist, helping students find their voices and build confidence. Emmett describes his work at Oakridge Neighborhood, a multi-faceted community organization where he has infused hip-hop into the art program. He shares stories of students who have transformed from shy and hesitant to confident performers through hip-hop. He details the creation of the music video made by the Children of Oakridge Neighborhood “Success is my Protest,” describing the collaborative process by which it was made and how the project empowered the young people. Emmett talks about his work in arts education creating curriculum for public schools, community organizations, and universities, and the role of arts education in empowering youth, building confidence, and fostering positive change within communities. Overall, Emmett Phillips's work highlights the demonstrable power of arts education, the creative exuberance of hip-hop and how the two can come together to create dynamic classrooms.
As we’re gearing up for “back to school”, it seemed like a good time to revisit my interview with Dr. Lisa Donovan about her work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) to increase access to arts education equitably in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The college collaborates with numerous arts organizations, educators, business leaders, and social workers through a network funded by four collective impact grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dr. Donovan discusses collective impact as a cross-sector approach to addressing complex problems such as increasing for equitable access to arts education for students across all 13 districts in the Berkshire region as well as the significance of school-based access to arts and cultural experiences for both students and the community. She also talks about the C4 initiative (Creative Compact for Collaborative Collective Impact), which encompasses career readiness, her commitment to arts integration (which she defines as learning in, through, and with the arts in collaboration with other content areas), and the power of networks and the potential for collective impact to open and sustain artistic and cultural opportunities in rural regions like Berkshire County. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts
Programs discussed in the podcast:
MCLA Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Berkshire Regional Arts Integration Network
Integrating the Arts Across the Curriculum
The C4 Initiative
Collective Impact
Wampum & Fiber Artist and 2023 National Heritage Fellow Elizabeth James-Perry (Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, Aquinnah) is a brilliant artist, marine biologist, and advocate for cultural preservation, Native lifeways, and environmental stewardship. In this podcast, Elizabeth talks about the intersection of art and science and explains how these two passions inform her work. She discusses the vital role of the Atlantic Ocean in the Northeast and its significance to tribal communities, the long history of fiber arts in tribal communities and her efforts to recover and preserve these traditional practices, the importance of sourcing natural materials sustainably, her experiences in reviving natural dyes for her artistic projects, and the connection between traditional arts and ecological knowledge. We also discuss the significance of Elizabeth’s project, “Raven Reshapes Boston”, a Native Corn Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts, which aimed to reclaim Native American culture and environmental values as well as her passion for teaching and mentoring. She also reflects on the significance of her receiving the National Heritage Award for Indigenous arts in the Northeast, raising their visibility and sustainability. . Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
This week, we’re revisiting 2017 National Heritage Fellow Phil Wiggins, a true master of the blues harmonica. In this music-filled podcast, Phil discusses the significance of Piedmont blues, the art of blues harmonica, and his own commitment to preserving and passing down the blues heritage to future generations. He recounts how his passion for the instrument grew, meeting legendary guitarist and 1989 National Heritage Fellow John Cephas and partnering with him to become the iconic duo "Cephas & Wiggins." Throughout the podcast, Phil talks about (and demonstrates) the art of blues harmonica, sharing insights about mastering various techniques, the importance of improvisation in blues music, mentoring aspiring musicians, and playing out with The Phil Wiggins Blues House Party featuring dancer Junious Brickhouse. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts
To mark Disability Pride month, we’re revisiting one of my favorite interviews: a 2020 conversation with Rebekah Taussig who discusses her memoir in essays (and current NEA Big Read title) Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. Rebekah, who has a Ph.D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, shares personal experiences that inform her book and shed light on the intersection of disability and identity, the daily obstacles and societal misconceptions individuals with disabilities encounter, and the physical and emotional challenges she can face as a wheelchair user. She discusses the need for inclusivity and accessibility in all aspects of life, emphasizes the power of personal narratives in reshaping societal perspectives on disability, and explains how storytelling can be a tool for empowerment, education, and fostering empathy. She talks about growing up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and 2000s and searching to find a story—any story—that reflected her own. She didn’t, and so she wrote it into existence. We talk about the steps society needs to take to become more inclusive and accessible, the importance of education and representation in dismantling ableism, and strategies for fostering empathy, understanding, and inclusion. In reading her book and interviewing Rebekah for the podcast, I felt as though I was listening to a very funny, very smart, and very thoughtful friend who was imagining big things for all of us. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Gil Rose is a conductor and the founder and artistic director of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), which is dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Odyssey Opera which is dedicated to performing lesser-known older operas as well as contemporary new works. Rose is also the founder of BMOP/Sound, BMOP’s independent record label, which was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s (and then Odyssey’s) extensive archive of music.
In this podcast, Gil Rose shares his motivation behind starting BMOP( which is celebrating its 25th anniversary) and his desire to create a musically interesting and worthwhile project focused on contemporary music and focused on the dynamic between composers, performers, and the audience. Rose discusses his emphasis on flexibility and collaboration with other arts organizations and creating a great orchestra with exceptional free-lance musicians—a decision that allows BMOP to perform a wide range of repertoire, from 90-player orchestra pieces to smaller ensembles. Rose also talks about the critical aspect of fundraising and the challenges of sustaining BMOP and Odyssey, and the importance of grants, particularly those received from the National Endowment for the Arts which have provided integral support for a variety of projects, and whose endorsement acts as a seal of approval and often helps in raising money from other sources. Gil Rose also discusses the "As Told By" initiative, a five-year project commissioning, premiering, and recording opera works by black composers about black historical subjects. (The first opera premiered was "X:The Life and Times of Malcolm X" by Anthony Davis; the second scheduled for 2024 will be “Harriet Tubman” by Nkeiru Okoye—both received grants from the Arts Endowment.) And finally, Rose reflects on BMOP's 25th anniversary, their many collaborations and partnerships, their debut at Carnegie Hall, which received glowing reviews from The New York Times and what’s on the road ahead. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
We’re celebrating July 4 by revisiting our 2015 podcast with former Singing Sergeant and current Director of Music and Opera at the National Endowment for the Arts Ann Meier Baker. In this podcast, Meier Baker talks about the professional bands and ensembles associated with each branch of the military and her decision to audition for and then join the Singing Sergeants—which meant going through boot camp. That was the hard part. She then relates her experiences over the four years she spent traveling nationally and internationally with this elite and diverse chorus. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts!
023 NEA Jazz Master Kenny Garrett is a saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He sees himself as a “preacher” on his saxophone—searching for that “one note that would touch people.” In this music-filled podcast, Garrett talks about his musical beginnings in Detroit, move to NYC, and time with the Duke Ellington Band, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and Miles Davis, and the different lessons he learned from all of them. He discusses finding his musical voice, his role as a band leader, the spiritual aspects of his music, the lasting influence of John Coltrane, and his collaborations with Pharoah Sanders and Chick Corea. Kenny also talks about his process for composing, teaching his music to band members, the energy created by live performance, playing as part of the Grammy-Award winning Five Peace Band, his ability to incorporate many different genres in his music, his commitment to both contemporary music and music from the ancestors, and his deep belief in music’s healing power. He also plays John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone live during an emotional moment in the podcast. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts!
Keywords: Kenny Garrett, NEA Jazz Master, Jazz, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Five Peace Band, Sounds from the Ancestors
Tiya Miles is best known as a historian and the author of the National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. But Tiya had preceded All That She Carried with a novel The Cherokee Rose, published in 2015, which she has revised and has just been reissued with a new introduction. The novel moves from contemporary Georgia to the early 1800s and back again, as it explores the intertwined and sometime painful histories of indigenous peoples and enslaved Black communities and those repercussions still felt in the 21st century. Drawn from Miles’s imagination but based in her scholarly research, The Cherokee Rose foregrounds the voices and experiences of women: Black, indigenous, multi-racial, and white while it shines a light on a little-known history. In this podcast, Tiya Miles talks about the challenges for her as an historian in writing a novel, what fiction allows her to explore, how writing the novel helped her think creatively when she conceptualized and wrote All That She Carried We also discuss her winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the freedom it gave her, her reasons for revising The Cherokee Rose, and how she draws hope from the creative determination of the women that she has spent her life studying.
Today, we’re celebrating Pride month by revisiting my 2021 conversation with poet, 2011 NEA Literature Fellow, and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown. In this poetry-filled podcast, Brown walks us through his writing of his prize-winning collection The Tradition in particular and poetry in general. He reads a number of poems and discusses his creative process, his exploration of the themes of love, race, sexuality, violence, and spirituality in his work, explains the new poetic form he invented called “the duplex” (and gives us poetic examples of it,) and talks about the significance of Black queer poetry and its capacity to expand our concept of love. We also discuss the poets and writers who have influenced and shaped Brown's own artistic journey, his reflections on winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for “The Tradition,” his thoughts on the importance of diverse voices in literature and the role of poetry in fostering empathy and understanding in a divided world.
Today we’re closing our celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by re-visiting our 2017 conversation with the acclaimed Washington DC-based dancer and choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess. Burgess and I spoke as his dance company was marking its 25th anniversary; so, the podcast is a retrospective of his philosophy and vision as a pioneering Asian American choreographer as well as a look at his first quarter century creating and leading the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company-- a company the Washington Post has called “a national dance treasure.” In this podcast, we discuss his background: growing up in New Mexico as the child of Korean immigrants, his exposure to diverse cultures, and the development of his passion for dance, his education at renowned institutions like Juilliard and the London Contemporary Dance School, and how these experiences shaped his artistic voice. Burgess talks about the fusion of multicultural influences in his dance and choreography, blurring the boundaries between contemporary dance, ballet, and traditional Korean movement. We gain insight into his creative process: how he develops ideas, collaborates with dancers, and brings his artistic vision to life. And we explore Burgess's perspective on the role of arts and culture in our daily lives and their ability to foster understanding and empathy. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
In this podcast, Navajo/Diné Textile Artist and Weaver and 2022 National Heritage Fellow TahNibaa Naataanii talks about Navajo/Diné weaving, which is more than an art--it's a way of life. Naatanii raises sheep, shears them, dyes, cards, spins, and, finally, weaves their wool. She tells us the creation story of Diné weaving, and its deep spiritual connections to her everyday practices. We talk about the ways she honors Navajo traditional weaving while also expanding it artistically in various ways--from reworking traditional patterns to incorporating different fibers into her weaving. Finally, Naataanii also talks about the impact of environmental degradation on the land and the challenges it poses for her and future generations. Email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts
You can see a sample of Naataanii's work at arts.gov where you can also check out the documentary Roots of American Culture—a film about TahNibaa and all of the 2022 National Heritage Fellows.
We’re marking Thanksgiving week by posting an interview I did earlier this year for the issue of American Artscape that focused exclusively on Native-Americans artists. I spoke with author and NEA Literature Fellow Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee) whose award-winning novel Crooked Hallelujah --a semi-autobiographical novel of linked short stories--takes us through the complicated lives of four generations of Cherokee women. Crooked Hallelujah, which is Ford’s debut novel, is not about “being Cherokee”; it is about these particular Cherokee women, how they fail, succeed, and survive. It’s an important distinction. They are not on the page to give us a history lesson but their experiences of intergenerational poverty, trauma, the scars of forced assimilation, and an unforgiving church are informed by that often unspoken history. Ford talks about writing Crooked Hallelujah, the importance of geographic place that resonates throughout the book, and the limitations and the fierceness of the love these women share. She also discusses her own upbringing on the reservation raised by generations of Cherokee women, living off the reservation as an adult, and her pushing against her own fiction as necessarily needing to contain cultural or historical explainers of what it means to be Cherokee. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts. And check out latest issue of American Artscape which just posted— Original Threads: Equity and Access in the Arts for Hispanic/Latinx Communities.
We are celebrating Native American Heritage Month and the NEA National Heritage Award by revisiting Theresa Secord—a 2106 awardee and Penobscot basketmaker. Although Secord’s great-grandmother was renowned for her baskets woven from the bark black ash tree and sweet grass, Theresa herself didn’t learn to weave until she was an adult. In the podcast she discusses returning to the reservation after getting a master’s degree in geology and becoming interested in the traditional cultural art forms of the Wabanaki and learning basketry from an elder Penobscot basketmaker. Becoming an accomplished and award-winning artist, Secord talks about her growing awareness that basket-making was close to becoming a dying art form and her determination not to watch this fade into history; she discusses co-founding the Maine Indian Basketmaker’s Alliance—an organization she led for 21 years, and her continuing commitment to conservation to preserve the ash tree against the destruction of the invasive emerald ash borer beetle.
Join us online on November 17 when we premier the documentary called “Roots of American Culture” a celebration of the artistry of the 2022 National Heritage Fellows. Check out our website arts.gov for more details.
We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
C. Brian Williams talks about the art of stepping—defining and historicizing the art form and discussing its deep connection to African-American fraternities and sororities. (He learned to step when he was accepted into a fraternity at Howard University). He talks about the creation of Step Afrika! which began in 1994 as a dance festival in South Africa and grew into an education and performing arts organization and in now one of the top 10 U.S. Black dance companies, the company’s commitment to education (all dancers are expected to be teaching artists) and its dedication to cultural exchange. He also discusses the company’s commitment to bring the art form to as many people as possible and its creation of choreography that fits as easily in a school auditorium as it does on a Broadway stage. C. Brian Williams also discusses the significance of traditional arts globally and its ability to open a window into the soul of a nation.
Join us online on November 17 when we premier the documentary called “Roots of American Culture” a celebration of the artistry of all the 2022 National Heritage Fellows. Check out our website arts.gov for more details.
We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Kevin Locke passed away on September 30, 2022. He was a Lakota flute player, hoop dancer, teacher, and 1990 National Heritage Fellow. And we’re paying tribute to him by reposting this 2015. In the podcast, Kevin Locke talks about learning to play the indigenous flute—which had been on the brink of extinction, his work in the revitalization of the Lakota language, and the difference in meaning dance has in indigenous culture as compared to European culture. Locke also describes the Hoop Dance and its significance—the Hoop Dance is another traditional practice that almost died out-- in which he uses 28 wooden hoops to create a series of designs and patterns. Kevin Locke also discusses the universal importance of traditional arts and how the specificity of them creates connections among different peoples. We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Early last year the NEA’s magazine American Artscape published an article by Paulette Beete entitled, “Let Black Voices Ring Again” about the Mount Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society’s participation in the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design (CIRD) to rehabilitate a vacant but historically-significant Black church. In this podcast, we’re following up to trace the continuing impact of CIRD’s work with the Athens, Ohio project and how these efforts have continued to progress. We’re joined by the Director of Communications for the Mount Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society, Dr. Tee Ford-Ahmed who shares the history of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, of the vibrant Black community that once existed in Athens, Ohio, and the Mount Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society’s determination to preserve that history and repurpose the church as a Black cultural center while retaining its stunning architectural features. Ford-Ahmed talks about bringing in students enrolled in various programs in Ohio University—another Athens’ institution— to work as interns and help the preservation society develop strategies and plans. Dr Ford-Ahmed discusses CIRD’s work with the Mount Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society, CIRD’s outreach to the greater Athens’ community, how the preservation society’s participation with CIRD led to other opportunities—including additional grants, greater community involvement in the project, and the creation of a docu-series called "Black Wall Street Athens County." She also discusses how the plans for the church have grown and evolved, the current state of the project, and where she sees it going in the next couple of years.
We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts!
Bluegrass Fiddler and 2022 NEA National Heritage Fellow Michael Cleveland talks about his life immersed in music
Virtuoso fiddler and 2022 National Heritage Fellow Michael Cleveland talks about his life in bluegrass—and it is a lifelong love affair. He was brought to bluegrass shows as an infant and began performing on stage when he was about seven years. Known for the speed, intensity, and artistry of his playing, Cleveland is one of the great fiddler players of his generation, recognized 12 times as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (INBA)“Fiddler of the Year” and inducted into the National Fiddler’s Hall of Fame. Cleveland was a child he came to the attention of musicians like Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, and Allison Krause (who brought him to the Grand Ole Opry to play with her band when he was 13). In this podcast, Michael talks about going to the Kentucky School for the Blind when he was four years old – a school with a rich music program that frowned on bluegrass. He learned classical violin during the week and bluegrass when he came home on weekends. We discuss Southern Indiana’s rich history in bluegrass, how the music itself is rooted in community where jams are the real places of learning the music, and the accessibility of bluegrass performers to their audiences. Michael recalls starting his professional career which began by playing with Dale Ann Bradley and Rhonda Vincent, his branching out to solo work, and beginning his own band, Flamekeeper (named Instrumental Group of the Year by INBA seven times.) We also discuss his many collaborations with musicians like Bela Fleck, Tommy Emmanuel, and Heritage Fellows Del McCoury, Andy Statman and Jerry Douglas as well as his Grammy Award for Tall Fiddler. We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
With her second novel “The Taste of Sugar,” Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. It tells the story of small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism and upended by the 1898 US Invasion and the devastating 1899 hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Vera’s protagonists, Valentina and Vicente, join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations where they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange land. In this podcast, Vera talks about her life as a storyteller, her need to write a book that explored the history of Puerto Rico—a history most people don’t know—her meticulous research and her determination to get that history right, and the deep impact of colonization on the island. She also discusses her own struggle to find herself in books when she was growing up in Chicago, her sense that she was always living in two worlds, in two languages, and embracing that in her writing which moves fluently between Spanish and English.
A discussion with performance poet, performer, and playwright Amalia Ortiz who directs the theater arts program at SAY Sí. SAY Sí is a year-round, long-term, tuition-free multidisciplinary arts program in San Antonio serving middle and high school students primarily at or below the poverty line. In this podcast, Ortiz talks about the work of SAY Sí in general and the theater program in particular. Ortiz discusses the program’s emphasis on producing original theater and encouraging a practical application of the arts. The students learn all aspects of theater: they write the plays, cast them, direct them, create the costumes and scenery, do the sound and the lighting. They learn to work with their strengths, augment their weaknesses, and to come together as team. Ortiz also discusses creating theater in community and for community and the issues at the border for both the students and the teachers. Ortiz discusses her own work and the impact of growing up three miles from the border on her life and her art, her commitment to and love of performance poetry, her 2020 American Book Award for Oral Literature, and her latest book The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs. And we talk about her joy teaching at SAY Sí where she feels like a producer—helping to nurture ideas into original theater. We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Afro-Dominican filmmaker Loira Limbal’s documentary Through the Night is an intimate look at one home-based 24-hour day-care center in New Rochelle, the couple who runs the center and the mothers and children who need it. The film, which was co-produced and presented by the PBS program POV, examines the impossible situations workers who are single parents--primarily women and most particularly women of color-- can find themselves in a 24 hour-a -day economy. Limbal asks: “What happens when they don’t have family to pick up the slack?” And Through the Night goes a long way in answering that question. In this 2020 podcast, we talk about the social and political conditions that lead to the need for 24 hour-day-care, the personal cost of our modern economy for working mothers and for the caretakers of their children. But we also talk about the film’s appreciation of the ways communities of color can answer these needs creatively and lovingly even as the film decries a system that demands this adjustment to survive. Limbal also talks about the making of the film, the women she met during filming and her responsibilities to them, the overlap and differences between journalism and art, her determination to make Through the Night while raising two children and working full-time job, and bringing out a film during the pandemic. We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Flamenco Artist and 2022 National Heritage Fellow Eva Enciñias has transformed and broadened the performance and study of flamenco in the United States generally and in her hometown of Albuquerque, N.M. particularly. In this podcast, Enciñias talks about the artistry and history of flamenco and her family’s roots in this art form; her dual loves: flamenco and teaching, her 43 year-long career as a teacher in the dance department at the University of New Mexico where she created a concentration in flamenco in the undergraduate and graduate levels— the only accredited dance program of its kind internationally. We also discuss the institute she founded The National Institute of Flamenco which houses many programs and events including the Flamenco Festival Alburquerque (they went back to the original spelling) which has just celebrated its 35th anniversary and is one of the premier flamenco festivals in the world, and her on-going work weaving flamenco in the fabric of her community. We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
Composer and Dean and Director of the Music Division at The Juilliard School, David Serkin Ludwig talks about the opportunities and challenges at The Juilliard School, with its 850 plus students in music, drama, and dance. He discusses issues of equity and diversity at the school and in “classical” music as well as his longstanding commitment to a more inclusive music community and the importance of creating a vibrant culture of new music.
We also talk about his own musical lineage which goes back seven generations and includes his grandfather Rudolph Serkin and his uncle Peter Serkin—both extraordinary pianists. We discuss his composing-- what inspires him, how he works—his teaching, and how each energizes the other. We chat about the upcoming season at Juilliard (some 700 events-- most free or at a reduced rate) and his vision for the school five years down the road.
We’d love to know your thoughts--email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
The new monthly series “Art at the Intersection” will explore the ways the arts are helping to shape and inspire work being done in many areas of society, for example, in healthcare, city planning, infrastructure design, public spaces. The list is long, varied and sometimes unexpected. The Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture) is a case in point. Co-founded by artist, researcher, and organizer Carlton Turner in 2016 in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi, Sipp Culture uses story to address food insecurity and to support community, cultural, and economic development. In fact, its motto is “Telling our story. Growing our future.” In this podcast, Carlton talks about the connection between story and food, the dinner table as focus for story-telling and sharing history, gathering stories about Utica from community-members and using that information to help create infrastructures that support the community’s needs, creating a farm and apprenticeship programs, creating an artist residency program for rural artists in a five state region, their research program Equitable Food Futures-- a collaboration with Imagining America, and programming for the long-term around work that can take a generation to realize. Turner also talks about creating purposeful art in, with, and for community, his growing up in Utica where his family goes back eight generations, and what Sipp Culture’s success in Utica will look like. Follow us on Apple Podcasts! And let us know what you think, drop us an email at artworkspod@arts.gov
Author and 2020 NEA Literature Fellow Vanessa Hua is getting a lot of well-deserved praise for her recently released novel, Forbidden City which tells the story of the Chinese Cultural revolution as experienced by a woman who is a member of Chairman Mao’s dance troupe. In fact, Vanessa ‘s NEA Literature Fellowship enabled her to finish the book, so it seemed like a good time to revisit my 2020 interview with her—which remains one of my favorites both because of the books and because of Vanessa—she has a wonderful sense of humor and a feel for an apt turn of phrase. In this podcast, she talks about her novel A River of Stars which she describes as “a pregnant Chinese Thelma and Louise” and her book of short stories Deceit and Other Possibilities whose theme she says is “model minorities behaving badly.” These two books explore the lives of immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the divide between 1st generation parents and 2nd generation children. She also discusses the 2020 Lit Fellowship which allowed her work on Forbidden City, as well as her experiences as a journalist, as a writer of fiction, as a mother and as a 2nd generation Chinese-American. She is clear these experiences don’t exist in silos but are always informing one another.
The 2015 vote of the New Orleans City Council to remove four Confederate monuments from public grounds was met with death threats, protests, lawsuits, and rallies. Writer and comedian CJ Hunt, curious “why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America” covered the hearings and protests. The result of Hunt’s exploration is a documentary called The Neutral Ground--a personal, disturbing, sometimes-funny, and informative exploration of the struggle over the removal of the monuments in New Orleans. But more broadly, the film, an official selection of the both the Tribeca Film Festival and AFI Docs, is an examination of collective memory, the myths of the confederacy, how history was re-written and reaffirmed, and the price paid, especially by Black people, to keep the story of “Lost Cause” alive. In this podcast from 2021, CJ Hunt talks about the film’s journey from short funny video to a timely and scholarly documentary, his decision to insert himself as a central character in the film, the conversations Black people have been having about these monuments since Frederick Douglass, and how humor can be a great method to get people to examine uncomfortable truths.
Jenny Mendez, director of the Mattie Rhodes Art & Cultural Center in Kansas City, Missouri, discusses the center’s work in arts education and community programming. The Mattie Rhodes Center has been a force on the west side of Kansas City for over 125 years. Believing that the arts are a basic and integral part of every person’s education and growth, Mattie Rhodes opened its art center 50 plus years ago. In fact, Jenny Mendez first began going there as a child. In this podcast, Mendez discusses the art programs for children, preparation for back-to-school, their role in the school district, and the center’s broader community programs, like the month long celebration of Dia de los Muertos. Mendez also discusses Mattie Rhodes’ holistic approach to its programming and services and the ways all the programs—art programs, emergency services, family services, and community support—work together and intersect with one another to address family and community needs.
Almeta Ingram-Miller is the leader of the powerhouse gospel group and 2022 National Heritage Fellows the Legendary Ingramettes. The Legendary Ingramettes are a case in point. In this musical podcast, Ingram-Miller, a born storyteller, talks about the group’s six-decade-long journey and the vison and legacy of her mother Maggie Ingram, who began the group when she was left with five children to raise on her own. Her goal was to keep her family together. So, she taught them to sing gospel, and Maggie Ingram and the Ingramettes were born—singing in churches in South Florida until the family moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1961. Ingram-Miller talks about living and traveling in the Deep South during that time, the way gospel music reflects the struggles and the joys of the Black community, how the Ingramettes began performing at folk festivals that expanded their audiences, and the group’s work with correctional facilities. She also discusses the matriarch of the group, Maggie Ingram, and how her songwriting reflected her experiences, Maggie’s passing that led to Almeta taking on the leadership of the group and making the recording Take a Look in the Book, and the legacy of service begun by Maggie that remains at the heart of the Legendary Ingramettes.
Other links:
National Heritage Fellows
National Council of the Traditional Arts
Virginia Folklife Program
Center for Cultural Vibrancy
Richmond Folk Festival
In today’s podcast, Sarah Smarsh discusses her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth which is a 2018 National Book Award finalist and a 2022-2023 NEA Big Read title. Smarsh discusses her family background in rural Kansas, intergenerational poverty, and the difficulty of recognizing the impact of class in America. We also talk about her decision to tell the story of her family against a broader background of systemic inequality and of public policies that impact and shape the lives of rural working poor. In this conversation, as in the book, Smarsh combines sharp socioeconomic insights with the deep psychological understanding that comes from a lived experience in poverty.
We’re celebrating the announcement of the 2023 NEA Jazz Masters by revisiting my interview with 2021 NEA Jazz Master and 2016 Pulitzer-Prize winner Henry Threadgill. Threadgill remains one of music’s great innovators—as a composer and as a musician. In this podcast, Threadgill reflects on the vast musical legacy he found in his hometown of Chicago and the early influence of Muhal Richard Abrams and The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He looks back at his ensembles and the various musical languages he’s expressed with each as well as his overall philosophy of composing and making music—explaining why he believes the true test of music is in the live performance. Henry Threadgill is not just a musical seeker, he’s also a deeply thoughtful and very funny storyteller. Follow us on Apple Podcasts!
The 2022 National Heritage Fellows have been recently named and we’re celebrating that and kicking off our “Artful Lives” series by revisiting my interview with songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Louie Pérez whose music with Los Lobos has deep roots in his neighborhood of East LA. The interview is a wonderful snapshot of Los Lobos’ fifty year journey as well as the beauty and strength of culture grown in community, a core principle of the concept of Artful Lives and of the National Heritage Award. Louie Pérez is a great story-teller and in this podcast he discusses the creation of Los Lobos, the band’s love for and admiration of traditional Mexican music, their half- century commitment to bring that music and culture to the world, the extraordinary journey of “La Bamba,” the influence of East Los Angeles on the music, and the brotherhood the band shares.
The 2022 National Heritage Fellows are:
Michael Cleveland, Bluegrass Fiddler from Charlestown, Indiana
Eva Enciñias, Flamenco Artist, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Excelsior Band, Brass Band Musicians, Mobile, Alabama
Stanley Jacobs, Quelbe Flutist and Bandleader, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
The Legendary Ingramettes, Gospel Musicians, Richmond, Virginia
TahNibaa Naataanii, Navajo/Diné Textile Artist and Weaver from Shiprock, New Mexico
Francis “Palani” Sinenci, Hawaiian Hale Builder, Hana, Hawaiʻi
Tsering WangmoSatho, Tibetan Opera Singer and Dancer, Richmond, California
C. Brian Williams, Step Artist and Producer, Washington, District of Columbia
Shaka Zulu, Black Masking Craftsman, Stilt Dancer, and Musician, New Orleans, Louisiana
Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) Shanta Thake talks about programming at the intersection of art that speaks to the needs of New York City at this pivotal moment, including bringing blood drives, food donations and health and wellness programs to the Lincoln Center’s campus—with live musical accompaniment. She also discusses the Summer for the City festival with its 300 plus free or “pay what you will” ticketed events from a Second Line to Mozart’s Requiem, from social dancing to an orchestral tribute to Biggie Smalls. We also talk about the complex scope of her job, expanding on Lincoln Center’s commitment to diversity and innovation as central to all decisions, and her centering the artists themselves in conversations about ways for LCPA to move forward. Finally, we discuss the continuing influence of her two decades at The Public Theater with its determination to create theater with staff, actors, and audience as diverse as the people who ride New York’s subways.
Dr. Lisa Donovan discusses her work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) to increase access to arts education equitably in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Donovan talks about the success of the collective impact approach-- working across sectors to create lasting change--, the support of the Arts Endowment through its Collective Impact Grant Program, the unique assets of Berkshire County, the challenges it shares with other rural areas, and the networks and programs created to meet those challenges and make the arts and arts education easily accessible to all its students across the region.
Links to programs and topics discussed in the podcast:
MCLA Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Berkshire Regional Arts Integration Network
Integrating the Arts Across the Curriculum
The C4 Initiative
Thinking Like a Region
Saheem Ali is Associate Artistic Director of The Public Theater as well as the director of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham.” In this podcast, Ali talks about working with Fat Ham playwright James Ijames, his ongoing work with plays that contemporize and expand Shakespeare (like Fat Ham which sets Hamlet in a Black Southern backyard barbeque with a Queer Hamlet figure at its center or Merry Wives which sets Shakespeare’s play in Washington Heights in the midst of a community of West African immigrants). Ali also discusses his role as Associate Artistic Director of The Public, the mission of the theater—particularly of its Free Shakespeare in the Park Program--, The Public’s continuing work in interrogating power structures in theater, and its commitment to ensuring diverse voices in leadership, staff, performers, and audience.
We’re celebrating Black Music Appreciation Month by revisiting my 2021 interview with MacArthur Fellow and artistic director of Silkroad Rhiannon Giddens. A classically-trained singer, banjo and fiddle-player, and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music, particularly of African-Americans, into the present. Giddens is a co-founder of the Grammy Award winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming for Black musicians a central and historically-accurate place in old-time music. She then went on to create solo albums of haunting beauty and power born of African-American struggles past and present. Giddens is, first and foremost, an artist determined to be of service which drives her commitment to unearth musical roots and put that knowledge of different musical traditions to good use. In this podcast, Rhiannon talks about uncovering the Black roots in old-time music, the importance of National Heritage Fellow fiddler Joe Thompson to her musical lineage, the path to creating her opera Omar, the centrality of history on the margins to her music, and her plans to have Silkroad explore the multiplicity of musical worlds within the US.
Keywords: Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Joe Thompson, Omar
Stella Abrera and Sonja Kostich share a background in dance, are Asian-American and now lead an important artistic center in the Hudson Valley Kaatsbaan Cultural Park. In this podcast, they talk about Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and its 30 year history, Kaatsbaan’s singular role as both an artistic incubator and an arts presenter, its unique position during Covid in having the space to create and present work safely for both performers and audience, Stella’s and Sonja’s careers as dancers and their transition to arts administration, their commitment to diversity in programming, performers, staff and audience, Kaatbaan’s upcoming festivals, and the organization’s first grant from the Arts Endowment.
https://www.instagram.com/kaatsbaan/
https://twitter.com/kaatsbaandance
Keywords: Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Stella Abrera, Sonja Kostich, Hudson Valley, National Endowment for the Arts
We’re celebrating Pride Month and the Tony Awards by revisiting my 2020 interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson. A Strange Loop, his play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer theater writer…, has wowed audiences and critics. Capturing some of 2020's most prestigious awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, A Strange Loop became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama without a Broadway run, and Michael R. Jackson is the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer for a musical. (The NEA funded the world premiere of A Strange Loop, which was produced by Playwrights Horizons in 2019.) The show emerged from the pandemic with a production in Washington DC at the Woolly Mammoth theater in December 2021 which then transferred to Broadway-- opening in April 2022. Along with glowing reviews and cheering audiences, the play has also received 11 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Score. A Strange Loop is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny, and heartbreaking. The songs are often bouncy tunes that stay in your head while the lyrics can tear at your heart. In this podcast, Jackson talks about the years spent creating A Strange Loop, sharing that because he never thought the play would ever be produced, he just wrote what he wanted. He also discusses the possibilities that theater offers, his determination "to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining," and the importance of soap operas in his early career. It was a pleasure to revisit this podcast, listen to Michael, and lose myself in the fabulous score. When you’re done with the podcast, check out this Tiny Desk concert with Jackson and the Broadway cast of A Strange Loop.
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Keywords:
Michael R. Jackson, A Strange Loop. Pride Month, Tony Awards, Woolly Mammoth Theatre
Michael R. Jackson--the creator of A Strange Loop—talks about the origins and evolution of the prize-winning musical.
We’re celebrating Pride Month and the Tony Awards by revisiting my interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson. A Strange Loop, his play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer musical theater writer who is writing a play about a Black queer theater writer…, has wowed audiences and critics. Capturing some of 2020's most prestigious awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, A Strange Loop became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama without a Broadway run, and Michael R. Jackson is the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer for a musical. (The NEA funded the world premiere of A Strange Loop, which was produced by Playwrights Horizons in 2019.) The show emerged from the pandemic with a production in Washington DC at the Woolly Mammoth theater in December 2021 which then transferred to Broadway--opening in April 2022. Along with glowing reviews and cheering audiences, the play has also received 11 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Score. A Strange Loop is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny, and heartbreaking. The songs are often bouncy tunes that stay in your head while the lyrics can tear at your heart. In this podcast, Jackson talks about the years spent creating A Strange Loop, sharing that because he never thought the play would ever be produced, he just wrote what he wanted. He also discusses the possibilities that theater offers, his determination "to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining," and the importance of soap operas in his early career. It was a pleasure to revisit this podcast, listen to Michael, and lose myself in the fabulous score. When you’re done with the podcast, check out this Tiny Desk concert with Jackson and the Broadway cast of A Strange Loop.
Follow us on Apple Podcasts!
Stella Abrera and Sonja Kostich share a background in dance, are Asian-American and now lead an important artistic center in the Hudson Valley Kaatsbaan Cultural Park. In this podcast, they talk about Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and its 30 year history, Kaatsbaan’s singular role as both an artistic incubator and an arts presenter, its unique position during Covid in having the space to create and present work safely for both performers and audience, Stella’s and Sonja’s careers as dancers and their transition to arts administration, their commitment to diversity in programming, performers, staff and audience, Kaatbaan’s upcoming festivals, and the organization’s first grant from the Arts Endowment.
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Modern Warrior LIVE is a unique and moving theatrical experience that mixes first-person narrative with music and multimedia to chronicle U.S. Army veteran Jaymes Poling’s story of his three deployments to Afghanistan and subsequent transition back home. In today’s podcast, I speak with its co-creators, Poling and jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci, about the conception of Modern Warrior LIVE and their process of working together—both in creating the show and performing in it. Poling discusses his own challenges when transitioning to civilian life and the importance of writing to his healing process. They also talk about the sense of responsibility they feel to the audience, their outreach to veteran communities, the centrality of talk-backs as part of the show, and their making local mental health and veteran resources available to the audience.
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You may know Daniel K. Isaac as Ben Kim from the television series “Billions,” but he’s also a committed and talented actor in theater and an accomplished playwright. In fact, his play “ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME”-- which was supported in part by the Arts Endowment-- is opening in New York in August. In this podcast, Daniel K. Isaac discusses his great love of theater, his new play “ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME”- his commitment to bring Asian and Asian-American voices and stories to the stage, his work with the Ma-Yi Theater Company, his series-in-development, “According to My Mother” which explores his challenging relationship with his mother after he came out to her, and, of course, his role as Ben Kim on the television series “Billions.”
Here are the actors discussed in the podcast that Daniel K. Isaac wants us to know more about: Shannon Tyo, Jon Norman Schneider, and Jeena Yi.
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Novelist and NEA Literature Fellow Peng Shepherd's latest book is the speculative mystery, The Cartographers. Those of us who love maps think they are magical; in Shepherd’s book, this magic isn’t metaphorical. The Cartographers has, at its heart, not only the wonder and possibilities of map-making, but a map that is actually magical and becomes a dangerous obsession for a group of cartographers. In this episode of the Art Works podcast, Shepherd talks about her fascination with maps, the phenomenon of phantom settlements and how they inspired the book’s premise, her love of speculative fiction, and the challenges of writing “the second book.”
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We kicked off our celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by going into the archives for excerpts from two great podcasts with cultural powerhouses and 2011 National Heritage Fellows taiko drum leaders Roy and PJ Hirabayashi and slack key guitarist Ledward Kaapana. The Hirabayashis discuss founding San Jose Taiko, creating a distinctly Asian-American art form, and their commitment to collaboration and community-building. Kaapana remembers the centrality of music during his upbringing in a small Hawaiian village (and the month-long house parties!), the unique aspects of Hawaiian music and music-making, and his joy in playing with guitarists across genres. There’s music, singing, and drumming!
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This week, we're speaking with the first Latino and non-academic Poet Laureate of Kansas Huascar Medina. Medina, who is a member of the National Council on the Arts, brings a strong and vibrant voice to poetry with work that explore home, separation, place, and inclusion, and with his advocacy for grassroots artists. In this podcast, Medina reads from his recent collection Un Mango Grows in Kansas a bilingual celebration with poetry presented in both English and Spanish. He discusses making Kansas his home as a Latino, his dedication to writing poetry to and for ordinary people, his advocacy for local arts and artists, his work as Poet Laureate of Kansas (including the program "Exquisite Kansas"), and his thoughts about the Arts Endowment's significance for artists and arts organizations on the grassroots level.
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Bassist, composer, and 2022 NEA Jazz Master Stanley Clarke discusses his long and storied career in this tuneful podcast. He had hoped to become a classical musician, but along the way discovered jazz. Equally adept on the acoustic and electronic bass, Clarke was a successful soloist, and his tune “School Days” is considered a bass anthem. He’s worked with many musicians across genres, founding with 2006 NEA Jazz Master Chick Corea the jazz fusion group Return to Forever, teaming up with George Duke to record music that mixed pop, funk, and jazz, rocking with Keith Richards, Stewart Copeland, and Ronnie Wood, and touring with Béla Fleck and Jean-Luc Ponty, while The Stanley Clarke Band won the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Additionally, Clarke has scored over 70 films and television projects, including Boyz ‘n the Hood and Romeo Must Die. In this podcast, Clarke talks about it all with humor and insight, including his partnerships with Chick Corea, George Duke, and John Singleton.
Listen to the concert celebrating to 2022 NEA Jazz Masters!
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This week, the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject—poetry. Part 1 is excerpts from my 2018 interview with poet Melissa Range. Her collection Scriptorium mingles history with the personal as Range explores how language is used and abused—who speaks with authority? Whose language is dismissed? What do we preserve and how? From medieval illuminations to Appalachian slang, Range discusses the joy and creativity that’s found in the vernacular. Scriptorium was chosen for the 2015 National Poetry Series by my second guest Tracy K. Smith who also wrote the foreword to the book.
Part 2 of the pod excerpts my 2021 interview with 2017-2019 US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Today’s podcast focuses on her collection Wade in the Water a wide-ranging series of poems that reflect on history and contemporary America. Smith looks at both with an unflinching eye that mixes compassion and outrage with her lyricism and attention to language. Smith’s work sings to us of possibility while demanding an acknowledgment of what was and is. Again, we are compelled to grapple with: Whose voices are heard? What is preserved? Smith discusses the power of poetry to open up historical narratives and complicate contemporary assumptions by speaking intentionally with a multiplicity of voices.
We're celebrating Jazz Appreciation month with an in-depth conversation with composer and jazz musician Terence Blanchard. Terence Blanchard has a long list of exceptional jazz credentials, but most recently he’s found acclaim as the first Black composer to compose an opera—Fire Shut Up in My Bones—presented by the Metropolitan Opera. In this podcast, he discusses how he came to write Fire Shut Up in My Bones (which was funded in part by the Arts Endowment), the bitter-sweetness of its Met premiere, how he works with collaborators in jazz, in opera and in film—especially his long collaboration with Spike Lee, how composing for film enabled him to write opera, the influence of Art Blakey on his music, the impact of Black Lives Matter on his work, and the joy of playing live with his group the E Collective. Terence Blanchard is thoughtful, eloquent, and gracious with a deep sense of history and a great sense of humor.
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Meet Cassandra Wilson—singer, songwriter, musician, and 2022 NEA Jazz Master Fellow. In this tuneful podcast, the Grammy Award winner takes us through her career in music, her influences, her approach to singing, how she works with other musicians, her ideas about songwriting, and the centrality of the blues and Mississippi’s rich musical heritage to her work. Wilson is as insightful as she is talented as she discusses the trajectory of her long and rich career.
Photojournalist Lynsey Addario has been making news herself lately: she recently took what many consider to be a war defining photograph--that of a church worker, a mother and her children killed by a mortar as they tried to flee the Russian bombardment outside Kyiv. It’s a photograph that resonated around the world, showing clearly the cost civilians are paying for the war in Ukraine. Working regularly for the New York Times, Addario has been documenting the cost of war—particularly for women and children for over 20 years. in Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq, Congo, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine, Addario has insisted that we look and understand what “collateral damage” actually means. We’re revisiting my 2016 interview with Addario in which she discusses what compels her work, her ability to interact and document women in Muslim countries, how she deals with her own fears, her kidnapping in Libya, and the effects of motherhood on her work.
Novelist and 2022 NEA Literature Fellow Marjan Kamali talks about her recent novel The Stationery Shop a story that begins in 1953 in Iran and spans 60 years. It’s a book that is steeped in Persian culture, poetry and food even as its protagonist spends the majority of her life in the United States. Marjan discusses her decision to write about a lost love but a life fully lived, the balancing act of telling a story shaped by a political moment that isn’t subsumed by politics, the centrality of poetry in the lives of Iranians and Iranian-Americans, living on the hyphen between Iranian and American, her plans for her 2022 NEA Literature Fellowship, and the absolute joy of writing about the food at the heart of Persian culture.
And from Marjan, below are links to food blogs she mentions in the podcast: “There are many great food blogs out there that explain everything in Persian cooking so well. I highly recommend:
https://turmericsaffron.blogspot.com
mypersiankitchen.com
Nooshe jân! (May it nourish your soul!)”
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We’re marking Women’s history month by replaying my in-depth interview with the late Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed “Wrapped in Rainbows: the Biography of Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized one of America’s great authors whose work opened doors for writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. When we heard that Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed biography of Hurston “Wrapped in Rainbows: The Biography of Zora Neale Hurston” died on February 17, it seemed appropriate to honor both women by revisiting my 2006 in-depth interview with Valerie Boyd about Hurston and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In this podcast, Boyd talks about the impact Hurston and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” had on literature, the significance of Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville to her life and work, Hurston’s place in the Harlem Renaissance, and her final years out of the public eye but deeply embedded in her community. Boyd brought years of research, her writer’s eye, and a keen curiosity to the biography and to our conversation.
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Violist Ashleigh Gordon and pianist Anthony R. Green were students at the New England Conservatory of Music and were frustrated by the lack of representation of Black voices in classical music. So, in 2013, they co-founded Castle of our Skins—a music initiative in Boston focused on celebrating Black artistry in music. Ashleigh Gordon is the organization’s artistic and executive director as well as violist who performs in many of the concerts. From its successful first outing, “Castle of our Skins”—the name comes from a poem by Nikki Giovanni—has grown into a distinguished concert and music education series with creative programming that weaves music with visual art, dance, history, and storytelling. In this podcast, Gordon talks about the organization’s founding, how its mission has evolved and expanded throughout the years, the centrality of interdisciplinary work and partnerships to its programming, and how, as a Black arts organization, Castle of our Skins, which received an ARP grant from the NEA, is moving forward through “a health pandemic and a racial pandemic.”
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You can listen to Castle of our Skins’s YouTube channel here.
Music Excerpts from today’s podcast:
“Love Let The Wind Cry...How I Adore Thee" by Undine Smith Moore, performed by soprano Sirgourney Cook and pianist Sarah Bob. Performed live May 26, 2018 at Hibernian Hall, Boston as part of Castle of our Skins's "Ain't I a Woman" project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8GV-bTW740
“Wade in the Water” from Spiritual Fantasy No 12 by Frederick Tillis, performed by Gabriela Díaz, violin; Matthew Vera, violin; Francesca McNeeley, cello; Ashleigh Gordon, viola. Recorded live in the Boston Athenaeum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c68p3p_JT1g
“Positive Negativity” by Gary Powell Nash, performed by Ashleigh Gordon, viola and Anthony R. Green, from Castle of our Skins's Black Composer Miniature Challenge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlkrqPTkLl0
Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, the 13th chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the Arts Endowment having had a great deal of first-hand experience with the agency as she has served on the National Council on the Arts since 2013. She comes to the position of chair with years of experience in comprehensive community building that focuses on the centrality of the arts, culture, and supports what she terms an “artful life.” The first African American and Mexican American woman to chair the Arts Endowment, Chair Jackson received her doctorate in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her resume is long, deep, and rich, with notable work at the Urban Institute, Kresge Foundation, and as Institute Professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she also holds an appointment in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. In this thoughtful and engaging conversation, Chair Jackson shares her thoughts about the arts, an artful life, and the Arts Endowment at this time of reopening, rethinking, and reimagining the arts landscape.
Photo Credit: Photo by Tom Pich/tompich.com¸
To celebrate Black History Month, we decided to mine the archives and revisit my interview with pianist, NEA Jazz Master and National Medal of Arts recipient Hank Jones. Born in 1918, Jones began performing by the time he was 13, and he continued performing and recording until his death in 2010. His career contains much of jazz history—with 60 solo albums and literally thousands on which he was a sideman. And his family history is entwined with jazz as well: two of his brothers--trumpeter Thad and drummer Elvin-- were great and well-known jazz musicians. Always in demand for record dates and tours, Hank Jones played and recorded with a who’s who in the jazz world, including bandleaders like Coleman Hawkins, Billy Eckstine, Howard McGhee, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and with artists such as Charlie Parker Lester Young, Cannonball Adderley, and Wes Montgomery. He was Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist for almost five years and served as the original pianist of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. He was an eloquent and lyrical pianist with an unmistakable style. I spoke with him in 2008 when he had been awarded the National Medal of Arts, and as you’ll hear, Hank Jones was elegant, humorous, and happy to talk about his extraordinary life in music. Enjoy!
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Donald Harrison, Jr. may have been named a 2022 NEA Jazz Master for his advocacy work, but this hard-swinging improvisational saxophonist is also a brilliant player as evidenced by his performances and recordings with musicians like Ron Carter Terence Blanchard, Miles Davis Lena Horne, Eddie Palmieri the Notorious B.I.G., and the powerhouse jazz group the Cookers. Yet, Harrison’s passion for preserving and celebrating the music and culture of his hometown New Orleans is unmatched. He founded the Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group to honor the cultures brought from Africa that found root in New Orleans and then traveled the world. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Harrison, who had been a dedicated teacher and mentor for young musicians, increased his activism and worked tirelessly to help musicians remain in the city. An intentional and avid student of some of the jazz greats, Harrison has devoted himself to passing down the lessons he’s learned to younger musicians. And he has mentored some extraordinary jazz artists including Jon Batiste, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Trombone Shorty, and Esperanza Spaulding. And in this podcast, Harrison talks about it all—from the importance of Congo Square to New Orleans and to jazz, to his playing with and learning from Art Blakey and Roy Haynes, his commitment to learning music from all the eras of jazz and passing that knowledge along to his students, and, of course, his thoughts about the music itself.
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Sade Lythcott, CEO of National Black Theatre (NBT), is carrying on the legacy of her mother, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, who founded NBT back in 1968. Based in Harlem and born out of the Black Arts Movement, NBT has spent the last five decades presenting stories by and about Black people with an aim is "to produce transformational theater…by telling authentic stories of the Black experience.” It has done so not just on its stage but in the streets, parks, shops, and bars of Harlem. And in the process, this nonprofit community theater has become an important cultural incubator. Since its founding NBT has produced over 300 new works and worked with artists ranging from James Baldwin to Nikki Giovanni, from Nina Simone to Maya Angelou. In this podcast, Lythcott talks about the philosophy that’s been guiding NBT since its beginning, its emphasis on community and placemaking, how NBT develops new work and how, at this moment of racial reckoning, NBT has no interest in calling anyone out, they’re calling people in to sit at “the table we’ve been setting for 50 years.”
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Educator and advocate Joel Snyder is one of the pioneers of audio description which makes the visual verbal for people who are blind or have low vision. Just as captioning or signing gives people who are deaf or hard of hearing access to media and performing arts, audio description provides a similar service to people who are blind or have low vision. It’s a specialized skill: AD must provide a narration of what a show is depicting visually, and it must do so without stepping on dialogue or musical cues. And there is no question: the use of AD is removing barriers to culture for blind people. And Joel Snyder was there from beginning. In the podcast, Snyder takes us back to the origins of AD, the differences in providing AD for live-theater or dance as opposed to film, television, or streaming, how technology is shaping the future of AD, and his work at the Audio Description Project at the American Council of the Blind.
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Professor, art historian, and curator Dr. Nicole Fleetwood has spent years exploring the art of incarcerated people and how it is essential to our understanding of mass incarceration and the people it affects. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Fleetwood began this work as she reflected on her family’s and community’s history of imprisonment. The project grew into an award-winning book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and a traveling museum exhibition also titled “Marking Time.” Both the book and the exhibit look at the work of some 35 artists who are currently incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or who’ve been affected by the prison system. In this podcast, Fleetwood discusses the ingenuity involved in creating art within the constraints of the prison system, the bonds that can be forged among prisoners who are artists, the sheer talent and dedication these artists bring to their work, and the insights about imprisonment that the artwork frequently displays. Dr. Fleetwood is passionate, knowledgeable, and deeply appreciative of the spark of creativity that won’t be extinguished even under soul-crushing circumstances.
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In March 2020, Joy Jones was rehearsing the part of Vera in the Arena Stage production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars directed by Tazewell Thompson. It’s not a surprise that Arena Stage would be mounting Seven Guitars. A long-time grantee of the National Endowment for the Arts, Arena Stage is a pioneer of the Regional Theater Movement and the largest company in the country dedicated to American plays and playwrights. The surprise came with the pandemic that closed theaters and brought the country to a halt or at least a pause. It took over a year and a half, but Seven Guitars finally opened at Arena Stage in late November 2021 with cast and audience equally jubilant. In this podcast, Joy Jones talks about the role of Vera, playing August Wilson, working with Tazewell Thompson, re-entering the rehearsal room and the stage after the shut down, and learning to love the arts as a kid in Washington DC.
(You can find my 2015 interview with Tazewell Thompson here).
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Andrew Krivak’s novel The Bear, which is a recent NEA Big Read title, is a story about the last of humanity. Yet the book somehow is remarkably hopeful. Set far into the future, it’s a fable that seems as old as time with a sense wonder that weaves throughout it. Without humans, or with the last of humans, nature has reclaimed its prominence and its rhythms once again prevail. The last two humans, a father and daughter, understand and live within those rhythms, which they must in order to survive. In this podcast, Krivak talks about how the book began for him, his desire to write a book in which nature was a protagonist, his love of storytelling, and his hopes for the conversations The Bear will provoke as an NEA Big Read title.
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Today, we revisit a conversation with 2019 NEA Jazz Master composer, conductor, and arranger Maria Schneider who creates highly original and evocative compositions for her jazz orchestra.
A New York Thanksgiving tradition was a week-long series of performances by the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard. As we know the pandemic put the performance of live music on hold for over a year, there was no residency in 2020 and sadly, the Jazz Standard has shuttered its location. But happily the Maria Schneider Orchestra has recently returned to the stage performing in late November at New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Much of Schneider’s music is autobiographical, evoking the Minnesota plains where she was born and raised. She returns to the theme of her childhood in a prairie town again and again; in fact, she’s come to realize that the foundation of her music is her hometown. She finds parts of it magical, and we certainly hear it in her music. Although she’s composed classical work and collaborated with David Bowie, Maria’s musical center remains in jazz. In this podcast, we talk about her connection to jazz (especially to the music of NEA Jazz Master Gil Evans), the ways in which she and the musicians in her band inspire one another, her collaboration with Bowie, and how her deep ties to Windom, Minnesota, translates into mesmerizing music.
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David Rodriguez is the Executive Vice President & Executive Producer of NJPAC (New Jersey Performing Arts Center)—it’s not only one of the largest performing arts centers in the country, it’s also one of the most diverse from its programming to its artists to its staff and its audiences. From its inception, NJPAC ‘s goal was to serve as a cultural anchor and help revitalize downtown Newark through the arts. It does so in a number of ways from producing world-class events in one of its four theaters to programming free events throughout the city of Newark to offering a robust arts education program which reaches some students & families annually. In this podcast, David Rodriguez discusses NJPAC’s place in the city of Newark, its commitment and responsibilities to the community, its programming during the pandemic, its ever-growing arts education programming, and his own background as a Newark-born musician turned producer, including his decade-long stint running the Apollo Theater.
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Today, we revisit our interview with 2018 National Heritage Fellow and black ash basket maker Kelly Church. An Anishinaabe belonging to the Gun Lake Potawami Band, Church combines the centuries-old tradition of ash tree harvesting and processing, creating ribbons of ash she then weaves into stunningly original and colorful baskets. Tied to her artistry is a deep commitment to keep this tradition not just alive but vital. She’s taken on a task that’s become more difficult and urgent since the ash tree is being destroyed by an invasive species: the emerald ash borer. In this podcast, Kelly Church takes us on the journey of taking a living tree and recreating it as a basket, the significance of the black ash tree for the North East people, and the steps she’s taking to keep this traditional art intact for the next generations.
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Arlo Iron Cloud (Oglala-Sioux) embraces and celebrates Lakota culture through his radio broadcasting, photography, filmmaking, language reclamation, and work in food sovereignty. He passionately embraces Lakota tradition and is deeply committed to its future. Iron Cloud is the station manager (and long time programmer) on KILI Radio—the radio station designed by and for the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In fact, he produced an episode of the NEA-funded podcast, Out of the Blocks from Pine Ridge. He works with his wife Lisa in the food sovereignty movement, which is focused on traditional foodways. And he documents every day life on Pine Ridge through his photographs. Iron Cloud is a dynamic guest, and once you hear his voice, you’ll know why he’s in radio. In this podcast, Iron Cloud talks about Kili Radio, the weight and joy of language reclamation, and discovering with Lisa the traditional and sustainable foodways of the Lakota.
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Today, Hill Country blues musician, songwriter, and 2021 National Heritage Fellow Cedric Burnside talks about bringing his musical roots to the 21st century. Cedric Burnside has the blues in his bones: his father, uncles, and cousins all played. His grandfather was blues legend R.L. Burnside, known to Cedric as “Big Daddy.” Cedric essentially grew up in R.L.’s house, listening to the music, playing along at the regular house parties and at the local juke joint. Beginning his musical career as a drummer, by the age of 12 or so, he was backing R. L. on tours. A songwriter most of his life, he added guitar-playing to his musical repertoire and began a successful solo career. In this podcast, Burnside talks about his “really amazing, adrenaline-pumping little childhood,” his relationship with R.L., what makes Hill Country blues Hill Country blues, and his joy in bringing the music to the world.
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Dr. Niyati Dhokai is Program Director of Veterans and the Arts Initiative at George Mason University’s Hylton Performing Arts Center. The program has been supported, in part, by Creative Forces®: NEA Military Healing Arts Network-- an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Creative Forces places creative arts therapies at the core of patient-centered care at clinical sites throughout the country, including telehealth services. It also invests in increased access to community arts activities to promote health, well-being and quality of life for military service members, veterans, and their families and caregivers. That’s where Veterans and the Arts Initiative comes in—it’s an arts and community hub for people connected to the military. Since Veterans and the Arts initiative began in 2014, it has served over 10,000 people—developing robust workshops in music and art as well as performances and events for the community. In this podcast, Niyati Dhokai discusses the unique aspects of programming for veterans, service members, and their families, the very concrete ways art creates community, how the program continues to evolve, and the support and resources Veterans and the Arts has received from Creatives Forces.
A further note: Applications for Creative Forces Community Engagement Grants—managed in partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance—are available now to eligible organizations for emerging and established projects. You can find the guidelines at maaa.org/creativeforces. Deadline for applications is December 15, 2021.
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Co-founder, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter for the band Los Lobos, named 2021 National Heritage Fellows, Louie Pérez is one of the great storytellers. For more than 40 years, he’s written songs from the Chicano experience that speak to the joys, struggles, challenges, and hopes of everyday life. Los Lobos is an East LA band who came together almost 50 years ago, and, miraculously, it still consists of the same four founding members; Pérez, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, and Conrad Lozano (Steve Berlin—the new kid—came on board in 1984).
Los Lobos began as rockers who came to appreciate the traditional Mexican music of their parents—so much so that they devoted themselves to it for ten years. They played (and play) authentic music, but they approached it with the energy of rockers. Their big breakthrough came when they contributed music to the soundtrack of La Bamba, including the title song which became a mega-hit. As Pérez says, “a little band from East LA, that had a number one record of a traditional Mexican song. The name of the band was Los Lobos. That’s quite a statement. Another snapshot of Chicano culture as it moves forward.”
Their entire discography can be seen as snapshots of Chicano culture as they moved through and with different musics from rock to traditional to zydeco to R&B but always referring back to their Chicano roots. In this musical podcast, Pérez takes us through the formation of Los Lobos, their love of traditional Mexican music, their lifelong commitment to bring that music and culture to the world, the extraordinary journey of “La Bamba,” their roots in East Los Angeles, and the brotherhood the band shares.
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This week, we turn our attention to the newly published report Disability Design,commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. First, a conversation with the report’s researcher—designer, teacher, and disability advocate Joshua Halstead. He gives us an overview of report’s findings, the challenges disability design faces, the opportunities it presents for all of us, and some recommendations for moving forward. Then we take a look (or a listen) to disability design in action with Grace Jun. She’s a designer, professor, and CEO of Open Style Lab—an innovative hub committed to inclusive design and, just as importantly, an inclusive design process. Both are fascinating conversations about this exciting and promising design field.
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Snehal Desai is the producing artistic director of East West Players (EWP). One of the longest running theaters of color, EWP is now the nation’s leading Asian American theater company. For half a century, EWP has been raising the visibility of Asian Americans and inspiring and advocating for a world free of racism and discrimination through transformative theater. In this podcast, Desai talks about programming with and for the diverse communities of Asian Americans, how EWP navigates the intersection of social justice and art, the importance of theater in combatting racist stereotypes, leading an Asian American theater company at this particular moment in time, and his own journey as an artist of color.
And be sure to check out our issue of American Artscape, Showing Strength through Creativity: Equity and Access in the Arts for Asian American/Pacific Islander Communities.
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With her second novel The Taste of Sugar, Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. Her two protagonists Valentina and Vicente are small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism. Then in 1898, Puerto Rico was invaded by the United States which assumed control of the island, devaluing the peso and levying property taxes. This was followed in 1899 by the devastating hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Losing their farm to these “twin catastrophes,” Vicente and Valentina join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations. Lured by the promise of good wages in exchange for hard work, they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange land. It is a powerful and moving story, deserving of all its considerable praise. But while this is a saga, it’s also a close look at family: we see this young couple grow and mature-- seizing whatever agency they can in the face of hardship. In this podcast, Vera talks about her need to write a book that explored the history of Puerto Rico—a history most people don’t know—her determination to get that history right, and the deep impact of colonization on the island. She also discusses her own struggle to find herself in books when she was growing up in Chicago, her sense that she was always living in two worlds, in two languages, and how writing helps her to bring these together and create something new.
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Two-time Newbery Award winner and the 2014-15 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Kate DiCamillo writes stories that matter. From the fantastical like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (which author Ann Patchett calls a “perfect novel”) to the more realistic Raymie Nightingale series, DiCamillo always finds the balance between humor and heart. First and foremost a storyteller, her immensely popular books are beloved by kids, parents, teachers and critics. Kate DiCamillo’s most recent book is The Beatryce Prophecy. Published by Candlewick Press and beautifully illustrated by Sophie Blackall, The Beatryce Prophecy is a compelling tale that opens our eyes to the sheer power of reading and storytelling to crack open the world. In this podcast, DiCamillo talks about how storytelling and reading both factor into her life, her writing process, why animals figure so prominently in her work, and her time as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Funny and thoughtful, Kate DiCamillo is as delightful to speak with as she is to read.
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Folklorist Elena Martínez is a producer for the documentaries “From Mambo to Hip Hop: A Bronx Tale” and “We Like It Like That: The Story of Latin Boogaloo.” What makes these documentaries stand out is, of course, the fabulous music. But the perspective or point of view of both films is just as important. The films examine the music through the lens of urban folklore—music created by and for the people in the neighborhood, a small stretch of the Bronx often known for urban blight and not much else. Well, as the films demonstrate, there is a lot more-the sound of Mambo which adopted Cuban rhythms and Puerto Rican traditions, a Latin beat joined up with R&B and funk which gave birth to Boogaloo, the creation of the New York salsa sound, the rise of hip hop. And astoundingly, all this creative energy happening in the same small neighborhood in the Bronx. In this podcast, Elena Martínez talks about the making of “From Mambo to Hip Hop” and “We Like It Like That” She takes us through the exuberant Latino musical traditions of the Bronx and its impact on the people who live there. Martínez is an enthusiastic guide to some fabulous urban music traditions.
“From Mambo to Hip Hop”
“We Like It Like That”
City Lore
Bronx Music Heritage Center
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September 27 will be an historic night for opera lovers: the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts company in the nation, will open its season after the long pandemic shut-down with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts since its development period, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is based on the memoir by Charles Blow. It’s composed by jazz great Terence Blanchard with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, and it is the first opera by a Black composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera. Angel Blue will be starring along with baritone Will Liverman. It’s the second time Angel Blue has opened the season for the Metropolitan Opera: in 2019, she was Bess in the Grammy-winning production of “Porgy and Bess”—a role in which she shone. But shining on stage is what Blue does as a singer and as an actress. For the past decade and a half, Blue has performed to great acclaim in opera houses around the world and in a variety of roles. Now, she has emerged as one of the most vibrant sopranos performing today. Her voice has been praised for its “shimmering beauty” that is “always perfectly controlled and consistent throughout her expansive range.” In this podcast, Angel Blue and I talk about opera and its joys, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” her career in Europe, her first-time performing at the Met, and her thoughts about DEI and opera.
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Tap Dancer and 2021 National Heritage Fellow Reginald “Reggio the Hoofer” McLaughlin has been motivated by one thing his entire life: his love of tap-dancing. He walked away from a successful R&B career as a bassist to pursue his unlikely dream of making it as a dancer. Born and bred in Chicago, he turned to mentors like Jimmy Payne to teach him the foundations of tap dance which only affirmed his passion for dance. Unable to find a job as a tap dancer, he went down to Chicago’s subways and danced there—learning along the way how to connect to an audience. He was approached by Urban Gateways—a non-profit that brings the arts to underserved children-- and began performing in classrooms. But McLaughlin wasn’t only dancing, he was also teaching the students the history of tap and its social and cultural context. Given his talent, personality, and dedication, Reggio McLaughlin was a natural performer and teacher. He teamed up with the legendry tap-dancer Ernest “Brownie” Brown and the two of them performed together for almost two decades. About 27 years ago, McLaughlin began teaching tap at the [oldtownschool.org]Old Town School of Folk Music where he remains an in-demand teacher. And he’s traveled around the world participating in Old Town’s International Program demonstrating tap and collaborating with dancers from many cultures. Reggio is a great story-teller, and in this podcast we talk about Chicago, his career as an R&B bassist, his love of tap as an American art form, choreographing his Christmas classic “The Nut Tapper,” and dancing-- in the subways, in the classrooms, around the world, and with Ernest Brown. His enthusiasm and easy laughter are contagious!
In Washington, DC, the evening of September 10 promises to be momentous: at 6 pm ET, Ford’s Theatre is presenting Come From Away: In Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate play than Come From Away to mark this occasion. The Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical was inspired by the aftermath of 9/11, when a small town in Canada welcomed some 7,000 people whose flights had been diverted when the U.S. airspace was closed. Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the free non-ticketed concert is the brainchild of Sue Frost of Junkyard Dog Productions, the lead producers of Come From Away, and Paul Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre. In this music-filled podcast, Frost and Tetreault talk about the origins of the play Come From Away, its inspiring story and glorious music, their hopes for the concert, and the power of art to give voice to tragedy and to shine light on possibility. We also discuss the significance of the return of live performance for Ford’s Theatre, for Come From Away, and for theaters across the country.
2020 NEA National Heritage Fellow, teacher, and Haudenosaunee Raised Beadworker, Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) creates contemporary art that is deeply rooted in the past. Haudenosaunee or Iroquois raised beadwork is unique to the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the Oneida. Its hallmark is beads sewn in a such a way that they arch above the fabric creating stunning dimensionality. Hoffman has taken this art to new literal and figurative heights—creating large beaded urns for example. But while her work is deeply connected to the traditions and culture of the Haudenosaunee, her interest is in taking the form and “exploring, expanding and reimagining it against contemporary life.” A three-time master-teacher in Wisconsin’s folk arts apprenticeship program, Hoffman is committed to keeping this traditional art vibrant for the next generations through her teaching. She is not just an extraordinarily talented artist, she’s also, as you’ll hear, a passionate advocate for the art form and a fabulous storyteller.
Drummer, producer, educator and 2021 NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington is not only a virtuoso musician, she’s also a strong advocate for social justice and gender equity on the bandstand and in the classroom. Deeply committed to empowering the next generation of musicians, Carrington is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Carrington has spent her life in jazz. Coming from a musical family, she had her first professional gig at the age of ten (with Clark Terry, no less!). By the time she 11, she was a part-time student of the Berklee College of Music. And her career took off from there. In the 1980s, she worked with jazz luminaries like Pharaoh Saunders and Frank West; in the 1990s, she toured with jazz greats like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She went on the lead her own groups, and in 2014, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award as a leader for Best Jazz Instrumental Album with Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue. She brought together women instrumentalists and vocalists for The Mosaic Project tours and recordings. Her recent album Waiting Game with her group Social Science is the definition of artistic intersectionality in terms of race, gender, age, and style. In this podcast, we talk about her early mentors, her development as a drummer and as a bandleader, some of the great musicians she’s played with, and her advocacy for gender equity in jazz and society.
With the new school year upon us, this week we’re turning our attention to arts education. First, Ayanna Hudson, director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts (and currently acting deputy chairman of Programs and Partnerships), reminds us of the singular role the arts and arts education can play as students return to the classroom. Hudson emphasizes that involvement in the arts not only engages and empowers students, it can also support the social and emotional needs of students during this critical transition and provide a much-needed vehicle for self-expression. Then we explore an example of arts education and its ability to transform students with new media artist and educator Agnes Chavez. Chavez is the founder of STEMarts Lab, which uses the arts to develop science and math skills. Based in Taos, New Mexico, the artists at STEMarts Lab design and create light and sound installations and then build curriculum tools around the art. STEMarts Lab also bring artists into the classroom to work with teachers and provide hands-on workshops both in person or virtually. During the pandemic and virtual classrooms, Chavez responded “to the problem that I was hearing from teachers that the kids were not engaged, that shifting to this online format was just not working. And my question to myself and to my team was, 'How can we use our creativity, our digital tools to come up a more engaging way to reach them?'" In answer, Chavez created a virtual international exchange program that connected a classroom in Taos, New Mexico, with a classroom in Portugal in which the students collaborated on an art installation that had real world and virtual applications. Space Messengers turned out to be a winning formula, engaging students and exciting teachers. As one teacher wrote, “The temptation of creating art and learning some fascinating science from experts around the world, while working with kids from another country, has proven magical for the COVID-battered students…” In this podcast, Chavez tells us about the program, how learning science through art impacts students’ ways of thinking, and the program’s continuing evolution.
Additional Information
National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Education
Arts Education Partnership
“Supporting Student Wellness Through the Arts”
“How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity” by Agnes Chavez
https://www.arts.gov/back-school-arts-education
This week, we’re talking about investing in the creative economy from two perspectives. First, we get an overview of the issues from Laura Callanan. She’s the founding partner of Upstart Co-Lab, an organization which works to connect impact investing to the creative economy. With global partners from the UK and Argentina, Upstart Co-Lab co-published a report about this--Creativity, Culture & Capital: Impact investing in the global creative economy brings together some 40 essays from organizations from around the world that support impact investing in creative industries. In the podcast, Callanan explains what’s meant by the creative economy and impact investing, and how they contribute to a thriving culture and economy. She always shares what the United States might learn from the work done in this area by other countries.
Then, we burrow down and look at investing in the creative economy from a local perspective by looking at the work done in Atlanta, Georgia, with Sheoyki Jones. Sheoyki Jones is the founding program manager of Creative Industries, an initiative of Invest Atlanta. (She also contributed an essay to the Creativity Culture & Capital report called “The Creative Industries: Driving Economic Opportunity in Atlanta.”) Jones talks with me about the programs that Creative Industries began that support Atlanta’s creative workers. She discusses the importance of genuine outreach to creative workers and also shares some of the challenges and best practices in designing programs that invest in and support local creative communities.
In his documentary The Story Won’t Die--an official selection of the AFI DOCS Film Festival-- director David Henry Gerson looks at the lives and work of eight Syrian artists in exile. Since the civil war in Syria began ten years ago, more than half of the country’s population has been forcibly displaced. Of these, 6.8 million are refugees and asylum-seekers who have fled the country. The life of an artist is never easy—but to create art, first, under a violent and oppressive dictatorship, and then, as a refugee struggling to survive in a strange land, is something else again. What meaning does free expression have for someone in exile? Who is there to see or hear? Where can words and images resonate? How do you make a community in exile? These are some of the questions that the artists ask themselves and that The Story Won’t Die explores. These artists do continue to create in spite of displacement, As Gerson says, they “find ways to turn very dark, awful circumstances into creativity.” The Story Won’t Die interweaves the stories of these eight artists, with their art—music, dance and visual arts—taking pride of place in the film and becoming a central part of the narrative. In this podcast, David Henry Gerson talks about his decision to make a film that focuses on Syrian artists in exile, the relationship that developed with the artists, interweaving the art with their stories, the burden of exile, and the extraordinary resilience shown by these artists under dire circumstances.
Featured Artists: Abu Hajar, Bboy Shadow (Mohammad Sabboura), Diala Brisly, Tammam Azzam, Anas Maghrebi, Medhat Aldaabal, Omar Imam, Bahila Hijazi
Anita Fields, a citizen of Osage Nation, is a renowned textile and clay artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her art reflects Osage philosophy with its connection to nature and emphasis on duality. Her work also gives a new visual language to the complexities of Native history and culture. While immensely talented in other media, Fields has been named a National Heritage Fellow for her outstanding ribbon work. Native American ribbon work is colorful, precise, and complex. The style of Osage ribbon work is unique and Fields is an exemplar of the art form. An innovative artist, she honors the tradition while taking it to new places--for example, taking the designs of ribbon work and impressing it on her ceramic and clay pieces. In this podcast, Fields talks about the centrality of Osage culture and philosophy in her art, her work in different media, her respect for and innovations of traditional textile and clay work, and her long and continuing artistic journey.
In 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four Confederate monuments from public grounds. Death threats, protests, lawsuits, and rallies ensued, and writer and comedian CJ Hunt thought the situation ripe for a short satirical YouTube video. He was curious “why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.” He covered the hearings and protests, and a bigger story began to emerge—one with profound implications. The result of Hunt’s exploration is a documentary called The Neutral Ground—a personal, disturbing, sometimes-funny, and informative exploration of the struggle over the monuments in New Orleans. But more broadly, the film, an official selection of the both the Tribeca Film Festival and AFI Docs, is an examination of collective memory, the myths of the Confederacy, how history was rewritten and reaffirmed, and the price paid, especially by Black people, to keep the story of “Lost Cause” alive. In this podcast, Hunt talks about the film’s journey from short funny video to a timely and scholarly documentary, his decision to insert himself as a central character in the film, the conversations Black people have been having about these monuments since Frederick Douglass, and how humor can be a great method to get people to examine uncomfortable truths.
One of the most important public artists in New Orleans is Enrique Alférez who was born in rural Mexico of indigenous Nahua heritage. His life spanned the 20th century, and his distinctive vision helped shape the look of the city. His figurative sculptures, fountains, architectural friezes, bas-reliefs and carvings can be found on buildings and streets throughout New Orleans from City Park to Lakefront Airport, from the Central Business District to Algiers Point. Alférez is the subject of a new biography by poet Katie Bowler Young called Enrique Alférez: Sculptor. Young had unrestricted access to his private papers and his family’s holdings; and, the result is a thoughtful, comprehensive, and visually-rich assessment of Enrique Alférez’s life and work. In this podcast, Young discusses the breadth of Alférez‘s work, his commitment to public art, his place in the New Orleans’ visual landscape, his celebration of women and laborers, his time with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army (oh yes!) and why a poet would take on the task of writing a biography—even one of a great artist.
Mohegan theater artist Madeline Sayet believes that stories have power; they can do harm or they can heal. And her aim is to use story medicine: to serve people by sharing stories in ways that heal communities. Sayet is an award-winning director whose many honors include a TED Fellowship, an MIT Media Labs Directors Fellowship, and a White House Champion for Change Award. She is a playwright, a performer, and a director of new plays, classic work, and opera. First and foremost. Sayet is an advocate for and participant in Native theater, championing Native playwrights, directors, and performers. She grew up with traditional Mohegan stories and Shakespeare, and it’s this intersection that informs her current exhilarating and intimate one-woman show Where We Belong. Sayet both wrote and performs in the play, which is presented by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library and is streaming through July 11. Where We Belong is Sayet's journey examining her time living in London while working on a PhD in Shakespeare and becoming increasingly uncomfortable in a country that doesn’t recognize its colonial past. Yet, when she returns to the United States, to Mohegan in Connecticut where she lives, she’s finds it difficult to feel grounded again. In this podcast, Sayet talks about the impulse behind Where We Belong, the challenges of performing a one-woman show during the pandemic, the enormous growth in Native theater and the possibilities it offers, and the centrality and potency of story to her life.
Maestro William Henry Curry is a man of incredible talent, tenacity, and enthusiasm. His love of music is infectious and informs his rigorous approach to conducting as well as his ongoing outreach to community members. He grew up in Pittsburgh in an African-American working class family, and both he and his brother went on to become professional classical musicians. There was a musical lineage, even if it skipped a generation: his maternal grandfather organized and sang in a Black opera company while his paternal grandmother was an organ major at the New England Conservatory. It’s not easy for African-American classical musicians, and it’s especially difficult for African-American conductors. And Maestro Curry has met numerous challenges even as he has found great success. In this podcast, the Maestro talks about some of those challenges and successes all of it filtered through his great love of music which has been a lodestar he’s been following his entire life. He talks about his student days at the Oberlin Conservatory, his extraordinary twenty year run as resident conductor of the North Carolina Symphony, his working with jazz artists when he was resident conductor for the New Orleans Symphony, and his current position as the music director and conductor of the Durham Symphony Orchestra where he insists on robust programming of American composers. Maestro Curry is a passionate story-teller whose gusto is matched by his charm, wit, and humor.
Celebrate Juneteenth with this conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of the novel Libertie. An historical novel, Libertie was inspired in part by the true story of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York and then co-founded of a hospital for women in Brooklyn. Greenidge shifts the timeline to before, during, and after the Civil War and creates the character of Dr. Kathy Sampson—a widow who is raising her daughter Libertie to walk in her footsteps in a Black community in Brooklyn, regardless of the girl’s wishes. As she runs up against gender roles, class and parental expectations, and colorism, Libertie seeks to create the life she wants. Kaitlyn Greenidge parallels Libertie’s struggles with autonomy to the ways Black people sought to enrich their lives and their communities in the aftermath of slavery, and she traces their ongoing discussions about what freedom would look like for Black people in America. In this podcast, Greenidge talks about writing an historical novel, the possibilities that Reconstruction offered Black people and the country as a whole, her decision to set her novel solely in Black communities and make white society peripheral to the story, and the pervasive and ongoing challenges of colorism.
We’re celebrating Pride month with a conversation with poet, 2011 NEA Literature Fellow, and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown. Drawing on biography, history, and mythology, Brown’s acclaimed collection The Traditionbears witness to personal and public violence, love, anger, and vulnerability. It challenges and forces a reckoning with tradition, even it seeks to enlarge its possibilities. And it does so with language that is both dazzling and haunting. Brutality and tenderness are never far apart in Brown’s work. In language that sings with lyrical intensity, Brown demands attention to the beauty of and damage done to the bodies of Black and queer people. In this poetry-filled podcast, Brown walks us through his writing of The Tradition in particular and poetry in general. When Brown writes a poem, he begins with sounds. He says, “Once you find the words that make those sounds, they tell you what you’re saying.” Brown gives us a close reading of a couple of his poems, explains the new poetic form he invented called “the duplex” (and gives us poetic examples of it,) and talks about the significance of Black queer poetry and its capacity to expand our concept of love.
We’re kicking off Pride Month by revisiting my interview with playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson. A Strange Loop,his play about a Black queer musical theater writer, has wowed audiences and critics, capturing some of 2020's most prestigious awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A Strange Loopis the first musical to win a Pulitzer for drama without a Broadway run, and Michael R. Jackson is the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer for a musical. (The NEA funded the world premiere, which was produced by Playwrights Horizons.) The show is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny, and heartbreaking. The songs are often bouncy tunes that stay in your head while the lyrics can tear at your heart. Jackson has said he never thought the play would ever be produced, so he just wrote what he wanted. (There's a lesson here.) And his mission statement is "to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining." He succeeded. It was a pleasure to revisit this musical podcast: Jackson is smart, funny, and extraordinarily engaging. And I’ve been singing his fabulous music to myself all week. You will too!
Jenny Koons is a director on the cutting edge of immersive theater. She specializes in bringing diverse artists together to create original cross-disciplinary work through a collaborative process. Central to her ideas is work that’s both site-specific and in a reciprocal relationship with its audience. It’s of a piece that Jenny Koons has been a facilitator and educator in creating anti-racist spaces and engaging in conversations around race and equity for over a decade. One of her primary interests in theater or as an educator is making and reaffirming community. As she says,” directing is community organizing… Because it's guiding a group of strangers towards something that doesn't exist. Something that's invisible. And that, to me, feels like such an important exercise in this moment where we're all kind of careening towards something we don't really know what it is.” In this podcast, we talk about making site-specific theater during a pandemic, immersive theater as we emerge from a pandemic, the ways organizing and theater intersect, AAPI representation both on stage and behind the curtain, and the magic of collectively making the imagined visible.
If you think opera is staid and calcified, then let me introduce you to the work of Heartbeat Opera—a small and radically innovative company. The brain-child of co-artistic directors Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, Heartbeat Opera came into being about seven years ago. Heard and Proske loved the power and beauty of opera and wanted to create work that would speak to contemporary audiences, particularly younger listeners. To that, they focused on creating adaptations that spoke to the present, setting Carmen near a US/Mexico border-crossing, adapting Fidelio to tell a story of a Black Lives Matter activist, looking at Madama Butterfly through the eyes of her bi-racial son. At the same time, Heartbeat presents opera in intimate spaces, so the audience can actually feel the vibration of the music which is frequently distilled into a smaller orchestra and incorporates unusual instrumentation like electric guitar or jazz saxophone. The results are stirring works and performances that are fresh, vital, and enlivening. In this podcast, Ethan Heard talks about Heartbeat Opera, its production of Fidelio and its incorporation of choruses of incarcerated men, the company’s online pivot during the pandemic, its deepening commitment to providing a space for social justice issues, and the glorious possibilities that opera contains.
Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.” But the series is a metauniverse, forever in production, dictating the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender and age. Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own: he wants to be Kung Fu guy. In this podcast, Charles Yu talks about writing Interior Chinatown as a screenplay, his desire to give a story to the “generic Asian man” we see in the background on TV series, the impact of Asian-American stereotypes in an omnipresent popular culture, and his own time spent in a writers’ room on a television series.
Painter Mequitta Ahuja has been re-visioning self-portraiture. While her large colorful canvasses have centrally positioned her own African-American and Indian-American identity, she also claims her own authority as the artist. She emphasizes the work of painting: depicting multiple genres of painting in pictures within the paintings themselves. The result gestures to history, collapses time. and makes new meaning. Ahuja’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her many fellowships and awards include a 2009 residency to the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2014 residency to the Siena Art Institute and a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship award. If you like to learn about the process of making a work of art, this is the podcast for you: Ahuja walks us through the making of her spectacular painting “Portrait of her Mother,” as well as her own evolution within the genre of self-portraiture, and the importance of her mentor Kerry James Marshall.
Born in Panama and currently based in New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnesis equally at home in poetry and theater. A former I Am Soul Resident Playwright at the Black National Theater, Holnes is known for his research-based work in theater, spending hours in interviews with people whose stories unfold on the stage. A celebrated poet, Holnes’s work has appeared in many publications including Poetry Magazine, The Caribbean Writer and Callaloo. He is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a judge in the semi-finals of the 2021 Poetry Out Loud Competition. His recently released chapbook Migrant Psalms has been awarded the 2021 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry prize. His full-length collection of poetryStepmotherland is due out in 2022. As the titles of both books indicate, Holnes poetry explores questions of belonging, bridging cultures, and building and rupturing communities. In this podcast, Holnes reflects on the different practices of writing poetry and of writing plays, the ethnographic research that inspires his work, the importance of acquiring the skill of listening both as a creator and as an agent for change, and the experience of judging the 2021 Poetry Out Loud semi-finals.
Drummer, producer, educator and 2021 NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington is not only a virtuoso musician, she’s also a strong advocate for social justice and gender equity. She has spent her life in jazz. Coming from a musical family, she had her first professional gig at the age of ten (with Clark Terry, no less!). By the time she 11, she was a part-time student of the Berklee College of Music. And her career took off from there. In the 1980s, she worked with jazz luminaries like Pharaoh Saunders and Frank West; in the 1990s, she toured with jazz greats like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She went on the lead her own groups, and in 2014, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award as a leader for Best Jazz Instrumental Album with Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue. She brought together women instrumentalists and vocalists for The Mosaic Project tours and recordings. Her recent album Waiting Game with her group Social Science is the definition of artistic intersectionality in terms of race, gender, age, and style. And Carrington is deeply committed to empowering the next generation of musicians--founding and serving as the artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. In this podcast, we talk about her early mentors, her development as a drummer and as a bandleader, some of the great musicians she’s played with, and her advocacy for gender equity in jazz and society.
Award-winning writer and two-time NEA Literature Fellow Camille T. Dungy is one of the significant voices in ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a challenge to classic nature poetry, which was often written by poets who observed nature rather than seeing themselves as part of the natural world. Ecopoetry dispels this illusion: “outside of nature” doesn’t exist. Ecopoetry probes the complexities and interconnections of all parts of the natural world. In a genre long been dominated by white voices, Dungy explores these entangled connections between humans and nature from her position as a Black woman in the United States. She does so with precise detail, rhythmic lyricism, and a broad inclusiveness. The author of four collections of poetry, Dungy is also the editor of the 2009 path-breaking anthology, Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African-American Nature Writing. The anthology insists that the place of Black nature poets be recognized on their own terms: as writers whose connection to nature is complicated by history. In other words, existing outside of history is as impossible as existing outside of nature. In this poetry-filled podcast, Dungy discusses the issues around the absence of Black voices in anthologies of environmental poetry, editing and organizing Black Nature, her own work as a poet, and the significance of environmental poetry.
The Heath Brothers are jazz legends—2002 NEA Jazz master Percy was a bassist, 2003 NEA Jazz Master Jimmy was saxophonist, composer, and arranger and now their youngest brother Albert, known to all as Tootie, a virtuosic percussionist, has now joined them as a 2021 NEA Jazz Master. Tootie Heath’s talent was apparent a young age—he was still in high school when he performed with Thelonious Monk. In fact, the list of musicians who have sought him out reads like a who’s who in jazz: John Coltrane, Dexter Gordan, Yusef Lateef, Art Farmer, Anthony Braxton, Ethan Iverson. The list goes on and on; after all, Heath has performed on more than 100 recordings. But note the range of styles of these musicians. Heath is known for his extraordinary versatility as a drummer—eager to play various styles of jazz as well as immerse himself in the music and rhythms of other cultures. Yet, there’s never any mistaking Heath’s own distinctive musical voice. And it was a voice that was nurtured from an early age at his home in Philadelphia where he grew up surrounded by music. In this podcast, Tootie Heath talks about his musical roots, his talented brothers, some of the celebrated musicians he’s performed with, and his commitment to embracing different musical styles. He’s funny, irreverent, and a born story-teller with great stories to tell.
2021 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellow for Jazz Advocacy Phil Schaap is an original—a legendary radio host since 1970 at WKCR, an award-winning audio engineer with a facility for remastering jazz classics, a renowned teacher of jazz, a virtuoso of jazz history in general and Charlie Parker in particular, and, as you will hear in this podcast, one of the great storytellers. Schaap has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes, audio engineering, and production. He’s taught jazz at Columbia University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University, and currently teaches in the graduate school at Juilliard. In addition, he became curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center where he created Swing University--an educational program where he teaches classes that cultivate listening and a deeper appreciation for jazz. From the mid-1970s until 1992, he booked musicians for Jazz at the West End a Manhattan club with nightly shows seven days a week. Phil Schaap literally grew up surrounded by jazz and in the company of extraordinary musicians who were close family friends—and he has funny, lovely, and appreciative stories about all of them. This podcast is a great way to kick off Jazz Appreciation Month—it’s harder to find anyone who appreciates the music more than 2021 NEA Jazz Master Phil Schaap.
Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poetry Oculus has gotten a great deal of well-deserved attention. The word Oculus comes from the Latin; it means “eye.” It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome. In her poetry, Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings as she examines the violence of spectacle. In Oculus, Mao presents the many ways in which Chinese people, most particularly women, have become spectacles for American audiences-- in life, in death, on film and online — objectified by a lens they don’t control. Her poems excavate this history of spectacle beginning with Afong Moy the first Chinese woman to come to America and displayed to paying audiences as an oriental curio. In a series of persona poems starring Anna May Wong, Mao travels through time from silent films to the present day. Mao also interrogates the culpability of current technology from an online suicide in 2014 to a murder that was a front page sensation and horror in 2012. Through them all, Sally Wen Mao makes clear the price these people paid and continue to pay as they hold the weight of our gaze, their visages a spectacle for others to consume, both visible and unknown. And the poet also intervenes—reanimating and resurrecting these women who have been flattened by history’s gaps and the narrowness of our stares. Earlier this week, Sally Wen Mao spoke with me about Oculus, her attempt to create poetry that can speak through historical silences, the fluid line between image and spectacle, and the weight of representation.
Tana French reigns over Irish crime fiction. She pushes the genre with descriptive lyrical language in novels that are character-driven and densely atmospheric. Her first six books center on the Dublin Murder Squad, an imaginary branch of the Dublin police force. But French defies convention—instead of a single narrator for the series, each book is narrated by a different member of the squad. So, a supporting player in one book might be the narrator of another. These first-person narrations by various detectives, whose own issues color their observations, give readers a deeply personal and extremely partial perspective of colleagues, suspects, and the crimes. All of which results in the understanding that truth is elusive. Then in her seventh book, the stand-alone novel The Witch Elm, French turns this model upside down. Here, the narrator is a character who is the victim of one crime and a suspect in another. Not surprisingly, the detectives and their actions look very different from this perspective—manipulative and bullying rather than cops just trying to get the job done the best way they can. In her latest book The Searcher, another stand-alone, French moves to new territory entirely: she takes the framework of the American western and shifts it to a remote rural area of Ireland where a former Chicago cop settles by himself in a ramshackle cottage ready to begin a new life. It’s a familiar trope but French molds it into a story of her own. In this episode of the podcast, she joins us to talk about that new novel and her other books, as well as her determination not to keep writing the same book over and over, how her time as an actor informs her writing, and why she blames her entire career on Stephen King.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.
When Nataki Garrett was named the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Spring 2019, people took notice for multiple reasons: Garrett is only OSF’s sixth artistic director and its first woman of color to hold that position. She also became one of few women of color in the country to lead a major theater. Because of OSF’s history, reach, prestige, and $44 million budget, and Garrett’s track record in developing new work and her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, her appointment seemed to herald an important moment in not-for-profit theater. But just as Garrett was launching her first full season as artistic director, OSF was forced to shutdown because of the pandemic—closing five productions only six days after opening. Since then Nataki Garrett has focused her efforts on keeping OSF vital, sustainable, and accessible to new and old audiences alike. In this podcast, she talks about OSF’s 2020 journey through the pandemic, the country’s racial reckoning, and the challenges and opportunities presented by both, OSF’s 2021 season, and her vision of creating strategies to support artists.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.
In July, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens was named as the new artistic director of Silkroad. A classically-trained singer, MacArthur Fellow, banjo and fiddle-player and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music forward. Giddens is co-founder of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming a central and historically-accurate place for black musicians in old-time music. She then went on to create solo albums of haunting beauty and power born of African-American struggles past and present. Giddens is, first and foremost, an artist determined to be of service and put her wide knowledge of different musical traditions to good use. She found a good match with Silkroad. Begun by Yo-Yo Ma in 2000, Silkroad brings musicians together from around the globe—not just to make music but to use art to have a positive impact across borders. In this podcast, Rhiannon talks about the importance of fiddler National Heritage Fellow Joe Thompson to her musical lineage, her drive to be of service, her current projects (she just wrote an opera!), the centrality of history in her music, and her plan to have Silkroad explore the musical worlds within the US.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.
Henry Threadgill remains one of music’s great innovators—as a composer and as a musician. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016 for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound, becoming only the third jazz artist to receive the award. A multi-instrumentalist, throughout his career he has led ensembles of varying sizes—experimenting with instrumentation and creating new compositional techniques. In this podcast, Threadgill reflects on the vast musical legacy he found in his hometown of Chicago and the early influence of Muhal Richard Abrams and The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—a collective that encouraged musicians to compose and play their own music. He looks back at his ensembles and the various musical languages he’s expressed with each as well as his overall philosophy of composing and making music—explaining why he believes the true test of music is in the live performance and why he eschews the word “jazz.” Henry Threadgill is not just a musical seeker, he’s also a deeply thoughtful and funny storyteller.
In The Office of Historical Corrections., Danielle Evans weaves themes of race, memory, and history throughout her finely-crafted stories. With extraordinary artistry, she complicates these issues with sensitivity, imagination, and wit. “You know how white people love their history right up until it’s true,” observes a character in the title story who works for a fictional government agency whose aim is to correct historical inaccuracies. Well, Evans shows us in beautifully-realized stories with no easy answers-- only complicated questions. How do you make things right—either personally or collectively? Who gets that second chance? How do you find a past that’s been erased? How/where do you place yourself in it? These are just some of the questions animating her stories…and our conversation about The Office of Historical Corrections.
Here’s a conversation with Tracy K. Smith about poetry, history, memory, and wonder. Smith collects awards and prizes the way the rest of us collect traffic tickets (only hers are well-deserved!) She served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of four prize-winning poetry collections, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2016 memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2018, she curated an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time—bringing together contemporary writers to create a poetic exploration of 21st century America. She’s also written the librettos for two operas and serves as the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton where she teaches creative writing. Her writing sings from the page. It is lyrical, accessible and crucial—combining honesty and imagination as she explores issues of race, family, and the infinite. In this podcast, she reads and discusses some of her poems and delves into her belief that the language of poetry with its multiplicity of voices can create possibilities with wide and deep implications. Tracy K. Smith is a voice for our time—both on the page and in this interview.
Amanda Morgan is in the corps of the prestigious Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) based in Seattle. PNB is one of the largest and best-regarded companies in the United States with a deep commitment to racial diversity. Although people of color comprise 26 percent of its dancers, Morgan is its only black female ballet dancer—add to that her height of five foot ten inches, and you have someone who stands out rather than fits in. But Morgan decided long ago that “if you don’t see what you want to see around you, create it." And so she has. Finding herself not picked by choreographers, she began to create dances herself; she co-founded a mentorship program between company dancers and students at Pacific Northwest Ballet School; she began the Seattle Project, an interdisciplinary artist collective that presents performing arts to the community; and she spoke at protests in Seattle about pervasive racism—calling out the ballet community at large for its lack of racial equity. Morgan is talented, determined, and outspoken. In this podcast we talk about her love of ballet—both as a dancer and a choreographer, her appreciation for being part of the PNB family, her belief that ballet has to change and embrace real inclusion from the studio to the boardroom in order to thrive, and the work she’s done to help bring that change about.
A conversation with Duke Dang—he’s the general manager of Works & Process the performing arts series at the Guggenheim Museum. Since 1984, Works & Process has been bringing audiences into the creative process of performing artists. Serving as a laboratory of sorts for artists to test their ideas, Works & Process has produced approximately 60 performances annually. Each performance would begin with an excerpt of a work in process, followed by a discussion with the artist. But this past year, because of the pandemic, Works & Process itself faced a shuttered theater. But the program made a remarkably quick pivot: it found a path for artists to safely gather, create and perform together again by establishing covid-free bubble residencies for artists in the Hudson Valley. Over fifty artists have entered eight Works & Process bubble residencies following strict safety protocols, and Works & Process captured this journey in a four-part docuseries Isolation to Creation. Isolation to Creation gives audiences a rare opportunity to go into the bubbles and behind the scenes to witness the exhilaration faced by performers returning to the studio, to the stage and to each other. It’s also a chance to hear some great music and see some extraordinary dancing. I speak with Duke Dang about Works & Process and its recalibration in the face of the pandemic. Duke and I also talk about the struggles performing artists are experiencing creatively, emotionally and financially.
(Isolation to Creationis streaming for free at allarts.org, and is also airing in the New York metro area on the All Arts TV channel)
Aaron Dworkin is a man of many talents: he’s a violinist, social entrepreneur, professor, author, MacArthur Fellow and member of the National Council on the Arts. In this time of a long overdue racial reckoning, many organizations are answering the challenge to interrogate how their own systems address diversity and inclusion. Aaron Dworkin is singularly positioned to speak to this moment: he has been shining a light and doing the work around inequity for decades. A violinist from early childhood, Dworkin was an undergraduate when he grappled with the implications of the dearth of African-American and Latinx musicians in orchestras as well as the lack of music by people of color in the repertoire of those same orchestras. Aaron Dworkin got to work and in 1997 founded the Sphinx Organization-- its goal was to address the underrepresentation of people of color in classical music on every level: on the stage, in the repertory, behind the stage, in the front office, and in the audience. Beginning as a competition for African-American and Latinx string instrumentalists, Sphinx has grown into a force in classical music with its own symphony orchestra, and robust programming that reaches over 100,000 students and artists annually. In this podcast, Aaron talks about diversity and classical music—what can be addressed immediately and what requires a complex and far-reaching overhaul. We also talk about his own very interesting biography and how it informed his love of music, the centrality of entrepreneurship to the arts today (he wrote a book called The Entrepreneurial Artist), and his public television show Arts Engines in which he talks to arts’ administrators from around the country. It’s a great conversation with someone whose passion and conviction are matched by his humor.
2020 National Heritage Fellow singer and songwriter Suni Paz is part of the progressive Latin American music movement known as nueva canción (new song). For decades, Paz has been guided by twin passions which are reflected in her music: a commitment to social justice and a creative approach to education. In fact, Paz is a pioneer in the use of music to teach Spanish-language curricula. Born in Buenos Aires, Paz's was a large extended family of musicians, writers, and artists. Her grandmother painted, her doctor grandfather would play his violin to patients, and her father insisted that the family listen to opera each weekend. Paz herself was singing and composing as a teenager. But when she heard the songs of Argentinian folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, who championed the music of indigenous people and songs about the poor, she became passionate about “music with a conscience.” She came to the United States and began performing—alongside singers such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Don McClean, and Phil Ochs—in folk festivals, rallies, marches, festivals, and on concert stages around the world.
In this podcast, we talk about her family, her belief in the power of music to inform and transform people, her commitment to children and education, and her years writing and performing “music with a conscience.”
To honor the Winter Solstice, (more specifically, that the days are getting longer from here on in), as well as Jupiter and Saturn having their closest visible alignment in 800 years and to celebrate her recent appointment to a third term in the position, we’re reposting my interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek). I interviewed her in early Spring, soon after the pandemic, and I find myself re-reading her work and appreciating how much Joy Harjo is a poet for this moment. Joy’s poetry is rooted in landscape and place yet is also transcendent. In her recent collection “An American Sunrise,” which is an NEA Big Read selection, Joy draws on Native myth and storytelling as she writes of tribal displacement, a trail of tears that sings of ancestral lands, of a history that remains present, and of a culture that’s essential. The podcast is a far-reaching conversation about poetry and music (Joy plays a mean saxophone). She reads some poems and talks about her deep love of poetry and language and her equally passionate relationship with jazz and music. She’s is a great thinker and lively conversationalist. So, enjoy the podcast as we say “good-bye” to 2020 and look forward to the new year!
Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) Lora Bottinelli joins me to talk about the central place of traditional art and traditional artists in the American experience. The many cultures and traditions that shape us a people are a strength that we can lean on as we get to the other side of the pandemic. This is a bedrock belief of the NCTA--the nation’s oldest producing and presenting organization focused on folk and traditional arts. As Lora notes, the grassroots nature of traditional arts—so deeply rooted in community— “can prove to be a powerful force to positive change for the country.” Lora also discusses the ongoing work of the NCTA as it works closely with traditional artists across the country and the profound impact of the pandemic on traditional arts which thrive on community interaction. But, Lora also notes, these art forms and cultural practices have survived many upheavals in society, and she shares some interesting and creative pivots made by artists and organizations, including the NCTA, that speak to this moment.
Theaters (and all live performance) are struggling to get through the pandemic. Most have been closed since March, and artistic directors are kept up at night with a host of questions: when people will be willing to gather indoors to watch a play together? What will that room even look like? How will theaters keep their actors, crew and audiences safe? How can theaters survive until that moment we can all come together again? And how can theater speak to this moment? And artistic directors—along with many in the theater community—have answered these questions with wit and imagination. The artistic director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival Rick Dildine, for example, moved theater out-of-doors and gave its audience the chance to voice monologues from a diverse set of playwrights. The project is called “Speak the Speech. ” “Speak the Speech” is set along a self-guided trail throughout Blount Cultural Park. As you wander the trail, you’ll find 14 great monologues…one from Shakespeare, the others from American writers like August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry and Mary Kathryn Nagle (along with short bios of the writers and context for the speeches). You’re invited to “speak the speech,” to feel the power of those words as you say them. Rick and I talk about “Speak the Speech,” Alabama Shakes, and the challenges and possibilities this moment offers theater and what theater can give to this moment.
Teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig recently published her first book Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. Rebekah, who has a Ph.D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, has been working through the ideas that appear in her book on Instagram @sitting_pretty. She grew up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and 2000s and searched to find a story—any story—that reflected her own. She didn’t, and so she wrote it into existence. Sitting Pretty is a memoir in essays in which—among other things-- Rebekah grapples with the myth of ableism which she maintains revolves around the idea of an idealized typical body that isn’t typical at all but exists only for the very few and only for a short time since we all age (if we’re lucky). In a conversational tone that makes it feel as though you’re talking with a very smart, funny and thoughtful friend, Rebekah makes the argument that “we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.”
Culture-bearer and 2020 National Heritage Fellow Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) is one of a handful of birch bark canoe builders left in the United States. The Ojibwe is a nation and cultural community that has a deep connection to waterways, and the birch bark canoe was commonly used for transportation, fishing, harvesting wild rice, and hunting. The tradition of building these canoes had been handed down for millennia. The boats are as beautiful as they are functional; in fact, it is one of the most sophisticated inland watercrafts in the world. Wayne Valliere is determined to keep this cultural knowledge alive and vibrant—ready to be passed down to the next generations. In this podcast, Wayne Valliere explains how the boats are made “on nature’s time; “ he takes us through the steps of the boats’ creation and their profound cultural meaning as well as Anishinaabe ways of teaching, learning and being.
Scott Yoo is a wonderful guide to the music and the influences of some of the great composers of western classical music. Now Hear Thisis in its second season—it’s a four-part mini-series from Great Performances. Yoo describes it as influenced by Anthony Bourdain but “substitute music for food.” But it is a feast for the ears and for the eyes. Yoo travels to the places where composers like Vivaldi, Haydn, and Schubert lived and worked; digs into the cultures that shaped them, the food they ate, the music they heard, and of course, the glorious music that they created. In a Covid-altered universe where performing art and traveling is out of reach, Now Hear This is a series that goes far in filling the breach for the classical music lover, the frustrated traveler, and the curious-minded.
In this podcast, we’re marking Halloween by revisiting interviews with authors who have created work that focus on monsters. We hit all the major horror figures with NEA literature fellow Ben Percy (werewolves), Max Brooks (zombies and vampires) and Kiersten White (the Frankenstein monster). All of the writers are entranced by the creatures they explore—but they also find them oddly safe, non-polemical images that inflame the imagination and lend themselves to explorations of anxiety, stratification, privilege, sexism and yes, pandemics.
The exhibit Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle is an American epic--depicting moments in early American history from 1775 thru 1817--some well-known, others not-- often seen through the eyes of marginalized peoples. Struggle consists of 30 panels painted by Lawrence during the early 1950s during Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Lawrence is well-known for painting the everyday life as well as epic narratives of African-American history and historical figures—think of The Migration Series. But with Struggle, Jacob Lawrence presented a radically integrated view of early American history—one in which African-Americans and Native Americans were woven into heart of the nation’s story. Yet, Lawrence also incorporates their particular struggles into the work as he examines the messy work of making a democracy. The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle reunites most of the 30 panels in the series for the first times in over 60 years. Organized by and first exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, it is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–with support from the National Endowment for the Arts--where it was co-curated by Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing and Randall Griffey a Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Sylvia Yount and Randall Griffey join me for a deep-dive into the work of Jacob Lawrence in general and Struggle in particular, his great belief in the past as critical to the present, and the ways that the work of Jacob Lawrence continues to shed light on the moment we find ourselves.
Poet, novelist and essayist Erika L. Sánchez may have been a National Book Award Finalist, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2019 NEA Literature Fellow and currently the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University, but she takes nothing for granted. Growing up in Chicago the child of Mexican immigrant factory workers, she understood early on that not everyone was able to realize their lives’ goals. Erika, often feeling like the odd kid out, found new worlds through books and herself through writing. And she was determined to make a place for herself in that world. After a long period of struggle, in 2017 Erika L. Sánchez had the year writers dream of: her debut collection of poetry Lessons on Expulsion was published to glowing reviews as was her YA novel I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter which became a finalist for the National Book Award. In this podcast, Erika talks about her traditional upbringing, her rebellion and her longing to see herself represented in literature (I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter was the book she wanted to read when she was 15) and the joy she finds in her first love—poetry.
Maria Manuela Goyanes, artistic director of Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is a theatrical force of nature. She arrived from New York City’s Public Theater in 2018 where she had been Director of Producing and Artistic Planning. Her role there included planning and supervising programming at all of the Public’s five main stages, as well as Shakespeare in the Park and Joe’s Pub. She did all this in addition to teaching and mentoring theater artists as well as volunteering for the job of executive producer for 13P--a collective of mid-career playwrights who each wrote and directed one play which would get a full-scale production which Maria supervised. Did I mention that while she was at the Public she was also associate producer for Fun Home, Straight White Men and Hamilton? A first-generation Latina-American, Maria Manuela Goyanes is an ideal fit for Woolly Mammoth which is known for producing new plays that are edgy, challenging, and thought-provoking. It’s a mid-sized theater with large footprint that nurtures talent and takes chances. It’s adventurous theater—unafraid of making audiences uncomfortable and tackling social issues head-on--challenging both its artists and audiences in ways that are sometimes fun, sometimes difficult but always interesting. In this podcast, Maria discusses what makes Woolly Woolly, how she brings the fullness to her background to her role as artistic director, and the challenges and opportunities this moment offers theater in general and Woolly in particular. Maria is a born raconteur—smart, engaging and engaged, with wonderful insights about theater.
Itunes keywords: Maria Manuela Goyanes, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Pandemic, theater, equity
In Through the Night documentary filmmaker Loira Limbal looks at a home-based 24-hour day care center run by Deloris and Patrick Hogan. Deloris, known to all as Nunu, is at the heart of this film as she steps up to give working mothers—primarily women of color—the flexibility they need as they work multiple jobs and/or night shifts. Filmed over a two-year period, it becomes clear as we see the Hogans teach, feed, guide and love these children that Nunu provides not just child-care but a critical social safety net for mothers working long hours to keep their families afloat. Limbal, herself a single mom of two, also introduces us to two of the mothers: Marisol who works three part-time jobs to provide for her family, and Shanona a pediatric ER nurse whose shifts typically run 14 hours. Through the Night is an inditement of the current childcare system in which mothers are forced to make impossible choices and an affirmation of the ingenious ways people come together to support one another in the face of systemic challenges. It is a remarkable film, and Loira is a passionate advocate for the women who make do against all odds while observing a system that doesn’t work for them. Loira talks about her determination to make Through the Night, the women she met during filming, her own journey as a filmmaker, the challenges of making the film as a mother of two with a full-time job and bringing out a documentary during the pandemic.
Poet Jose Marti wrote “With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot.” 2020 National Heritage Fellow and Founder and Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe Hugo Morales could well write the same. A Mixtec, born in Oaxaca, he came to California with his mother and siblings when he was nine and joined his father working in the fields in the central valley. Growing up in a farm labor camp, Hugo quickly became aware of the dignity and poverty of the workers and of the sustenance provided by their traditional cultures, especially their music. Hugo’s musician father would often talk about the pride he had in Mixtec traditions and frequently played with other indigenous musicians for farmworkers’ fund-raisers, funerals or dances. Against most odds, Hugo went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School; but, he returned every summer to work in the fields and graduated with a determination to work for farmworkers and give voice to their culture. And so, in 1980, Radio Bilingüe was born. Based on “honest” culture by and for the people, Radio Bilingüe was the first Latino-controlled full-power FM radio station in the San Joaquín Valley. Now, 30 years later, Radio Bilingue is the leading Latino public radio network and content producer for the nation’s public broadcasting system with 24 stations and over 75 affiliates. Listen to the podcast to learn about Hugo’s and Radio Bilingüe’s extraordinary journey.
This week, the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turned 90 years old. To celebrate, we’re revisiting my 2017 interview with this 1983 NEA Jazz Master and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. Sonny Rollins has been the jazz player’s jazz player and acknowledged as jazz’s greatest living improviser. He’s always been an adventurous musician-- unafraid to change or to embrace the sounds of calypso, Latin, avant-garde, funk and R&B. His solo work is unsurpassed-- either playing solo gigs or when performing with his band launching into long, extemporaneous unaccompanied cadenzas. As he said in the interview, “I like to play by myself. And, I'd like to go out and play by the water, by the ocean. I go in the park, anyplace where I can be alone with my saxophone… I always like to put all the music in my head, create it myself, patterns, ideas, thoughts, passages, anything like that… the greatest thing in the world is to be playing your instrument… because it's you and the universe.” Sonny’s universe also included many legendary musicians including Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, and his closest friends John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. This is a thoughtful and insightful conversation with an American genius. Enjoy it.
Many women won a political victory 100 years ago with the passage of the 19th amendment which declares that the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.". The Brandywine Museum of Art is commemorating its passage and the long struggle leading to it with the exhibit Votes for Women: A Visual History funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Votes for Women shines a spotlight on the movement with over 200 hundred objects including drawings, illustrations as well as historic photographs of marches and rallies and examples of clothing and sashes worn by the suffragists. Significantly, Votes for Women works against what had been a dominant narrative: that the suffrage movement had been mainly white. It recognizes both the critical efforts of women of color and their community networks and the inability of the 19th to guarantee access to the ballot to women of color—primarily but not exclusively in the Jim Crow south. A companion exhibition Witness to History ”continues the story of the ongoing struggles marginalized communities faced when voting following the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment” featuring 55 photographs taken during the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Curator Amanda Burdan talks about creating an inclusive exhibit about suffrage, its challenges and rewards, as well as the determination, political sophistication and publicity savvy of the suffragists.
Dorthaan Kirk has been named a 2020 NEA Jazz Master for her jazz advocacy…and it’s easy to see why. For more than 40 years, Dorthaan has been a major force at WBGO, Newark Public Radio—the only full-time jazz station in the New York/New Jersey area. She had been married to the brilliant jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk who died tragically young. After his death, Dorthaan wondered what her next step would be when a phone call changed everything: someone was starting a jazz radio station in Newark; would she interested in coming on-board? She was, and the rest is history. Dorthaan took on the role of special events and community relations coordinator at WBGO, bringing with her creativity, tenacity, a knowledge of the music business and firm friendships with many musicians. Among the programs she spearheaded at WBGO are its Jazzathons—a live 24 hour musical fund-raiser, the WBGO art gallery which supports local artists and opens the station to the community so they might enjoy the art, and, dearest to Dorthaan’s heart, the WBGO children’s concert series where musicians have been introducing children to jazz through two generations. Dorthaan is a great talker—as she will be the first one to tell you—so it’s a podcast filled with stories, memories and love for the people who make and support jazz.
2020 National Heritage Fellow Singer/Songwriter William Bell was the first male solo artist signed by the legendary Stax record label in the early 1960s. With his great sense of melody, rhythm, and lyrics as well as one of the best voices in the business, Bell played a pivotal role in creating a new genre of music known as Southern soul or the Memphis sound. In this podcast, William Bell discusses the pivotal role Stax played in his life and the lives of so many kids in Memphis. We talk and listen to some of his biggest hits like “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and “I Forgot to be Your Lover”, his collaboration with Booker T. Jones and his 2016 Grammy-Award winning album “This Is Where I Live” which he recorded under the newly revived Stax label. He is a born story-teller with a voice like velvet and a lifetime in music.
2020 NEA National Heritage Fellow and Haudenosaunee Raised Beadworker, Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) creates contemporary art that is deeply rooted in the past. Haudenosaunee raised beadwork is unique to the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the Oneida. Its hallmark is beads sewn in a such a way that they arch above the fabric creating stunning dimensionality. Hoffman has taken this art to new literal and figurative heights—creating large beaded urns for example. But while her work is deeply connected to the traditions and culture of the Haudenosaunee, her interest is in taking the form and “exploring, expanding and reimagining it against contemporary life.” Hoffman is not just an extraordinarily talented artist, she’s also, as you’ll hear, a passionate advocate for the art form and a fabulous storyteller.
Last December, the Office of Accessibility held a webinar in which three successful artists discussed how they navigated their careers working with a disability. To no one’s surprise, one of the invited artists was Gordon Sasaki. For nearly 40 years, visual artist Gordon Sasaki has been working to increase accessibility to the arts for both practitioners and audiences. Believing in the fundamental power of art to advance disability rights, many of his paintings, sculptures and photographs reflect the body and how it is represented, the reality of living with a disability, and the diversity of disabilities, both obvious and subtle. Today’s podcast celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act with an interview with Gordon Sasaki about his work, navigating the art world and the streets of New York, the changes the ADA has brought to his life, the work left to be done and his service dog Maki.
What do a playwright and a director do when the theaters are closed, a pandemic is raging, and they want to be useful? Well, if they’re playwright Catya McMullen and director Jenna Worsham, they bring playwrights, actors, and directors together virtually to create The Homebound Project, an online series of short original plays that each actor performs on-camera in isolation. The Homebound Project has been a success in every sense of the word. McMullen and Worsham have gathered some extraordinary talent—playwrights like C.A. Johnson, Michael R. Jackson, Migdalia Cruz and Sarah Ruhl have contributed new work and actors including Daveed Diggs, Diane Lane, Blair Underwood, Phillipa Soo, and Cherry Jones have brought that work to life online. The Homebound Project is currently presenting its fourth digital series (July 15-19) with its fifth and final edition scheduled to stream August 5–9. That amounts to more than 50 new plays written, directed, and performed in the past few months with everyone donating their services to support a great cause. (More on that in the podcast.) Join us as McMullen and Worsham talk about creating The Homebound Project, finding and matching actors with playwrights, directing theater virtually, how the pandemic has affected the theater sector, and the promise the art of theater holds in times like this when story-telling is essential.
Founder and executive artistic director of SFJAZZ Randall Kline takes us behind the scenes of Fridays at Five—a weekly digital series which offers hour-long concerts filmed at the SFJAZZ Center over the past six-plus years. It’s another example of performing artists and presenters stepping up during the pandemic in creative and innovative ways to share the art that keeps us all going. And—to no one’s surprise—SFJAZZ is leading the way. A national and international leader in jazz creation, presentation, and education, SFJAZZ is the biggest presenter of jazz on the West Coast—with over 200,000 customers and students going through the doors of the SFJAZZ Center each year. So, when the center had to close temporarily because of the pandemic, the organization went to work and quickly introduced Fridays at Five. For a nominal monthly fee, viewers can hear and see music performed by the likes of Terrance Blanchard, and NEA Jazz Masters Branford Marsalis and Dave Holland. Additionally, patrons still get to mingle with one another, as well as with SFJAZZ staff, board members, and musicians via a live chat. Back in April, I spoke with founder and the executive artistic director of SF Jazz Randall Kline about jazz, Fridays at Five, and the origins SFJAZZ itself, including the role the Arts Endowmen played in its growth.
In this podcast, Clifford Murphy, National Endowment for the Arts Director of Folk and Traditional Arts, introduces the recently announced 2020 NEA National Heritage Fellows. This is the country’s highest honor—a lifetime achievement award—for folk and traditional artists whose life’s work includes both artistic excellence and efforts to sustain cultural traditions for future generations. As Murphy says in the podcast, folk art has been described as “something learned knee-to-knee.” All nine recipients of the Heritage Award serve as exemplary mentors as well as inspired artists. Murphy doesn’t just discuss each artist, he also talks about each art form—whether it’s dance, song, beadwork, or canoe-building—and the culture in which it's embedded. We also talk about some of the ways the folk and traditional arts field has been impacted by the pandemic and creative adjustments that folk and traditional artists have made in response to the crisis. Murphy is not only enormously knowledgeable about the folk and traditional arts, but it's clear he holds a deep love for these arts and the people and communities that create them.
Jack Johnson is an unlikely subject for a book of poetry. But that’s exactly what poet and NEA Big Read author Adrian Matejka did when he wrote The Big Smoke-- a collection of 52 poems about Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight world champion. He held the title from 1908 to 1915 when Jim Crow ruled and white America was outraged—by Johnson’s holding the title, certainly; but, also by his propensity to live large and live large with a white wife. White America called for “a great white hope” to take the title from Johnson, and that “hope” emerged when boxer Jim Jeffries comes out of retirement to take up the challenge. The Big Smoke follows Johnson’s journey from the son of formerly-enslaved parents to the victor in the ”fight of the century” against Jeffries through the perspective of Johnson himself and occasional observations of three women who figure prominently in his life. In this podcast, Adrian Matejka takes us through his interest in Johnson and boxing (spoiler: it was his mother who introduced him to both!), reaching across a century to find Johnson’s voice and the music he finds in poetry.
Playwright, composer, lyricist Michael R. Jackson's play A Strange Loop had an extraordinary year--it has won Lambda Literary Award for Drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama becoming the first musical to win a Pulitzer for drama without a Broadway run, the first time it was awarded to an African-American for a musical and only the second time an African American received the award for drama.(The NEA funded the world premier which was produced by Playwrights Horizons.) A Strange Loop in the words of its author," about a Black queer musical theater writer who works as an usher at a Broadway show who is writing a musical about a Black queer musical theater writer who works as an usher at Broadway show who's writing a musical about a Black queer musical theater writer...as he cycles through his own self hatred." The show is bawdy, joyous, disturbing, funny and heart-breaking. The songs are often bouncy and hummable while the lyrics can tear at your heart. Michael R. Jackson has said he never thought the play would ever be produced, so he just wrote what he wanted. (There's a lesson here). And his mission statement is "is to make works that are as challenging as they are entertaining." He succeeded. In this podcast, we learn about the strange loop A Strange Loop has taken from its beginning as a monologue to its recent full-scale production. Michael talks us through some of the songs, we learn how his career goal changed from writing for soaps to writing for musical theater and much more. Michael is smart, funny, and extraordinarily engaging. (And the music is great!) Enjoy!
Today, we re-visit a discussion with two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward about her memoir Men We Reaped. In her memoir, Jesmyn attempts to understand the death of five young black men, including her beloved brother Joshua. But more broadly, her subject is what it means to be a black man in the south. Jesmyn uses her formidable literary skill to give voice and texture to poor, rural, black Mississippians struggling against poverty and racism in a world with no forgiveness. It’s an important and beautifully-written work with much to teach us today. And, Jesmyn Ward is as clear-eyed and thoughtful in discussion as she is in her writing.
Brent Benjamin is the director of The St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). And so we take a close look at one museum through its closing to its transition as it works to reopen; and, a wider, more general view of the concerns of art museums across the country as they deal with financial short-falls and traverse the various roads to reopening. Benjamin is a great guide to both. He is, of course, deeply immersed in preparing SLAM for reopening—which is a complicated venture—and he has a keen sense of the challenges faced by museums around the country.
And, here’s some bonus audio: In April, AAMD adopted temporary measures designed to give its members greater flexibility in managing finances as they work through the pandemic. They’re a bit complicated, and Benjamin walks us through them to give a greater understanding of just what challenges museums are facing.
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Author and 2020 NEA Literature Fellow Vanessa Hua has a sense of humor and a feel for an apt turn of phrase. She describes her novel A River of Stars as “a pregnant Chinese Thelma and Louise.” She’s just as wry in her description of her book of short stories, Deceit and Other Possibilities, whose theme she says is “model minorities behaving badly.” And while both descriptions are spot-on, they only hint at the complexity of the lives she explores in fiction. She vividly explores the lives of immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, single mothers hustling to support themselves and their children while agonizing over the daily separation, and first-generation parents and second-generation children facing a divide as wide as the Yangtze River or San Francisco Bay. Hua began her career as a journalist, and she has a keen ear for the struggles of people on the streets and has the ability to give them voice. In this podcast, she talks about her experiences as a journalist, as a writer of fiction, as a mother, and as a second-generation Chinese American. She is clear these experiences don’t exist in silos but are always informing one another.
This week is a bit different: the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject-- Festivals. We begin by taking a broad look at festivals, their place in the cultural landscape, and their adjustments to the shut-downs caused by the pandemic. Our guide to this is Brandon Gryde our new director of Presenting and Multidisciplinary Works. Having come from Opera America and Dance USA, he’s extremely knowledgeable about the many types of festivals and their various responses to the uncertainty caused by Covid 19.
In part 2, we look at single festival—the New York Opera Fest which is hosted by New York Opera Alliance a community-based consortium of independent opera companies and producers. Fairly early on, New York Opera Fest moved their eight week festival online and reinvented itself as New York Virtual Opera Fest. Founding director of NY Opera Fest and co-founder of NY Opera Alliance Peter Szep explains the transformation of the five-year old festival and the range of work the festival is offering (including a discussion of Heartbeat Opera’s incandescent virtual performance of “ Make Our Garden Grow” featuring over 30 Heartbeat alumni including singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and a gardener.) And because it’s impossible to talk about an opera festival without talking about the innovative work being done by independent opera companies in NY, (and there are over 80 companies in NY!), you’ll hear about the exciting music that continues to be created!
Elizabeth Acevedo is a poet and novelist whose books are alive with Dominican-American and Afro- Caribbean culture and community and have at their centers teenage girls learning to navigate life, relaxing into and pushing against their upbringings. A National Poetry Slam Champion, Liz’s second book The Poet X won the National Book Award for young people’s literature in 2018. (And in case you haven’t read it—and if you haven’t, you should-- The Poet X is a novel in verse that tells the story of 15 year-old Xiomara as she wrestles with her mother’s expectations and discovers herself through slam poetry.)
Since The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo has written two more highly acclaimed books: With the Fire on High, a novel told in prose about Emoni a high school student who’s a mother and who’s also determined to become a chef. And now, most recently, Clap When You Land -- once again a novel in verse—that has as its jumping off point a tragic plane crash, the lies and secrets it reveals, and what’s lost and what’s found in the face of terrible grief. Clap When You Land looks at family and community across two cultures from the perspective of two generations of women—all fierce, capable and imperfect. Elizabeth Acevedo is as lively and charismatic a guest as she is a writer. In this podcast, she talks about her own family who inflamed her imagination with stories, her love for the Dominican Republic even as she understands its flaws, the profound difficulty of uprooting oneself and leaving one country for another, and the challenges and joy of having deep connections to multiple worlds.
Pianist, composer, and 2006 NEA Jazz Master Chick Corea is a musical shape-shifter. Beginning a brilliant solo career in the mid-1960s, he has moved effortlessly from straight-up jazz to avant-garde, from bebop to fusion. In addition to his 23 Grammy Awards, Corea has also won 4 Latin Grammys. Aside from being a sensitive interpreter of Mozart, Corea has also composed contemporary classical music including concerti, string quartets and other symphonic works. Over his five-decade long career, his list of collaborators read like a veritable “Who’s Who” in jazz. They include Stan Getz, Mile Davis, Anthony Braxton, Bobby McFerrin, Gary Burton, Béla Fleck, Christian McBride, and Rubén Blades. We spoke with Corea in December 2019 to ask him for his thoughts about his long-time collaborator, 2020 Jazz Master Bobby McFerrin—but of course, who would miss the opportunity to talk to Chick Corea about Chick Corea? In this music-filled podcast, Corea discusses his music, his many collaborations, his love of performing and composing classical music, and the importance of play when he takes the stage. He’s deeply thoughtful—loaded with charm and generosity. Enjoy!
Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek) the Poet Laureate of the United States (and NEA Big Read author) joins me this week for a far-ranging conversation about poetry and music. We talk about—and she reads poems from—her most recent collection An American Sunrise. She talks about her family history on the Trail of Tears and how it led to An American Sunrise, her long deep relationship with the spirit of poetry, her equally long love of jazz and her commitment to honoring her poetic ancestors as well as her familial ones. It was a great conversation—she’s deeply thoughtful, engaging and funny. If you enjoy the interview half as much I did, you’ll love it.
Saxophonist, composer and 2020 NEA Jazz Master Roscoe Mitchell is a musical seeker. He’s interested in sound and its colors. He is one of the most influential (and prolific) jazz musicians around who nonetheless says he has never been as excited or inspired as when I spoke with him in December 2019. And this from one of the original members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and one of the founders of the Art Ensemble of Chicago! Our interview was on my birthday—and it was the best present I could have received. Roscoe Mitchell—aside from being a fabulous musician--is an eloquent philosopher about music. Speaking with him was a true pleasure and I hope you’ll feel the same listening to this podcast.
The National Endowment for the Arts' Literary Arts Director Amy Stolls joins me for a conversation about books that can see us through difficult times. From children's books to YA to short stories to novels...and oh yes, there's poetry too, we discuss the many ways books can bring the world to us as we shelter in place. Amy and I also talk about the almost magical power of books to open ourselves to imagined worlds in other universes and then intensely inhabit the perspective of a single human being in a barren landscape. And, Amy is known as the agency wit--so it's a fun podcast! The books we discussed are below:
Metropolitan Stories: A Novel by Christine Coulson
Culinaria Italy: Pasta Pesto Passion edited by Claudia Piras
The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman
Here by Richard McGuire
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Severance by Ling Ma
At the Same Moment Around the World by Clotilde Perrin
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies
Barn 8 by Deb Olen Unferth
The Murderer's Ape by Jacob Wegelius
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva
American Journal: Fifty poems for our Time, selected and introduced by Tracy K. Smith
Unladylike 2020 is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Charlotte Mangin. It's an innovative multimedia series about little known but extraordinary women at turn of the 20th century whose legacies we all benefit from today. There are 26 ten minute films that combine archival footage, diary entries, animation, and dynamic artwork (funded by the NEA). Narrated by actors Julianna Margulies and Lorraine Toussaint, Unladylike 2020 puts the biographies of women like aviator Bessie Coleman, politician Jeannette Rankin and actor Anna May Wong in their historical and social context. But they also include interviews with contemporary women who are the direct beneficiaries of these trailblazers' legacies. The series began on March 3--with a new episode dropping each week at Unladylike 2020 and PBS American Masters. Both websites are packed with information, so if you're home with the kids visit the websites. These films are perfect for family viewing, and they can open the door to thoughtful conversations. In this podcast, Charlotte Mangin takes us "backstage" and walks us through how Unladylike 2020 came to be. We talk about some of the women she chose, the innovative techniques she used to bring these women to life digitally and the joy of working with a team of women on stories about women.
Anna Needham (Red Lake Anishinaabe) is an emerging theater artist, arts administrator, and a former NEA intern with Folk and Traditional Arts. Theater arts typically is an uneven career path (the performing arts aren’t exactly a reliable source of income). Add to the uncertainty Needham’s passion for and commitment to Native theater, and the road becomes that much more challenging. In this podcast, Needham tells us how she meets those challenges, and how she’s learned to become an advocate for the arts and for Native culture and rights.
It may come as a surprise to discover that in the 2019-2020 season, (Shakespeare aside) Lauren Gunderson is the most produced playwright in America. She’s achieved this in no small part by putting women’s stories at the center of her work. And she doesn’t just create the lone female protagonist—she has women interacting with other women-- sharing dreams, hopes, disappointments and successes. Her protagonists who are smart, funny, and determined and if they’re involved with science—so much the better. Science is a topic Gunderson returns to again and again in her work. As Lauren said in our interview, “I think theater is made for the biggest questions we can manage, and science like religion, like the arts-- is the thing that says, “What are we doing here?” That literally was the question at the center of her play Silent Sky that was recently produced at Fords’ Theater in Washington DC (and partially funded by the NEA). Silent Sky is based on a turn of the century astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt, who worked at the Harvard Observatory. Although she is little-known, Leavitt’s work and discoveries are crucial to our current understanding of the stars and the universe. In this podcast, Lauren talks about Silent Sky, her adaption of Peter Pan (in which Wendy is an aspiring scientist), her love of theater and science, and most crucially, what changes when women take the center stage.
Cord Jefferson began his career as a journalist, but six years ago he began writing for television. Since that time, he has put together a jaw-dropping resume—writing for shows like Succession, Master of None, The Good Place (for which he just received an NAACP Image Award) and the ground-breaking series Watchmen. Watchmen is a super-hero series set in an alternative world that nonetheless shares much of our racial history. In fact, the series opens with 1921’s Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—where whites rioted and razed Greenwood, a prosperous black part of town, killing hundreds of African Americans and destroying the community. A bold way to begin a super-hero series—but then Watchmen is a smart and profound examination of African-American history and how it shapes our world today. In fact, the episode Jefferson wrote with showrunner Damon Lindelof has a character living out her grandfather’s memories of vicious racism in the 1930s. In this podcast, Jefferson takes us inside the writers’ room of Watchmen; we talk about Lindelof’s vision for the series and how the writers worked together to bring it to fruition. We also talk about the process of collaboration, world building, and weaving real history into a fantasy series. Jefferson is immensely talented and a great storyteller.
Filmmaker, writer, and teacher Trey Ellis knows how to tell a story—whatever the genre. He recently moved into documentary filmmaking, working with the acclaimed documentarian Peter Kunhardt on what became the award-winning King in the Wilderness. They joined forces again almost immediately for the documentary True Justice--about Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)-- which opened the 2019 AFI Docs Film Festival (a long-time National Endowment for the Arts grantee). The filmlooks at Stevenson’s work tackling death row appeals at EJI as well as his more recent work as a public historian. Stevenson is also responsible for both the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates the nearly 4,000 persons lynched in the south, and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which spotlights how the effects of slavery and Jim Crow reverberate through the criminal justice system today. In this podcast, Ellis talks about bringing Stevenson’s work to the screen, how his approach to filmmaking changes based on the visibility of his subject, and the ways in which his films have profoundly changed his life. He also discusses writing for screen versus for the stage and the challenges of teaching screenwriting in a quickly-changing media landscape.
Cartoonist Nate Powell is the 2016 National Book Award co-winner for Young People’s Literature. He shared the prize with Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin for the graphic memoir/history March. March is a trilogy, and it tells the story of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of John Lewis. From a very young age, Lewis was involved in the fight for racial equality through non-violent action. As one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was present at pivotal moments in the struggle for civil rights, including lunch-counter sit-ins, freedom rides, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In this week’s podcast, Nate Powell talks about how he captured those moments in cartoons; the challenges of representing figures who were well-known, like Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr.; and how he grappled with portraying the horrifying violence endured by protestors in a medium so often occupied with super heroes and super-villains.
Bassist and 2020 NEA Jazz Master Reggie Workman is aptly named. The man might not have played with everyone in jazz, but he has come close. I don’t want this to turn into a list of Workman’s gigs, so I’ll just touch on some of the major ones: He was a member of both the John Coltrane Quartet playing in such legendary recordings as Live at the Village Vanguard, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers during one of the band’s great line-ups. According to Reggie, Coltrane and Blakey were very different leaders: Coltrane gave his band a lot of freedom while Blakey knew exactly what he wanted. Because he could play any style of jazz from the American songbook to avant-garde, he became the go-to bassist for Blue Note Records backing folks from Abbey Lincoln to David Murray. He’s also led his own groups like the Reggie Workman Ensemble and performed in collaborative trios. In this wide-ranging conversation, Workman talks about what makes a good supporting artist and what he was looking for when he began his group. As professor at the New School for more than 30 years, Workman also talked about teaching and helping young musicians to understand “there are mistakes (in jazz),…but you have to be able to justify each note.” This music-filled podcast is a look at a fascinating artist.
Leatherworker and 2019 National Heritage Fellow James F. Jackson creates sculpture by carving leather. Go to his website and check out his work—then listen to the podcast. You really have to see the complexity and beauty of his leatherwork to appreciate our conversation about it. With all his projects, James does the work from start to finish: he designs, cuts, carves, glues, sews, sometimes paints and finishes the leather. And while James has certainly created his share of saddles, he also uses leather as the material for unlikely forms like vessels or lamps or wall hangings. Listen to a gentle man from Sheridan, Wyoming discuss his art, his teaching leatherwork around the world, the significance of traditional arts, and the deep impact of the Sheridan style of carving on Japanese leatherworkers.
Commander and conductor of the US Air Force Band Colonel Don Schofield leads a remarkably diverse set of musicians. The Air Force Band consists of 172 members and six ensembles playing music that ranges from rock to jazz to brass to an orchestra. (We can't forget the string ensemble or the fabulous Singing Sergeants!). They play over 1600 performances around the world each year with a repertoire that is expansive and extensive. In this tuneful podcast, we learn how it all comes together, why Colonel Schofield went from music teacher to military service member, and why leading the U.S. Air Force Band is his dream job.
Playwright Ken Ludwig has a resume most theater folks would envy: his ear and eye for humor has given him hit after hit. His first play on Broadway was Lend Me a Tenor which had already opened in London where it garnered some Olivier Awards. (When it opened on Broadway, it picked up a Tony). He followed this with Crazy for You—a play inspired by the music of George and Ira Gershwin. This tune-packed extravaganza delighted audiences as much as the critics—it ran for five years and won the Tony Award for best musical. His extraordinary run of plays include Twentieth Century, Moon Over Buffalo and Leading Ladies. His most recent play just had its world premiere at Arena Stage here in Washington DC. It’s a two-hander called Dear Jack, Dear Louise, and it’s based on the correspondence between his parents during World War II. While it has amusing moments, no one would call this laugh-filled, nor is it meant to be. It’s simply a story of two people who get to know one another and fall in love through their correspondence. In this podcast, Ken Ludwig takes us behind the scenes of writing and mounting a play, why so many of his plays are set in a theatrical environment and his deep life-long love affair with theater.
For more than 40 years, folklorist, state park manager, and 2019 National Heritage Fellow Bobby Fulcher has been seeking out and recording traditional artists, creating programming around these artists to shine a light on their work, and serving as an inspiration and mentor to multiple generations of young folklorists. That Fucher has accomplished all this while working for Tennessee State Parks really gets to the heart of his vision: the deep connection between traditional culture and the natural environment in which it occurs. He began his career as a naturalist and came to love and cherish not just the environment but also the traditional arts that were created in the Cumberlands of Tennessee. When he first heard traditional banjo music in college, he thought, “If I could learn that, I’d be happy every day there on out.” He did learn the banjo and would bring it with him when he went on his search for little-known traditional musicians because he believed that if you arrive with “a banjo or fiddle in your hand, you’ll make yourself welcome wherever you go.” He is a soft-spoken philosopher who has brought to his work an insatiable curiosity and a deep sense of wonder. You’ll hear it in this podcast—and you’ll also hear some of the old-time music Fucher has shone a light on.
Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Director Kevin Gover (Pawnee) has been leading the only national museum devoted exclusively to Native peoples since 2007. Established by an act of Congress in 1989, NMAI consists of a museum in New York City, a conservation facility in Maryland, and a stunning five-story, 250,000-square-foot golden-colored building with sweeping curving walls and indigenous landscaping on the National Mall. With Native Americans taking the lead in both its design and organization, the museum is home to more than 800,000 Native artifacts from throughout the Western Hemisphere, an archive of more than 125,000 photographs, and a vibrant collection of contemporary native art. It also offers a range of exhibitions, film and video screenings, school group programs, public programs, and living culture presentations throughout the year. In this podcast episode, Gover talks about the mission of the museum, which is to celebrate the art, culture, and history of Native peoples as vital and sustaining while unraveling the myths that have been engendered about Native peoples through popular culture. Given the museum’s mandate to represent not just the 573 Indian nations in the United States but all the Native peoples in the Western Hemisphere--from the Arctic Circle straight down to South America, Gover has a daunting challenge. He meets it with extraordinary equanimity, insight, and a commitment to collaborative creativity. Here’s a look at a museum like no other through the eyes of the man who guides it.
Documentary filmmaker Jenifer McShane’s new film Ernie and Joe puts the viewer in the car of two police officers who are part of the San Antonio Police Department’s ten-person mental health unit. As partners they respond to to 911 calls involving people in emotional distress not as enforcers but as resources working to de-escalate situations and lead people to much needed mental health services. McShane spent three years, on and off, riding with Ernie and Joe--chronicling their work and their partnership. In this episode of the podcast, McShane talks about riding along in the police car and filming the titular duo as they worked patiently and compassionately with people who were despondent, despairing, or violent; and, she talks about Ernie and Joe themselves, their relationship and the ongoing banter that allows them to decompress. We also discuss how she filmed Ernie and Joe without compromising their work, and the emotional reception the film has received at festivals across the country. Ernie and Joe has been picked by HBO where it is now streaming.
For a young actor, only four years out of the conservatory, Ayana Workman has amassed an impressive resume, including: Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (at the public Theater in NYC and the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington DC), Perdita in Winter’s Tale (again at the Public) and Banquo in MacBeth at the Lucille Lortel Theater in NYC. But frankly, these roles seem like a walk in the park compared to her next play Everybody by MacArthur Fellow Branden Jacobs-Jenkins which opened the season at DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company. In Everybody, which based on the 15th century morality play Everyman, the actors rotate their parts randomly via lottery for every performance. So, they find out in real time, in front of the audience, which character they’ll be playing that evening. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of guts and no small amount of talent to do. And while many of Ayana’s friends told her she was crazy, Ayana was eager to take it on. If she relishes creative challenges, it runs in the family. Her dad is 2020 NEA Jazz Master Reggie Workman and her mother is dancer and choreographer Maya Milenovic Workman. Ayana grew up in a household steeped in creativity, filled with access to music, dance, theater—all the arts, really. As she said, she grew up thinking it was normal for musicians to have jam sessions in her home every weekend or to fall asleep as she listened to her father’s playing in a jazz club. In this podcast, Ayana talks about her parents’ influences on her career as well as all aspects of performing in Everybody—from learning the script to rehearsing to getting up on stage not knowing who you’re going to play that evening and the special bond that cast has formed because they all, at one time or another, play the same parts. She’s smart, honest and ridiculously charming.
Christmas has come early this year: filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer has made N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear a documentary about novelist, poet and painter N. Scott Momaday. Momaday is an artistic force of nature, and it's a nature embedded in Kiowa art, culture and history. He's received many awards; most notably the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Literature--the first and only time it's been awarded to Native-American writer--and the 2007 National Medal of Arts. For his long career, N. Scott Momaday has been profoundly influential for Native artists and extremely significant for anyone interested in American culture. Although they are generations apart, Momaday was an influence on Jeffrey Palmer. Kiowa and born in the same area of Oklahoma as Scott, Jeffrey met him when he was a kid and while overwhelmed by his size and deep voice, (Jeffrey remembers it was like shaking hands with a catcher's mitt), he also was instantly inspired by him and the possibilities he represented. And thirty years later, he found himself making a documentary about M. Scott Momaday for American Masters. Jeff and I talk, of course, about Scott Momaday and his deep importance to American culture, as well as Jeff's decision to present Scott's story within the larger story of the Kiowa and add visual elements of magical realism. (It's a visually stunning film that partners beautifully with Scott's poems and stories.) We also have a couple of excerpts from the documentary, so you'll get to hear N. Scott Momaday distinctive voice and get a sense of his captivating presence. He is a national treasure.
In 2013, when Sam Pressler was an undergraduate, he came to a profound understanding of the civilian/military divide and the sobering realities many veterans face when they return to civilian life. Based on his own experiences of coping with loss, he thought comedy might be a way to help returning veterans cope. Since there weren’t any comedy classes for veterans, he started one—partnering with an existing writing group. From that one class, the idea of Armed Services Arts Partnership (or ASAP) grew and flourished. Located in Hampton Roads Virginia and the Washington, DC area, ASAP has reached close to 1,000 veterans, service members, and their families through over 200 workshops and classes. It’s also produced 150 performances of its graduates—including shows at the White House—and reached some 15,000 audience members. Sam Pressler—who recently stepped down as executive director and now sits on the board of ASAP—and the current executive director Brian Jenkins tell us how ASAP came together and grew into a thriving and beloved organization and what they’ve learned about community, veterans, and the arts. It’s a great story.
Author, physician, and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow Daniel Mason wrote and published his first novel while he was still in medical school. The Piano Tuner received international acclaim, was translated into 28 languages, and adapted for theater and opera. Mason took time off after medical school to complete his second novel, A Far Place, which was short-listed for several literary prizes. Mason then finished his medical training and began his clinical practice and--since he’s not super-human after all--his third novel was 14 years in the making. Again,he struck gold wowing critics and readers alike with The Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier tells the story of Lucius who leaves medical school in Vienna at the outbreak of World War I to serve in the Army. The Austrian-Hungarian empire, facing a shortage of doctors, allows medical students to staff field hospitals. Anxious for this practical experience, Lucius joins up and finds himself in a tiny village in the Carpathian mountains. He is expecting a well-staffed hospital run by experienced doctors who can mentor him. Instead, he finds himself the sole doctor in a bombed-out church doubling as a hospital whose single remaining medical personnel is a field nurse, Sister Margarete. The story that unfolds is Lucius’s medical and emotional coming of age. But the novel is also about the mad incongruity of World War I, the fleeting connections forged by war, and the growing awareness of the pervasiveness of a new condition affecting the armies—shell shock. Mason speaks thoughtfully about writing and psychiatry (his medical practice) and how his two careers are complementary and how they are not. We also talk about the joys and pitfalls of research and the attitudinal changes in medicine in the past 100 years.
Here’s a podcast for your Halloween listening pleasure: Actor and Executive Director of Summoners Ensemble Theatre John Kevin Jones talks about his one-man show Killing an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. In Killing, Jones performs four of Poe’s best-known works: “The Tell-Tale Heart;” “The Cask of Amontillado;” “The Pit and the Pendulum;” and, of course, “The Raven.” It’s a bravura performance, undertaken with a minimum of props….but who needs props when you have Poe’s words and a setting guaranteed to put the audience in an appropriately spooky mood? Killing an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe is performed in the candle-lit salon of the Merchant’s House Museum—a 19th century family home in lower Manhattan preserved virtually intact with original furnishings and personal belongings. The intimate space with candles casting their shadows brings the audience into the action of the play in more ways than one. Jones and I talk about Poe’s work, bringing it to life on the stage, and the challenges and joys of playing in an intimate and historic space. (He’s also performed a one-man show of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Merchant’s House Museum for seven seasons.) And Jones gives you a taste of the evening with excerpts from “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven.”
Singer/songwriter Crys Matthews makes music that is absolutely her own. Sometimes the songs are bluesy, at other times they’re country soul. Maybe a song has a little funk or maybe it’s absolutely bluegrass or Americana. Matthews lets the song decide what it wants to be. It’s working for her: she won first prize at the 2017 New Song Music and Performance competition, which led to performances at both Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center. The preacher’s kid from a small town in North Carolina is doing quite well with eight releases under her belt including songs about social justice, love, loss, and her dog. She’s really terrific--immensely talented and personable. And miracle of miracles, she can actually support herself through music. No small feat! Find out how she does it and listen to some very cool live music on this week’s podcast. And yes, we talk about her dog!
In Circe --Madeline Miller’s second novel and our newest NEA Big Read title—the goddess/witch moves from the sidelines of The Odyssey to the center stage of her own story. Miller knows and loves the classics and Circe is an imaginative response to questions Miller had about the exiled goddess. She doesn’t change the story so much as expand it and give us Circe's back story. For example, Circe still turns men into pigs, as she does in Homer’s telling, but in Miller’s book she gives us the context behind this piece of magic. Miller and I talk about gods and mortals, the fine distinctions between witches and goddesses, what shifts when you put a woman’s story in an epic frame, the timelessness and timeliness of these myths, and why every woman should have a lion. She is engaging, fun and funny—in other words, she’s a great addition to the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program and a super podcast guest.
For young adult novelist Pam Muñoz Ryan, a multi-cultural perspective comes naturally. She grew up in Bakersfield, California, with her grandmother who was an Oklahoma pioneer woman moving in as she grew older, and a big extended family nearby anchored by her other grandmother, Esperanza, who was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Muñoz Ryan based her novel Esperanza Rising on her Mexican grandmother’s life, and it’s become a classic of young people’s literature—taught in schools and beloved in homes throughout the country. She has written over 40 books, and she casts a wide net in terms of subjects: from the childhood of Pablo Neruda in The Dreamer, to a young kid living in a trailer in Oklahoma in Becoming Naomi Leon, to the magical realism of Echo in which three young people in pre-World War II Germany and post-Pearl Harbor America are connected by an enchanted harmonica. But whatever the topic, Muñoz Ryan knows how to write for young people; her respect for them and the way they move in the world is enormous, and it’s reflected in her writing. (She has the awards to prove it; it’s a staggering list!) In this episode of the podcast, Muñoz Ryan talks about her upbringing, learning the histories of both her grandmothers, her writing in general and writing for young readers in particular. She’s fun, thoughtful, and full of stories.
Documentary Filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky is the daughter of two deaf parents and the mother of a deaf son. Clearly she has thought long and deeply about deafness; as she says, “I’ve never known a life without deafness in it.” Her first feature documentary, the award-winning Hear and Now, told the moving story of Brodsky’s deaf parents, their decision in their mid-60s decision to have cochlear implants that allowed them to hear, and the consequences of that decision. In some ways she has returned to that topic with her latest film, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements. It’s another family story that centers on her deaf son’s desire to play Ludwig von Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" interwoven with the story of her father growing old and forgetful, and Beethoven's life the year he was affected by deafness and wrote the iconic sonata. In this podcast, we go behind the scenes of the film with Brodsky and discuss it as a portrait of the place of sound and silence in life.
Novelist and 2016 NEA Literature Fellow R.O. Kwon's first novel, The Incendiaries, was ten years in the making. But that persistence and hard work paid off: the debut novel was named a best book of the year by over 40 publications. It’s a vivid, dark story that deals with faith, loss, a fractured love, and fanaticism. But Kwon herself is anything but dark. Talking about that ten-year journey of writing The Incendiaries, she told me she would wonder, ”Why didn’t I become a dermatologist? I would have been a good dermatologist. I love thinking about skincare.” It’s one of the funny asides that pepper this conversation in which she is also thoughtful about herself and about writing. We find out about the genesis of the book—the loss of her deep Christian faith and her grief over that loss, her deep love for fiction, and her sadness that when she was growing up there were so few Asian-American writers for her to model a career on. Kwon also shares how her love of language tripped up her writing in the novel's early drafts and some of the strategies she used to keep going. It’s a wide-ranging conversation with an engaging, thoughtful, and smart author.
2019 National Heritage Fellow Basque musician, teacher and restauranteur Dan Ansotegui brings his passion for the Basque culture into everything he does. But he also sees culture as a breathing entity—not something set in amber. The roots of the tree may come from the Basque Region, but those leaves are growing in Boise, Idaho. Ansotegui is a great talker. In this podcast, learn about Basque music, dancing, and food (he does it all!) and the deep social connections these traditions give a community.
Director Rosa Joshi is a lover of classical theater, particularly the work of William Shakespeare. She is also committed to producing theater in which the cast reflects the demographics of the audience, and she is passionate about creating work that has big, juicy roles for women. That might pose a dilemma to a director who is driven by the text of the play—as Joshi is. But she approaches casting creatively—casting actors of colors in all roles and switching the gender of the play’s characters—so that in her current production of I Henry IV at the Folger Theatre, Wooster, Poins, and Vernon are played by women. Additionally, she is one of the founders of the Upstart Crow Collective—a theater group that creates classical work in which all the parts are played by women. That creative flexibility is one of the reasons Joshi loves theater. As she noted, “There’s nothing you can’t do if you ask the audience to engage their imagination.” Listen to my conversation with Joshi about theater, imagination, Shakespeare, and I Henry IV. Her passion is contagious!
2019 National Heritage Fellow Rich Smoker has been carving decoys for half a century. He is one of the people who elevated this utilitarian craft to an art form. Rich is a self-described river rat: he grew up along the Susquehanna River in rural Pennsylvania and now lives alongside the Annemessex River in the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland—an area with long and strong tradition of decoy carving. Rich spends hours on the river observing wildlife and pouring through his massive collection of books and images. He’s able to bring those observations and research to his art and realize his vision. Rich is a master of both utilitarian and decorative carving—winning over 500 hundred ribbons, 100 best-in-show awards and a best-in-the world award. But he is also committed to passing this art form to others, particularly younger people and has taught upwards of 2000 students. Rich Smoker is a natural-born storyteller who frequently turns his humor on himself. In this podcast, we learn about his passions: for nature, for carving and for telling a good yarn.
Twenty-five years ago, Julia Alvarez published In the Time of the Butterflies, which was chosen as a Big Read title in 2010. Set in the Dominican Republic, In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered by henchmen of dictator Rafael Trujillo for their resistance to his regime. The girls were known in the underground by their codename “Las Mariposas,” or butterflies. Their story was very close to Avarez's own. She spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic, but her family got out. In this podcast, Julia Alvarez discusses how In the Time of the Butterflies came to be, the rich source material she finds in her family's immigrant experience, and how her life as a reader led to her life as a writer.
You might know J. Dash as the man who wrote and performed the double platinum song “WOP,” but that hardly scratches the surface. J. is a musician, composer, and producer who is also a great advocate for arts education. He works with schools in his hometown city of Jacksonville, Florida, and his current town of Austin, Texas. And J is a longtime volunteer with the National Association of Music Merchants’ Foundation, or NAAM, making yearly trips to Congress to lobby for more Title IV funds and working with students trying to break into the music industry. Even though he is best-known in the hip hop world, J. Dash is also a big fan of jazz and blues (he used to play in a blues band). And he also has begun to score films and television shows. Have I mentioned he has a parallel career as a computer scientist? What sparks his creativity and how does he juggle all the aspects of his careers? Listen to the podcast and find out…..
Matt Nicola, the artistic director of the Highwood Theatre, believes deeply in the company’s double-pronged philosophy: “anyone can do theater” and “theater builds community.” Highwood is an educational theater with classes for students from kindergarten to 12th grade covering all aspects of theater, from acting to lighting to set and sound design to directing. In addition, the students put on 12-13 full-fledged shows a year, taking care of all aspects of the production with some guidance from theater professionals. The shows are sophisticated—these students are performing in shows like Sweeney Todd and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. They are also uniformly very well-received, which is a bit of surprise since there are no auditions for the student productions. Whoever signs up, gets a part. But Highwood has discovered that given an opportunity and a certain amount of guidance, students are capable of extraordinary things. In this week’s podcast, you can hear about what theater teaches students, and what the students teach Nicola and the rest of the Highwood staff.
Junious Brickhouse is a dancer, choreographer, and executive director of two cultural organizations—Urban Artistry and NextLevel. He’s a powerhouse who is on a mission to teach and preserve urban dance traditions. There’s no question that urban dance is a vibrant and creative art form, and it’s one that’s deeply rooted in community. It is extremely democratic allowing people to tell their own stories through dance. Brickhouse sees hip-hop as modern folk art, and he is clear about its connection to the blues. As he says, like the blues, hip hop ”is rooted in our communities about things that makes us laugh and things that make us cry.” His realization of that connection brought Brickhouse to NEA Heritage Fellow and Piedmont Blues harmonica player Phil Wiggins. And he is now also dancing to the blues as part of Wiggins’ House Party. I spoke with Brickhouse backstage at an urban dance competition that he was hosting. It was a perfect setting for a dynamic conversation about urban dance both in community and around the world, his own experiences as a dancer, and his dedication to documenting hip hop’s deep value to American culture.
Marine Corps veteran Stephanie Kline is a DC-based stand-up comic. At loose ends after leaving the Marine Corps and then dealing with the end of her marriage, Stephanie turned to comedy through a workshop with the Armed Services Artists Partnership. There she found the camaraderie she had been missing and she found a way to tell her story that provoked laughter not pity from the audience. It’s not an easy path. As Stephanie says in the podcast, ”for a lot of us, we are taking some of the most painful experiences and issues, we are breaking them down and putting them together in a way to get people to laugh. That is terrifying…. (But) I think the response of laughter really helps build us back up.” Stephanie Kline talks about her time with the Marine Corps and the different kind of strength it takes to get up on a stage and let it all hang out. She’s also very funny.
Dr. Nina Kraus is a professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University where she directs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, also known as Brainvolts. She has made the study of how we biologically process sound her life’s work. She and the Brainvolts’ team have conducted long-term, multi-year studies looking at the brainwaves of children and found that making music—whether with instrument or voice—actually makes biological changes to the way the brain processes sound which, in turn, strengthens the ability of the brain to better apprehend the depth and breadth of language and speech. Simply put, creating music builds our capacity to turn sound into meaning. Nina is passionate about sound—she remembers as a child sitting under her mother’s piano as she played. She brings that same sense of wonder and excitement to her rigorous biological research, and you’ll hear it throughout the podcast…which is a perfect way to explore the way we process sound.
Sculptor and three-time NEA grantee Ursula von Rydingsvard’s art is unlike anything else. While she works with all manner of organic material—including the fourth stomach of a cow—von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from 4x4 cedar beams. These are cut, stacked, assembled, glued, and laminated before being rubbed with graphite. The result are textured, many-faceted surfaces, work that’s both sensuous and massive—that at once conveys solidity and movement. Born in Germany during World War II to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father who spent time in a Nazi labor camp, von Rydingsvard and her family made their way to the United States after years in refugee camps. She senses a connection between her work and Poland—much of her work is given Polish names—but the connections are so subtle that’s she’s unsure of their meanings herself. In this podcast, we talk about von Rydingsvard’s four-decade long career. She explains how she makes her labor-intensive massive sculptures, her early years as an artist when she was poor but joyful about creating art, the importance of her NEA grants, coming to the U.S. as a child of seven, and why she began to make art with the fourth stomach of a cow.
Fireworks are such a wonderful amalgam of artistry, science and tradition; and, for six generations the Grucci family has been lighting up the skies with innovative pyrotechnics. Just in time for July 4, I speak with President and CEO of Fireworks by Grucci Phil Grucci and his daughter Lauren who is a pryrotechnician and photographer. In today’s podcast, we learn how the Grucci family put these glorious displays together. From the Brooklyn Bridge centennial to the bicentennial of “The Star Spangled Banner” and all the July 4 celebrations in-between, Phil and Lauren take us behind the scenes of these spectacles of color and light: we learn about the innovations they led in pyrotechnics, the amount of planning that goes into each event, the magic when it all comes together, and the family history that remains at the center of the work. It’s a great way to celebrate July 4!
Author Victor Lodato has written two highly acclaimed novels Matilda Savitch and Edgar and Lucy. Nearly a decade in the making, Victor calls Edgar and Lucy “my New Jersey gothic.” And he’s not wrong. It’s an epic novel that’s part mystery, part love story, part ghost story, part family drama. It is both unexpected and perfectly believable. It’s set in Victor’s native New Jersey, in a working class Polish/Italian family much like Victor’s own. But that’s where the similarity ends. Edgar and Lucy are a son and mother; and, while the book concentrates on one very difficult year in their lives, it actually examines their relationship over the course of their lifetimes. It has its comic moments and heartbreaking ones—both with an attention to character and language. Happily, Victor Lodato is as thoughtful and compelling as his book. In this podcast, we talk about his very complicated characters, his childhood in New Jersey, why he was attracted to theater, and his move to novels.
Storyteller Linda Goss, one of the pioneers of the Black Storytelling Movement, has just been named a 2019 NEA National Heritage Fellow. Goss is known as “Mama Linda” because of her pathbreaking work, which includes co-founding (with Mother Mary Carter Smith) the National Association of Black Storytellers, unearthing and documenting nearly forgotten stories, serving as a mentor to younger storytellers, and her own exuberant way of telling stories. From the beginning, Mama Linda has recognized the transformative power of storytelling and the importance of bearing witness. She’s a mesmerizing speaker—beginning each storytelling session with her trademark bells and a call to the community to come and listen. She draws listeners into the heart of the story she’s telling; she’ll draw you into the podcast as well! The NEA National Heritage Award is the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts. Have a listen—you’ll see why Mama Linda is a national treasure.
Jeff VanderMeer writes fiction that defies classification—it has elements of speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and eco-fiction, with an attention to language that literary fiction would envy and a voice that is utterly distinctive. VanderMeer’s novel Borne, which is a recent addition to the national community reading program NEA Big Read, is a case in point. Borne is a post-apocalyptic novel about a woman and the mysterious creature she finds in a city broken by a biotechnical company and terrorized by a five-story-tall flying bear. It sounds crazy, but it is a compelling, moving page turner that looks at the connections creatures make, or try to make, with one another. It’s an unpredictable cautionary tale—quite an unlikely combination. But so is VanderMeer. He spent a good part of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, immersed in the natural world with his parents, an entomologist and a biological illustrator. He was enraptured by the biodiversity of the islands and became an avid birder, which led him to writing. He remains immersed in the natural world and entranced by life in all its forms while living in Northern Florida, where he spends a great deal of time hiking through swamps and parks. In this podcast episode, we hear about it all—from Fiji to Florida. VanderMeer talks about his singular creative process, the themes he returns to in his work, his interactions with readers, and his excitement about Borne and the NEA Big Read program.
Stephan Wolfert had been in the army for six years when he saw his close friend killed during a training exercise. Wolfert “lost it,” as he put it, hopped a train, and went on a drinking binge that lasted quite a while. He ended up in Montana and wandered into a theater where Richard III was being performed. Wolfert saw in the title character a veteran like himself who did not fit in and who spoke directly and eloquently to the audience about his anger and contempt for those that did. Wolfert’s life was transformed. He left the army, went to graduate school to study acting, and immersed himself in Shakespeare. He quickly saw that Shakespeare populated his plays with soldiers and veterans who faced their own bloody losses and seemed to speak directly to the trauma Wolfert was facing. Believing that Shakespeare and theater could be as transformative for others as it is for him, he began working with veterans using Shakespeare to help them unpack their own experiences. He eventually started the non-profit DE-CRUIT whose basic premise is theater is medicine and Shakespeare can be the key to healing. In this podcast, Stephan talks about his time in the military, his “Aha!” moment in Montana, how Shakespeare helps veterans both penetrate and contain their own experiences, and the unlikely parallels between theater and the military.
Literary translator and National Endowment for the Arts fellow Jennifer Croft was passionate about Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights—so much so that she spent ten years trying to persuade a literary house to publish an English translation. Croft would translate excerpts of the book and send them to journals trying to gin up interest in Tokarczuk’s distinctive work—a compilation of 116 chapters or fragments that travel through centuries and countries, ranging from single-page ruminations on airports or hotels to 30-page-long stories about a man searching for his wife and child who disappear as they are all vacationing or Chopin’s sister smuggling the composer’s heart back into Poland. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Croft was able to complete the translation. She also persuaded an independent English publisher to take a chance on the novel. The result: Flights was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded to the best work of fiction translated from any language into English, and it was also a finalist for the National Book Award. In this episode of the podcast, Croft talks about Flights, the strange alchemy that goes into translation, the importance of grants and the Arts Endowment to translators, and how her own interest in Slavic languages began (Hint: figure skating played a central role).
From Hotspur to Antonin Scalia, actor Edward Gero can (and does) play all manner of parts. An actor’s actor, he is a shining light in Washington DC’s theater community. He began his career as a classical actor playing some 60 roles for over 26 years at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. But he made the transition to contemporary work seamlessly. Bringing an authenticity and precision to roles as disparate as Mark Rothko in Red, Harry Brock in a revival of Born Yesterday, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and Antonin Scalia in The Originalist a role that was created for him. In this podcast, Gero talks about playing Shakespeare, his move to contemporary work, how Washington DC is a distinctive theater-town, and the power and wonder of theater. He is smart, funny and generous—a true bon vivant. Enjoy!
In this week's podcast, poet, writer and multi-media artist Mary Rand Hess takes us into the heart of her collaborations with Newbery medalist Kwame Alexander. Together MAry and Kwame have written two best-selling YA titles Solo, a book that has rock and roll weaving through it and Swing, a bookthat centers around jazz and baseball. Both tell rich and complex stories of teenage boys trying to grow up in a world they didn't create--and both do it entirely in verse. Mary talks about writing for young adults and kids, what draws her to poetry (she started out wanting to be a rock star!), and making a life as a working writer.
Great Performances has been on the air for more than 40 years and Executive Producer David Horn has been there for 39 of them. In many ways, Great Performances, which is the longest running performing arts anthology on television, has been shaped by his vision. The series has brought the performing arts into American homes—from opera to dance, from musicals to drama to concerts. In this podcast, Horn takes us behind the scenes of Great Performances: he explains what goes into putting a Broadway play on television; why and how he brought Shakespeare back to public television with some major star-power; his experiences directing Chita Rivera, Tony Bennett, and Lady Gaga; and his embrace of new technology and new media to both enhance the viewing experience and build new audiences. He’s a deeply thoughtful man who has done a wide variety of extraordinary work for decades. He knows everyone, and I’m not sure when he sleeps.
Pianist and 2019 NEA Jazz Master Abdullah Ibrahim combines the musical influences of his childhood in Cape Town, South Africa, which include traditional South African songs, gospels and spirituals, and Indian ragas, with the improvisation of jazz to create a sound that is distinctly his. Born Adolph Johannes Brand in 1934, he was known professionally as Dollar Brand before changing his name when he converted to Islam in 1968.Ibrahim, along with Hugh Masekela and KippiMoketsi, formed the short-lived but impactful septet The Jazz Epistles who recorded the first South African jazz album, Jazz Epistles, Verse 1. Because of the limits imposed on black South Africans by the repressive apartheid government, Ibrahim left the country. He traveled first to Zurich, where he met Duke Ellington who recorded him, and then to New York City, where he met everyone else and played in Carnegie Hall. He returned to South Africa briefly and in the mid-1970s composed what became the people’s national anthem, “Mannenberg.” Exiled once more, he returned to South Africa at the invitation of Nelson Mandela and performed at Mandela’s presidential inauguration. In this podcast episode, Abdullah talks about his many diverse musical influences, his deep love of jazz (which he calls “the highest form of music”), living and performing under apartheid, exile, and the musician as healer. We pack a lot into this podcast, but Ibrahim has had a long, rich life.
Jazz bassist Christian McBride takes us through his own musical journey--from his early days in Philadelphia to playing with some of the great jazz legends like NEA Jazz Masters Sonny Rollins and Chick Corea. He also talks about fronting a group and walks us through composing one of his signature songs "Brother Mister." Christian also reflects on his long friendship with 2019 NEA Jazz Master Stanley Crouch and Stanley's importance to jazz criticism and advocacy.
2019 NEA Jazz Master composer, conductor, and arranger Maria Schneider creates highly original and evocative compositions for her jazz orchestra, which she formed in 1992. Much of her music is autobiographical, evoking the Minnesota plains where she was born and raised. She returns to the theme of her childhood in a prairie town again and again; in fact, she’s come to realize that the foundation of her music is her hometown. She finds parts of it magical, and we certainly hear it in her music. Although she’s composed classical work and collaborated with David Bowie, Maria’s musical center remains in jazz. In this podcast, we talk about her connection to jazz (especially to the music of NEA Jazz Master Gil Evans), the ways in which she and the musicians in her band inspire one another, her collaboration with Bowie, and how her deep ties to Windom, Minnesota, translates into mesmerizing music.
Meet Maryland’s new poet laureate Grace Cavalieri. Grace is a language maven: she’s a poet (24 published books and chapbooks), a playwright (26 produced plays), and a broadcaster (creator and host of The Poet and the Poem, a public radio series now in its 42nd year). Her range of subject is matched by the depth of her observations. Her poems about old age can break your heart and make you laugh; she sometimes channels other women’s voices writing a series of poems as Anna Nicole Smith and another as Mary Wollstonecraft. She’s a poetic force to be reckoned to be reckoned with. Now, at the age of 86, Grace Cavalieri has been named Maryland’s new poet laureate. In this podcast, you’ll learn about where she’s been and where she’s going, how she made time for writing as a Navy wife with four kids, her long marriage to the boy she met when she was in junior high school, her loss at his passing, and her plans as poet laureate.
Composer Julia Wolfe recently premiered her third oratorio that is centered on American labor history—this latest piece is based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that occurred in New York City in 1911. 146 workers—most of them immigrant women—died. Julia was determined not show these women as victims, but rather as resourceful people who had the courage to travel to a new country and band together to struggle for better working conditions. Fire in my mouth, a multi-media work, opened with the New York Philharmonic as its orchestra, a chorus of 146 women, a sold-out house and a cheering standing ovation. It was a good night.
Julia Wolfe, who has won a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur fellowship, has a large and varied body of work. A composer that is hard to classify, she not only embraces all musical genres, she hears sound itself as a music which is helpful when you want to recreate the particular roar of a factory floor. In this week’s podcast, Julia talks about her deep interest in history, her wide embrace of music and her methods for translating the sounds of work into music.
Aislinn Clarke is the first Northern Irish woman to direct a feature-length horror film The Devil’s Doorway, and she brought a particularly female point-of-view by setting it in a Magdalene Laundry in 1960 Ireland. The Magdalene Laundries were institutions run by the Catholic church that were real-life horror stories for an untold number of women. They were essentially workhouses for women of “ill-repute” which could mean unwed mothers, prostitutes, women who wouldn’t get out of the way…the list of women who could be put away is quite long and varied. Aislinn Clarke feels connected to the laundries—shockingly, the last one closed in 1996—there was one in the town she grew up in and her father worked for a bakery and would deliver bread to the place. His stories stayed with her…as did his love for film, particularly horror films. Aislinn and I have a wide-ranging conversation about the history of the Magdalene Laundries, women in the film industry, what makes a good horror film and not a word about St. Patrick!
Author Renée Watson talks about her prize-winning YA title, Piecing Me Together and her most recent book, Watch Us Rise (co-written with Ellen Hagan). Both look at the lived experiences of black girls as they grapple with identity right at the intersection of race, class and gender. But Renée tells stories--she's not preaching...and, as in life, her characters can respond in unexpected ways. In the podcast, we talk about what goes into writing for young adults and Renée's own trajectory as a writer, educator and performer.
Documentarians Gordon Quinn and Tracye A. Matthews discuss their film ’63 Boycott—a documentary about one of the largest (and possibly most-under-reported) civil rights actions in the 1960s. On October 22, 1963, more than 250,000 students boycotted the Chicago Public Schools to protest racial segregation. Many marched through the city along with their parents demanding to be allowed to enter under-enrolled white schools. Standard policy had been to erect trailers on playgrounds and parking lots of overcrowded black schools rather than let students enroll in nearby schools populated by white students. It was an extraordinary political moment that laid bare the racism of Chicago’s public school system and changed the lives of many of the students involved. By some quirk of fate, Gordon Quinn, who would go on to found Kartemquin Films, was a student at the University of Chicago in 1963 and took his camera out on the street to film the demonstration. That footage is at the heart of ’63 Boycott along with the participants’ reflections of that astounding time. Gordon Quinn and Tracye A. Matthews, who is also a historian, take us through the process of creating this documentary, from locating the people who were in the original footage to getting the history of the boycott right to finding the money to see the film through. (Spoiler alert: The National Endowment for the Arts has a role!)
Rachel L. Swarns and Darcy Eveleigh are two of the four editors of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives. In Unseen, the editors took on the monumental task of going through millions of unpublished photos in the archives (or morgue) of The New York Times. They were looking for pictures of African Americans--both the ordinary and the famous. They then tried to get the story behind the photo centering around two major questions: why was the photo taken and why wasn't it used. The process was like unraveling a mystery taking a lot of determination. And the result is pretty extraordinary. Both Rachel and Darcy were longtime staff journalists at and are now contributors to The New York Times--Rachel is a writer and Darcy a photo editor. They talk about the book from these different perspectives and also share how putting this book together influenced their own approach to the work that they do.
Raymond O. Caldwell recently stepped into the role of Producing Artistic Director at Theater Alliance-the resident company of the Anacostia Playhouse. Theater Alliance is a small company that produces socially-conscious and thought-provoking work that aims to lead its audience toward positive constructive dialogue. It also happens to be terrific theater—nominated for five Helen Hayes Awards in this season alone. In today’s podcast, Raymond Caldwell talks about what it takes to create good, meaningful theater that speaks both to the neighborhood and the larger DC community. He also takes us on a journey through his own experiences as an actor and director who has worked in locations from India to Kiev to Berlin...and how those experiences inform his work at Theater Alliance.
2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, the intellectual, social and artistic burst of African-American culture that erupted in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. The Columbus Museum of Art is marking the anniversary with a dazzling exhibition I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100. Through paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, contemporary documents, books and posters, the exhibition sheds light on both breadth and depth of the Harlem Renaissance. Wil Haygood-a Columbus native-was guest curator and author of the companion book I, Too, Sing America. In this week’s podcast, Wil and I talk about the Harlem Renaissance: the lives of its artists and the spectacular work they produced, the social history that informed the art movement, and the work of bringing it all together in the exhibit and the book.
In Part 1 of my conversation with 2018 National Heritage Fellow and old-time fiddler Eddie Bond, we learned about his deep musical roots and the family and friends that nurtured them. Eddie said that the music has taken him to so many places, and in part 2, we follow him on these travels as Eddie brings his old-time fiddling across the country and around the world—beginning in an unlikely spot: Iraq during the Gulf War where Eddie served as a young soldier.
Old-time fiddler Eddie Bond was born and bred in Grayson County, Virginia, which many consider the musical heart of Appalachian old-time music. Eddie himself comes from a rich musical heritage: he learned the guitar and flat-foot dancing from his grandmother, the banjo from his grandfather, and the fiddle from neighbors. He’s a stunning musical talent picking up all three instruments very quickly and excelling at each. But Eddie gave his heart to the fiddle—winning competitions and playing across the country and throughout the world. Because old-time music is so deeply rooted in place and because Eddie Bond is a great storyteller, this is a two-part podcast. In part 1, we’ll learn about Eddie’s upbringing, the place music had in his family’s life, his own playing, and talk about the roots of old-time music.
For almost 25 years, Native Voices at the Autry has been providing opportunities and support to Native American playwrights…and by extension Native actors, designers, musicians and other theater artists. It is the country’s only Equity theatre company dedicated exclusively to producing new works by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights. Deeply committed to developing as well as producing new work, Native Voices also provides a venue for new plays with festivals and public staged readings as well as retreats and workshops for emerging and established Native playwrights. Randy Reinholz is a founder of Native Voices and has been its producing artistic director since its inception. In this podcast, Randy talks about the unique and changing points of view Native artists bring to the table, the issues facing Indian Country, and the place theater has in telling Native stories.
Actor Jeffrey Wright discusses the documentary he produced for HBO, We Are Not Done Yet, which profiles a group of veterans and service members as they come together to collaborate on a series of poems. The former and current service members are part of a United Services Organizations’ writing workshop at Walter Reed National Military Center; and, all of them struggle to cope with PTSD. The workshop creates a safe place for them to grapple with their experiences through poetry. In fact, they decide not just to write a poem collectively but to present a publicly staged reading of it. That’s where actor Jeffrey Wright came in—he had worked with veterans in the past and was looking for an opportunity to involve himself again. He came to Walter Reed to direct the staged reading of the poem. And that experience became the HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. Listen to this conversation with Jeffrey Wright about his work with these veterans, his continuing relationships with them, and his commitment to making sure their stories are heard.
In her novel, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, young adult author Kiersten White retells Mary Shelley’s classic. In White’s book, we get the story from Elizabeth Lavenza—the childhood companion and then wife of scientist Victor Frankenstein. Kiersten White closely follows the outline of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but by changing the point of view to Elizabeth, we get another story entirely about Victor Frankenstein, the monster, and Elizabeth herself. For this Halloween podcast, Kiersten and I talk about the original Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s singular life, and the challenges and fun of taking this well-known classic tale, telling it from a different perspective, and finding a story that hadn’t been told before.
Poet David Tomas Martinez’s book (and new Big Read title) Hustle explodes with verbal dexterity about street life. Born in San Diego to a working class Chicano family, David Tomas Martinez found power and strength by running with a gang. A father at 17, he ended up in college as a returning student through sheer luck, and there he found strength and power through language. David became a poet and the rough side of town and the people he knew (and knows) there became his subjects. His first collection, and first publication, is Hustle which became a prize-winning book…and a new Big Read title. David’s joy in linguistic playfulness isn’t confined to the page. His honesty, exuberance, and charm comes through in this podcast as we walk with him down the streets of Southern California; there’s violence and meanness—but also heart-stopping moments of grace.
2018 National Heritage Fellow African American Quilter Marion Coleman is a story teller with fabric. Her narrative quilts depict personal stories, history, and portraits…from small nightclubs in Oakland to a series about Black Cowboys to the life story of the first African American woman pilot—Marion’s quilts create visual stories. She’s combines both traditional and contemporary quiltmaking techniques, using ceramics, whole garments, buttons, paper, and photographs in her quilts. Sometimes, she transfers photo imagery onto the quilt itself—which she then fills in with fabric. Her distinctive way of looking at the world is apparent in her conversation as well. Listen to the podcast and follow Marion from Texas to Oakland where she had a thirty year career as a social worker and became one of the most innovative quilters of her time.
2018 National Heritage Fellow Kelly Church is a black ash basket maker. An Anishinaabe belonging to the Gun Lake Potawami Band, Kelly combines the centuries-old tradition of tree harvesting and processing ash trees, creating ribbons of ash that she then weaves with her own keen visual sense which result in stunningly original baskets. Tied to her artistry is dep commitment to keeping this tradition not just alive but vital. She’s taken on a task that’s become more difficult and more urgent, since the ash tree is being destroyed by an invasive species the emerald ash borer. In this podcast, Kelly Church takes us on the journey of taking a living tree and recreating it as a basket, the significance of the black ash tree for the North East people, and the steps she’s taking to keeping this traditional art intact for the next generations.
Herman Cornejo is about to celebrate 20 years with American Ballet Theatre—spending 15 of those years as a principal dancer. You could say the Argentina-born Cornejo practically grew up at ABT. He came to the company as an apprentice at the age of 17; yet, he was already considered a prodigy. The previous year, he had won the Gold Medal at the prestigious International Moscow Competition becoming the youngest dancer ever to do so. Over the past twenty years, Herman has developed a repertoire of more than 90 classical, contemporary and modern ballets—working with some of today’s greatest choreographers including Justin Peck and Alexei Ratmansky. Herman Cornejo is also as charming as he is talented. In this podcast, he talks about becoming a dancer in Argentina, joining ABT—his dream company, the secret sauce to a good partnership, and the process of learning a dance that a choreographer “makes on him.”
Chicana altarista and 2018 National Heritage Fellow Ofelia Esparza carries on and extends her family’s tradition of celebrating The Day of the Dead or Dia de los Muertos by creating altars to honor deceased loved ones and create a bridge between the living and the dead. She brings an artist’s eye to this cultural practice: her altars are colorful, intricate multi-level structures embellished with photos, traditional food, flowers, as well as handmade and found ornaments that evoke ancestors and deceased relatives. She’s also been in the forefront of reclaiming this practice for the Chicana community in Los Angeles. In this podcast, Ofelia shares her stories of growing up in East LA and discusses the essential meaning at the heart of Dia de los Muertos which is to remember.
2018 NEA National Heritage Fellows Don and Cindy Roy are the embodiment of Franco-American musical tradition. He is an outstanding fiddler and she backs him up with her wonderfully rhythmic piano playing and her pretty fabulous step-dancing. They have been married and playing together for 38 years—giving audiences across the country a flavor of the Franco-American traditions they both grew up with—the music their grandparents played in the kitchen while family and friends gathered. Their love for this music and the joy they take in it –and each other--is immediately apparent. Meet the Roys and their music in this tuneful podcast.
Director of the documentary Personal Statement Juliane Dressner and the cast students Karoline Jimenez, Christine Rodriguez, and Enoch Jemmott join me to talk about the film which documents the challenges New York public school students have when applying to college—especially when they are the first generation in their family to make the leap. There is a profound lack of college counselors in public schools which often leaves students on their own to negotiate applications, financial forms, and personal statements. But back in 2005, students themselves got together and created a peer counseling program where they can get the training to help not just themselves but their fellow students as well. Karoline, Christine and Enoch, although they’re facing challenges of their own and struggle with their own college possibilities, embrace their roles as peer counselors and pour their hearts and souls into helping their classmates succeed.
Documentary filmmakers Dana Nachman and Don Hardy have co-directed the award-winning film Pick of the Litter. The litter in question are five Labrador Retrievers bred by Guide dogs for the Blind (or GBD) for the specific purpose of becoming service animals. The film follows a litter of puppies from birth to their graduation and assignment to a person who’s visually impaired…that is if the dog makes the cut. Not every pooch is cut out for the rigorous training in which intelligence and perspicacity is valued as much as experience…which also makes for risky documentary filmmaking. When Dana and Don began, they had no idea if any of the dogs would pass muster. Tune in and listen to Dana and Don share their experiences of centering a film on five principal subjects who can’t speak for themselves.
Let’s celebrate Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday with a trip to Broadway! Bernstein only composed a handful of shows on Broadway, but he was a game-changer. From On the Town to West Side Story, Bernstein mixed genres and styles of music—incorporating jazz, blues, ragtime, Latin sounds-- mixing them with popular song traditions and the rhythms of the streets and then filtering it all through a classical voice. He was fluent in all languages of music and so created a music distinctly his own. Composer, conductor, and commentator Rob Kapilow takes us on a musical journey through Bernstein’s Broadway career. You may know Rob from the public radio program “What Makes It Great?” in which he takes listeners inside of music to explore that very question. Explore Bernstein’s Broadway music with Rob Kapilow (and me) in this week’s podcast!
More and more museums are moving away from focusing entirely on the content of their collections to focusing on the experience of visiting a museum. Douglas Hegley at MIA had the idea reach out to the tech community and ask them to develop ideas for alternative ways to experience the museum. So MIA teamed up with 3M to create The 3M Art and Technology Award to do just that. Meanwhile founders of the Advanced Imaging Service for Objects and Spaces at the University of Minnesota, Sam Porter and Colin McFadden loved puzzle rooms-- places that create a challenge or mystery that a group of friends solve together by finding and deciphering clues usually within a specified period of time. Sam and Colin combined their expertise to create the app which won the 2018 award: “Riddle Mia This” which transforms MIA into a giant puzzle room. Douglas, Sam and Colin join me to talk about the how and why of it all.
The Lotus World Music and Arts Festival is turning 25 this year. So it seemed like a good time to talk with its executive director Sunni Fass and long-time staff member LuAnne Holladay about this one-of-a-kind festival.
Lotus is an urban event—turning streets in downtown Bloomington Indiana into a center for music, dance and visual arts for one weekend each September. The musicians come from all over the world—over the course of the festival’s history it has welcomed artists from over 120 countries-- and they reflect the great diversity of these cultures as well as appreciation and respect for their fellow-artists. In another music-filled podcast, Sunni and LuAnne talk about what it takes to put the festival together and the deep impact the festival has had on Bloomington and Southern Indiana.
Although he’s only in his early 30s, singer, educator, conductor and music director of The Dessoff Choirs Malcolm J. Merriweather has already made his mark on the world of choral music. It is his passion; and, his mission is to open singers to all its possibilities, students to it wide and varied paths, and audiences to its wonders. His mission is as simple as it is ambitious: “impacting the world through the gift of music.” And after speaking with him, I’m convinced he’s doing it. As you’ll discover in this week’s podcast, it’s hard to resist his love of voices joining together to make song…and, as you’ll hear, Malcolm himself is a brilliant baritone.
2018 NEA Jazz Master Todd Barkan is a man of many talents: impresario, club owner, producer, artistic programmer. But he would count chief among them his deep and abiding love for jazz and the musicians who create. Owner of the legendary Keystone Korner, Todd created a club where musicians ruled and audiences felt at home. In this music-filled podcast, he talks about that great San Francisco club and shares stories about his many friend-- jazz greats like Miles Davis, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bobby Hutcherson and Sonny Rollins.
The US Army Artist in Residence SFC Juan Munoz might be the Army's best-kept secret. His job is to document through art the experiences of soldiers as they fulfill their duties both home and abroad. SFC Munoz deploys with troops for a month as a soldier/artist--expected to carry his weight and to document what he sees. SFC Munoz has an extraordinary amount of freedom: he chooses what to document and how to document it. In fact, when he was appointed, the army emphasized he was not creating propaganda but rather telling the stories of soldiers through art. In this week's podcast, we visit the studio of SFC Munoz at Fort Belvoir and learn about the role of the army's artists in residence.
2016 Bess Lomax Hawes NEA National Heritage Fellow Artemio Posadas has spent his life keeping the musical tradition of son huasteco vibrant. Son huasteco is a rich and complicated musical tradition. Beginning in Northeastern Mexico in the late 19th century, it combines distinctive rhythms, musical solos—with the violin taking a major role, poetry and dance. Improvisation is key; but so is participation. This isn’t a tradition that separates musicians and audience, and the dancers feet provide beats and rhythms in response to the music. Artemio Posadas grew up with son huasteco , and he brought it with him when he moved to the Bay area in the 1970s teaching this tradition through the generations. In this music-filled podcast, we’ll hear Artemio talk about his love of son huasteco in all its multi-dimensionality. Posadas’ apprentice, musician and anthropologist Russell Rodriguez serves as interpreter.
The Washington Jewish Film Festival’s director Ilya Tovbis wants to open doors to Jewish life around the world. And for ten days, the Washington DC area is home to some 70 international films both documentaries and narratives from emerging and established directors. Ilya defines a “Jewish film” as a work with “ something deliberately to do with the Jewish experience, culture, history, which is a malleable concept.” Yet, he chooses not to aim the films at a Jewish audience exclusively. He wants the audience to be as diverse as the stories on the screen, which is neither quick nor easy. Now in its 28th year, the Washington Jewish Film Festival has established itself as a prestigious event for filmmakers. How then to reach out to the audience in its own backyard? That’s some of questions Ilya discusses in this podcast.
Folklorist, poet and president of the International Storytelling Center, Kiran Singh Sirah is passionate about the power of stories. He heads the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee—the oldest festival of its kind in the world and a driving force behind the renaissance in storytelling. Kiran talks about creating community through stories, the ability of story to transcend petty politics and connect us to what is essential. His own story is pretty interesting: born in England to parents who had been expelled from their home in Uganda and grandparents who were part of the liberation movement in India. He understands first-hand the ability of stories to translate cultures to each other. We also hear a story from NEA National Heritage Fellow Sheila Kay Adams who can spin a tale with the best of them.
Actor Dria Brown talks about playing Joan in Bedlam’s almost postmodern production of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan in DC’s Folger Theatre. It’s stripped down in every way: minimal sets and costumes and a cast of four; Dria plays Joan and only Joan; the other three actors juggle 26 roles. The rehearsals were interesting. We hear about her growing up in South Carolina, how time in her father’s church readied her for the role, and her desire to get the audience to engage with the performance.
The first part of this week’s podcast looks at Creative Forces : NEA Military Healing Initiative. NEA Chairman Jane Chu and others reflect on the power of art to heal physical and psychological trauma as well as strengthen families and build community. In part 2, Sebastian Junger discusses his book, Tribe—which looks at the profound sense of loss some combat veterans feel when they return from deployment, and the various ways that art and ritual can help them re-enter their communities.
Curator Nora Atkinson has brought a sense of that annual hotbed of artistic ingenuity in Nevada’s Black Rock desert with the daring and successful “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man.” It’s the hottest exhibit in DC appealing to all ages. The exhibit at Renwick Gallery often has lines around the block—and for good reason. It is dazzling; focusing on massive installations that fill rooms with sight and sound. But please don’t just look. Participate and play with the interactive installations; leave a remembrance behind at the temple, lie down on pillows and watch the ceiling shift and pulsate with light. The exhibit fills the museum and spills out into the streets of Washington DC. In this week’s podcast, Nora Atkinson talks about the practical and visionary aspects of bringing this very particular desert art to Washington DC.
Cartoonist and multimedia artist Liz Reed is co-creator with her husband Jimmy of Cuddles and Rage—it’s a world inhabited by food with quirky personalities. Liz calls it “disturbingly cute,” which seems about right. In one-panel cartoons, dioramas, and animated short videos, Liz and Jimmy Reed create work that is cute—but it always has a twist. Take Dr. Taquito—a serial killer of food, who gives cooking lessons—ruthlessly shredding lettuce and chopping tomatoes as the poor vegetable victims try to get away. It’s an unashamedly playful and dark imaginative work. In today’s podcast, Liz takes through the creation and evolution of the singular world of Cuddles and Rage.
Watch video: Cooking with Dr. Taquito: 3 Ingredient Pancakes.
A conversation with Michael Fields, director of California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA). For 32 years, CSSSA has been training the next generation of artists. Each summer, CSSSA gives approximately 500 motivated and talented California high school students in the visual, literary, performing and media arts an intensive learning experience. Conducted by distinguished arts professionals, the four-week residential program is designed to hone the students’ artistic skills and to help give each student a sense of their potential as creative artists. Michael Fields discusses the thinking that went into the program’s creation, its rigorous course of study, and the talented students who rise to the challenges.
In Jennifer Haigh’s fifth novel Heat and Light, she returns to the fictional town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania: its prosperity withered with the closing of the coalmines. So when it’s learned that the area is rich in natural gas, many people are eager to sign over their mineral rights to energy companies. And the debate about fracking and all that it entails upends the community. Jennifer Haigh knows her subject well; she was raised in a former coal town that also sits on deposits of natural gas. In our conversation she talks about her hometown and how it’s become the basis for much of her writing, the pull of the past on the present and the legacy of North Appalachia’s geology.
Poet and essayist Seema Reza investigates loss and love with ruthless honesty and lyrical power in her book, When the World Breaks Open. In this week’s podcast, Reza discusses writing her life and her determination to reveal herself on the page through poems, essays, fragments and observations, recipes—whatever it took to tell her story precisely and thoroughly. The result is at times heartbreaking but not grim. She owns her sorrow, but she’s also fierce and joyful in her determination to be known for herself.
Guitarist and 2018 NEA Jazz Master Pat Metheny creates music that challenges easy description: he can play free jazz (as he did with Ornette Coleman in Song X) as well as acoustic guitar and pretty much everything in-between. In this tune-filled podcast, we talk to Pat Metheny about the music he plays, the people he’s played with and making the music you want while making a career in music.
The making of the independent film Little Boxes.
Please note: This interview took place before the unexpected death of Nelsan Ellis who stars in the film Little Boxes.
Casting Director Walter Ware III brings the right people together. Read all about the behind-the-scenes crew in NEA Arts.
Embracing and reinterpreting Ladino music.
Watch the video Una Noche Al Borde De La Mar.
The National Book Award winner talks about Julia Alvarez, Oscar Wao, and the wonder of reading.
Their film Spettacolo looks at a small Tuscan village where each year life is translated into art.
With Another Brooklyn, acclaimed children’s author Jacqueline Woodson creates an adult novel that reads like poetry.
Author and moderator of Face the Nation, Dickerson’s book Whistlestop is a witty, rollicking tour of presidential campaign history.
With her character Lou Norton, Hall creates one of the few African American female detectives.
With Presidential Suite,Ted Nash transforms iconic political speeches into an inventive jazz composition.
Michael Berry reflects on the art of translating Yu Hua’s influential novel and new Big Read title To Live into English.
Using empty storefront windows as his gallery, Standart exhibits “WE ARE- A Nation of Immigrants” in the heart of New London, CT.
As host of the Emmy Award-winning series, Mickela Mallozzi travels the world learning the traditional dances and music of each place she visits.
Justin Cronin brings his post-apocalyptic Passage trilogy to a close with The City of Mirrors.
Founding her company after a near-fatal accident, Amy’s work is an exuberant affirmation.
In her new book, Rachel Moore gives practical advice and strategic insight for creating a career in the performing arts.
McBride’s latest book looks to understand what shaped James Brown-- one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.
Dr. Cole’s mission is to inspire a love of art especially in girls from under-represented communities.
Wolf Trap is integrating art with fundamental science and math learning for young children and the data show significant results.
In her new work Baltimore, playwright Kirsten Greenidge grapples with the issue of race on college campuses.
Archie Shepp shares his musical biography—and his thoughts about the legacy of African-American music.
Poets and social workers, the twins’ primary audience have been Wilmington’s underserved children.
In his memoir Soul Serenade, Ollison describes how music was a lifeline during a difficult upbringing.
Harrell Fletcher shares his passion for social practice—creative projects in communities that are by, for, and of the residents.
Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders took Julianna Baggott 18 years to write… Julianna discusses how writing 14 other novels in a variety of genres, three collections of poetry, and a children’s series helped her finish Harriet Wolf.
A half-century of musical innovation and self-determination, told by AACM co-founder (currently AACM-New York president) and 2010 NEA Jazz Master Muhal Richard Abrams, current AACM-Chicago chairman Ernest Dawkins, and AACM member and 2014 NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton.
Dave Porter’s iconic music is an essential part of the story: Think Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul.
From Pericles to Tupac Shakur, Wayne Carr embodies fully-realized characters on the stage.
Tazewell Thompson may be wowing critics and audiences with his direction of the opera Appomattox, but he’s an equally brilliant theater director and playwright.
After 40 years, Joseph Riley steps down from being mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, leaving a legacy that demands art and beauty in the everyday.
Jane Alexander reflects on her time at the NEA, her life-long love affair with theater, and the centrality of art to the human experience.
Richard Hunt talks about creating large pieces of abstract art for public spaces and reflects on his time on the National Council of the Arts.
Karen Zacarias is the most produced Latina playwright in the nation. Now, she brings the telenovela to the stage with Destiny of Desire.
By performing and teaching Lakota flute and dance, Kevin Locke brings the past and the future together.
Most kids run away from home to join the circus. For Dolly Jacobs, it was a family affair.
They got the first grant from the NEA back in 1965 and are celebrating their own long history.
The new poet laureate of the United States and two-time NEA fellow calls for everyone's heart to speak out.
From beautifully crafted short fiction to page-turning gothic novels, Rebecca Makkai puts art at the heart of her work.
Ensemble for the Romantic Century blends chamber music with fully staged dramas and changes both theater and concerts in the process.
Still Dreaming documents octogenarian actors taking on Shakespeare at the Lillian Booth Actors' Home.
2001 NEA National Heritage Fellow Joe Wilson weaves his storytelling spell into the history of Blue Ridge Mountain culture.
Graham Beal takes us behind the scenes of the new exhibit Frida Kalho and Diego Rivera in Detroit and shares his support for the Blue Star Museum Program.
Ric Burns' documentary American Ballet Theatre: A History celebrates dance and ABT’s 75th Anniversary.
Ukrainian embroiderer, weaver and bead worker Vera Nakonechny keeps a traditional culture alive.
He had a childhood no one could make up—with his memoir, he creates order from the chaos.
Writing for big bands, choirs, and small ensembles, Carla Bley remains a graceful and innovative voice for progressive jazz.
The saxophonist/flutist/composer talks about expanding the tradition and language of jazz.
Sam White loves Shakespeare and loves her hometown Detroit. So she emptied her bank account and started a site-specific professional theater company, Shakespeare in Detroit. It’s amazing.
Actor Tonya Beckman: a core member of the Taffety Punk Theater Company and a Riot Grrrl in good standing. Classical theater with a difference.
Dual Lives: Deborah Bond sings like a dream, has three cds and tours internationally. But she still needs a day job to pay the bills.
Raymond Arsenault's book The Sound of Freedom examines the 30-minute concert by Marian Anderson that helped move a nation forward.
Filmmaker Sam Pollard talks about his new documentary August Wilson: The Ground on which I Stand.
Carolyn Mazloomi shines a powerful light on the African-American community through narrative quilts.
Organizing curator John Vick and consulting curator/editor Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw tell us about its rich history.
Barry Bergey shares some memories about a lifetime immersed in folk and traditional arts.
Ping Chong, a visionary citizen-artist and six-time NEA grantee, connects racial history to our current unrest in his recent play, Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America.
Diana Green and Cathy Gassenheimer have a mission:
Arts Education for Every Alabama pre-k thru 12 Student!
In a slim, lucid and compulsively readable book, Nathaniel Philbrick makes an enthusiastic case for taking a look at Melville’s classic Moby-Dick.
Find out from Maria Jukic, executive director of Cleveland’s Clinic’s Arts and Medicine Institute and Tom Schorgl, director of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture.
The neurologist/holistic practioneer knows first-hand the healing power of the arts for veterans.
In her memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward attempts to understand the links in the untimely deaths of her brother and four friends.
Nicole Gomez Fisher brings it all back home in her film, Sleeping with the Fishes. And goes on to win the award for Best New Director at the Brooklyn Film Festival.
Quill worker and 2014 National Heritage Fellow brings a Native-American tradition into the 21st century.
For 40 years, Chunky Sanchez has playing and singing the stories of the Chicano people.
How Dance Place’s open door policy helped transform an underserved neighborhood into a vital arts district.
Blue-collar worker and union organizer Ralph Fasanella would have been 100 this week. His paintings of urban working class people struggling and thriving continue to live on.
The DC Youth Slam Team is an award-winning internationally acclaimed poetry group. Listen to their poems and find out how it all comes together.
Elizabeth McCracken gives us her take on the differences in writing novels, short stories, and tweets.
Believing that music is a unifying force, ETHEL has joined forces with musicians across genres and regions and built a family of artists along the way.
2011 MacArthur Fellow Francisco Nunez brings together New York youth of all backgrounds and together they create beautiful music and an inclusive community.
Julie Otsuka’s first novel When the Emperor Was Divine explores her family’s history in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
For Jennifer Pickering, all art is both local and global and LEAF is that philosophy in action.
The author discusses the NEA Big Read selection, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, his novel about an Ethiopian exile in a gentrifying Washington, DC neighborhood.
This Memorial Day Weekend, conversations about Blue Star Museums and the healing power of art, Jacob Lawrences's War Series, and a poem by veteran Lynn Hill.
Behind the scenes of “Sending Messages,” the award-winning monthly podcast produced by incarcerated youth.
David Mura uses his considerable talents as a poet, novelist, memoirist and performer to explore what it means to be Japanese-American.
With a trunk full of her mother’s saris, Kenyan author and performer Shaija Patel reclaims a lost history.
Sherrie Maricle has played with jazz legends, leads an all-woman big band, and forges new roads for women in jazz.
In Translation: Verónica Castillo expands a traditional Mexican art form, the Tree of Life, to express the need for social justice in the 21st century.
Louisiana Swamp blues singer, composer and pianist Carol Fran looks back at her 60-year career.
Meet some of the greatest back-up singers! It may be only Twenty Feet from Stardom but director Morgan Neville shows us just how long that walk can be.
It's a music-filled podcast with New Orleans composer, producer, and pianist Allen Toussaint who combines elegance with funk. [29:29]
Pratibha Parmar discusses making the recent documentary about an iconic American writer, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, which can be seen on the American Masters’ website.
Daniel Beaty's play and bravura performance in The Tallest Tree in the Forest shines a light on the artistry and activism of Paul Robeson.
Tope Folarin becomes the first writer born outside of Africa to win the Caine Prize with his short story set in Texas in an evangelical Nigerian church.
Jen Masengarb explains Chicago's rich architectural legacy and CAF’s role in bringing it public awareness.
Jeff Orlowski goes to the Arctic to film James Balog’s documentation of the rapidly disappearing glaciers. We hear all about it.
Here’s a peak at the Screen Actors’ Guild or SAG Award--the show where actors honor actors.
Bassist Richard Davis talks about his musical life outside of jazz -- working with folks like Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Bernstein and Igor Stravinsky.
One of the great bassists Richard Davis remembers a few of jazz musicians he's played with -- like Sun Ra, Ahmad Jamal, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones, and Eric Dolphy.
Musician and teacher Jamey Aebersold believes that anyone can improvise and he's developed the tools to show them how. [27:11]
Kati Texas takes us behind the scenes of the Kinetic Sculpture Race, Grand Championship, where art and science go to play. [28:10]
McCraney shares his exuberant passion for live performance and his determination to bring theater to underserved kids in Miami.
Nicholson Baker may have written three exuberant sex novels, but he turns to his other passion in his latest book, Traveling Sprinkler: the extraordinary details of the ordinary.
In the second part of a two-part interview, we hear Sheila as storyteller and learn about some of the folks who lived in Sodom, North Carolina.
Singer, musician and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams talks about (and sings) songs brought over from England, Scotland, and Ireland in the mid-17th century and kept alive by the people in the mountains of North Carolina.
In his current novel, Red Moon, Ben Percy serves up a hybrid of horror and literature to tell a story about our lives today. [35:10]
The 78th Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax, Virginia. Where music happens on and off the stage. [32:13]
In the second of our two-part interview, talk about his latest play and his screenplay for the movie, Lincoln.
In part 1 of a two-part interview, Tony Kushner talks about his early attraction to theater and writing Angels in America. [28:50]
Laurie Olin on the work of landscape architecture—balancing nature and cultivation. [32:45]
Nancy Buirski discusses her prize-winning documentary, The Loving Story, a look at a couple’s decision to remain a family and challenge Virginia’s miscegenation laws.
Founder of Philadanco!, Joan Myers Brown reflects on what goes into building a leading African-American dance company and school. [27:29]
Andre Dubus III's memoir Townie isn’t a literary coming of age story. It’s an exploration of violence and absence.
The City of Devi, an apocalyptic sex comedy and love story, is the third book in Manil Suri’s trilogy centered on Mumbai. [26:08]
Stephan Jost discusses how the Honolulu Museum of Art works to serve its military community.
In her latest book, When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams explores the legacy of her mother’s journals. [28:11]
The team behind the new app Poems by Heart discuss how they combine great gaming with classic poetry.
2010 NEA Literature Fellow Adam Johnson talks the challenges of setting a novel in North Korea.
Lynn Hill discusses her participation in "Holding It Down" -- Vijay Iyer's and Mike Ladd's performance piece based on the dreams of veterans of color. [26:44]
A conversation with George Wein, the man who launched the first outdoor jazz festival in the US--the legendary Newport Jazz Festival.
Lillian Faderman's writes a "reconstructed memoir" about her mother's life as an immigrant factory worker and single mother during the Great Depression.
M. Evelina Galang's work spans generations with her writing of young Filipina-Americans and the surviving World War II "comfort women."
The winner of the 2012 Joyce Wein Artist Prize discusses the relationship in her work between visual art and sonic art.
In the 2nd part of our interview, Frank Price talks about the business of film making as well as some of the iconic films he’s made, including Tootsie, Gandhi, and Boyz in the Hood.
In the first of a two-part interview, Frank Price talks about his early days as a television writer and producer of shows like The Virginian and Columbo.
Nick Cave, chosen to participate in the U.S. State Department's Arts-in-Embassies program, talks about his Sound Suits, a unique blend of sculpture, fashion, and dance.
Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas discusses his dual career as conductor and educator. [30:49]
Bread and Roses in a Brooklyn shelter: Caron Atlas demonstrates how the arts can be a critical component of disaster relief.
Taylor Branch discusses his trilogy of the Civil Rights Movement America in the King Years.
Pianist, bandleader, composer and 2013 NEA Jazz Master talks about his innovative music blending Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz.
Sweet Poppa Lou talks about the musical roots of his swinging bop saxophone sound. [38:23]
Singer/songwriter Mel Tillis tells stories about his career and how performing helped him cope with his stutter. [29:43]
Dennis Yerry discusses his multi-faceted career as Native American composer, arranger and musician AND as a jazz pianist and cabaret performer. [29:27]
The founder of a young people's theater organization discusses the critical need children have for theater and arts education. [29:40]
Josh McManus talks about the thousand little things that make up creative placemaking. [27:17]
Mystery Writer Laura Lippman talks about the terrifying brilliance of Edgar Allan Poe. [29:32]
Author Margot Livesey discusses The Flight of Gemma Hardy -- her reimagining of Jane Eyre. [32:40]
Arts Advocate Al Head discusses the profound impact of traditional arts on communities. [28:50]
Backstage with the director of Gatz, a play that takes as its text F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic of and about the Jazz Age.
Meet Christopher Paul Curtis. He is known for writing historical fiction for young adults that center on African-American families and tackle tough issues with humor and honesty. His latest book, The Mighty Miss Malone, has all the hallmarks of a Curtis novel: a likeable and utterly believable young protagonist, a Rust Belt setting, a vividly drawn moment in history (in this case, the Great Depression), and moments of real humor interlaced with a story of genuine pathos.
In many ways, Curtis has had a blessed career. His first book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, tells the story of ten-year-old Kenny, his family, and a trip that leads them into a tragic moment in American history. It somehow managed to be hilarious, and in turn, tragic. It also racked up a slew of awards including a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor. Curtis followed that up with Bud, Not Buddy, which is set in 1936 Flint, Michigan, and focuses on ten-year-old orphan Bud Caldwell, who hits the road in search of family. It became the first book ever to receive both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Author Award. Curtis then went on to receive still another Coretta Scott King Author Award and a Newbery Honor for Elijah of Buxton, a novel about the first child born free in a settlement of runaway slaves in southern Canada. [34:01]
Bryan Doerries discusses how bringing Greek tragedies to service members opens up new conversations.
Michele Lowe discusses the process that moved her award-winning play Inana from page to stage. [32:07]
Yeohlee Teng talks about her design philosophy and her work with Making Midtown, an initiative to reinvigorate creative production in NYC’s garment district.
In part 2 of our conversation with Andy Statman, we follow his musical path as he blends klezmer, jazz, blues, and bluegrass into a distinctive musical voice.
In the first of two-part interview, musical wonder Andy Statman talks about his early musical career, including the importance of bluegrass for a boy born in Brooklyn. [31:04]
Dean Bakopoulos discusses his first novel about fathers and sons in middle America's working class.
You may know him as the guy who takes surreal pictures of his Weimaraners; but that's just one strand of William Wegman's long and varied career.
Na'alehu Anthony discusses his documentary about traditional Polynesian open sea canoeing and its significance to the revitalization of Hawaiian culture. [29:47]
Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, discusses the new science of creativity.
The editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol 1 discusses the relationship of the two artists.
Aditi Brennan Kapil discusses the ways her mixed cultural background informed her play, Agnes Under the Big Top: A Tall Story. [29:32]
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove talks about her writing with a focus on her most recent book of poems, Sonata Mullatica.
Meejin Yoon talks about creating work at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape, and technology.
Stephen Manes discusses his book Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear, his inside look at a full season of Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet. [24:58]
Trumpeter and flugelhorn player, composer, arranger, educator, and advocate Jimmy Owens talks about his life in jazz.
Literary biographer Brenda Wineapple discusses her book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. [28:47]
Keri Putnam discusses Film Forward, an initiative of the Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Now in its second year, the program aims to enhance cross-cultural understanding, collaboration and dialogue through film. [25:49]
Tim O'Brien, who served in Vietnam, talks about his novel (and Big Read selection) The Things They Carried and how fiction can often tell a deeper truth about war. [29:34]
Saxophonist, composer and arranger Jimmy Heath talks about his storied career and some of the jazz greats he’s played with.
Kerry Henderson talks about co-creating a festival from scratch in a small mountain town with little money and a lot of help from friends and neighbors.
Billy Luther explores different facets of his heritage in his documentaries. His latest looks at a little known celebration of the Laguna Pueblo, Grab Day.
Meet Morris Robinson, who was an All-American at The Citadel, started studying voice at the age of 30, and sings at the great opera houses throughout the country.
The 1994 NEA National Heritage Fellow, violinist, and oud player discusses his merging of Arab and western musical traditions.
A conversation with songwriter/novelist Wesley Stace who performs under the stage name John Wesley Harding.
Co-Founder of the Vermont Performance Lab, Sara Coffey talks about creating spaces and community support for contemporary dance in rural Vermont. [26:06]
Co-founders of San Jose Taiko, Roy and PJ Hirabayashi talk about the importance of this traditional art in the Asian American community. [28:34]
Innovative director Nic Muni talks about the challenges and rewards of producing opera.
David Seidler talks about his film, The King's Speech, and his own struggle with stuttering.
Three of Miami’s cultural organizers talk about the power of art in building community.
In part 2 of our conversation with Choreographer Liz Lerman, we explore false dichotomies, including the one that opposes art to science.
2010 National Heritage Fellow Jim "Texas Shorty" Chancellor talks about the great tradition of Texas fiddling. [25:43]
Youngblood co-directors Graeme Gillis and R.J. Tolan talk about a unique organization for up-and-coming playwrights. [22:25]
Here's part 2 of our conversation with Sean Wilentz, author of Bob Dylan in America. [28:26]
Sean Wilentz discusses his biography of 2009 National Medal of Arts recipient Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan in America.
Charles Randolph-Wright talks about directing Lynn Nottage's play Ruined at Arena Stage.
Howard Shalwitz talks about the theater company’s production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park.
Poet Kevin Young talks about his book, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. [23:45]
Novelist Jennifer Egan talks about her National Book Critics Circle Award-Winning book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. [29:24]
Linda Murray talks about her organization Solas Nua, the only organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to contemporary Irish arts.
2009 National Medal of Arts recipient, composer John Williams discusses the art of scoring films.
NEA National Heritage fellow Mary Jackson talks about the art and tradition of sweetgrass basketmaking.
NEA Jazz Master Ron Carter, bassist/cellist/educator extraordinaire, talks about his career playing jazz and classical music.
Playwright, actor, and activist Anna Deveare Smith talks about her extraordinary career and her current one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy.
Isabel Wilkerson talks about her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, focusing on the transfer of Southern culture to the North, creating a new, vibrant culture in the country.
Author of two memoirs about her life in Iran, Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I've Been Silent About, Azar Nafisi talks about her books, her life in Iran, her parents, the Iranian Revolution, and, of course, the power of literature.
Bert Crenca talks about founding the community arts center AS220, its interaction with the city Providence, and its arts education offshoot AS220 Youth.
Author Luis Alberto Urrea talks about the inspiration for and writing of his novel Into the Beautiful North, which takes place from Sinaloa, Mexico, all the way up north to Kankakee, Illinois.
Dan Morgenstern, recipient of the 2007 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, discusses the 2011 class of NEA Jazz Masters. [27:27]
Molly Smith talks about American theater, including the often-overlooked musical, her commitment to new play development, and her vision for the newly-renovated Arena Stage at the Mead Center.
Shirley Sneve talks about the mission of the Native American Public Telecommunications organization, which shares stories of Native American people through the creation, promotion, and distribution of Native media on television and radio.
2010 MacArthur Fellow Sebastian Ruth talks about the community-based arts organization he founded, Community MusicWorks, which won a 2010 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for its teaching, mentoring, and performing activities with urban youth in Providence, Rhode Island. [27:11]
Choreographer Parker Esse talks about his experience creating new choreography for Arena Stage's revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic musical Oklahoma!.
Jeffrey Sweet talks about the revitalization of theater in Chicago through the Second City and other theater companies, as well as his own experience as a playwright and the art of theater and musical theater.
One of the most well-regarded postwar American artists still working, Frank Stella discusses his five-decade career in the visual arts, from paintings to sculptures to murals to architecture.
Musician Chuck Brown talks about his career, from honing his chops in prison in Lorton, Virginia, to developing his own musical genre in DC: go-go music.
The only general director to found and lead two opera companies (Michigan Opera Theatre and Opera Pacific), David DiChiera talks about his career, bringing opera to Detroit audiences, and composing his first opera in his 60s.
Legendary soprano Martina Arroyo talks about her career in opera, including working with such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti.
Natasha Wimmer was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2007 to translate Roberto Bolaño's epic novel 2666. In this interview, she discusses the complexities of translating Bolaño's work and other tribulations of working as a translator. [27:08]
Rudolfo Anaya talks about the writing of his acclaimed novel Bless Me, Ultima as well as in the influence of the oral tradition and folk tales on his writing and his life growing up in New Mexico.
Awarded the 2010 Bess Lomax Hawes Award for the preservation of cultural heritage, Judith McCulloh talks about her extensive work as a folklorist and editor at the University of Illinois Press.
Mike Rafferty talks about growing up in East Galway, Ireland, and learning flute playing from his father, as well as coming to America and eventually returning to Irish music in his 50s as both a performer and teacher.
Bluegrass legend Del McCoury discusses his 50-year career, from joining Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the 1960s to multiple appearances at the Bonnaroo music and arts festival in the 2000s.
Writer Julia Alvarez discusses how her life as a reader led to her life as a writer and the rich source material she finds in her family's immigrant experience.
Ed Herendeen talks about founding and sustaining a theater festival committed to supporting bold, daring new works for the stage. [18:27]
Basque writer Unai Elorriaga and Amaia Gabantxo, translator of Elorriaga's novel Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, discuss the book as well as the art of translation and the Basque language. [25:50]
Joel Nelson talks about how he grew to love poetry and how he writes and recites poetry, as well as growing up on a ranch and his love of horses, among other subjects. [27:00]
Ken Burns talks about his most recent documentary series on the National Park system, as well as his approach to filmmaking and his attraction to iconic American subjects. [22:24]
Operatic tenor Everett McCorvey talks about how he was drawn into the music, how he helped build the opera program at University of Kentucky, and the difference between spirituals and gospel, among other topics. [26:17]
John Hickenlooper discusses his efforts to use the arts to revitalize Denver and promote economic development and increased livability. [23:37]
A look at the Washington, DC roots of Duke Ellington and their impact on his development as a musician and composer. [8:40]
Josephine Reed talks with a collection of local experts about the history and revitalization of U Street, NW in Washington, DC. Once known as the "Black Broadway," U Street is again a vibrant cultural place in the city, as evidenced by Arena Stage's smash production of Sophisticated Ladies at the historic Lincoln Theatre. [25:57]
Amy Tan talks about her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, her relationship with her mother, and the art of writing. [27:49]
Carlisle Floyd talks about his extensive career in opera, including writing some of his most famous pieces, Susannah, Of Mice and Men, Willie Stark, and Cold Sassy Tree. [29:55]
David Baker discusses his immersion into jazz, from playing to composing to teaching. [26:46]
The Birmingham Sunlights discuss the creation of their group and their unique "Birmingham sound" [28:50]
Rajiv Joseph talks about developing and writing his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a 2010 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theater, and his burgeoning career as a playwright. [22:13]
Recipient of the 1997 NEA/Seaver Conductors Award, Alan Gilbert discusses his first year as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. [28:49]
Star of stage and screen--and winner of just about every performance award--Rita Moreno talks about her life as a performing artist. [28:06]
Dean Stull talks about the latest developments at one of the nation's outstanding music conservatories. [28:07]
Hear about New York City's best kept secret, where nature and art provide a urban unique oasis. [12:42]
Hank Jones talks about his long career in jazz, including playing with such jazz greats as Charlie Parker and fellow NEA Jazz Master Ella Fitzgerald. [24:52]
U.S. Poet Laureate talks about her teaching career, her reaction to that initial phone call from the Library of Congress, and, of course, poetry. [21:52]
Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Hulk, Doctor Strange: Stan Lee was there at the creation. [29:56]
A world without Mary Poppins? No way. The two-time Oscar winner lets us in on how great show tunes get written. [29:58]
One of America's most beloved stars spills some backstage secrets while discussing career highlights. [27:52]
Queen Ida Guillory discusses the Zydeco tradition and how she became a part of the band. [25:22]