About Art

Nene Humphrey is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans across mediums including performance, video, drawing, and sound. Known for her unique approach to storytelling, Humphrey’s projects often explore the connections between personal memory, dream states, and the collective human experience. Her recent project, This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time, is the culmination of years of research into the emotional and psychological impact of dreams and the healing power of music. Humphrey has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, and Sculpture Center, New York, NY; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Mead Museum, Amherst, MA among others.

Tony Freund is Editorial Director and Director of Fine Art at 1stDibs, which operates at the intersection of design, collecting, taste, and cultural storytelling. Freund has spent decades chronicling the world of design, collecting, and connoisseurship, helping to shape the editorial voice of one of the world’s leading online marketplaces for art and design. He brings a deep, nuanced view of how we live with objects — and what they say about us.He and Zuckerman discuss the connoisseur’s eye in a digital world, the evolving meaning of luxury, the power of objects to connect time, place, and people, beauty, storytelling,and why objects — whether functional, historical, or sublime — continue to hold cultural power!

Sara Raza is the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Of Iranian and Central Asian origin and a member of the international diaspora, Raza focuses on global art and visual cultures from a postcolonial and post-Soviet perspective with a specialism in Orientalism. She is the author of Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion(Black Dog Press, London, 2022). At the helm of the CCA, Raza leads its creative mission to foster cultural and educational partnerships, while championing regional and international artists in their engagement with Uzbekistan’s rich cultural heritage and dynamic contemporary art scene. Raza is the recipient of the 11th ArtTable New Leadership Award for Women in the Arts and was honoured by Deutsche Bank and Apollo as one of 40 under 40 global art specialists (thinkers’ category). Formerly, she was the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for the Middle East and North Africa at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Curator of Public Programs at Tate Modern in London. She currently teaches in NYU’s Media, Cultures, and Communication Department, and is a 2025 Yale School of Art Guest Critic and Visiting Faculty member.She and Zuckerman discuss looking beyond the borders of Europe and the EU, being a global citizen, translation, constellations, mathematics and abstraction, moments of crisis, understanding the present through the past, looking back to look forward, cultures of interruption, finding similarities, punk as a way to combine desperate ideas, reciprocal cultural labor, accessibility, retelling moral tales, art as a re-orientation, and shifting both the imagination and the heart!

Los Angeles-based artist Su Yu-Xin considers painting as a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Su Yu-Xin collects, studies, and processes the color substances scattered on the earth's crust. From there, she invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation. For her, such landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, organic and synthetic matter.

Casey Fremont is the Executive Director of the Art Production Fund, a non-profit dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious public art projects, reaching new audiences, and expanding awareness through contemporary art.She and Zuckerman discuss creating experiences that support working mothers, growing up around artists, making art pilgrimages, Prada Marfa, what social media means to public art, and the role public art plays in making art accessible to many!

Lisa Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements, in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, which was on view at the Aspen Art Museum in 2020 and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021. In 2015, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, presented Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, a major survey spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s work. The show traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2016. Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings just opened at The Morgan Library & Museum and is on view through January 4, 2026.Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She and Zuckerman discuss changing the world, vulnerability, why make art, using pushback as an opportunity, pushing against resistance, getting rid of self-doubt, and how Art makes you feel less alone!

Jonathan Lethem, a celebrated novelist and cultural critic known for 'Motherless Brooklyn', shares his unique insights on the interplay between art and personal identity. He reflects on his upbringing as the child of a painter and how it shaped his narrative style. Lethem discusses the nostalgic contrast between past and present media consumption, the joy and acceptance of failure in creativity, and the importance of memory in art. Their conversation beautifully captures the transformative power of storytelling, encouraging listeners to embrace the extraordinary in everyday life.

Glenn Lowry, director of The Museum of Modern Art since 1995, shares his transformative journey in the art world. He discusses how innovation has reshaped MoMA, increasing its visitor engagement both on-site and online. The conversation explores the balance of leadership and community engagement as museums adapt to contemporary challenges. Lowry emphasizes the value of patience in decision-making, the role of mentorship, and the intersection of sports discipline with creativity. He advocates for embracing discomfort in art to foster deeper connections.

Cultural journalist Jori Finkel is based in Los Angeles and won the 2023 Rabkin Prize for excellence in the field. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the West Coast contributing editor of The Art Newspaper, covering artists and the art world with particular attention to gender issues. Previously, she was a senior editor of Art+Auction magazine in New York. She developed and co-produced the Emmy-nominated 2018 PBS documentary Artist and Mother, working to flip the script that devalues art made by parents and establish an art historical lineage for artist-mothers. She is also author of the critically acclaimed book It Speaks to Me: Art that Inspires Artists, called “an argument for why art museums matter” by New York magazine. She speaks at museums and art fairs and appears on broadcasts and podcasts as part of her larger project of making contemporary art more accessible.She and Zuckerman discuss turning an advocation into a vocation, opening doors for people, realizing your mission, being in the wrong place, communicating with people, advocacy, following her curiosity, the consensus making machine of the art world, ways of resistance, motherhood, artworks you keep coming back to, not complaining, taboos, female genius, the germ of something, and art as a safe space for dangerous thinking!

Los Angeles based, Australian artist Ricky Swallow uses ordinary materials to create precisely rendered objects that he then casts in bronze. The unique works that result are expressions not only of the objects’ constructed forms, but also of the process of transformation by which an inert grouping of things becomes a sculpture. Swallow is invested in equal measure in the making of things and the testing of concepts; in hands-on work with cardboard, tape, wood, and rope and the mediated potentials of the foundry; in the immediacy of craft and the austere elegance of geometric abstraction. He elicits a questioning state of mind by establishing geometries and juxtapositions that just manage to exceed what the eye perceives as possible. Like mysterious, hieroglyphic numbers or letters translated into three dimensions, his works are as indelible as they are evocative.He and Zuckerman discuss how we see our own work, working against the logic of an object or image, when people remember your work, doing less, the availability of abstraction, meaning, conducting yourself with authenticity, sculptors as underdogs, being married to an artist, what makes him happy, space and order, meditation, the radical idea of doing nothing, figuring things out himself, a time-tested belief system, leaving your mark, not destroying anything, self-guided work, collecting, what is parallel to making!