About Art

Sanford Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “future ethnographies.”   His work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Zuckerman curated his first one-person museum exhibition 20 years ago this year and will open the new Orange County Museum of Art with a new site specific commission. He and she discuss where ideas come from, making space, trees, transcendent moments, Buddhists and break dancers, the symphony of silence, new iconographies, where we are from, and power objects!

Leo Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions in light. His goal is to create a rich environment in which emergent behavior can occur without a preconceived outcome. His work is focused on stripping systems down to their essence to better understand the underlying structures and rules that govern how they work. He is interested in lowest common denominators such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. The resulting forms move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms that are inspired by mathematician John Conway's work with cellular automata and the Game of Life. On March 5, 2013 Villareal inaugurated The Bay Lights, a 1.8-mile-long installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge which has since become a permanent installation. In April 2021, Villareal completed Illuminated River, which unites 9 bridges in central London into a single, monumental work of public art. He and Zuckerman discuss different types of public art, connecting the flow state and creativity, circularity, being a beacon, personal and family history, NFTs, and yoga!

Fred Tomaselli’s work reveals a uniquely American vision. Growing up in Southern California, he was influenced by both the manufactured unreality of theme parks and the music and drug countercultures of Los Angeles during the 1970s and 80s. His distinctive melding of these traditions coalesces in an updated, personalized, folk-driven vision of the American West. Tomaselli amasses pills, herbs and other drugs, along with images of plants, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations carefully cut from books. Pulling from this visual archive, Tomaselli creates baroque paintings that draw upon a range of art historical sources and decorative traditions—like quilts and mosaics. Combining these unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin, Tomaselli’s paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions in a multilayered coexistence of the real, the photographic, and the painterly. Friends for nearly three decades, in 2009 Zuckerman organized a major exhibition of Tomaselli’s work that traveled to two venues including the Brooklyn Museum. In this episode he and she talk about being shaped by cars, surfing, Disneyland and Orange County in general, their shared love of nature, losing yourself in music, mind altering substances and experiences, The New York Times and current events!

Robert Nava draws inspiration from sources ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to Egyptian art and cartoons to create hybrid monsters populating a mythical contemporary world. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art. An MFA graduate from Yale University, Nava builds on the gesturalism of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He and Zuckerman discuss the energy he utilizes and creates, what different people see in the same imagery, the importance of heart, how he describes his own work, and of course why art matters!

This week on my podcast “Conversations About Art” we are reissuing one of our earliest—recorded in October 2019–when I spoke with artist Seth Price. Price in addition to making paintings has designed a fashion line, written a novel, and made music. He and I talk about the allure of being unavailable, the power of defocused thinking, creating a sound track for artists, #menswear, and skin.

Mike Kaplan is President and CEO of Aspen Skiing Company for the last 17 years. He recently announced that after 30 years with the company, that the 2022-23 winter season would be his last at the helm of the organization. Together he and Zuckerman in a completely unprecedented, brave, and innovative way collaborated to place art by world renowned contemporary artists on all lift ticket products and to integrate art into the company in unexpected places and ways. He and Zuckerman discuss powder days, flow state, focusing on paths to success, being taken out of your place, noble pursuits, not just skiing, a life worth living, family, and the beauty in the ordinary!

Tamar Zagursky was born in Beer-Sheva, Israel in 1975 to an Israeli born Engineer father and an American born English teacher and translator mother. She grew up in a small town in the Negev desert and Zagursky served as a tank driver in the Israel army. From 2002 to 2020 she was the Director of Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv, one of top galleries in Israel, curating exhibitions and representing the gallery at art fairs all over Europe and the United States. In 2029 she began to manage the studio of Guy Zagursky, a renowned Israeli sculptor and her husband. She also launched SIDDUR, an innovative line of Contemporary Judaica, all designed and produced by Guy. She and Zuckerman discuss Judaica (ceremonial objects used in Jewish rituals), working with your life partner, organizing a table, female entrepreneurs, courage, contemporary spirituality, the value of awkwardness, and being a working mom in the art world. 

Christopher Y. Lew is Chief Artistic Director at Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art. He has over fifteen years of experience working at American museums and arts nonprofits. He is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he oversaw the emerging artist program and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. At the Whitney, he organized Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2018), and mounted the first US solo exhibitions for several artists. Prior to joining the Whitney, he was assistant curator at MoMA PS1. Lew has contributed to publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse. He and Zuckerman discuss art as a window into another world, spending time with things we don’t yet understand, being entrepreneurial, doing curatorial work in museums, being a parent, NFTs, transformational invitations, slowing down, and why should anyone care.

After more than a decade as an art dealer and gallery owner specializing in contemporary Southeast Asian art, in the last year Tyler Rollins founded a nonprofit organization nurturing connections between contemporary art and religious faith. The Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts is based in Charleston, SC and forefronts a focus on transcendence and orienting oneself to a higher power knowing that these can be a source of insight, illumination, and inspiration. He and Zuckerman discuss Edgar Allan Poe, how to build a community, the Holy City, justifications for art, soulful connections, polite conversations, pandemic introspection and access, divisiveness, the link between a career practice and a life practice, connection to a higher purpose, the relationship between integration and transcendence, gentleness, cracking the shell of self, being uncomfortable, the notion of faith, allowing artists to flourish, creating space, a contemplative approach to art, empathy with and towards something higher, the divine, general acts of kindness, and not walking alone!

Following studies in Paris, Paula Cooper (b. 1938, MA) entered the New York art world aged 21 working at the World House Galleries on the Upper East Side. In 1964 she opened the Paula Johnson Gallery, where she showed work by Walter de Maria and Bob Thompson, among others. From 1965 to 1967 Cooper served as the Director of the artist’s cooperative Park Place, whose members included Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor and David Novros––artists she continues to work with today. Paula Cooper opened the first art gallery in SoHo at 96-100 Prince Street in 1968 with a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, showing works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, as well as Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing. Paula Cooper Gallery moved to Wooster Street in 1973 and then to Chelsea in 1996, and has consistently shown art that is conceptually unique and visually challenging. In addition to the artistic program, the gallery has regularly hosted concerts, music symposia, dance performances, book receptions, poetry readings, as well as art exhibitions and special events to benefit various national and community organizations. Of particular note was a series of New Year’s Eve readings of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for twenty-five years until 2000, a ten-year series of concerts by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center that began in the early 1970s, and an annual concert by the S.E.M. Ensemble that continued until 2019. Cooper was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (1995) and the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication (2002) followed by the order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres (2014). In 2003 Cooper and her husband, the publisher Jack Macrae, opened the independent bookstore 192 Books. Cooper continues to run Paula Cooper Gallery. She and Zuckerman discuss the end of life, bad and good, how art revives, relationships, the New York artworld, the line between art and business, art as a language, visceral connections, celebrating messiness, art as true expression, not taking anything for granted, and the importance of encouragement!