Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

The international avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama has passed away at 97, but her work and extraordinary legacy will remain for posterity. As our own small remembrance, we revisit a 2025 episode exploring her unmatched influence, in which art historian Jennifer DeVere Brody, art critic Johanna Fateman, and curator Catherine Taft unpack the many versions of Yayoi Kusama—and her singular importance in 20th and 21st century art. A global travelling retrospective devoted to over seven decades of Kusama’s work will open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on September 11.  It was previously on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater & Performance studies, and, by courtesy, African & African American Studies at Stanford University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts Research supported her forthcoming book, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (Duke UPress, 2026).  Johanna Fateman is a writer, co-chief art critic at Cultured Mag, and a member of the band Le Tigre.  Catherine Taft is a writer and curator and deputy director of The Brick, a non-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles.

Curator Adrienne Edwards joins guest host Ebony L. Haynes to share their tips, tricks, and must-see shows from the 2026 Venice Biennale, the sixty-first iteration of the world’s largest and longest-running art biennale.  This year’s Venice Biennale opened to great acclaim in May, under especially poignant circumstances: its acclaimed curator, the Cape Town–based Koyo Kouoh, had passed away in 2025, just a few months into the planning. The two discuss the impact of her passing as they call out a number of their favorite presentations to help listeners sift through the many on view. A veteran of many Biennales and former juror, Edwards also explains how to navigate the city and make the most of your visit.  The Biennale Arte 2026 is now on view through November 22, 2026. Learn more here: https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026 Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and associate director of curatorial programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Ebony L. Haynes is a New York–based curator and is the global head of curatorial projects at David Zwirner. She is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw, opening at David Zwirner Los Angeles on September 19. Image: Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, Liquid Tongues, 2026 (video still) Presentations & Artists Mentioned: 8:45: Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys  10:04: Artist Issa Samb included in In Minor Keys  14:30:  Alfredo Jaar, The End of the World (2023–2024) 14:40: Rose Salane, Panorama 94   15:14: Denniston Hill 15:33: fierce pussy, organized by Jo-ey Tang: arms ache avid aeon: fierce pussy amplified, Chapter Nine20:30  Sumakshi Singh in India’s first pavilion ever 21:16 Ei Arakawa-Nash for the Japanese National Pavilion  23:33: The Austrian Pavilion 28:33 Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa at Fondazione Prada, curated by Nancy Spector 31:57: Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski at the Polish National Pavilion 36:39: Lorna Simpson at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection  37:38: Michael Armitage at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection 

Dialogues is pleased to present an episode podcast from our colleagues at The New York Review. Private Life is hosted by Jarrett Earnest and this episode features an interview with writer Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, criticism, and narrative empathy.  Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020).  Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.

In this bonus live episode, Lucas Zwirner returns to the mic for an interview with Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, to celebrate Weber’s new biography, titled Anni Albers: A Life. Over the course of the exchange, Weber opens up about the writing process behind this major new biography and shares some rare anecdotes from a lifetime spent working closely with the Alberses. Anni Albers: A Life is out now from Yale University Press. Learn more about the book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269376/anni-albers/

This special episode with Helen Molesworth and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was taped in front of a live audience at David Zwirner New York for a 2023 exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s final paintings. A new exhibition of Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften, is now on view at our 20th Street gallery in New York. The illuminating conversation draws on Buchloh’s decades of scholarly work on Richter, including a discussion of the art historian’s landmark 2022 study Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History.  Learn more about the exhibition Landschaften: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2026/gerhard-richter-landschaftenLearn more about Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543538/gerhard-richter/

An interview with Michael Armitage about his unique use of material and color, and his singular approach to narrative on the occasion of his major retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Titled The Promise of Change, the show is presented concurrently with the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and on view through January 10, 2027. Armitage is also the founder of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a non-profit visual art space dedicated to the growth and preservation of contemporary art in East Africa and a participant in In Minor Keys at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, on view through November 22, 2026. Learn more at the Palazzo Grassi website: https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/en/michael-armitage-promise-change Image: Michael Armitage, Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024 (detail) © Michael Armitage

Rachel Harrison, a Brooklyn-based sculptor known for playful installations, and Alex Kitnick, an art historian who teaches at Bard, discuss Marcel Duchamp and his legacy. They explore Duchamp as rumor and wider practice. They consider image versus object, ready-made circulation, secrecy in making, and the role of reproduction and museum framing.

Art historian Lisa Saltzman discusses Walter Benjamin’s final days in Paris before his suicide in 1940 and the network of intellectuals who saved his most prized possessions from World War II, including the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.  The exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through July 26, 2026. It traces the Swiss-German artist’s departure from the Bauhaus and his experience throughout the political upheaval of the 1930s prior to his death in 1940, providing a new basis for understanding his sociopolitical perspective and commitment to artistic freedom.  Lisa Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her current book project, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores how one prescient passage from Walter Benjamin’s posthumously published writings came to transform his most cherished possession—an idiosyncratic little Paul Klee drawing of an angel—into the "angel of history," a postwar icon of impotent witness to historical catastrophe.

Helen speaks to Rachel Hunter Himes, author of the essay “Black Block” in Triple Canopy, about the long history of black artists underserved by white critics, museums’ moral and political responsibility to the public, and more. Rachel Hunter Himes is an art writer, museum educator, and PhD candidate at Columbia University. Read “Black Block” here: https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/black-block?ui.header=true

Award-winning filmaker Todd Haynes and his longtime collaborator, film producer Christine Vachon, discuss their thirty-year creative partnership, from the emergence of the new queer cinema to the culture wars of the nineties.  In 1987, Haynes directed the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. His first feature film, Poison, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. After Safe, which featured Julianne Moore in a breakthrough role, he conjured David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine, then paid homage to German director Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven. Haynes had six actors play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. He directed the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce, then returned to feature films with Carol, Wonderstruck, Dark Waters, and the documentary The Velvet Underground, followed by the feature film May December.  Christine Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award winner who co-founded the powerhouse Killer Films with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over three decades, the company has produced more than one hundred films, including some of the most celebrated and important American independent features. Recent releases include Todd Haynes’s May December (Netflix), starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and Celine Song’s Past Lives (A24), which marks her first Oscar nomination in the Best Picture category.