Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times critic Wesley Morris comes on the podcast to unpack the long history and current state of artistic rivalries, from Leonardo daVinci and Michelangelo to Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

Helen Molesworth hosts a special episode, starting with a conversation with leading ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and followed by an interview with artist Laurie Simmons and activist Maryhope Howland.Chase Strangio is the Co-Director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Laurie Simmons is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Connecticut and New York City and a member of Families United for Trans Rights.Maryhope Howland is a social psychologist, design researcher, and co-founder of Families United for Trans Rights.Families United for Trans Rights (FUTR, www.ourfutr.org) is a volunteer-run organization dedicated to securing the rights of trans Americans.

As we turn the page on a quarter century, Helen Molesworth and the artist Steve Locke look back with a highly opinionated list of their favorite art shows of the last 25 years.

Helen Molesworth speaks to Dean Kissick, author of The Painted Protest, a polemic piece on the state of contemporary art in this month’s Harper’s Magazine that has had a lot in the art world talking.Dean Kissick is a writer, contributing editor of Spike Art Magazine, and a director of Earth.

Art historian and critic Hal Foster joins Helen for a live conversation on Richard Serra (1938–2024) at David Zwirner New York. They discuss Foster’s decades-long engagement with Serra’s work and the artist’s enduring legacy.This conversation was taped in Every Which Way, a major Richard Serra installation from 2015, on view at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery in New York from November 8–December 14, 2024.

We revisit an episode from Season 5, a conversation between artist Luc Tuymans and the eminent Yale Historian Timothy Snyder. The two discuss history, truth, and lies, and art’s singular ability to live between them all. Timothy Snyder is the author of the books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom, among others, and Luc Tuymans is an artist who has been interrogating the power of images for decades. Tuymans is also the subject of a major solo retrospective, called The Past, on view at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing through February 16, 2025.

Writer, curator, and editor Jarrett Earnest joins Helen to discuss his most recent edited volume of writings by the iconoclastic, enduring art critic Dave Hickey, titled Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982-2002. Out now from David Zwirner Books, wherever books are sold.

New Yorker critic Hilton Als joins Helen to discuss his exhibition, Alice Neel in the Queer World, on view at our Los Angeles Gallery through November 2nd, 2024.Alice Neel in the Queer World is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited and with a text by Als, as well as newly commissioned scholarship by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Academy award-nominated Luca Guadagnino and Belgian painter Michaël Borremans discuss the relationship between painting and film, touching on light specificity, the uncanny, and art as a reflection of self. They explore the impact of light on tone, the importance of non-verbal communication in art, and the intersection of creativity and emotion in their works.

Grace Wales Bonner, an acclaimed fashion designer and curator known for her explorations of clothing and art, joins Horace Ballard, curator of American Art at Harvard, for a thought-provoking dialogue. They discuss the ethical dimensions of design and the profound role of intentionality in artistic creation. The conversation dives into how personal experiences and cultural heritage shape both art and fashion, and they examine the evocative interplay of sound and visual mediums. Additionally, photography's relationship with identity and transformation is revealed as a key theme.