Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

The artist KAWS’s output has been both wide-ranging and radically democratic, from toys to fashion to street art to museum exhibitions. In this conversation, he explains the vision behind one of his latest ventures, an experiment in augmented reality art making in collaboration with the curator Daniel Birnbaum, which both brings his work to a wider public and offers ideas for an especially timely problem: how to present art virtually. KAWS AR artworks are viewable through the Acute Art app.

A conversation about the power of editors and curators, and all that happens behind the scenes. Doon Arbus, the author of the new novel The Caretaker, and her editor Barbara Epler, the head of the famed publisher New Directions, tell the origin stories of Arbus’s debut novel about the caretaker of an eccentric museum, and the tiny literary house that became the first American publisher of Neruda, Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and many more.The Caretaker is available now.

A moving, complicated, and at times ecstatic conversation between two groundbreaking women. The artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who was raised in Nigeria and now lives in Los Angeles, and the Booker Prize-nominated writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was born in Zimbabwe and educated in England, examine their personal experiences with protest, government corruption, Trump’s America, the erosion of indigenous culture, and ongoing missions to center their African and immigrant stories in their art.Dangarembga’s new novel, This Mournable Body, was recently shortlisted for a 2020 Booker Prize. In July, Dangarembga was arrested in Zimbabwe, protesting government corruption. She’s currently out on bail, but her trial is still pending.

Two icons of the comics world—and old friends—tell their cartoonist origin stories, from the psychedelics-fueled breakthroughs of the 1960s to finding their singular styles and the generational divide among the comics cognoscenti today. R. Crumb is one of the founding fathers of the alternative comics movement, and Art Spiegelman is equally influential, having authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. 

A conversation between two dynamic artists and good friends, P. Staff and Julie Tolentino, whose work feels especially urgent now. Staff, who recently had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London, uses video and other mediums to comment on body politics from a queer and trans perspective. Tolentino also addresses issues facing marginalized groups, through performance that combines her dance background with social exchange. Always integral to their practices, these concerns are only heightened in the current moment. Here, they discuss contagion, toxicity, anxiety, the “leaky body,” and art during the pandemic. P. Staff’s work is currently on view as part of Platform: Los Angeles, an online exhibition featuring thirteen Los Angeles-based galleries hosted on David Zwirner Online. You can learn more about Julie Tolentino’s work via the gallery Commonwealth and Council. 

A conversation with the acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin that transports us to two of her favorite cities, Venice and Rome, in a celebration of Italy as the country begins to loosen the longest coronavirus-related lockdown in Europe. The episode features evocative readings from her forthcoming book,Two Cities, which captures the meditative yet constantly surprising nature of travel from a deeply personal point of view. Learn more about Two Cities here. 

Artists Diana Thater, a leading pioneer of video and installation and major figure in the L.A. art community since the early 1990s, and Rachel Rose, a defining new voice of the medium, discuss the rapid evolution of video art and its limitless possibilities—including, for both of them, its ability to reckon with personal trauma and threats to the environment.

A timely conversation with the art critic Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, on how minimalism went from radical 1960s art movement to, ironically, a hyper-commercialized lifestyle adopted by luxury brands and millennials everywhere—and where Marie Kondo and Agnes Martin overlap, if at all. During this time, we’re evolving to give you even more to listen to, with one-on-one episodes with the people—and on the subjects—we find compelling now. Please stay tuned.You can buy Chayka’s book here. 

Photographer Tyler Mitchell and critic/curator Antwaun Sargent on the radical power shift from gatekeepers to artists, the breakdown of barriers between fashion and art photography, cautionary tales of social media groupthink and overexposure, and historical artists who made the new black vanguard possible.

A special episode dedicated to the late artist Noah Davis, with some of the the people who knew him best. The curator Helen Molesworth, his brother, the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, remember Davis, whose legacy continues to grow—through his paintings, which depict everyday life with emotional and formal ambition; The Underground Museum, the space he founded in Los Angeles that combines many different worlds; and the family, literal and figurative, that coalesced around the magnetism of his personality.You can learn more about Davis here.