Art Works Podcast

National Endowment for the Arts
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Mar 28, 2023 • 31min

Regina Carter: Portrait of the Jazz Artist as a Young Woman

In the first part of this two-part podcast with Regina Carter, she discusses her upbringing and musical education in Detroit. Trained in European classical music, she was exposed to wide variety of music and while in high school, she discovered jazz violin and it was life-changing. She talks about the appeal of jazz, her two years in the New England Conservatory of Music, her return to Michigan and transition to jazz violin, her mentors Marcus Belgrave and Marvin Holliday, her time with the all-woman quintet “Straight Ahead,” her move to New York where she played with a broad array of artists from Chucho Valdés to Max Roach to Dolly Parton, the beginning of her solo career and being tapped by Wynton Marsalis to tour with his Pulitzer-Prize winning oratorio Blood on the Fields.  (Next week, we continue our conversation with Regina Carter—we explore her solo career, her collaboration with NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron, her receiving the MacArthur Award, her time as a hospice worker and much more!) Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts
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Mar 21, 2023 • 33min

Meet the New Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH)

In this podcast,  we meet Tsione Wolde-Michael, the new executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH.) Wolde-Michael talks about her background growing up in the twin cities as a 1st generation child born to Ethiopian immigrants, her pull towards history and her desire to work in public history where she was able to do transformative work that would reach a broad and diverse audience. We discuss her time as part of the inaugural staff at the National Museum of African American Art and Culture, her work on the exhibit “Slavery and Freedom” and the museum’s Slave Wrecks Project, her founding of the Center of Restorative History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and some of the center’s programs. Wolde-Michael gives us a little background about the history of PCAH and President Biden’s recent executive order which not only reinstituted PCAH but expanded its mission.  She also discusses moving from her role as public historian to directing PCAH and the ways in which her previous experience prepared her for this new appointment. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Mar 14, 2023 • 36min

Bushra Rehman's novel celebrates the Pakistani American community in 1980s Corona, Queens

Author Bushra Rehman discusses her novel, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion which is loosely based on her own girlhood growing up in a tightly-knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens and slowly opening up to her own queer identity. Bushra talks about her own upbringing and her desire to celebrate that community and show its many facets, her discovery of the larger world and the found family that she created especially through writing groups such as the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, Cave Canem, and Kundiman. We talk about her beginning her writing journey as a poet, her time as spoken work poet by night and poetry teacher by day, her desire to write fiction and the challenges that presented, and her editing, with Daisy Hernández, the ground-breaking anthology Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism  (which they have recently updated).
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Mar 7, 2023 • 36min

Presenting Art for the City of Pittsburgh

We’re kicking off Women’s History Month by looking at some of the artistic and cultural programming President/CEO and Artistic Director Janis Burley Wilson has brought to the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and the city of Pittsburgh over the years.  In this podcast, Janis Burley Wilson discusses the philosophy (engaging artists across disciplines to tell stories of African-American experiences and the African diaspora) that informs the programming of the  August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh’s cultural district. We talk about the center’s history  and the many programs and events it produces which include theater, music, dance, visual art, and educational programs as well as the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, the Highmark Blues and Heritage Festival, and the Black Bottom Film Festival.  Janis also talks about the center’s deep commitment to the Pittsburgh community (nearly half of all programming is free and open to the public), her own deep roots in the city, her previous work with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and experience with the arts as a catalyst for economic development, all the juggling that’s necessary in her current role, the enduring legacy of August Wilson, and  her hopes for the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in the future. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Feb 28, 2023 • 41min

Meet 2023 NEA Jazz Master--Drummer Louis Hayes!

In this podcast, Louis Hayes talks about his long and illustrious career as one of the great hard bop drummers. We talk about his growing up in Detroit—home to many great musicians—in a household filled with music. Hayes started drumming when he was young— influenced by the two drummers in his family: his father and his cousin Clarence Stamps, who was his first teacher.  As a youngster, Hayes heard Charlie Parker and it rocked his world.  By 15, Hayes was leading teenage bands, and, at 18, he was playing in a club with Yusef Lateef. He’s talks about his life-changing move to NYC to play with Horace Silver and all he learned there, the NYC jazz scene in the 50’s, recording with John Coltrane, and the happy experience of playing with Cannonball Adderley for six years before joining the Oscar Peterson Trio. He also discusses his own reluctance to become a bandleader as well as his tribute albums to both Silver and Adderley. But what shines through his deep love for the music and his fellow musicians. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Feb 14, 2023 • 29min

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson reflects on her first year as Chair of National Endowment for the Arts

Chair Maria Rosario Jackson looks back at her first year leading the Arts Endowment and shares her ideas, plans, and initiatives for the year ahead. She discusses the philosophy that guides her vision for the NEA: "artful lives" and "arts In all" and reflects upon her travel throughout the country meeting with artists and arts administrators as well as local and civic leaders.  The chair also notes the NEA's collaborations with other federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as a partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chair Jackson also discusses the NEA's Equity Action Plan that builds on the agency’s work with community engagement, a recently announced pilot program that helps increase arts opportunities to underserved communities, and the agency's expanding role as a national resource on many fronts for the arts sector.  Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Feb 7, 2023 • 40min

Choreographer Kyle Abraham Creates Dance for the 21st Century

Kyle Abraham is an acclaimed choreographer and company director who is the recipient of many awards including a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.  In this podcast, he talks about growing up in Pittsburgh in a home that encouraged music and art, his life-changing experience when he first saw professional dance at the age of 15, his brief career as a professional dancer and early entry into choreography. We discuss his dance company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham which creates work that is draws from Black history and culture as well as Kyle's personal experiences as a gay Black man.  We discuss his use of multi-media in his work and some of his notable pieces like "An Untitled Love", "Pavement" and "Another Night" --which he created for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—a frequent collaborator. He also talks about how he makes dances for his own company and for classical ballet companies like New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet. We discuss his "strategy" during the pandemic—all dancers were kept on the payroll full-time, but there were no zoom performances or rehearsals: instead he and the dancers zoomed  weekly to talk about films, TV shows, or books they had watched or read together; and, finally, he shares how he finds his own joy through choreography and teaching.  Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Jan 31, 2023 • 35min

Science and Art: Dr. Alan Lightman has thoughts!

Author and MIT physicist Dr Alan Lightman is the co-writer and host of the new PBS series “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.”   In this podcast, Dr. Lightman discusses the experience that led to him to write the book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, why he agreed to develop the book into a series, his explorations with scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders around the question: how do we find meaning in an age of science. He also discusses his own dual trajectory—a student who won both science awards and poetry prizes, a man who has had two successful careers as a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist, (his best-selling novel Einstein’s Dreams puts the readers inside Albert Einstein’s mind imagining possible worlds as he discovers the theory of relativity),  the similarities between scientific and artistic creativity, the aesthetics that can drive scientific inquiry, the role of art as a meaning-maker, and the artistry and collaboration involved in making the series Searching.
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Jan 24, 2023 • 29min

Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi talks about the beauty and power of African American quilts

In this 2015 podcast, quilter, curator, and National Heritage Fellow  Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi takes us through her own history with quilts and quilting. She discusses her first career as an aerospace engineer and then her discovery of quilts, especially African-American narrative quilts. She talks about her own process for quilt-making, her work as a curator-- including the exhibit  of narrative quilts "And Still We Rise" which traces 400 years of African American history, her founding in 1985 the Women of Color Quilters Network, her determination to carve out a place for African American quilts in American cultural history, and her ground-breaking book. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.
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Jan 17, 2023 • 43min

Novelist Kevin Wilson Gives a Voice to the Weird

Kevin Wilson, the author of the NEA Big Read title Nothing to See Here, explains his long-time obsession with spontaneous human combustion—a condition that figures prominently in the novel. In a nutshell, 28-year-old Lillian is tasked with minding the stepchildren of a wealthy old school friend whose politician husband has two kids who literally burst into flames when they get angry or agitated. One reviewer called the novel a brilliant parable about childhood and child care.   But, in our lengthy discussion about this wise and funny book, Wilson points out that at its core, the novel asks "how do we take care of people" and "how do we live with conditions that others might see as disabilities."  Wilson discusses his own issues with life-long anxiety that was diagnosed as Tourette's Syndrome when he was an adult and the ways that writing has helped him to come terms with it. He talks about parenthood, the joy he takes in being very active in his sons' lives and how his initial anxiety around parenting informs Nothing to See Here.  And we discuss the extraordinary joy he has always gotten from reading, the importance of the library had for him as he was growing up in a small rural town, and the connection and expansiveness created by bringing a community together around a single book. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov.

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