Listen up 2021!
Our third year of asking friends and acquaintances to share their favourite podcasts with us continues. Each round of suggestions adding to an ever-lengthening list of must-listens. We have Dr. Neil Wenman of international contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth with us on this occasion to let us in on their current listening.
Dr. Wenman is both a Partner at Savile Row’s Hauser & Wirth gallery and Director of Brand, deeply involved with many of the artists showing their work. He is also working on numerous global projects at any given time. Currently, he is on the development committee of South London Gallery, the board of Roberts Institute of Art, London and the board of Performa in New York. His doctorate is in architectural theory from the Bartlett School, UCL and he was previously a director at both White Cube and Lisson Gallery in London.
And here are Dr. Wenman’s podcast choices:
The Art Newspaper’s ‘A brush with…’ podcast
Hosted by Ben Luke, a true art insider having worked as an art critic for the Evening Standard and editor at The Art Newspaper, this podcast draws out incredible insights surrounding the work of artists we know and love the most. Ben taps into the humanity of the creative process by asking artists questions about their influences in music, literature and cultural experiences, which gives way to interesting stories that we might not have yet heard from artists. He has the most incredible ability to make the artist feel relaxed. His episode with Roni Horn looks at her childhood affinity with Marcel Duchamp, her love of jazz and soul music and her fascination with Iceland.
Lou Mensah’s Shade podcast tackles pressing issues such as decolonising the curriculum and cultural appropriation, via conversations with creatives across disciplines, who have challenged existing narratives on representation and identity within their work. Her guests vary from artists and art historians to playwrights and policymakers, who all unpick race and identity in a compelling way.
The fourth season focused on key images that have arisen throughout the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and the most recent season includes special episodes in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, the first of which is a fascinating conversation with Silas Munro on the life and work of Sir Frank Bowling.
Although not officially a podcast, Performa NYC is an incredible organisation that has moved its promotion of performance art onto the web. Set up by Rosalee Goldberg in 2004 it is a not-for-profit organisation that plays a critical role in highlighting the importance of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions for the twenty-first century.
‘Bow Down: Women in Art’ with Jennifer Higgie
Jennifer Higgie is the editor-at-large of Frieze Magazine where she has been an editor for over 20 years. This magical podcast looks at the broad sweep of history in connection with significant women artists from the past. Jennifer’s unprecedented depth of knowledge, paired with her incredible voice for radio, make this podcast a fascinating look through the mirror of female creativity, helping to really bring these women’s stories to life.
In a world where there is so much emphasis on the discovery of the new, it is so interesting to take a step back and look at artists we may have forgotten who made an undeniable impact. Within the 20-minute episodes, Jennifer invites a guest of note to talk about one of these artists through their creative lens, simultaneously gaining perspective on these two people.
The episode with fashion designer and curator Duro Olowu on artist Emma Amos taught me about radical African American art collective, Spiral, founded in 1963. The episode on Claude Cahun, the radical mid-20th-century surrealist photographer and resistance worker, shows us how ahead of her time she was in the breaking down of boundaries between genres.