Advertise on podcast: The Selection Committee Radio Show

The charming painter Danny Balgley joins us for an in-depth conversation about process, technique, materials, memory, and New York! His exhibition “Pentimento” is currently on view at the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia through October 2, 2026. Directly translated, ‘pentimento’ means “to change one’s mind” or “to repent.” In painting it refers to a mark, shape, or figure that has been painted over but which, over time, becomes visible again. This process of painting, covering, and revealing has become central to Balgley’s work—abstractions which both unearth and fold in on themselves. Balgley unpacks his complicated process at length, describing the way he prepares his canvases and then slowly applies layer after gestural layer of color to them; wiping some away, building up texture, and then delicately going back into the resulting forms to finesse the composition. We discuss the tools he uses and his interest in special effects in painting—how different techniques and color relationships can evoke space or surfaces, and how abrupt juxtapositions can break them apart. Maybe it’s because he’s a fourth generation New Yorker on both sides of his family that Balgley is so connected to the way that changes reveal themselves over time, to reclamation and renovation, with history that shows through the current moment. We talk about his own history, what it means to be a queer artist making non-representational work, and what his paintings looked like before he ventured into abstraction. Listen in to a rich discussion about imperfection, slipperiness, and the transparency of time with a perfectly balanced musical accompaniment!

On this episode of the Selection Committee Radio Show I am joined by the fabulous artist Reuben Paterson (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi, Scottish). Born and raised in New Zealand, he now lives and works in New York City, to the great delight of those who know him here. For our enjoyment, Paterson brings us an all-Kiwi playlist that begins with the call of the kiwi bird itself. We discuss his Māori heritage in detail—from the story of how people originally arrived in New Zealand to development of his own family tree to the explosion of Māori history and culture back into the mainstream. Paterson grew up on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand, a place of sparkling black sand and shining waters—a lucky boy in a glittering landscape. He traces his lifelong fascination with crystals, sequins, and most especially glitter back to those early days. He is best known for his spectacular use of colored glitter in paintings, sculptures, and videos. Paterson’s work explores the way that light interacts with scintillating surfaces and connects with landscape, memory, and the stars. With pieces ranging from monumental public sculpture and land art to intimate paintings, Paterson navigates the spaces between the sacred and the profane. Through pattern, personal history, and fantasy, Paterson creates a world of shimmering intensity. Our conversation is a crash course in a unique, queer, Māori point of view—and not to be missed!

Born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, Kamrooz Aram emigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. As a young person, he became an enthusiastic drummer, and music has continued to be an important part of his life. It is no surprise, then, that he brings an exceptional mix to the Selection Committee. With music spanning Iranian, Kurdish, Algerian-French, and iconic American pieces, Aram shares the history and context of the songs along with eloquent exegeses on their connection to his work. In his practice, Aram is invested in narratives of form that have been overlooked, dismissed, or intentionally written out of art history. Working against modernist ideas about abstraction as “pure form,” Aram engages in the historical and political content of painting as well as of the decorative arts. His sculptural pieces—like “Requiem for Perpetual Defeat”, currently on view in the Whitney Biennial—employ modes of museological display to incorporate artifacts of varying quality without offering any didactic information. Flickering between nostalgia, reverence, and suspicion, the works invite viewers to question how they assign value and what it means for objects to be institutionally recontextualized. We talk about the first screen Aram ever made—for his 2022 exhibition “Privacy” at the Arts Club of Chicago—and how screens are objects that sit squarely in between painting and the decorative arts. They are also dividers between public and private spaces. Inspired by the Club itself, both a member’s-only society and a public art space, Aram’s screen alludes to curious points of contact between the gendered sections of the traditional Iranian home and those in the domestic spaces of modernist architects like “Ornament and Crime” author Adolf Loos. These conflicting accords infuse Aram’s work with an edgy vitality. Kamrooz Aram’s work vibrates with an elegant tension between shape, color, abstraction, allusion, and various art histories. Our discussion and the music that he brings are a genuine delight!

This week on the Selection Committee Radio Show I welcome the fascinating artist and educator David L. Johnson whose work is currently on view in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Johnson grew up in Manhattan, and New York City’s public and private spaces, methods of dominance and control, and irrepressible sociality are continual sources of inspiration for his challenging and legally ambiguous work. Johnson was a student at the Cooper Union when Occupy Wall Street camped out in Zuccotti Park. Fascinated by the complex legal status of the park as a privately owned public space (or POPS), Johnson began investigating how private real estate companies negotiate the privileges of operating these spaces with the challenges of managing the public—sometimes with the assistance of the state. “Rule,” 2024-ongoing, is a series of purloined signs outlining codes of conduct from various POPS around the city. Each sign is unique in form and content, interdicting behavior ranging from the criminal, to the merely annoying, to the protected (distribution of literature). By removing the signs, which must be visible in order to be enforceable, Johnson creates a space for the return to greater freedom. Johnson brings a great selection of music for the show, including two tracks that are excerpts from a collection of cassette tapes his late father made by recording radio broadcasts. For his series of 2025 video sculptures called “Cleveland’s Mix(es),” Johnson replayed a tape in a POPS on one of his father’s boom boxes. The resulting object is a portrait of a stereo returning the radio and a sense of sociality to the public sphere. We talk about the ramifications of working in between public and private spaces and the relationship his work has to performance and to artists like Dennis Oppenheim and David Hammons. We also discuss early 2000s hip hop, landlords, and audible deterrents designed to be heard only by people under 25. It’s a captivating show!

This week we welcome the amazing Rebecca Cleman, a writer and the director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York City. Born in Flagstaff, Arizona the same year that VCRs came on the consumer market, Cleman has an abiding interest in the mythologies of the American West and the public use of video recording. Cleman discusses the legacy of EAI, a nonprofit founded in 1971 by the visionary gallerist Howard Wise to encourage the use of video technology by artists. We talk about the changing role of EAI in a world where video has become ubiquitous and how this historically important institution is navigating the continual evolution of technology, from video cassettes to streaming, from cable access TV to YouTube and beyond. Cleman’s audio selections range from Ennio Morricone and the Clash to George Carlin and Lily Tomlin. Comedy and the Spaghetti Western are perfect foils for her interest in artists who can take things apart and expose narratives and histories that are hidden, people like Jaime Davidovich, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Robert Buck, Cory Arcangel, and Nancy Holt. We also talk about “Yo! MTV Raps”, horror movies, Marshall McLuhan, and her childhood growing up in a very musical family in the desert wanting nothing more than to play ice hockey. A great show!

For this episode of the Selection Committee Radio Show, former guest B. Wurtz joins me in conversation with Matlok Griffiths, an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Both artist-musicians, the two first became acquainted when Griffiths approached Wurtz to do a book project with his imprint Tutto. This began an ongoing conversation about art and music between the two that we get to join. Griffiths’ wonderful exhibition “And My Unnamed Corners” recently closed at Gordon Robichaux in New York City. The show featured a selection of modestly scaled paintings on sculptural canvases as well as a series of gouache paintings on crossword puzzles. We discuss the New York connection to this work—in 2016 Griffiths spent four months in the city doing a mentorship with painter Stanley Whitney. He began picking up free newspapers and using the crossword puzzles as a found grid to make gouache paintings. Through time and inspiration these crossword paintings found new form in the sculptural canvases. The conversation also touches on his ceramic practice which began when a neighbor gave his family a bag of clay during Melbourne’s intense Covid lockdown. Inspired by a figure his daughter made of a girl sitting bolt upright in bed, Griffiths created an entire body of work that is a meditation on that strange time. Throughout the program, Griffiths shares a semi-autobiographical set of songs including selections from his own band, Big Supermarket, formed with his wife Katrina and his friend Travis. This three-way conversation is a window into a practice that is remarkably open to opportunities, collaborations, and the unexpected. It was a pleasure to spend the afternoon with Griffiths and Wurtz!

The great artist Phyllis Baldino graduated from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford as a dedicated sculptor. But a few years later, a chance encounter with a generous subletter with a trunk full of video cameras changed the course of her life. She began making video pieces on her Sony Handycam in the early 90s in what would become the remarkable "Gray Area Series." Inspired by books about fuzzy logic, each video records a sequence of actions by Baldino on common household objects that are—sometimes aggressively—deconstructed and repurposed. In "Wine Rack/Not Wine Rack," for example, a wooden thrift store wine rack is sawed up to accommodate a 4L jug of blush wine. In "April 1994: The Gray Band," Baldino gathered together four musician friends, Dez Cadena, Lynn Johnston, Tom Watson, and Mike Watt, to reconstruct instruments that she disassembled and play a single song: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive.” Baldino's musical selection for the show includes great songs from each of these artists as well as music that has influenced her work or been included in her work. Baldino's abiding interest in the intersection of science and the everyday has led to fascinating works about nanotechnology ("Nano-cadabra," 1998), quantum mechanics ("Baldino-Neutrino," 2003), and parallel universe theory ("19 Universes/my brother," 2004). She has been exploring issues of climate change in works like "u_n_d_e_r_w_a_t_e_r," 2019 and "Fake Nature Box," 2021. It was through research on the Little Ice Age (1300 - 1850) that Baldino arrived at the process that is powering her current body of work. Learning about horrific stories of women accused of witchcraft and weather magic instilled in her the desire to speak firsthand with witnesses to the events. So she turned to an experienced friend and a Ouija board to find out what really happened: "whether weather what" was the result. Continuing this process led to "Hit thegroundrunning," 2025, about immigrants to the US who came through Ellis Island in New York as children. What is it like communicating with the dead? Listen in to find out! We discuss all this work as well as some of the vicissitudes of making video art. It’s a fascinating conversation with a truly unique artist. Information about the work can be found on www.phyllisbaldino.com.

I first met the charming art historian Alexander Dumbadze when he was my TA in a Richard Schiff class at the University of Texas at Austin. In the years since, Dumbadze has produced a focused body of work, including his two books “Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere” and the just-published “Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky.” Combining biography, traditional art history, and theory, these books are eminently readable portraits of two remarkable people. Both artists died prematurely—Ader was lost at sea during a transatlantic solo voyage at 33 and Goldstein by his own hand at 57— and both are big, mythic figures in the art world. What happens when the idea of the artist dominates the work that they make, when the myth precedes them and hovers around their art? Both artists were searching for a fundamental truth—Ader by making art that was unmediated and could communicate without representational systems and Goldstein through deep exploration of the possibilities of the representational image. Dumbadze walks us through Jack Goldstein’s life and times, from his early student days at Chouinard and Cal Arts, to his social circles and his time in New York City, and ultimately to the end of his life in California. We discuss Goldstein’s major bodies of work and his tendentious relationship to artistic mediums. Most of all we talk about Goldstein’s efforts to make an ideal image, something pure that is also a fundamental experience: an unsustainable moment of intensity. Dumbadze considers the books on Ader and Goldstein to be part of a trilogy of works, and he is currently working on the third and final book in the series: a novel set in the 1970s about a conceptual artist who only makes works in his head. I am very much looking forward to seeing how this book will continue the questions, problems, and possibilities that Dumbadze is dealing with in art history!

Artist Sam Anderson returns with a new selection of music that continues our journey into the world of synthesizers that started with her first appearance in 2021. Anderson breaks down every track, giving us an in-depth history of the instruments, contexts, and the artists who made them. She focuses especially on legendary pioneers of synth/electronic music like Suzanne Ciani, Shiho Yabuki, and Raymond Scott. Anderson’s most recent project started when she discovered a draft of a one-act play written in the 1970s by her mother, the late actress Conchata Ferrell. Using notes and journals that she inherited as well as other resources from the time, Anderson finished the play, "The Wolf Is an Endangered Species". It's about five women in a theater company working to put on a play. Themes of relationships, competition, and the difficulties for women of working in a male-dominated field are still very relevant today. In December, she produced, directed, and starred in a production of the show at 15 Orient gallery in New York City, and in the spring she plans to produce it in Los Angeles. We discuss Anderson’s mysterious and evocative sculptural work, including her pieces "E Number 1-11" and "TV" from her 2017 show “The Park” at Sculpture Center in New York City. "TV" comprised a weathervane positioned outside the museum that determined the soundtrack for the gallery below; one of eight pieces composed by Anderson and her partner would play depending on which way the wind blew. It is emblematic of Anderson's concerns with space, sound, story, and fate. In this music-forward episode, we talk about the psychoactive properties of sound and how it can be used for better or for worse. In Anderson’s playlist, it is used for good!

The wonderful Pam Lins joins us to share some favorite studio songs and talk about “Laterness,” her two-person show with Roger White at Uffner and Liu gallery in New York City through January 10, 2026. The title of the exhibition came from a conversation the artists had in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory: is it too late for action? How can one make work that is both an inflection and reflection of the political moment? What does it mean to be a maker situated in history? The exhibition features collage works by White and sculptural floor works by Lins comprising quasi-modernist forms made from USPS flat-rate shipping boxes and ceramic birds inspired by John James Audubon’s (imaginary) “Mystery Birds.” A collaborative project by Lins and White inspired by Lins’ research into visionary architect and artist Frederick Kiesler forms the second part of the show. We dive deep into the role that investigations into history and archives play in her work, particularly the idea that bringing concepts and forms from the past into the present can illuminate the political and aesthetic economies of both times. Looking at past exhibitions and bodies of work as well as past lives—a jeweler!—Lins charts her idiosyncratic relationship to craft, form, subject matter, and the complicated histories of sculpture and painting. With characteristic midwestern humility and wit, Lins talks about other collaborations, cultivating mushrooms, the vagaries of scale, the Vkhutemas school in 1920s Moscow, and whether or not sculpture is based on lying. Truly an enjoyable conversation with a singular artist!

The charming artist Meredith James joins the Selection Committee Radio Show to discuss her current show “The Exit” at Marinaro Gallery in New York through December 13, 2025. In 2019, James became intrigued by a building near her home in TriBeCa. After some finagling she managed to get inside and take some pictures of an abandoned office space—designed for efficiency with low cubicles and drop ceilings—which eventually led to the work in “The Exit.” Depicted in each of the four photographs in the exhibition is a mirror, and reflected in each of the mirrors is another mirror. James then translated the resulting mesh of nested spaces into four exquisitely produced dioramas which represent the reflected images in a fractured, uncanny three dimensions. Each one is a kind of ontological puzzle box, with the viewer trying to piece together the logic of the space and missing, like a vampire, her own reflection. James’ focus on the relationship between image, space, and experience is evident in her earlier work as well. Day Shift, 2009, features a security guard who watches a closed-circuit monitor of what looks like the same office she is sitting in. She leaves the office and walks through whatever space the work is shown in (James reshoots this part of the video every time the work is shown in a new place) and goes out to her truck—where she climbs through the back window into a miniaturized version of the office space. The video is then displayed on the closed-circuit monitor in the miniaturized office space installed in the gallery, retranslating the logic of cinema and dreams back into the real world. Her work often incorporates these kinds of practical effects as well as optical illusions that push questions of scale and perspective, and she insistently uses only analog effects. We discuss many more of James’ pieces, including her large-scale public sculptures, and what it means for people to interact with her work, particularly people outside the art world. James is a sculptor at heart, and we talk about her belief from childhood that objects can carry with them not only the history of their use and the lives they have touched, but also past time itself. In that sense her work doesn’t just create visual and conceptual loops, but time loops as well. Inspired by sources as varied as Maya Deren, Chantal Ackerman, walks around the city, and the cartoon Adventure Time, James’ work always contains a sincere meditation on the time and space of living. Along with a playlist of very personal songs, Meredith brings an illuminating conversation about her kaleidoscopic point of view.

Appropriately enough for her gritty, challenging, yet lyrical work, the great photographer Eileen Quinlan joins me with a playlist about heartbreak. In this wide-ranging conversation, Quinlan discusses the arc of her career, from her breakout body of work in grad school to her most recent experiments. Consistent throughout her explorations in photography is a focus on process, mortality, and the haptic. Quinlan goes into the long-established relationship between photography and mortality and how moments of flux and change are central to her project. For her, this focus on transformation includes both the subject(s) of the photographs as well as the photographic medium itself. Working in a “wrong and slightly backwards way,” Quinlan has always used experimentation as a key modality in her process; her failures become a kind of language, the focus of the work, the evidence of her struggle or hand. We discuss how she came to work in this way—her background in advertising and commercial photography and her early fascination with spirit photography—and how the process has informed her development as an artist. With a great sense of humor Eileen Quinlan tackles big questions of photography and life—listen in!

Patrick Carlin Mohundro is an artist, educator, and rogue gallerist who lives and works in New York City. He joins me to discuss his two-person exhibition (with Nathaniel de Large), “Magnolium,” on view at International Waters from September 27 through December 14, 2025. In honor of the exhibition, which features 14 sculptures composed of a stained-glass flower radiating from the business end of a hammer, Patrick brings us a botanical playlist. We talk about Mohundro’s journey into the world of stained glass and how he came to find the form of the flower in his work. (It started with an Oscar Mayer hot dog…!) He speaks movingly about his collaboration with Nathaniel de Large and how important working with other people has been in his life and work. A big part of that collective action has been his long-running Project Art Distribution (P.A.D.). Started when he was in grad school, P.A.D. is an intermittent exhibition program that happens mostly in SoHo on a moving blanket/furniture pad with artwork priced mostly at $75 or less. Every iteration of P.A.D. is different, and includes a press release and checklist of works. Hundreds of artists have participated in the project over the years: a group of artists hanging out for the better part of a day interacting with the public on the street. P.A.D. has now grown to include participation in art fairs and more traditional gallery exhibitions, but the project continues in its original form. Mohundro’s entire artistic project involves risk and work, force and fragility, conversation and community. His warmth, humility, and earnest sense of humor come through clearly in this delightful episode!

Soundtracks both real and imagined were the inspiration for the playlist of the great artists, educators, curators, and longtime couple Sun You and Ethan Greenbaum. Ethan engages with the iconography of public urban spaces, from signage to advertisements to the plywood barriers around building sites. His complex process incorporates printing, painting, and sculpting to create ambiguous yet compelling objects. Sun’s work brings together baked polymer clay, cut and manipulated canvas, and paint to create intricate abstractions. Concentrating on play, intuition, and self-imposed constraints, Sun works a kind of alchemy of improvisation on humble materials. The focus of our conversation was their two-person show “Fun,” full of new works on view at Geary in Millerton, NY from October 11 to December 7, 2025. The juxtaposition of the two artists’ work and practices finds form in a photo mural on either side of the central wall dividing the exhibition space. This mural is composed of an index of images of Ethan’s and Sun’s work in progress and life together. Like the mural, our discussion roams topics from process and materials to ideas and politics to the challenges and benefits of being a creative couple!

When she was a child, Katarina Burin escaped communist Czechoslovakia with her family on the pretense of going on vacation. This transformational moment was foundational in a practice that engages the intersections of architecture, sculpture, drawing, research, and memory. Her process involves delving deep into discrete bodies of work, translating ideas into elegant, slightly uncanny, forms. One of her earlier endeavors was a creative research project about the underrepresented Czech architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár—a woman who, despite limited opportunities, managed to create her own body of work in community with other architects and designers in the interwar period. Burin’s most recent works, collectively called “For the Benefit of Tourism,” are a meditation on tourist propaganda made for and consumed by residents of Eastern Bloc countries. Like all of her work, these pieces explore the connections between history, communication, politics, fact, fiction, and form. We discuss all of this as well as anti-monuments, communism, public and private space, and all the different places Burin has lived. Fittingly, her playlist is an upbeat, eclectic, thoroughly international selection of songs that is perfect for working in the studio! Burin’s work truly rewards extended looking and thinking—find it at www.katarinaburin.studio