Advertise on podcast: The Selection Committee Radio Show

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

Much like his work, artist Ted Mineo’s mixtape ranges from serious to weird, funny to terrifying, funky to sentimental. Mineo’s paintings are painfully realistic depictions of fantastic objects and spaces. His latest work, shown most recently at Harkawik in New York, combines elements of hospital operating theaters, dentists’ chairs, space ship interiors, and optical illusions. These uncanny pictures are painted intuitively without reference to observation—they are about summoning something into existence rather than recording external reality. Flesh nestles up inside metal armatures, shadows misbehave, rigid architectures bend and flex. Mineo’s work extends beyond painting to drawings, photo collages, and even music. We discuss his love of collaboration and the projects he’s worked on with with the electronic band Matmos, the writer Sheila Heti, and his own experimental band Voider. Mineo brings his irreverent and irrational logic to everything he does. This conversation gets at the things that make his biomechanical subjects tick.

Painter Sam Cockrell (b. 1989, Colonial Williamsburg) joins the Selection Committee Radio Show with a sweet, Slowcore mixtape of songs he listens to in the studio. While in grad school at Columbia University in 2014, Sam Cockrell took a trip to the Bronx Zoo. He was in the Reptile House looking at snakes and it occurred to him that this—an encounter between himself and an animal—was the subject of his work. That realization grew into a practice of painting an animal (almost) every day on a standardized 8" x 10" canvas. Every picture uses a photograph taken by Cockrell as a reference; each image is a record of a real animal or insect seen and captured by him on a daily walk. These pictures, made exclusively using an airbrush, are soft-focused and tender, and surprisingly varied in subject matter, scale, and feeling. Cockrell discusses how he came to use the airbrush as his primary painting tool and the mechanics of his process. We also get into his unique archiving system, the relationship between his work and time, and the benefits of spending a part of one’s day in whatever kind of nature is available. We talk practice, pixels, paint, and emotional hardcore music! Sam Cockrell’s exhibition All Creatures Great and Small is on view at Blade Study in New York from July 10 through August 10, 2025.

A smooth, cool, mix for a hazy summer beach day.

“Won’t you let me see your naked body?” demands Leonard Cohen from Greg Carideo’s mixtape about looking and being seen. “They cannot see me naked,” replies Michael Stipe; Anohni and Yoko Ono weigh in. My delightful conversation with artist Greg Carideo traverses topics from Elliott Smith’s appearance on a demented FX morning show in 1995 to the close relationship between Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Bannisters” and Greg’s own work. Carideo transforms steel, old t-shirts, bits of scrap metal, and other shopworn fragments into tabernacles of urban life. Each sculpture is a little world, a structure that carries narrative, materiality, and vernacular forms of architecture and adornment—ghostly bodegas, ramshackle duplexes, basilica-shaped cuchifritos. For Carideo, collecting—impressions, images, writing—is a major part of his process. We talk about how his use of found objects, each one a little history of wear and tear, is a reflection of collected ideas and shapes that he transforms into palimpsests of time, material, and thought. We discuss all of this and more in this wide-ranging exploration of materiality, will, lyrics, and looking.

My great friend Matt Taber joins me to talk about the current exhibition at International Waters gallery, “Landscapes of Fear,” a group exhibition co-curated with Trang Tran “exploring how fear materializes within our environments, shaping the spaces we inhabit and influencing our interactions with them.” The show features the work of Andre Yvon, Andy Kincaid, Brandi Twilley, Bruno Smith, Bryce Kroll, Cait Porter, Carlos Rigau, Chang Sujung, Charlotte vander Borght, Daniel Boccato, David Bordett, Greg Carideo, Jason Murphy, Jeff Williams, Jen Mazza, Lino Bernabe, Lucia Love, Marie Lorenz, Nate Heiges, Nick Irzyk, Nicholas Sullivan, Olivia Drusin, Patrick Carlin Mohundro, Philip Hinge, Pooneh Maghazehe, Quincy Langford, Rudolf Samohejl, Seung-Min Lee, Shaina Tabak, Shaun Krupa, Tuguldur Yondonjamts. We discuss Taber’s interest in late nineteenth-century ideas about art and labor, particularly in the work of John Ruskin and William Morris, and how that relates to landscape, environmental degradation, and the role of the artist. He describes humanist geography and the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, whose 1979 book, Landscapes of Fear, gave the show its title. We also listen to some great music connecting emotion and the natural world, and we discuss some key pieces of work in the exhibition. It’s a great show! Matt Taber is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. He is the co-founder of International Objects and International Waters, two galleries dedicated to exploring the intersections of contemporary art, material culture, and design. His practice engages the relationship between handcraft and representation, with a focus on how artifice and material forms mediate experience and meaning. Taber has exhibited his work internationally and has curated exhibitions with many artists across both galleries. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

In this music-heavy show, painter Nick Irzyk brings a banging mixtape ranging from anarcho-punk to Finnish black metal to country. We discuss his journey from the hardcore and skateboarding scene to zine-making, eventually leading to printmaking in college. His paintings incorporate diagrammatic abstractions that resemble architectural blueprints or speculative spaces. The grid is a key structural tool, breaking forms into individual "cells" akin to a mirror ball or wireframe model—machines that hint at function but never fully activate. There is a tension between clarity and ambiguity: in form versus space, scale, and references to industrial or institutional interiors like cockpits and nuclear reactors. These sometimes oppressive spatial compositions, force the viewer into tight confrontations with looming structures. Underlying much of the work is a meditation on power—its potential energy, withheld force, and the emotional charge that creates a sense of terror through restraint and latent movement. Nick Irzyk was born in 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014. Select exhibitions include: Jack Barrett, New York (solo), Martos Gallery, New York (solo); Fall River MoCA, Fall River; KDR, Miami (solo); Nexx Asia, Taipei, TW; PMAM, London, UK (solo); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ; My Pet Ram, New York; Ruschman, Chicago, IL; Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, Canada; Syracuse University, NY (solo); Critical Path Method, New York/Baltimore (solo); No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; The Pit, Glendale, CA; 247365, New York, NY; and 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY (solo), among others. He was a Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY, in 2019-2020. He has co-run A.D.NYC in the lower Manhattan since 2019. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For this music-only episode, host Nate Heiges brings songs of obsession and longing. Get ready for some Spring Fever...