The Lonely Palette

“I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” - Norman Rockwell Whether arguing for soft versus hard taco shells or the Neo-Nazi right to march in Skokie, freedom of speech is a fundamental right we all enjoy as Americans. But it turns out that telling people that is pretty complicated, actually. Thank goodness we have Norman Rockwell, virtuosic photorealistic painter and America's crown prince of nostalgia, to help us understand our fundamental freedoms from the intimacy of the magazines fanned across the coffee tables inside our homes. See the images: https://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2025/6/4/episode-70-norman-rockwells-freedom-of-speech-1943 Music used: The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" The Blue Dot Sessions, “The Zeppelin,” “Lord Weasel,” “No Smoking,” “Transeless,” “Silver Lanyard,” “Ice Tumbler,” “Sino de Cobre,” “Georgia Overdrive,” “The Consulate”

“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? Maybe then we appreciate the beauty, and the human resilience, of what new things it could be, in the now. See the images: https://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2025/2/26/episode-69-yee-sookyungs-translated-vase-2011 Music used: Billy Joel, “You May Be Right” The Blue Dot Sessions, “Littl Jon,” “The Dustbin,” “BlueGarden,” “Nesting,” “A Rush of Clear Water,” “A Common Pause” Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She sends her microphones into the elements – fire, here, and rivers, in a recent series called Sound Maps, where she captures, among other things, the tonality of the different depths of the water. She loves chanting, tones, drones. She loves what sound does to our body, how we respond to it, how we visualize it. How sound breathes. How we breathe differently around different sounds. And for me, as an art historian who fell in love with sound, I get it. I think I get it. And this is what today’s conversation is about. Annea joined me to talk about what it means to listen with your body, to experience the silence in all th

"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the powerful metaphor that they represent, that we can best get to the root of what loss can mean. And, maybe, healing as well. See the images: https://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2025/2/10/episode-68-felix-gonzalez-torres-untitled-march-5th-2-1991 Music used: The Blue Dot Sessions, “A Little Powder,” “Lerennis,” “Taoudella,” “The Melt,” “Rafter” Open Book, “Second Chance” Episode sponsors: Art of Crime The Seattle Prize Visual Arts Passage Smartist App With extra special thanks to Martin Young.

“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his prose and his love of the work leaps off the page and into your lap, offering a guiding hand past the velvet rope, not just for his readers, but for himself: he’s a critic who is constantly looking inward, curious about his own responses to artworks, and what it can teach him about teaching us. Sebastian joined me to discuss his latest book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,” as well as writers on writing, becoming an expert about a movement on deadline, how looking back at the muddiness of a historical moment can help us understand the muddiness of ours, and what happens when art critics ar

"My line does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." - Cy Twombly Critics have described the work of consummate scribbler Cy Twombly as at once "barely there" and overly academic, but what about us art civilians? What is it about these half-baked scraps, scratch, and scrawl that speaks to our own creative impulses, our own inner children dying to grab the crayon and crush the tip in an ecstatic series of fat, juicy loopdeloops? See the images: https://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2025/1/22/episode-67-cy-twomblys-second-voyage-to-italy-second-version-1962 Music used: The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" The Blue Dot Sessions, “Inessential,” “Tiny Putty,” “A Burst of Light,” Palms Down,” “Parade Shoes,” “City Limits” Episode sponsor: The Art of Crime Podcast: https://www.artofcrimepodcast.com/

Mark your calendars! The new season of The Lonely Palette drops Thursday, January 23rd! This season, we've got a stellar line-up: Cy Twombly, Lawren Harris, Käthe Kollwitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name just a few. We've got interviews with the Washington Post's Sebastian Smee, the artist and composer Annea Lockwood, and more. We've got a whole National Gallery residency! So listen and subscribe, rate and review, and fire up your earbuds for another season of looking with your ears.

Tamar is alive! The Lonely Palette is alive! But in the year since we last spoke, she's been elbow-deep in audio projects galore - good for the pocketbook, but bad for independent art history podcast productivity. But your patience will be rewarded! And in the meantime, a few announcements: - Join me and my fellow H&S colleagues at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allson, MA on Wednesday, November 6 for an evening of audio camaraderie. Register here: https://bit.ly/3Cd05fB - Explore our Hub & Spoke Expo showcase, starting with the first episode of our very first exclusive Expo series, "The Rabbis Go South." (All episodes now available: https://bit.ly/3NUhhc8) Imagine 16 American rabbis jailed for acting on their beliefs. The Rabbis Go South is a thrilling seven-part narrative podcast that uncovers a true story of Jewish-Black solidarity in St. Augustine, Florida during the Civil Rights Movement. An inspiring tale of hope for a divided world. The Rabbis Go South was created by documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going. This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what if a monument was human-scaled? What if it made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold. This episode takes us to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to Shreveport, Louisiana, to the South Side of Chicago, to Navajo Nation in Arizona. It explores how many American monuments to slavery took inspiration from Holocaust memorials

The Lonely Palette, as you've heard so often, is an enormously proud founding member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a group of fiercely independent, story-driven, mind-expanding podcasts. Since 2017, we've supported each other while forging our own paths, prioritizing craft and humane storytelling above all else. Now, if you haven't noticed, media in general, and podcasting in particular, is in a space some may generously call post-apocalyptic. But an incredible silver lining is that the industry is now recognizing how important independence is. We've been here all along, and with your support, we're not going anywhere. Please enjoy a bonus episode of the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, a tasty sampler of a few of our shows in a dapper audio package. Today's theme is love. As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, what is love? It turns out, love can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. Here at Hub & Spoke, we want to stretch our ar

Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation. Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photographs, drawings, relationships, grandchildren – is the subject of her new memoir, or, actually, what she calls “Stuff (Instead of a Memoir).” She joined me to talk about the book, but also more than 60 years of writing about art in the way that centered life. After all, “art,” she often quotes, “is what makes life more interesting than art.” Art is the artists, the world they inhabit, their shared cultural references, their shared understanding of the art world and art history. Their human experiences rendered in paint. The stuff they leave behind. Music Used: The Blue Dot Sessions, “Lacquer Groove,” “Hardwoo

In the 1950s and 60s, Coenties Slip—an obscure street on the lower tip of Manhattan overlooking the East River—was home to some of the most iconic artists in history, and who would define American Art during their time there: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, these artists created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation. Prudence Peiffer is the kind of art historian who understands the importance of context and place, and her book, “The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever” provides the kind of rich context and human detail that textbooks could only dream of. She joined me to discuss the history of these artists, why we have such a hard time seeing artists as people, the friction between accessible artists and their inaccessible art, why watching Robert Indiana eat a mushroom for 39 minutes is actually totally beautiful,

Taking a break from writing about astronauts, Tom Wolfe donned his white suit and strolled to the art museums of New York City, letting the incomprehensible literary works of the movement wash over him like a warm bath of clam broth, and producing what, in the words of art critic Rosalind Krauss, "hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch." For you, dear listeners, here is the headache-inducing introduction to "The Painted Word," read aloud, as was always intended. This free preview is available to all listeners, but the full chapter, and all future chapters, will be going to $2 (and above) per episode patrons, so pledge that support to find out just what in the heck Wolfe defines as an "apache dance." It's so not what you think it is that it might just be what you think it is. The next chapter will be released on Tuesday, October 17. Don't miss a word, painted or otherwise, by becoming a patron. www.patreon.com/lonelypalette Music used: Glenn Miller, “Tuxedo Junction

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) may have gone down in history as the very first Western art historian, but he is also a messy bench who loves drama, and we are here for it. Listen to his take on Sandro Botticelli from “The Lives of the Artists” (Bondanella trans., 1991), particularly his practical jokes, from which no friend or neighbor escaped unscathed. This is a free edition of The Lonely Palette Reads, a perk that will be going out exclusively to Patreon patrons in the future. To become a patron, go to patreon.com/lonelypalette and sign up at any level of support. Thank you! Got suggestions for other intimidating-until-read-aloud-texts for future episodes of The Lonely Palette Reads? Email the show at tamar@thelonelypalette.com. Music used: Glenn Miller, “Tuxedo Junction” The Blue Dot Sessions, “Belle Anette” Our website: www.thelonelypalette.com Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

The neoplatonic ideal of beauty, the girl on the half-shell, the naked chick riding a clam. Her tilted head and fluttery hair are recognized by everyone and their grandma, but no one - experts included - can explain just why in the heck this painting is so iconic. Shell we take on the challenge? See the images: https://bit.ly/3LeIwxu Music used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust” The Blue Dot Sessions, “TwoPound,” “Coulis Coulis,” “Delmendra,” “No Smoking,” “Belle Anette,” “Rue Severine,” “Ranch Hand,” “Pastel de Nata,” “Khfett” Lady Gaga, “Venus” Episode sponsor: https://www.artofcrimepodcast.com/ Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

In April 1989, Barbara Kruger - an artist, activist, and former magazine layout editor - created a flyer for a pro-choice women’s march in Washington, DC to protest the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe vs. Wade. This flyer, though, was never meant to be a picket sign. Instead, it has become a timeless artwork all its own: directly addressing any viewer from any era, demanding they confront their own politics, and drawing the battle lines between all the external - and internal - tensions that exist not only within the parameters of the abortion debate, but within women themselves. See the images: https://bit.ly/45wNrSb Music used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” The Blue Dot Sessions, “Thread Indigo,” “Monder,” “Tall Journey,” “Stephi,” “Morning Glare” Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman” (performed at the Mobilize for Women's Lives Rally in Washington in 1989) Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette Episode sponsors: Jay Handy Financial Services (for artists!) https://www.signalpointinvest.

Whether for his critics, his friends (...?), or his canvases, the Victorian-era, Gilded-age Aesthetic ex-pat painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler had one motto: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. See the Images: https://bit.ly/3PMpK3o Music Used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" The Blue Dot Sessions, “Slate Tracker,” “Laser Focus,” “The Griffiths,” “Crumbtown,” “Discovery Harbor,” “Leave the TV On,” “Pickers,” “Caraval, “Lady Marie” Support Hub & Spoke's Independence Fundraiser: www.hubspokeaudio.org/july4

Splotches, spills, and stains. They can evoke shapes, moods, energy, even music. Yet no one seemed to appreciate their very beauty with the same intuitive, delicate flair as Helen Frankenthaler, who created something fiercely new "between cocktails and dinner," or, more accurately, between the broad shoulders of a relentlessly masculine movement. Not bad for a saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington. See the images: https://bit.ly/3ChhuAE Music used: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" The Blue Dot Sessions, “Bedroll,” “A Common Pause,” “Palms Down,” “Desmontes,” “Delamine,” “Greylock,” “Angel Tooth,” “Dear Myrtle” Joe Dassin, “Les Champs-Elysees" Episode sponsor: The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments: https://bit.ly/43Qp1SJ Support the show! www.patreon.com/lonelypalette Register for our Hub & Spoke live show in Woodstock, VT on June 15: https://normanwilliams.org/events/podcasts-a-listening-event/

The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums. Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate interests or expectations, which means we are offbeat, unexpected, formidable, and really poor, so please take a listen to our shows and, if you like what we do, join our mailing list and consider supporting the collective: www.hubspokeaudio.org Link to our live event in at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock, VT on Thursday, June 15: https://normanwilliams.org/events/podcasts-a-listening-event/ *** Today's episode: "The Museum of Everyday Life" by Rumble Strip The mission of The Museum of Everyday Life is "a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitu

The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums. Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate interests or expectations, which means we are offbeat, unexpected, formidable, and really poor, so please take a listen to our shows and, if you like what we do, join our mailing list and consider supporting the collective: www.hubspokeaudio.org Link to our live event in at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock, VT on Thursday, June 15: https://normanwilliams.org/events/podcasts-a-listening-event/ *** Today's episode: "Rekindling Hope" by Out There Carolyn McDonald was struggling — hard. The depression had gotten so bad that she couldn’t see a way forward. Then, one day, she went to the beach. Story