Acclaimed fashion designer and curator Grace Wales Bonner is joined by the scholar and curator Horace D. Ballard. In a wide ranging conversation on art and fashion, they unpack the nuances of style, medium, and intentionality in art.

In addition to her brand Wales Bonner, Grace Wales Bonner’s curatorial exhibitions include A Time For New Dreams, Serpentine Galleries London (2019) and Artist’s Choice - Spirit Movers at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023) with accompanying publication Dream in the Rhythm: Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection (2023). Grace is currently leading a four-year research project, titled Between Critique and Hope, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 

Horace D. Ballard is the Theodore E. Stebbins Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, where their work investigates the art, ideas, and visual cultures of the United States and the Americas. They are the author of numerous publications, most recently Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone (Williams College Museum of Art, 2022), and “Wet-into-Wet: Passages of Time and Tradition before 1880,” in Into the Light: American Watercolors, 1880-1990 (2023) edited by Hoffman, Grasselli, and Stewart for Harvard Art Museums.

In this very special episode, artist and legendary record collector R. Crumb visits his friends and fellow rare music enthusiasts John Heneghan and Eden Brower to listen to 78 records from Heneghan’s sprawling collection. 

John Heneghan is a musician, podcast host, record collector. He and his wife, Eden R. Brower, play in Eden & John’s East River String Band with R. Crumb and Ernesto Gomez. Tune into John’s Old Time Radio Show to hear more 78 record collectors spin discs from their collections 

For over four decades, R. Crumb has used the popular medium of the comic book to address the absurdity of social conventions, political disillusionment, irony, racial and gender stereotypes, sexual fantasies, and fetishes. Explore his available titles at David Zwirner books.

Artist Cauleen Smith and Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, join Helen for a live conversation in the garden at David Zwirner Los Angeles. Held on the occasion of the exhibition John McCracken, they explore the influence of Minimalism, a quintessential and often negated 20th century art movement.

John McCracken will be on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles through March 30, 2024.

Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. Most recently, her exhibition, The Wanda Coleman Songbook, was on view at 52 Walker, York, from January 19–March 16, 2024.

Michael Govan is the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

An episode on the art and life of Hilma af Klint featuring art historian Briony Fer and af Klint’s biographer, Julia Voss.

Briony Fer is an art historian and professor at University College, London, and curator of the 2023 exhibition Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. 

Julia Voss is a curator, art critic, and professor and author of Hilma af Klint: A Biography. She is the co-curator, along with Daniel Birnbaum, of Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky Dreams of the Future, on view at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from March 16–August 11, 2024.

For the third interview in her series with creative couples, Helen spoke to the first couple of American fiction: literary critic James Wood and award-winning novelist Claire Messud.

Writer and critic Hua Hsu received the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 memoir Stay True. Helen and Hua discuss the challenges of writing about the past as it was experienced as your younger self, and how writing itself is an act of remembering.

In the second episode in Helen’s interview series with creative couples, the artist Hank Willis Thomas and curator Rujeko Hockley get intimate about the unique challenges and rewards of being married and working in the same field.

Was Vermeer really the artist behind some of his most well-known works? The question has lingered at the margins of art history for years and was resurfaced during the Dutch master's blockbuster retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in 2023.

Helen invited writer Lawrence Weschler and art historian Claudia Swan to interrogate what is at stake—politically, financially, and art historically—in reattributing works by the old master.

Claudia Swan is a scholar of northern European art, whose recent books include Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic and of Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe.

Lawrence Weschler is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, including the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. His recent writings can be found at Wondercabinet.

Ira Sachs's 2023 film Passages won wide acclaim for its portrayal of human desire. Helen goes deep with the filmmaker on the psychology of his finely wrought characters and the many influences that inform his work.

In the first episode of Helen’s series of interviews with creative couples, artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham give an unvarnished look into nearly five decades of partnership. The veteran artworld pair share how they’ve managed it all, from raising a family together to maintaining independent creative practices.

Artist Lauren Halsey and George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic open up about their friendship, from their first meeting to ongoing and fruitful collaborations since. They discuss metaphor, the collective, and of course, the power of the funk.