Jennifer McCabe is a distinguished curator, educator, and museum director with over 20 years of expertise in leading cultural institutions, fostering innovative curatorial practices, and supporting artists. Currently, she serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the SFO Museum, the only airport-based institution accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Under her leadership, the museum operates more than 25 exhibition sites throughout the San Francisco International Airport, engaging millions of visitors annually. Its acclaimed Aviation Museum and Library houses a permanent collection of over 160,000 artifacts documenting the history of commercial aviation.

Previously, McCabe served as Director and Chief Curator of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, where her eight-year tenure garnered significant acclaim, including consecutive "Best Museum" awards from the Phoenix New Times. Her curatorial vision and writing delve into themes of intersectional feminisms, site-responsive art commissions, and groundbreaking artist interventions.

She and Zuckerman discuss SFO, what one can do with all the time and headspace one had spent fundraising in a museum, bypass doors, how what she learns can be applied in other organizations, shaking up societal associations of craft, expanded perspectives, having an audience of millions, moments of pause, a journey through space, joy, incorporating breaks from art talk, being forever changed by parenting, seeing things through someone else’s lens, daily practice, the pause, and being your own support system!

Artist Claire Tabouret studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Motivated by a sensitivity to the passing of time and the floodgates of vulnerability opened by human relationships, Tabouret's painting practice is paced between periods of productive urgency and quiet reflection, and animated by layers, fabrics, and full, loose brushstrokes. Her hydrous palette is suspended somewhere in the ether between the synthetic hues of makeup and subdued tones of the earth, simultaneously referencing the natural and artificial ingredients of representation. Tableaux depicting bodies in confrontation, portraits, paintings of assemblies of people from young debutants to migrants at sea, and landscapes are often washed in color fields, alternately evoking ine possibility of anywhere and site specificity.
She and Zuckerman discuss her studio practice and a typical day, where her ideas come from, living in California, comfort and risk, ‘fluff,’ motherhood, music, what art has to teach us, and her selection to design new, contemporary stained-glass windows for the newly renovated Notre Dame Cathedral.

Stephan Jost is an art museum director who is currently the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. Previously, he served as Director of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, and the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California. He also held curatorial positions at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. 

Jost serves as Past President and Nominating Chair on the Board of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and is also on the Board of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. He previously served as Vice Chair on the Board of Hampshire College, where he was Board member from 2018-2022, as well as 2008-2016. He holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin in Art History. He is originally from East Lansing, Michigan and is a citizen of Canada, the USA, and Switzerland.

He and Zuckerman discuss original intention, cultural urgency, having a young and diverse museum audience, when people fall in love with culture, why people care about art, being in the presence of great works of art, the optimism of the extraordinary, the innovation of decorative arts, the maintenance of power, keeping our humanity, how museums can build social cohesion, and the power of inconsistency!

Carrie Scott is an English American curator and arts commentator based in London. Over the past two decades, she has worked globally with galleries, artists, and collectors. She began her career as curator of the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, later becoming Director of the James Harris Gallery and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York. In 2009, she launched Carrie Scott & Partners, collaborating with artists like Nick Knight, John Pawson and Walter & Zoniel. She has curated exhibitions worldwide, including in South Korea, Japan, London, and New York. In 2024, she founded Seen, a platform promoting emerging artists and transparency. She and Zuckerman discuss art and entrepreneurship, embracing messiness, the impact of people saying yes, expanding the artworld, how art makes you feel better, how art is not rewarded in society, Seen.art and understanding ourselves!

Art collector and philanthropist Komal Shah, originally from Ahmedabad, India, migrated to the US in 1991 to study computer science in California. After completing her Masters at Stanford, she earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, eventually holding positions in the executive suites of Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo. In 2008, Shah left the tech industry to focus on philanthropic pursuits. She then began developing the Shah Garg Collection with her husband and tech entrepreneur Gaurav Garg, solidifying a vision for the collection’s emphasis on women artists in 2014. Today, they are focused on amplifying the voices of women artists and artists of color through the Shah Garg Foundation.
She and Zuckerman discuss activism, mistakes, excellence, motherhood, ungendered works, the seduction principle, how only 12% of works collected by museums are by female artists and how women artists make $.10 on a dollar, how to build a collection, great artists, and the social reality of guilt!

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle is a New York based art dealer and curator. Ine-Kimba Boyle was recently appointed partner and co-owner at CANADA gallery in New York. Her previous positions include leading the online sales strategy at Pace gallery as Senior Director and Global Head of Online and working as a Senior Director at CANADA. Her latest curated exhibitions include Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed, a two-person exhibition featuring Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester II and “Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude,” a group exhibition benefitting Eighth House Residency.

She and Zuckerman discuss being a teenage intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the long term impact of exposure  to art before age 24, online art sales during COVID, combing art and technology, strategies of access, her Black Out dinner series, opportunities for artists to rest, Matcha (!) as a morning ritual, Canada as a verb and a noun, managed growth with a global footprint, artist’s loyalty, and Hudson River School artists!

This week on my podcast, “About Art” I spoke with the British contemporary artist Robert Montgomery. Montgomery is well known for his work in public space. He makes light works, billboard poems, fire poems, paintings and watercolors. His work brings text art closer to the language of poetry. He represented the UK in the 2012 Kochi Biennale and the 2016 Yinchuan Biennale. His work is in museum collections across the world including the Albright Knox in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He has had solo museum projects at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and the Cer Modern Museum in Ankara. His work was recently included in the Musée du Louvre exhibition “La Suite de l’Histoire” in Paris. His work is hugely popular on the internet, the piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 200 million times.

He and Zuckerman discuss the gentle 90 percent, kindness, grief, love outlasting death, the temporary nature of power and wealth, modernist poetry, how to be a painter and poet at the same time, devotional reflection, having conversations with people across time, the magic in the mundane, light, and mentorship!

A compilation episode of the answer to the question "why does art matter?" Thank you for being apart of our community, and we will see you in the new year. Happy holidays!

Dr. Shauna Shapiro, PhD, is a best-selling author, clinical psychologist and internationally recognized expert in mindfulness and self-compassion. She is a professor at Santa Clara University and has published over 150 papers and three critically acclaimed books, translated into 16 languages. Dr. Shapiro has presented her research to the King of Thailand, the Danish Government, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Summit, and the World Council for Psychotherapy, as well as to Fortune 100 Companies including Google, Cisco Systems and LinkedIn. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Oprah, NPR, and the American Psychologist. Dr. Shapiro is a summa cum laude graduate of Duke University and a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, co-founded by the Dalai Lama. Her TEDx Talk, The Power of Mindfulness, has been viewed over 3 million times.

She and Zuckerman discuss mindfulness, meditation training in Thailand, looking for the magical, self love, how subtle is significant, beginning again, loving awareness, attitude of flexibility, kind attention, intentional practice, glimmers and micro moments of goodness, hardwiring happiness, finding love, how art connects us to what we have forgotten, what it means to be human and free!

Alex Anderson lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  Anderson uses the delicate medium of ceramics as his main vehicle to explore the sublime experiences that make up both the man-made and natural worlds, as well as deeper, more complicated issues of race and cultural representation. His artworks combine a dexterity in the medium with a confluence of baroque imagery and compositions, Japanese pop art references, and current contemporary fashion and design trends in order to probe the depths of reality, illusion and identity.
He and Zuckerman discuss his relationship to ceramics, reflectivity and sparkle, what it means to be alive in the present moment, the metaphysical aspects of light, empathy, history and research, personal motivation,
perfection, beauty desire, and the human condition!

Marine Tanguy is the CEO of MTArt agency. At the age of 21, Tanguy became Europe’s youngest gallery manager, working for Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s discoverer. By 23, she launched her first gallery, De Re, in Los Angeles. Inspired by talent agencies like CAA and UTA, Marine founded MTArt Agency in London in 2015 at age 25. MTArt, a Certified B Corporation, is now the leading talent agency in the art world, working with global organizations and cities, nurturing an international community of art-lovers and collectors as well as diverse brands ranging from Apple to Hyundai and even the World Cup. The agency has expanded to the US and Middle East, earning recognition on the Sunday Times Power List. Supported by investors like Frederic Jousset and Saul Klein, MTArt was valued at over £35 million in its last fundraising.
Tanguy is a passionate advocate for the role of the artist in our society, she wishes for art to become a part of our everyday experience. She published her first academic paper age 27 years old with Warwick University supporting a new way to value public art projects within cities. She also published her first book with Penguin encouraging a more active participation in our visual culture, all the while teaching visual literacy. Her talks include three TED Talks on how to transform cities with art, how social media visuals affect our minds and how harmful are the visual biases we see daily.
She and Zuckerman discuss her talent agency for artists, diversified revenue streams, visual literacy, visual pollution, artist selection criteria, consensus, vulnerability in leadership, and what she’s excited about!
This episode is sponsored by Jil Sander.