New Getty Recording Artists Podcast Out Now

Getty’s award-winning podcast Recording Artists, featuring archival materials from the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) collection, is back for a second season.

On September 26, travel the world and the 20th century with poet and journalist Tess Taylor and actor and writer Anna Deavere Smith for Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses.

Centering on correspondence between artists and their family members, partners, friends, and professional associates, Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, begins in 1942, in the rubble of the Second World War, and marches toward the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, all the while touching on critical questions that artists face today. Each episode weaves in conversations with some of today’s luminary working artists and art historians.

“The first season of Recording Artists focused on recorded interviews—in other words, artists presenting themselves publicly to the world,” says Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the GRI. “For the second season, the letters offer a much more private address, featuring a range of very human emotions from hardship to joy and indignation to gratitude.”

The series explores interconnections between artist’s projects, their networks, and their times. In the process, Intimate Addresses explores how artists build networks, call out to one another, and change the way we see art in their own times and beyond.

The opening episode finds Marcel Duchamp writing Man Ray fresh after his escape from Nazi France. Duchamp, usually dry and collected, is dazed, too poor to join his old friend in Hollywood. Instead, he’s asking for help selling what would become a signature work of art: his Boîte-en-valise or Box in a Suitcase—beautifully-rendered miniatures of his most famous works.

As the season continues, we meet Frida Kahlo near the end of WWII, in Coyoacán, Mexico, managing relations with her New York gallerist (and former lover) in the face of rupture in the world and extraordinary pain in her own body. We encounter M. C. Richards, a powerful but largely forgotten woman philosopher of craft, as she works to find her own voice. We find the fascinating Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson, a Black avant-garde composer, as he leaves an extraordinarily exciting music and performance career to parent and to build better networks for the Black artists and musicians who succeed him, all while creating art for himself. We catch Nam June Paik in his cockroach-filled apartment, seeking financial support for a fellow artist in even more dire straights. We hear experimental polymath Meret Oppenheim, who’d begun her career 40 years earlier in Duchamp’s circle, writing to a curator with an unforgettable feminist letter which speaks truth to power. It’s a voice that calls out not only to be heard in our time, but our own.

As the podcast travels, it visits Oppenheim and Duchamp’s Paris and New York; Kahlo’s Mexico City; M. C. Richards’ Black Mountain College and arts commune in Stony Point, New York; Patterson’s and Paik’s Germany and New York; and Oppenheim’s final years in Switzerland and Italy. The episodes offer chances to imaginatively enter new art landmarks around the world, like the home at 14 Rue Halle in Paris where Duchamp and his Surrealist friends often gathered for wine before the war. As the season unfolds, characters recur, so that the podcast introduces artists as a community of linked characters calling to each other—and to us—across time. The artists address each other—and us. They call us to intimacy, too.

“This podcast offers us all deep glimpses into six different role models in creativity,” says Tess Taylor, host of the podcast. “Some of these artists we might think we know, others may be new to us. But all of them have fascinating stories, and their lives helped me more deeply understand artistic wisdom, artistic strategy, artistic stamina. It was incredibly nourishing to see, in each letter, a backstage view into what it means to be a maker. I found that it even helped me see my own doodles, letters and drafts differently. This project left me feeling incredibly grateful for the chance to converse with these artists across time.”