Show Notes
I have been making Who ARTed for seven years, and I appreciate everyone who has supported the show and learned along with me over that time. To wrap it all up, I put together a collection of seven of my favorite mini episodes. Learn about all sorts of works, including Paul Van Hoeydonck’s 1971 lunar memorial Fallen Astronaut and Alexei Leonov’s pioneering 1965 sketch made during the first spacewalk, to Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic ukiyo-e woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, highlighting the dynamic tension between nature and Mount Fuji alongside the revolutionary adoption of imported Prussian blue. In classical painting, the enduring intrigue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa demonstrates the optical nuances of Renaissance sfumato, anatomical study, and the cultural mythology amplified by its infamous 1911 theft from the Louvre.
Bridging historical tradition with modern and contemporary experimentation, this overview details how unexpected materials and radical conceptual strategies have expanded the definition of visual art. The progression moves from Herb Williams’ high-concept sculptures constructed from hundreds of thousands of wax crayons, to the meditative precision, sacred geometry, and ritual destruction of Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, embodying the philosophy of impermanence over material attachment. That exploration of presence and absence culminates in Robert Rauschenberg’s radical 1953 conceptual breakthrough, Erased de Kooning Drawing, which transformed meticulous erasure into a profound act of tribute, followed by Andy Warhol’s 1962 Marilyn Diptych, which appropriated religious altarpiece formats and commercial silkscreening to critique mass media, consumerism, and the tragic commodification of celebrity.
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More from Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages
My guest this week was Doreen Carvajal, author of The Girl in Blue: Renoir's Portrait of a Dynasty Erased. In our conversation, Carvajal shared her insights into the girl behind the portrait, her family and what happened to them during World War 2.
My guest this week is Tim Bogatz from The Art of Education and host of Art Ed Radio. He was kind enough to join me to talk about Robert Longo.
Aztec art served as a vital instrument of statecraft, religious ceremony, and cosmic order rather than individualized aesthetic expression. Organized into royal and religious guilds, master artisans known as tolteca worked in dedicated neighborhoods across Tenochtitlan, mastering lapidary arts, stone carving, and metalwork. Elite featherworkers (amanteca) produced radiant mosaic tapestries, headdresses, and ceremonial shields from iridescent quetzal, macaw, and hummingbird plumage, items prized far above gold or silver for their spiritual association with breath, solar rays, and divine vitality. Aztec sculptors carved massive, dense volcanic rocks such as basalt and andesite without iron chisels, relying instead on harder mineral hammerstones, quartzite abrasives, and water to achieve crisp detail. Although centuries of weathering left these stone monuments bare and monochromatic, they were originally coated in lime plaster and brilliantly painted with mineral pigments like ochre, cinnabar, and Maya blue to demarcate cosmological realms. Beyond monumental sculpture, scribe-painters (tlacuiloque) documented historical chronologies, rituals, and tributary records on accordion-folded deerskin and amatl bark paper using an intricate system of pictographs, ideographs, and phonetic rebuses.
Sir Anish Kapoor is an internationally acclaimed British-Indian sculptor celebrated for his pioneering investigations into scale, void, and perceptual depth. Emerging in the early 1980s as part of the New British Sculpture movement, Kapoor initially gained renown for forms coated in intense, unbound raw pigments, a technique influenced by traditional Hindu ritual powders, before expanding into colossal public installations using materials such as reflective stainless steel, polished stone, and light-absorbing Vantablack. His decorated career includes major honors such as the 1991 Turner Prize, a 2013 knighthood for services to the visual arts, and the 2017 Genesis Prize, from which he directed the full $1 million award toward humanitarian organizations aiding Syrian and Rohingya refugees.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) was an Austrian visual artist, architect, and environmental philosopher renowned for his vibrant, unconventional aesthetic and radical ecological convictions. Rejecting the rigid straight lines and functional geometric grids of modernist architecture, Hundertwasser championed organic forms, irregular contours, spirals, and vivid mineral pigments. His artistic worldview prompted him to adopt names reflecting his ideals including “Regentag” (Rainy Day) and “Dunkelbunt” (Dark-Multicolored) and led him to advocate for architectural concepts such as the "window right," which granted tenants the autonomy to decorate outer walls, and the integration of dry composting toilets to restore natural ecological cycles.