Episode No. 138 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Deborah Grant and curator Scott Allan.

Grant makes paintings rooted in art history, but takes as a significant goal the adding of new names and bodies of work to the roster of artists we know. Her work mixes folk traditions, the work of famous artists and our cultural history to build narratives that use our past to address our present. Her work is included in “When the Stars Begin to Fall; Imagination and the American South,” a group show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that was curated by Thomas J. Lax. The show is open through this weekend and then travels to the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in August. Earlier this year The Drawing Center exhibited “Deborah Grant: Christ You Know it Ain’t Easy!!”, which was curated by Claire Gilman.

Next, Allan, the curator of “The Scandalous Art of James Ensor,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It will be on view through September 7. The show focuses on Ensor’s wild, groundbreaking work of the 1880s and 1890s, and places the artist’s two greatest works in the context of Ensor’s larger project. The Getty’s own Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is famous and well-known, but the exhibition also includes Ensor’s 1887 The Temptation of St. Anthony, a mammoth drawing never before exhibited in the United States. It’s in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, to which this exhibition will travel after it’s in LA.

Air date: June 26, 2014.