Episode No. 35 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Brian Sholis and artist Mark Ruwedel. 

The program spotlights a new exhibition at New York’s apexart titled “The Permanent Way.” The show looks at the continuing impact of the railroads on the way American artists look at landscape. The exhibition is on view through July 28.

Sholis is a New York-based writer, editor and PhD candidate at the City University of New York. He is the co-editor of “The Uncertain States of America Reader,” a 2006 anthology of writing on contemporary art and politics. He contributes to Artforum, where he was previously an editor and to magazines such as Aperture, Art in America, Bookforum and Frieze. His essay for “The Permanent Way” is available (for free) here.

Ruwedel is a California-based photographer whose work frequently examines the ways in which Americans have impacted the land in the American West. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA and more. The book related to the project discussed on this week’s show, “Westward the Course of Empire,” was published in 2008 by the Yale University Press.

Air date: July 5, 2012.