No. 376: Robert Pruitt, Maggie Cao

Episode No. 376 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Robert Pruitt and art historian Maggie Cao.

The California African American Museum is showing “Robert Pruitt: Devotion,” a survey of Pruitt’s large-scale drawing and sculpture that is installed with art that has informed Pruitt’s work. The exhibition was curated by Mar Hollingsworth and will be on view through February 17.

Robert Pruitt’s drawings, sculpture, animation and more brings together spiritual traditions, fictional narrative, technology and science fiction in a way that suggests new stories and new black identities. Pruitt has received solo shows at museums such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ICA Boston, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Studio Museum and more.

On the second segment, art historian Maggie Cao discusses her book “The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America.” The book, which was published by University of California Press, offers some ideas about why Cao thinks landscape declined as a subject of American art near the end of the nineteenth century. Amazon offers it for $59.

Air date: January 17, 2019.