Episode No. 494 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historian Jennifer L. Roberts and master printer and author Phil Sanders.

Beginning this Sunday, April 25, Roberts will deliver the 2021 Mellon Lectures, America’s leading series of annual lectures about art. Typically delivered at the National Gallery of Art each year over six consecutive Sundays in the early spring, the pandemic has required an adjustment. Roberts will deliver this year’s Mellons digitally. As ever they will be presented weekly and on Sundays. You may watch them on the NGA’s website, where they will remain available for viewing. (No registration is required.)

Roberts’s lectures are titled “Contact: Art and the Pull of the Print.” Roberts will consider printmaking as a physical experience, and will point to how artists have used the physicality inherent in printmaking as metaphors for the themes and topics they address in their work. Roberts’s lectures will primarily focus on American and European contemporary art, and will address work by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hammons, Christiane Baumgartner and Glenn Ligon.

Roberts is a professor at Harvard University.

• For images of Mark Bradford’s 2017 Pickett’s Charge, please see the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden website.

On the second segment, Phil Sanders discusses his new book “Prints and their Makers,” which was published by Princeton University Press. “Prints and their Makers” places contemporary prints and a range of print-making practices in the context of traditions and techniques developed over more than a thousand years.

Sanders was formerly the chief operating officer of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York and director/master printer of its program Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Sanders was previously the master printer and studio director for Universal Limited Art Editions.

• For William Kentridge’s 2016 Triumphs and Laments, see the Kentridge studio’s website.
• Jillian Ross’s website.
• Andrea Mantegna’s 1484-92 nine-painting series Triumphs of Caesar.

Indiebound and Amazon offer the book from about $50.

Instagram: Jennifer Roberts, Phil Sanders, Tyler Green.

Air date: April 22, 2021.