Episode No. 88 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Jason Middlebrook and historian David Anfam.
This summer MASS MoCA is presenting the exhibition “Jason Middlebrook: My Landscape.” Curated by Susan Cross, it will be on view through April 7, 2014. The show continues Middlebrook’s examination of the intersection between the man-built environment and nature, especially the incursion of one into what seems to be the domain of the other. The show includes a hanging, Fallingwater-recalling mobile made from discarded material and many of his painted planks, which juxtapose abstract natural forms against painted abstractions.
Middlebrook has received solo shows at Art House in Austin, the University Art Museum in Albany, NY, and the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art in Ridgefiled, Conn. His work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the MCA Chicago, the MFA Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
On the second half of the show, art historian David Anfam returns to talk about “Memory, Myth and Magic,” his latest installation at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. It’s on view through September 29. According to the CSM, the exhibition “explores these currents of imagery and ideas that surge through Still’s figurative and abstract compositions.” As with pretty much every CSM show, it presents never-before-seen Stills, helping to give us a more complete idea of the artist’s oeuvre.
Air date: July 11, 2013.

Jason Middlebrook, installation at the MCA Chicago for “Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy,” 2010.

Clyfford Still, Row of Elevators, ca. 1928-29. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington.