Podcasts you can see (AKA shows about art🎨)

Last Seen

81 Minutes

Two security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recount the night thieves broke in during their shift and pulled off the greatest art heists of all time. One of the guards recalls being handcuffed and tied up in the museum’s basement, wondering if he’d live through the night. It’s devastating.

Stuff the British Stole

A Tiger and a Scream

Host Marc Fennell explores a different kind of art theft – the looting of a wooden tiger sculpture from India, which today sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum in Britain. The episode explores the violent colonial history attached to the work and questions what it means for the piece to be displayed in Britain today.

A Piece of Work

How Questlove Learned to Love Silence

This WNYC MoMA collab on the artist Yves Klein has incredible descriptions of the bluest pigment on the planet and some seriously funny commentary from comedian Abby Jacobson. To top it all off, Questlove shares musings on minimalist art that made me understand abstraction in an entirely new way.

Immaterial: 5,000 Years of Art, One Material at a Time

Stone: Making and Breaking Legacies

This series from The Met – which our curator worked on – uses art-making materials as a framework for reconsidering art history. This episode on stone goes behind the scenes of the dramatic repair of a priceless marble sculpture that fell and broke into hundreds of pieces.

99% Invisible

Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux

Producer Emmett FitzGerald traces how art informs and instructs our interpretations of the past, through the history of dinosaur drawings. This episode is filled with interviews with some very wacky paleoartists as well as great dino descriptions (i.e. one dinosaur is described as a “giant gray vacuum cleaner”). It all culminates to some fascinating questions about how illustrations actually influenced and dictated the scientific study of dinosaurs.

Paranormal Pajama Party

Paranormal Pajama Party, the folklore/society podcast that delves into ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales, has just launched its second season.

Hosted by Steph, a horror enthusiast and feminist, this podcast combines immersive storytelling with historical and cultural context, providing insights into the portrayal of women in horror. The new season kicks off with the haunting tale of Sarah Whitehead, also known as the Bank Nun, shedding light on Regency-era England and the role of penny dreadfuls in promoting literacy among working-class women.