Podcasts you can see (AKA shows about art🎨)

Emma Vecchione brings us five podcast episodes on art and artists

Podcast artwork for Last Seen, Stuff the British Stole, A Piece of Work, Immaterial: 5,000 Years of Art, One Material at a Time, and 99% Invisible

Curator:

👉🏽Emma Vecchione (she/her)

Why this theme?

👉🏽I work in the wild world of art museum podcasting, and one thing I’ve learned here is that there’s much more to visual art than just, well, visuals. What I love about art podcasts is that they draw on all of our senses to animate untold histories and illuminate the inner lives of artists.

Spanning from epic art thefts to vivid descriptions of the bluest blue on earth, these five podcasts use sound to make you see art in a new way.

Podcast Picks

Last Seen podcast cover art

Last Seen

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 podcast cover art

Stuff the British Stole

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 podcast cover art

A Piece of Work

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 podcast cover art

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

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 podcast cover art

99% Invisible

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.

Want to sponsor this newsletter? Learn more about our advertising options. 

Community

🎤 This week in Podcast The Newsletter: Lauren Passell writes: “You can finally listen to episode one of Nichole Hill’s Our Ancestors Were Messy, an official Tribeca selection. Nichole is telling Black history stories focusing on the people who brought the drama, reading society pages and gossip columns of popular pre-Civil Rights era Black newspapers with a guest.

🔍Read Kieran McRae’s article on 21 tips for getting more podcast listeners.

🎧Dive deeper into the epic world of Peacock's "Those About to Die" with the official companion podcast Rise or Die: A Those About to Die Podcast.

🎙️Humans in Public Health is a podcast that takes listeners into the world of public health, a field that touches all of our lives whether we realize it or not! A lot of people think that public health is just about infectious diseases, but really it includes our legal and healthcare systems, climate change, policing, meditation, the food we eat, and the misinformation we see online.

Podcast news from Podnews

Spotlight

Paranormal Pajama Party podcast cover art

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.

More podcast-related newsletters you’ll love

Beyond the PodcastEach wednesday we send you an interview with an industry-leading business person who integrates podcasting into their success story.
Podcast DeliveryThere are lots of great podcasts out there but they’re not always easy to find. Leave it to us – subscribe today and get your first podcast recommendation on Monday.