Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

An interview with Michael Armitage about his unique use of material and color, and his singular approach to narrative on the occasion of his major retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Titled The Promise of Change, the show is presented concurrently with the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and on view through January 10, 2027.

Armitage is also the founder of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a non-profit visual art space dedicated to the growth and preservation of contemporary art in East Africa and a participant in In Minor Keys at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, on view through November 22, 2026.

Learn more at the Palazzo Grassi website: https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/en/michael-armitage-promise-change

Image: Michael Armitage, Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024 (detail)

© Michael Armitage

A conversation with artist Rachel Harrison and art historian Alex Kitnick on the occasion of a once-in-a-generation retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Alex Kitnick teaches art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. 

Rachel Harrison is a Brooklyn-based artist.

Learn more about the exhibition at MoMA.org.

Art historian Lisa Saltzman discusses Walter Benjamin’s final days in Paris before his suicide in 1940 and the network of intellectuals who saved his most prized possessions from World War II, including the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History. 

The exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through July 26, 2026. It traces the Swiss-German artist’s departure from the Bauhaus and his experience throughout the political upheaval of the 1930s prior to his death in 1940, providing a new basis for understanding his sociopolitical perspective and commitment to artistic freedom. 

Lisa Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her current book project, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores how one prescient passage from Walter Benjamin’s posthumously published writings came to transform his most cherished possession—an idiosyncratic little Paul Klee drawing of an angel—into the "angel of history," a postwar icon of impotent witness to historical catastrophe.

Helen speaks to Rachel Hunter Himes, author of the essay “Black Block” in Triple Canopy, about the long history of black artists underserved by white critics, museums’ moral and political responsibility to the public, and more.

Rachel Hunter Himes is an art writer, museum educator, and PhD candidate at Columbia University.

Read “Black Block” here: https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/black-block?ui.header=true

Award-winning filmaker Todd Haynes and his longtime collaborator, film producer Christine Vachon, discuss their thirty-year creative partnership, from the emergence of the new queer cinema to the culture wars of the nineties. 

In 1987, Haynes directed the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. His first feature film, Poison, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. After Safe, which featured Julianne Moore in a breakthrough role, he conjured David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine, then paid homage to German director Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven. Haynes had six actors play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. He directed the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce, then returned to feature films with Carol, Wonderstruck, Dark Waters, and the documentary The Velvet Underground, followed by the feature film May December. 

Christine Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award winner who co-founded the powerhouse Killer Films with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over three decades, the company has produced more than one hundred films, including some of the most celebrated and important American independent features. Recent releases include Todd Haynes’s May December (Netflix), starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and Celine Song’s Past Lives (A24), which marks her first Oscar nomination in the Best Picture category.