LARB Radio Hour

A double header show on sculpture, public art, communal space, and gaps and omissions in American history. First, Kate Wolf speaks to Hamza Walker, co-curator of "Monuments," an exhibition currently on view at the  Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and The Brick. The show presents a series of decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities across the US alongside contemporary pieces by Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kara Walker, Julie Dash and more. Next, Kate is joined by legendary artist Senga Nengudi to discuss a new career-spanning book of her work, "Populated Air." Published in conjunction with Nengudi's exhibition at Dia Beacon, the book charts the many forms of her practice, including performance, sculpture, dance, and poetry. Nengudi talks about collaboration and her role in the Studio Z collective; being someone who relishes in "thinking" things rather than "making" them; organizing a performance under an LA freeway; and following her own intuition. She is joined by the curator of the Dia exhibition, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer Lauren Rothery to discuss her novel Television, which follows an aging movie star named Verity, his on and off lover Helen, and Phoebe a screenwriter and filmmaker. One day, on a whim, Verity decides to hold a lottery, giving away his earnings from a massive superhero movie to one lucky filmgoer. Rothery discusses the relationship between failure and success, the current state of Hollywood and why she thinks television is a good metaphor for romance.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Caroline Fraser about her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Taking an ecological approach to true crime, the book explores how decades of industrial pollution from large smelting plants in the Pacific Northwest may have shaped the social and environmental conditions that coincided with an unusually high number of serial killers in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, including Ted Bundy, Randall Woodfield, and others. Fraser discusses how she came to draw connections between environmental contamination and these terrifying killers, while also considering the wider human costs of unchecked corporate power and deregulation on vulnerable communities.

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer and author Susan Orlean, whose latest book is Joyride: A Memoir. In Joyride, Orlean recounts how she became a writer: the strokes of luck, as well as the ambition and talent that led her from alt-weeklies to Esquire, Vogue and The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992. Orlean has written essays and books that have since become classics of contemporary narrative nonfiction like The Orchid Thief (which inspired the film Adaptation), Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, The Library Book as well as many others. Here she discusses her life and career, her curiosity, her approach to change and opportunity, as well as the state of journalism today.

This week, we are revisiting our episode with photographer and writer Sally Mann about her book, Art Work: On the Creative Life. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Mann, whose book describes her path to becoming an artist and provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes selections from Mann's rich archive of photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann's advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it's a job like any other: you have to work at it.