Art History 101

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They wer...Show More

Show Notes Nate DiMeo was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Artist in Residence for 2016/2017. He produced 8 episodes inspired by the collection and by the museum itself. This is the eigth episode of ...Show More

Nate DiMeo is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Artist in Residence for 2016/2017. He is producing ten pieces inspired by the collection and by the museum itself. This is the fifth episode of that resi...Show More

When Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was placed in the Stedelijk museum it was meant to be provocative, but one reaction that it received was so intense, so violent,...Show More

In 1990, two thieves stole 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. We take a closer look what happened that night.

The Museum of Lost Objects traces the histories of 10 antiquities or cultural sites that have been destroyed or looted in Iraq and Syria. Since 2012, Aleppo - Syria's largest city - has been a key ba...Show More

We visit a place where the “black sheep” of the Guggenheim family went to be free. Francine Prose’s book is Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sig...Show More

Following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned famed architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh, to signal India’s rise on the ...Show More

Social Media is not just for modern folk. In ancient Pompeii, people also shared what they thought, who they met with, what they ate... It's just, they had to use different technology. For more inform...Show More

You can find Frida Kahlo's image all over the Bay Area. The Mexican painter lived in San Francisco for a little bit in the '30s and '40s with her husband, Diego Rivera. She became even more famous in...Show More

Once considered “the eighth wonder of the world,” the Amber Room was a treasure of kings and architectural marvel before being stolen by Nazis and lost to history. So…what happened? It all depends on ...Show More

Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. If it looks unreal because Vantab...Show More

How two well-respected New York art galleries sold more than $80 million in fake art. * *Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

In 1942, Lebanon’s National Museum opened in Beirut, celebrating the country’s golden age and inside, it housed some of the region’s most important artifacts. So when the Lebanese wa...Show More

Investors are pouring money into art, and a lot of it is disappearing into storage. We try to find out where the art goes, and why it goes there.

In this Slate Money mini-series, Felix Salmon will investigate SWAG -- Silver Wine Art Gold -- and other things people invest in that don’t have any cash flows.  This week, Felix sits down with Julia ...Show More

There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing tha...Show More

Edmonia Lewis was the first American woman of color to achieve international fame as a sculptor. Her 3,000-pound masterwork, “The Death of Cleopatra,” commemorated another powerful woman who broke wit...Show More

Music * We start off with Wien, by Labradford. * The guys head out to the work site to Piano 3, from Jon Brion's score to Synecdoche, New York. * Then we hear a bit of Metamorphosis by Vladamir Ussac...Show More

The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event was an opportunity to show the world that they were ...Show More

It’s been a year since Brazil’s National Museum burned down in a fire. Not only was its collection one of the most extraordinary in the world, but Brazil’s entire history ran through the museum. On th...Show More

Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair It’s this amazing collection of s...Show More

If the 1995 animated Disney film is your guide, Pocahontas was a free-spirited Native American heroine who sang to the wind. So why is she dressed like European royalty in her painting at the National...Show More

Alexander von Humboldt might not be a name you know, but you can bet you know his ideas. Back when the United States were a wee collection of colonies huddled on the eastern seaboard, colonists found ...Show More

In the Victorian era, plaster casts became a way to preserve important artifacts in 3-D. Now, virtual reality promises to preserve places and experiences. But who decides what gets preserved? And is t...Show More

Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ago they weren't seen as scary at all. Many of them ...Show More

To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim Museum...Show More

Instagram censors almost all photographs of female nipples on its platform. The impact of this policy is much larger than you might think, affecting both art and identity. Featuring: @raindovemodel @...Show More

Knut Kreuch was a 13-year-old schoolboy in 1979 when his town in East Germany was shaken by an audacious and baffling art heist. Five very old and valuable paintings were stolen from a museum within t...Show More

The day that Amy Sherald heard that she had been chosen to paint the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, she called her mom to tell her the news, and then she told her dog. But soon after,...Show More

Walking fish, knights fighting snails, murderous rabbits, mischievous monkeys, The images in the margins of many medieval manuscripts, both holy and secular, can be saintly and beautiful - but also pl...Show More

Christopher de Hamel discusses his recent book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which has just won the Wolfson History Prize. Meanwhile, we speak to Jonathan Ruffle, creator of the BBC Radio 4 dr...Show More

In the late 19th century, a painting titled The Roll Call, by a virtually unknown artist, took England by storm. But after that brilliant first effort, the artist all but disappeared. Why? And what do...Show More

An escape from war-torn Germany. Lavish dinners with Hollywood royalty. A Swedish baron and a dime-store heiress: we explore the long journey of a Van Gogh still life — and what it says about the real...Show More

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts. Help support this show and the network that makes it possible by making a donation today....Show More

“To those who served to save a little of the beauty of this world.” – epigraph, memoirs of Rose Valland   Surprise! I know I said I was done with Women At War, but then I im...Show More

A look at the most famous - and most mysterious - animal kingdom in French history. SHOW NOTES: http://www.thelandofdesire.com/2017/07/27/episode-29-lascaux/

Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby became a global star with her Netflix special Nanette. It’s a remarkable piece of work, and it does what great art is supposed to do: Give you a sense, however fleeti...Show More

Greg Jenner digs into the history and mystery surrounding Stonehenge. Is it really the symbol of fertility and scene of sacrifice it’s portrayed to be, and what part of Stonehenge is the henge exactly...Show More

When it comes to tarot cards, there is an artistry to designing a world of emperors, fools, priestesses, hermits and other iconic figures. But few people know about Pamela Colman Smith, the woman who ...Show More

Seventy years ago, India and Pakistan became independent nations - but at a cost. People and lands were partitioned, and a once shared heritage was broken apart. Kanishk Tharoor explores the tussle fo...Show More

Ahead of her new BBC Two series The Shock of the Nude, classicist Mary Beard discusses some of the thorny issues surrounding the naked body in western art over the centuries. Later on in the episode s...Show More

How a toy tiger became the symbol of a struggle between India and its former British colonisers

What if your doorstop was evidence of brutal mass murder and wholesale theft?

Cobalt has been hoodwinking people since the day it was pried from the earth. Named after a pesky spirit from German folklore, trickery is embedded in its name.   In 1940s Netherlands, cobalt lived up...Show More

How Galileo’s training in art helped topple the ancient Greek dogma about the moon... For more on Sam's New York Times-bestselling books, see http://samkean.com Help keep this podcast going by beco...Show More

Santa Muerte. Holy Death. To outsiders, she's become a symbol of cartel driven violence in Mexico—a "narco-saint," worshiped only by traffickers, and venerated at crime scenes. To her followers, she's...Show More

In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion dolls. It might seem like an odd thing to fund, but the fant...Show More

Don't believe everything you see. Art, science and the curious making of fake news.

Sherlock Holmes is known for approaching all mysteries with cool logic - and yet when his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw photographs taken by two young girls purporting to show real life fairies a...Show More

The educational toys that changed the world

Art crime is booming and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings (or at least some very realistic forgeries) are the loot du jour. Reporter Brett Sokol and a guy who used to forge Basquiats explain. This epi...Show More

In 1980s Manhattan, a young Cuban artist named Ana Mendieta made a name for herself as a rising star in the art world. Her turbulent marriage to the older and well-established sculptor Carl Andre rais...Show More

There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic.   ...Show More

In 2013, GBH’s Antiques Roadshow appraiser John Buxton met a guest claiming to have an ancient Mayan carving. Buxton’s gut said this was a fake but the guest had paperwork proving otherwise. Is it pos...Show More