Alexander Dumbadze
January 27, 2026

1. The Headmaster Ritual, The Smiths, 1985
   
2. Save It for Later, The English Beat, 1982
   
3. Ceremony, New Order, 1987
   
4. O Superman, Laurie Anderson, 1982
   
5. Uncertain Smile, The The, 1983
   
6. Freak Scene, Dinosaur Jr., 1988
   
7. Death or Glory, The Clash, 1979
   
8. What the World Is Waiting For, The Stone Roses, 1989
   
9. Star Sign    , Teenage Fanclub    , 1991
   
10. Rattlesnakes, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions    , 1984
    
11. Anesthesia, Luna, 1992
    
12. 6’1”, Liz Phair, 1993
    
13. Miss Modular, Stereolab, 1997
    
14. That's Entertainment, The Jam, 1980
    
15. The State I Am In, Belle and Sebastian, 1996
    
16. Sooner Or Later, The Feelies, 1991
    
17. Corona, Minutemen, 1984
    
18. Our Lips Are Sealed, The Go-Go’s, 1981

Alexander Dumbadze is Associate Professor of Art History. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (University of Chicago Press, 2013; paperback 2015) as well as co-editor and co-author of Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; Korean translation, 2015). He is currently writing Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky. His essays and criticism have been published in a variety of national and international publications. A recipient of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Dumbadze was a Visiting Professor of Art History at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis in 2012. He is also a co-founder and former president of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians. He teaches courses on contemporary art, theory, and historiography.

Sam Anderson Returns!
January 13, 2026

Artist Sam Anderson returns with a new selection of music that continues our journey into the world of synthesizers that started with her first appearance in 2021.

Anderson breaks down every track, giving us an in-depth history of the instruments, contexts, and the artists who made them. She focuses especially on legendary pioneers of synth/electronic music like Suzanne Ciani, Shiho Yabuki, and Raymond Scott.

Anderson’s most recent project started when she discovered a draft of a one-act play written in the 1970s by her mother, the late actress Conchata Ferrell. Using notes and journals that she inherited as well as other resources from the time, Anderson finished the play, The Wolf Is an Endangered Species. It's about five women in a theater company working to put on a play. Themes of relationships, competition, and the difficulties for women of working in a male-dominated field are still very relevant today. In December, she produced, directed, and starred in a production of the show at 15 Orient gallery in New York City, and in the spring she plans to produce it in Los Angeles.

We discuss Anderson’s mysterious and evocative sculptural work, including her pieces E Number 1-11 and TV from her 2017 show “The Park” at Sculpture Center in New York City. TV comprised a weathervane positioned outside the museum that determined the soundtrack for the gallery below; one of eight pieces composed by Anderson and her partner would play depending on which way the wind blew. It is emblematic of Anderson's concerns with space, sound, story, and fate.

In this music-forward episode, we talk about the psychoactive properties of sound and how it can be used for better or for worse. In Anderson’s playlist, it is used for good!


Listen on Mixcloud here

1. At The Store, Ernest Hood, 2019
   
2. Footprints on the Moon, Johnny Harris, 1969
   
3. The Inspector Clouseau Theme, Henry Mancini, 1982
   
4. Thatcherie (from "Inner Space",) Sven Libaek, 2006
   
5. Ride a White Horse (Tiny Surf,) Sven Libaek, 2013
   
6. Le carnaval des animaux, R. 125: VII. Aquarium; Camille Saint-Saëns, Pascal Rogé, Cristina Ortiz, London Sinfonietta, Charles Dutoit; 1980
   
7. Baby Elephant Walk, Henry Mancini, 1962
   
8. Track Of The Cat, Pram, 2003
   
9. Tomoshibi, Shiho Yabuki, 2018
   
10. The Seventh Wave - Sailing Away, Suzanne Ciani, 1982
    
11. Pompeii 76 A.D., Gail Laughton, 2013
    
12. Deep Distance, Ashra, 1977
    
13. Sleepy Time, Raymond Scott, 1995
    
14. Tempo Block, Raymond Scott, 1995
    
15. Noonday Yellows, Ernest Hood, 2022
    

Sam Anderson is a sculptor whose work explores the fragile interplay between memory and the material world, as much through language as through form. Her rigorously arranged, often minimal compositions combine figures and objects that feel both intimately familiar and unsettlingly existential. Using materials such as clay, metal, plastic, resin, reclaimed wood, and fabric alongside everyday objects, Anderson constructs scenes that oscillate between the poetic and the uncanny, humor and pathos. Drawing from the visual language of American literature and cinema, personal history, and the slippages of linguistic play, Anderson’s work probes how meaning is constructed and deconstructed. Her sculptures inhabit the sad, often absurd space between expectation and desire, functioning like prototypes—she believes the prototype of an idea is often more sincere and open-ended than its final result. By reconfiguring interchangeable, everyday materials, she uncovers the latent narratives embedded within the mundane. Bio courtesy Derosia

Pam Lins
December 16, 2025

The wonderful Pam Lins joins us to share some favorite studio songs and talk about “Laterness,” her two-person show with Roger White at Uffner and Liu gallery in New York City through January 10, 2026. The title of the exhibition came from a conversation the artists had in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory: is it too late for action? How can one make work that is both an inflection and reflection of the political moment? What does it mean to be a maker situated in history?

The exhibition features collage works by White and sculptural floor works by Lins comprising quasi-modernist forms made from USPS flat-rate shipping boxes and ceramic birds inspired by John James Audubon’s (imaginary) “Mystery Birds.” A collaborative project by Lins and White inspired by Lins’ research into visionary architect and artist Frederick Kiesler forms the second part of the show. We dive deep into the role that investigations into history and archives play in her work, particularly the idea that bringing concepts and forms from the past into the present can illuminate the political and aesthetic economies of both times.

Looking at past exhibitions and bodies of work as well as past lives—a jeweler!—Lins charts her idiosyncratic relationship to craft, form, subject matter, and the complicated histories of sculpture and painting. With characteristic midwestern humility and wit, Lins talks about other collaborations, cultivating mushrooms, the vagaries of scale, the Vkhutemas school in 1920s Moscow, and whether or not sculpture is based on lying. Truly an enjoyable conversation with a singular artist!

1. Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem Of World Contact Day), Carpenters, 1977
   
2. More Than This, 10,000 Maniacs, 1997
   
3. (Theme From) Valley of the Dolls, Dionne Warwick, 1968
   
4. The Letter, Arthur Russell, 2004
   
5. Everybody's Talkin' - From "Midnight Cowboy", Harry Nilsson, 1968
   
6. La La Love You, Pixies, 1989
   
7. Everybody's Talkin', Iggy Pop, 2022
   
8. Let Love Flow On, Sonya Spence, 1981
   
9. Fast Car, Tracy Chapman, 1988
   
10. Killing Me Softly With His Song, Fugees, Ms. Lauryn Hill, 1996
    
11. Silly Games, Janet Kay, 2016
    
12. Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), Beyoncé, 2008
    
13. Superstar, Sonic Youth, 1994
    
14. Rockin' Back Inside My Heart, Julee Cruise, 1989
    
15. TNT, Tortoise, 1998
    
16. These Days, Cat Power, 2022
    
17. I'm Easy, Keith Carradine, 1975
    
18. Women of the World: Take Over, Jim O'Rourke, 2025
    
19. Jet Plane, Sonya Spence, 1978
    
20. Waterfalls, TLC, 1994
    
21. I Say a Little Prayer, Aretha Franklin, 1968
    
22. Let the River Run, Carly Simon, 1989

Pam Lins (b. Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY in 1995. The artist has been in institutional exhibitions at venues including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2022); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2017); White Columns, New York, NY (2015); the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (2015); The Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2012); The Suburban, Chicago, IL (2012); the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2012); CCS Bard Galleries, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY (2012); Artists Space, New York, NY (2005); and the Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2004). Lins has recently worked with artist-run spaces including Room 3557, Los Angeles, CA (2024) and was recently honored at the the KAJE Annual Benefit (2025). The artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, The Anonymous Was A Woman Award, The Brown University Howard Foundation Fellowship, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award and the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2007, Pam Lins and Trisha Baga cofounded Ceramics Club, an ever-evolving, direct action organization that brings artists together to collaborate and raise money for a variety of progressive causes. Ceramics Club will partner with White Columns for an upcoming benefit exhibition in November 2025. Lins has held teaching positions at The Cooper Union, The Milton Avery MFA Program at Bard College, and Princeton University where she is currently the Interim Director or the Visual Arts Program. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. Lins lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Meredith James
December 2, 2025

The charming artist Meredith James joins the Selection Committee Radio Show to discuss her current show “The Exit” at Marinaro Gallery in New York through December 13, 2025.

In 2019, James became intrigued by a building near her home in TriBeCa. After some finagling she managed to get inside and take some pictures of an abandoned office space—designed for efficiency with low cubicles and drop ceilings—which eventually led to the work in “The Exit.” Depicted in each of the four photographs in the exhibition is a mirror, and reflected in each of the mirrors is another mirror. James then translated the resulting mesh of nested spaces into four exquisitely produced dioramas which represent the reflected images in a fractured, uncanny three dimensions. Each one is a kind of ontological puzzle box, with the viewer trying to piece together the logic of the space and missing, like a vampire, her own reflection.

James’ focus on the relationship between image, space, and experience is evident in her earlier work as well. Day Shift, 2009, features a security guard who watches a closed-circuit monitor of what looks like the same office she is sitting in. She leaves the office and walks through whatever space the work is shown in (James reshoots this part of the video every time the work is shown in a new place) and goes out to her truck—where she climbs through the back window into a miniaturized version of the office space. The video is then displayed on the closed-circuit monitor in the miniaturized office space installed in the gallery, retranslating the logic of cinema and dreams back into the real world.

Her work often incorporates these kinds of practical effects as well as optical illusions that push questions of scale and perspective, and she insistently uses only analog effects. We discuss many more of James’ pieces, including her large-scale public sculptures, and what it means for people to interact with her work, particularly people outside the art world.

James is a sculptor at heart, and we talk about her belief from childhood that objects can carry with them not only the history of their use and the lives they have touched, but also past time itself. In that sense her work doesn’t just create visual and conceptual loops, but time loops as well.

Inspired by sources as varied as Maya Deren, Chantal Ackerman, walks around the city, and the cartoon Adventure Time, James’ work always contains a sincere meditation on the time and space of living. Along with a playlist of very personal songs, Meredith brings an illuminating conversation about her kaleidoscopic point of view.

1. Seven Days: Tuesday Afternoon, Gregory Spears, Pedja Muzijevic, 2025
   
2. Rain, The Clientele, 2000
   
3. (I Can’t Seem to) Make You Mine, The Clientele, 2005
   
4. Place To Be, Nick Drake, 1972
   
5. The Devil Is Loose, Asha Puthli, 1976
   
6. I'll Be Your Mirror, The Velvet Underground, 1967
   
7. Pillow Talk, Sylvia, 1996 
   
8. Hey Cowboy, Lee Hazelwood & Nina Lizell, 1970
   
9. Happy New Year, Camera Obscura, 2001
   
10. By the Sea, Wendy & Bonnie, 1969
    
11. Time Adventure (feat. Olivia Olson, Niki Yang & Hynden Walch), Adventure Time, 2018
    
12. Waving to You (feat. Rebecca Sugar), Adventure Time, 2018
    
13. Source Decay, The Mountain Goats, 2002
    
14. Another Girl Another Planet, The Only Ones, 2006
    
15. Granny, Vic Chesnutt, 2009
    
16. Charlie Zink, Bob Martin, 1972
    
17. Chelsea Hotel #2, Leonard Cohen, 2002
    
18. Every You Every Me, Placebo, 1998
    
19. Where Is My Mind?, Pixies, 1988
    
20. Clouds, Hiroshi Yoshimura, 2017

Meredith James completed her AB at Harvard University and her MFA at Yale University. She had a museum exhibition at the Queens Museum, NY and has had solo shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; LaMontange Gallery, Boston; and Marc Jancou, NY. She has installed major public art projects at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; The Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston; and Lieu Histrorique National Center-Brébeuf, Quebec City.