What if we reimagined everything in culture, from painting to patronage? Tune in to The Art World: What If…?! to hear leading thinkers, creators and innovators in art rethink the system, exploring the consequences with wit, wisdom and humor.
Join art journalist Charlotte Burns and world-renowned art advisor Allan Schwartzman as they exclusively interview museum leaders, collectors and artists including MoMA director Glenn Lowry, Guggenheim deputy director Naomi Beckwith, non-profit leader Kemi Ilesanmi, curator Cecilia Alemani and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the director of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and many others over the course of the series.
From the team behind In Other Words and Hope & Dread, The Art World: What If…?! is brought to you by Schwartzman& for Art& and produced by Studio Burns.
In this episode, Allan Schwartzman sits down with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, ahead of the November opening of the museum’s first purpose-built home. Rising seven stories and spanning 82,000 square feet on 125th Street, the new building is rooted in the aspirations and vision of the artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents who founded the institution in 1968.
One of the most transformative museum leaders of any era, Golden reflects on her career—from groundbreaking exhibitions at the Whitney straight out of college, to the mentors who shaped her, to her 25 years at the Studio Museum. She speaks about leading an institution that is at once hyperlocal and hyperglobal, and about building the structures and spaces that nurture generations of artists, curators, and thinkers.
This new Studio Museum stands a testament to possibility, asking: What if we imagined and created the spaces necessary for art and ideas to truly flourish?
Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com (http://artandschwartzman.substack.com/).
Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.
25 Sept 2025TRANSCRIPT
The Art World: What If...?! with Sin Wai Kin
Artist Sin Wai Kin constructs fantasy worlds to show how storytelling doesn't just reflect reality—it creates it. Through characters like ‘The Storyteller’, and works that present us with newsreaders in parallel universes or boy band members embodying the marketed self, their practice threads the line between frightening and funny, stretching language to places where it becomes both meaningless and profound.
In this conversation with host Charlotte Burns, Sin Wai Kin talks about their creative process, their hopes of transforming the personal into the universal and the power of art and imagination to create spaces of freedom.
Through the universes they create, Sin Wai Kin explores time, identity, and consciousness— inviting us to question the binary of reality and fantasy, asking: what if multiple things can be true at once?
What if we could imagine different ways of being in the world?
Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com (http://artandschwartzman.substack.com).
Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.
11 Sept 2025TRANSCRIPT
The Art World: What If...?! with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim
There is never just one way of seeing. And Nana Oforiatta-Ayim—writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder—has spent her career proving exactly that.
For Nana, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s critically acclaimed first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, art is not sealed off in white cubes but alive, porous, and connective.
In this episode, she opens up about the journey from proving worth to claiming inherent value in conversation with host Charlotte Burns. She speaks about the victories and challenges of her groundbreaking projects, including the Mobile Museum—which brings art into kiosks on street corners and tours it through local communities—and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia, which reorders and re-presents knowledge, narratives, and representations from across the African continent, the first of which launches this year.
Fifty years after critic John Berger cracked open the canon of art history with Ways of Seeing, Nana is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy of books. She speaks candidly about reimagining Berger’s radical gesture for our time, reckoning with the limits of Western paradigms, and building from indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.
What if the future of art looked more like a festival than a mausoleum?
Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.
Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.
Inside a recent episode
The Art World: What If...?! with Thelma Golden
Published 9 Oct 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] So we have a collection presentation and that presentation is accompanied by a collection handbook. So we publish a volume that presents 300 works from the collection, each interpreted through writing by 300 different curator scholars and writers and that publication will be available when we open. And so the combination of these two projects has given us a way to look at the collection a new and to open it up in this form for the opening. So will we be seeing the collection less chronologically or more thematically? It will be completely thematically throughout the building across several of the galleries in the building. […]
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