The NewCrits Podcast

About The NewCrits Podcast

This is what critical care for the arts sounds like. Meaningful conversations on creative practice and the conditions shaping artistic life today. Tune in on the second Thursday of every month for SPENT with Ajay Kurian, our series on creative burnout and breakthrough, and on the fourth Thursday for The Forum, our recorded artist talks. Subscribe today at newcrits.substack.com or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also join our community for transcripts and archival access via the Substack app or watch on YouTube. newcrits.substack.com (https://newcrits.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

with Ajay Kurian

Category

arts · arts

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

1 Apr 2024

Latest episode

27 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

31 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Oct 2026

   The/Forum 26 | Kevin Beasley

   Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Kevin Beasley, the recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2026 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (congrats, Kevin!). Beasley's sculpture, sound, and drawing hold together histories that rarely share a room. At the Whitney Museum in 2018, Beasley’s A View of a Landscape had a cotton gin motor whirred silently inside a soundproof vitrine: its noise set loose and transformed by collaborators in the listening room next door.Through this conversation, Beasley separates the responsibility of a Black artist from the expectations placed on one by landing on the core values of community care. He explains why the gestures that matter most to him are the ones he can never replicate and how thirty years from now, he’d like to run a marathon. In a way, he’s already running one. 00:00 – Episode Preview 00:58 – Introduction to Kevin Beasley 03:39 – Sport Utility, Marshawn Lynch, and artistic vulnerability 07:33 – Playfulness and the pressures of the art world 10:40 – Football, violence, and material experimentation 15:10 – Automotive design and the origins of working with resin 18:54 – Crushing a Cadillac: Family, identity, and American history 25:43 – Childhood, drawing, and early artistic influences 31:58 – From automotive design to fine art 37:17 – Protecting yourself and finding mentorship as an artist 43:30 – A View of a Landscape and the Whitney exhibition 48:10 – The cotton gin motor, memory, and sound 55:46 – Storytelling, abstraction, and accessibility 58:09 – Multiple entry points into a work of art 01:03:53 – Identity, contradiction, and embracing complexity 01:05:47 – Kevin's hopes for the next thirty years 01:07:52 – Audience Q&A: Landscape and the act of drawing 01:12:55 – Responsibility versus expectation for Black artists 01:17:53 – Artistic freedom, core values, and social pressures 01:22:00 – Performance, choreography, and capturing moments in time Full transcript available soon on Substack 🎧 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe (https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   8 Oct 2026

   SPENT Episode Seven | Stephanie Wambugu

   Ajay Kurian sits down with writer Stephanie Wambugu, whose debut novel Lonely Crowds arrived last year to considerable acclaim, for a conversation that begins with the anxiety of ambition and opens into questions of friendship, artistic survival, and what it costs to keep working in a world where someone else's book lands on the shelf every Tuesday.Wambugu, the youngest child of Kenyan immigrants, talks about the novel's two Black women artists coming up in the 1990s New York art world, and the friendship at its center: one woman who decides very early to make herself secondary to the other. She and Kurian trace how Ruth and Maria felt real enough to believe in, why Wambugu finds them more self-sabotaging the further she gets from the book, and why friendships can wound as lastingly as romances while having little language to describe the damage. She explains why she set the book in the 1990s: a friend's thesis on the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which aimed to put white artists in the minority for the first time, struck her as a moment of hope that never fully materialized.The conversation also turns to the habit of reading Black writers sociologically, whatever the work is actually about, and to what Wambugu calls the defanging of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin into totems of feel-good inspiration. Along the way, Kurian shares the story of a gifted artwork surfacing at an Ohio flea market, and Wambugu reflects on how watching books arrive and quietly disappear at a bookstore shaped her sense of ambition and impermanence, and taught her how rare staying power really is. 00:40 — Introduction to Stephanie Wambugu and Lonely Crowds 03:32 — Family, immigration, and choosing a creative life 07:22 — Altered states, experimentation, and transcending the self 11:40 — Dreams, the unconscious, and writing fiction 16:19 — Creating Ruth and Maria: believing in fictional characters 19:26 — Codependency, boundaries, and the psychology of Lonely Crowds 20:41 — The novel’s circular structure and ambiguous ending 23:43 — Turning real experiences into fiction 26:57 — Friendship, emotional wounds, and the influence of Sula 31:18 — Protecting one’s inner life and maintaining boundaries 35:47 — Ambition, responsibility, and knowing your limits 38:08 — The single-mindedness required to pursue art and writing 40:29 — Publishing, professional anxiety, and sustaining momentum 44:51 — Why Lonely Crowds takes place in the 1990s art world 46:08 — The 1993 Whitney Biennial, representation, and artistic opportunity 53:19 — Race, sociological readings, and the limitations of criticism 57:31 — Jazz, Thelonious Monk, and navigating white institutions 1:00:25 — Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and the simplification of literary figures 1:03:53 — Why contemporary criticism should match the quality of the work 1:05:24 — Closing rapid-fire questions Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe (https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   22 Sept 2026

   The Forum 25 | Alex Da Corte

   Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Alex Da Corte, whose recreations, personas and total immersion into figures from Marcel Duchamp to Eminem have made him one of the most distinct and prolific voices working today. So much so that he has been tasked with co-curating the Whitney Museum’s survey on Roy Lichtenstein with Meg Olni, opening on October 11th, 2026.The conversation begins with the sandwich as a transgressive object — central enough to his practice that the title of one show, As Is Wet Hoagie, is tattooed on his arm. It morphs into reflections on dressing up as Michael Myers to stalk his own parents, and lands with the strange intimacy of inhabiting someone else's body to better understand your own.Da Corte traces his practice back to his first video, made when he was thirty, living with his parents, and costuming himself out of grocery-store flour and coffee — a far cry from the eight to fifteen hours of prosthetics his work now demands. He describes the disorienting experience of being mistaken for Eminem by a stranger — and, for a jet-lagged moment, mistaking himself for Slim Shady too — an accident that led him down a decade-long road of playing the rapper. He and Kurian also discuss his recreation of a lost Paul Thek sculpture and his one-time-only performance as Duchamp at the Met.Throughout the conversation, Da Corte reflects on how objects and images shift as memory erodes and on what happens when you finally meet your own fantasy. Kurian, at the close, calls Da Corte a sort of “pop doula,” and the two end by giving thanks to not just one another, but also to the wind. 00:00 – Introduction to Alex Da Corte 04:00 – Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2 08:34 – Costuming, puppetry, and the body 11:17 – Illness, identity, and artistic practice 13:03 – The sandwich as a recurring motif 14:03 – As Is Wet Hoagie: Memory, fantasy, and fiction 19:19 – Religion, transformation, and memory 22:45 – Dementia and the architecture of memory 24:06 – Parade: Storefronts and nostalgia 28:40 – Letter writing, waiting, and time 30:06 – The Pink Panther and inhabiting characters 35:02 – Becoming Eminem 38:49 – Stalking his parents as Michael Myers 43:03 – Reconstruction as an act of love 45:55 – Recreating Paul Thek’s The Tomb 50:31 – Embodiment and becoming Marcel Duchamp 53:26 – Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney 56:54 – Art, friendship, and personal transformation 01:01:05 – Giving thanks to the wind 01:02:48 – Audience Q&A 01:03:18 – Easternsports: Collaboration and production 01:07:48 – Acting, improvisation, and embodiment 01:11:20 – Artistic confidence, permission, and ego 01:14:01 – Closing Full transcript available on Substack 🎧 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe (https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

13 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

12 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 22 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

19

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

Contact The NewCrits Podcast

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  A brush with...

• 

  Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

• 

  The Art Angle

• 

  Talk Art

• 

  The Great Women Artists

• 

  The Week in Art

Questions about The NewCrits Podcast