About Art

Bart van der Heide is Director of Museion in Bolzano, Italy. Before joining Museion, Bart held leadership and curatorial positions at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstverein München. Throughout his career, he has championed museums as places where contemporary art, civic life, and community come together.
This conversation explores museums as spaces of imagination, belonging, and public trust. Bart reflects on the exhibition that transformed his life, what artists have taught him about leadership, and why institutions must evolve from within to meet the needs of both their communities and the people who work inside them.
Together Bart and Heidi Zuckerman discuss contemporary art, organizational culture, mutual aid, public responsibility, collective experience, and the evolving role of museums in shaping the future.
A thoughtful conversation about leadership, imagination, and why art continues to matter.

This week on About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with actor, writer, and artist Lisa Edelstein and artist Robert Russell.

Recorded as they celebrate their collaborative exhibition Palace in Time at the Skirball Cultural Center, this conversation explores partnership, artistic practice, Jewish ritual, memory, storytelling, and the ways we create meaning through the objects, relationships, and traditions that shape our lives.

Lisa discusses her evolution from actor to painter, drawing on family photographs to create intimate works that explore narrative, memory, and the Jewish experience. Robert reflects on his paintings of everyday objects, the sacredness of attention, and how ordinary things become vessels for history, devotion, and remembrance.
Together they speak about creativity, discipline, vulnerability, seeing, collecting, marriage, and the experience of building individual artistic practices while supporting one another's creative lives.

Lisa Edelstein is an actor, writer, and artist whose paintings transform family photographs into deeply personal explorations of memory, identity, and storytelling. Her work has been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery, Anat Ebgi, GAVLAK, and is included in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Robert Russell is a conceptual painter whose work explores memory, mortality, iconography, and ritual through paintings of everyday objects. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Anat Ebgi Gallery.

A conversation about attention, making meaning, and the ways art helps us understand ourselves and one another.

Daisy Murray Holman is Executive Director of the Artists Legacy Foundation.
She and Zuckerman explore the often unseen work of supporting artists beyond the present tense: archives, artists’ estates, preservation, catalogues raisonnés, and the emotional and structural care required to sustain artistic legacies over time.
Murray Holman also reflects on the legacy of her mother, painter Elizabeth Murray, and what it means to inherit not only artwork, but responsibility.
A conversation about care, stewardship, continuity, and why artists matter enough to protect across generations.

This week on About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with artist Jennifer Guidi.
This episode was recorded live before an audience at the Orange County Museum of Art in conjunction with And so it is., Guidi's solo exhibition curated by Heidi Zuckerman.
Born in Redondo Beach, California, Guidi received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
Known for her luminous paintings that draw inspiration from nature, meditation, ritual, and the California landscape, Guidi has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in repetition, mark-making, color, and the exploration of consciousness.
In this conversation, Heidi and Jennifer discuss artistic practice, meditation, motherhood, ritual, silence, creativity, nature, and the relationship between awareness and intention. They also explore the role of repetition in art, the influence of landscape on memory and perception, collecting, community, and the lifelong process of discovering one's own visual language.
Together they reflect on inspiration, failure, trust, surrender, and the ways creativity can help us connect more deeply with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
A thoughtful conversation about art, awareness, and what it means to devote a life to making.

This week on About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with Diane Brown, founder of RxART.
For more than twenty-five years, Diane has worked at the intersection of contemporary art and healthcare, commissioning leading artists to create projects for hospitals and medical facilities across the United States. Through RxART, artists including Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Rashid Johnson, Laura Owens, Rob Pruitt, Will Cotton, Mickalene Thomas, and many others have transformed clinical environments into spaces that support healing, imagination, and human connection.
In this conversation, they discuss the origins of RxART, the relationship between art and healthcare, public engagement, philanthropy, empathy, access, and the growing body of research demonstrating the positive impact of art on physical and emotional well-being.
They also explore childhood, fear, resilience, collaboration, neuroplasticity, the role of environment in shaping experience, and the ways artists help us navigate uncertainty through creativity, beauty, and wonder.
At the heart of the conversation is a simple but profound idea: art is not separate from life. It has the capacity to comfort, connect, transform, and change how we experience the world around us.
A thoughtful and inspiring conversation about healing, imagination, and why art matters.