Art Works Podcast

Chair Maria Rosario Jackson looks back at her first year leading the Arts Endowment and shares her ideas, plans, and initiatives for the year ahead. She discusses the philosophy that guides her vision for the NEA: "artful lives" and "arts In all" and reflects upon her travel throughout the country meeting with artists and arts administrators as well as local and civic leaders. The chair also notes the NEA's collaborations with other federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as a partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chair Jackson also discusses the NEA's Equity Action Plan that builds on the agency’s work with community engagement, a recently announced pilot program that helps increase arts opportunities to underserved communities, and the agency's expanding role as a national resource on many fronts for the arts sector. Let us know what you think about Art Works—email us at [email protected].

With her second novel “The Taste of Sugar,” Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. It tells the story of small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism and upended by the 1898 US Invasion and the devastating 1899 hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Vera’s protagonists, Valentina and Vicente, join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations where they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange land. In this podcast, Vera talks about her life as a storyteller, her need to write a book that explored the history of Puerto Rico—a history most people don’t know—her meticulous research and her determination to get that history right, and the deep impact of colonization on the island. She also discusses her own struggle to find herself in books when she was growing up in Chicago, her sense that she was always living in two worlds, in two languages, and embracing that in her writing which moves fluently between Spanish and English.

In this podcast, 2023 National Heritage Fellow “Little Joe” Hernández describes his musical journey, explaining how his culture, family, and personal experiences shaped his legendary style. Coming from a musical family, he took the traditional Mexican songs he grew up hearing and blended them with jazz, country, rock 'n roll, and blues to create a distinctive voice in Tejano music. He discusses his transition from a shy boy to the front Hispanic Hisman of Little Joe and the Latinaires—later Little Joe and La Familia—as well as his time in California and the explosion of Latin jazz, the great significance of the Chicano Movement on his music, his concerts for the United Farm Workers Union, and his return to Temple, Texas, to raise his family. He sheds light on the band's compositions and collaborations, indicating how they honed their distinctive sound over time.

Hernández also discusses the profound emotional connection music can forge, allowing artists and audiences to bond over shared feelings and experiences, his collaborations with Willie Nelson for Farm Aid, his five Grammy Awards, his longevity in the music business, and the way the music preserves, expands, and celebrates Chicano culture.

Author and MIT physicist Dr Alan Lightman is the co-writer and host of the new PBS series “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.” In this podcast, Dr. Lightman discusses the experience that led to him to write the book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, why he agreed to develop the book into a series, his explorations with scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders around the question: how do we find meaning in an age of science. He also discusses his own dual trajectory—a student who won both science awards and poetry prizes, a man who has had two successful careers as a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist, (his best-selling novel Einstein’s Dreams puts the readers inside Albert Einstein’s mind imagining possible worlds as he discovers the theory of relativity), the similarities between scientific and artistic creativity, the aesthetics that can drive scientific inquiry, the role of art as a meaning-maker, and the artistry and collaboration involved in making the series Searching.

John Maeda: designing at the intersection of art and technology.