3rd of May

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights a new exhibition at New York’s apexart titled “The Permanent Way.” The show looks at the continuing impact of the railroads on the way American artists look at landscape. The exhibition is on view through July 28.

My guests are Brian Sholis, who curated the show, and Mark Ruwedel, a photographer who is included in the exhibition and whose “Westward the Course of Empire” series spotlighted the continuing physical presence of the railroad in the West. Sholis’s essay for “The Permanent Way” is available (for free) here.

This picture of Ruwedel’s, Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific #17 is not in “The Permanent Way,” but is on view now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in the museum’s third-floor, permanent collection photography galleries. Ruwedel and I discuss images such as this one on this week’s program, including where the heck the railroad tracks — which would have run across the top of these bridge supports — disappeared to. (You can see a larger version of the picture here and more of Ruwedel’s work in SFMOMA’s collection here.)

When Ruwedel and I discuss this picture on the program, he explains the origins of his attraction to 19th-century railway cuts and how they helped instigate his interest in the series that would become “Westward the Course of Empire.”

Ruwedel is a California-based photographer whose work frequently examines the ways in which Americans have impacted the land in the American West. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and more. The book related to the project discussed on this week’s show,“Westward the Course of Empire,” was published in 2008 by the Yale University Press.

To download the program directly to your PC or mobile device, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can see images of the artworks discussed on this week’s program here.