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This episode features ten contemporary African artists: Ibrahim el-Salahi, Beatrice Wanjiku, Eddy Kamuanga Illunga, Aida Muluneh, Yinka Shonibare, Dawit Petros, Hassan Hajjaj, Abdoulaye Konate, Billie Zangewa, and Nnenna Okore. These artists, who range in age, gender, country of origin, and medium, demonstrate the fecundity of the continent's often-overlooked artistic offerings. Whether they are dealing with identity, history, memory, or the nature of art and its role in society, their work is always intellectually and aesthetically appealing.

This episode we look at the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, whose photographs from the 1970s and 1980s challenged conventional ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Wry and witty, Ghirri's work took for its subject banal and quotidian scenes but rendered them in ways that make viewers stop and consider how photography can both depict and distort reality. First, though, here are the works from the Broad that I mentioned in the first part of the podcast. All images courtesy of the Broad's website, www.thebroad.org

This episode we briefly look at two exhibitions from New York this past summer -Scott Patt at Winston Wachter, and Jenny Morgan at Babcock Driscoll. Patt is an irreverent, clever painter of the idiosyncratic and the quotidian; his exhibition featured selections from his project to paint a new work every day. Morgan's paintings are hypnotic, Botticelli-meets-psychedelia portraits of herself, friends, and models that deal with themes of death, femininity, and motherhood.

This episode we discuss Irish photographer and filmmaker Richard Mosse. His work is instantly recognizable (and memorable), as he uses a discontinued film called Aerochrome, which turns vegetation a fantastical, psychedelic pink. He has used this film to capture the landscapes and denizens of the Congo, a region beset by turmoil and violence for decades. His work thus straddles the line between fine art and documentary photography, posing provocative questions for viewers who are seduced by the beauty of the images but forced to think about what they are actually admiring. Beguiling, conceptually rigorous, and an important document of an almost-invisible crisis, Mosse's work has elevated him to his status as one of today's most important artists. Follow along at ContemporaryArtPodcast.com Tweet us at @ContArtPodcast

Follow along with this episode at ContemporaryArtPodcast.com/shiva-aliabadi This episode we discuss the sculptures of Shiva Aliabadi, one of Los Angeles's most promising young artists. Aliabadi engages with the discourses of minimalism and post-minimalism to create works of stunning originality. She is particularly interested in material, allowing it to guide her process and inform her understanding of the work's function as an art object and as a conduit of memory and emotion. She mediates between a desire to create physical, permanent objects and to evoke the ephemeral and transitory. I was fortunate enough to converse with Aliabadi through email, so this podcast incorporates our conversation as well as my research and insights. Visit us on the web at ContemporaryArtPodcast.com

This episode we discuss the gorgeous, messy, complex abstract collage-paintings of Los Angeles-based painter Mark Bradford, who is considered one of the most talented and visionary artists working today. Bradford's work may appear abstract, but it conjures up topographies, cartographic landscapes, aerial photographs, and urban neighborhoods through their criss-crossing lines, grids, and demarcated spaces. Additionally, Bradford has done videos and installation work; together with the paintings, his work deals with the African American cultural and social experience, economies and exchange, and the relationship between public and private spaces. Visit us online at ContemporaryArtPodcast.com

This episode we look at the work of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose ephemeral, delicate, and meditative works both using and within nature itself, represent a particular type of Land Art or Earthwork. Goldsworthy's work is comprised of such "materials" as snow, leaves, stone, and twigs. They are often limited in duration and survive mostly in photographs and other documentation. His site-specific works utilize materials significant to the location itself. Visit us online at ContemporaryArtPodcast.com

This episode we look at the work of the emerging Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung, whose poetic and meditative installations, cyanotypes evoking the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, and photographs of the landscape have brought him much early acclaim.

This episode we discuss the paintings and videos of the esteemed Sarah Morris, one of the most well-known and critically acclaimed contemporary artists. The paintings and videos usually correspond with a particular city, such as Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, and Washington, D.C. Morris captures each city's unique dynamic, energy, and visual iconography in her bold geometric canvases and stark videos. She explores the intersection of capitalism, architecture, power, and spectacle, conveying through color and line the urban landscape.

This episode of the Contemporary Art Podcast we discuss the work of Ugo Rondinone, a Swiss artist whose oeuvre is incredibly diverse and expansive. Rondinone's video work, paintings, and sculptures seem to have little in common with each other, but upon closer examination, similar themes of the circularity of time, the ritualistic component of artmaking, and the resonance of the primitive and the spiritual abound. Most people know of Rondinone because of his charming, enigmatic, and popular public works, but the rest of his art is equally worth contemplating.

This episode we discuss the work of Mark Flood, an artist whose insouciance and provocative commentaries on consumer capitalism and the art world occupy the same space as his exquisite “lace paintings.”

This episode we look at the work of Adam Pendleton, an artist whose videos, paintings, and texts deal with themes of history and race. His work is experimental, conceptual, and appropriationist, juxtaposing images and words from various sources in order to convey new ways of interpreting the historical narrative.

This episode we look at the work of Emily Mae Smith, a young painter whose work is a fusion of humor and seriousness, uniting pop culture, idiosyncratic imagery, and elements from different art historical genres in memorable compositions. Her work, with its sly sexuality, calls into question the depiction of the female form, and requires the viewer to think about how her strange and compelling juxtapositions of imagery on her canvases suggest disquieting truisms about visual representation.

Today we look at the work of Jacqueline Humphries, an artist whose abstract paintings are both in dialogue with and subvert the works of the modernist, abstract artists of the past. Stubbornly adhering to abstraction even though she came of age in an era that declared painting was dead and abstraction in particular was irrelevant, Humphries’s work is a dynamic engagement with painting’s possibilities in the contemporary moment. Her “black light” paintings and signature use of reflective silver paint elevated her to fame, and each new exhibition manages to offer new insights into the methodology and meaning of painting.

This episode we look at the current exhibition of painter Isabel Bigelow’s work, on display at Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York City. Bigelow’s paintings of pine trees, snow, and leaves blowing the breeze possess the visual simplicity of Color Field painting and Japanese screens, conjuring sensations of serenity and peace. Her work is filtered through her studies of world religions; her vision of nature is one of simple but profound beauty and grace.

This episode we are looking at a current exhibition of Kay Rosen’s work, Blingo, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York City. Rosen is a painter of words in the spirit of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. Her simple, striking works utilize the letters of the words in playful, insightful, and occasionally unsettling ways. The architectonic letters in various vibrant colors on simple white canvases jump out at the viewer, provoking associations, questioning, and, behind the deceptively simple visual imagery, truth.

This week we are looking at the photographs of David Maisel, whose aerial shots of open pit mines, the arid remains of Owens Lake, logging activities in Maine, and the massive sprawl of the city of Los Angeles are referred to as exemplars of the "toxic sublime". His landscapes are surreal and beguiling in their otherworldly splendor and mystique, but implicate the viewer because that beauty is derived from the profoundly devastating impact of human activity on the environment. Maisel's several projects also include working with x-rays of three-dimensional objects from antiquity in order to reveal their fragile interiors, and copper canisters from the former Oregon State Insane Asylum, in which the copper reacted with human remains to create stunning, disturbing objects.

This episode we look at the photographs of John Divola, an artist whose oeuvre spans four decades and is a fusion of documentary and conceptual photography. Divola’s many projects include forays into abandoned houses, photographs of San Fernando Valley denizens, found photographs of movie sets, shots of isolated houses in the desert, and images showing how far he could run before the camera timer ran out and snapped the picture.

This episode we discuss Mary Weatherford, an abstract painter whose work engages with the pioneers of abstraction from the 1930s and the 1950s/1960s. Weatherford’s work is closely anchored to a sense of place -the Pacific coast, Los Angeles, New York -and her concomitant memories and associations. Her last few series catapulted her to art world fame and widespread recognition as one of the most dynamic painters of the last decade.