Studio Museum in Harlem
What happens when an artist's work enters a museum's permanent collection? The Studio Museum in Harlem's first podcast asks the artists themselves.
The Studio Museum in Harlem has been building its collection of artists of African descent since 1968, and with New Additions, its first podcast, it set out to meet the latest additions to the permanent collection in person.
We were honored to produce this series, hosted by Studio Museum Senior Curatorial Assistant Habiba Hopson. New Additions brings in artists at a pivotal moment in their career to discuss their path to artmaking, their process in the studio, their dreams and inspirations, and how they start each day.
The conversations range from Nikita Gale’s metal barricades and microphone stands, to a painting by Jared Owens stamped with the Brooks slave-ship diagram, to Brandon Ndife’s decaying domestic objects shaped in part by Hurricane Sandy, to Vladimir Cybil Charlier’s Billie Zulie in aluminum, sequins, and beads, and the films of Oscar-nominated Garrett Bradley. Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Zora J. Murff, Derek Fordjour, and Cassi Namoda join them.
The season closes with writer and curator Diallo Simon-Ponte joining Hopson to look back across the conversations: why these artists became artists, memory, culture and diaspora, and what it means to join a collection.
Client
Studio Museum in Harlem
Project
New Additions
Services
Concept Development - Creative Direction - Production - Post Production
Voices
Habiba Hopson, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Zora J. Murff, Brandon Ndife, Nikita Gale, Derek Fordjour, Cassi Namoda, Tarik Brown, Jared Owens, Garrett Bradley, Diallo Simon-Ponte
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Our Process
Safe-keeping the personal and the profound.
Opportunity
Growing out of an online interview series and a feature in the museum's Studio magazine, the opportunity was to give the Studio Museum its first podcast and a way to introduce the artists behind its newest acquisitions in their own words.
Insight
An acquisition is usually a quiet event, recorded in a catalogue and on a wall label. We treated it instead as an occasion, a moment worth sitting down with the artist for, and found that a single work could open onto a whole life: a childhood across continents, a career in social work, a hurricane.
Outcome
Ten episodes and a trailer, released from June 2024 to August 2025, giving the Studio Museum its first podcast and listeners an intimate first introduction to the artists shaping its collection.
