The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Holiday clips: Aliza Nisenbaum

November 26, 2025·49 min·4 clips

Aliza Nisenbaum started painting to depict undocumented immigrant women who are rarely seen in museums.

The occasion stays deliberately modest. Green marks the holiday weekend with a clip from his 2021 interview with Niesenbaum and places it alongside her Des Moines Art Center presentation, where five paintings are on view. The intro also notes her Obama Presidential Center mural commission, Reading Circles, Weaving Dreams, Seeding Futures. The conversation keeps circling proximity. Niesenbaum talks about where abstraction and figurative painting meet in her work, especially in choices about color, flatness, and the picture plane. Barnett Newman gives her a way in. She is interested in his large color fields, but even more in his idea that zips can stand in for individuals. For her, that is not just formal. It has moral pressure. She began as a social worker in Mexico City before studying art in the United States, and she connects composition to relation. Green draws out the painterly point: figures pushed toward the viewer feel nearer, not just closer in space. Niesenbaum agrees. Closeness, she says, can be a form of empathy, though another person's inner life still stays out of reach. Skin becomes one place where that tension shows up. Her faceted color comes from face-to-face sittings, where warmth and coolness shift over time. Philosophy enters quietly, through the ethical demand of meeting a face, then returns to the work of painting from life. The close turns to public recognition. At Tate Liverpool, doctors and nurses she had painted attended a December 2020 opening during the pandemic, a moment she only reached later.

As heard by us

Nisenbaum makes ethics, color, and proximity feel like practical studio decisions.

This holiday clips episode revisits Tyler Green's 2021 conversation with Aliza Nisenbaum, framed by her Dia de los Muertos presentation at the Des Moines Art Center and a newly announced Obama Presidential Center mural.

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Why you'd press play

A holiday clips show turns into a thoughtful art conversation about abstraction, portraiture, ethics, and closeness.

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