The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Woody De Othello, Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country

January 22, 2026·1 hr 20 min·5 clips

Woody D'Othello reveals how touching clay felt like a past life memory, unlocking a doorway to indigenous rituals.

Tyler Green begins with Woody D'Othello. He starts inside Coming Forth by Day, a Perez Art Museum Miami exhibition with new ceramic and wood sculptures, tiled wall works, and a large-scale bronze. The work moves between matter and spirit. Green talks through D'Othello's interest in the old relationship between body, earth, and spirit, then gets into still life as one of the artist's recurring concerns. The exhibition is on view in Miami through June 28th, then is scheduled to travel to the Minetti-Schrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis. Green also gives the institutional map: a previous solo exhibition at the Bowes Museum in the UK, group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Seattle Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, plus inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Museum of American Art biennial. A Public Art Fund solo presentation in Brooklyn's Brooklyn Bridge Park is part of the picture too. The sharpest passage is about display. D'Othello says a standard pedestal can fight with an object, so the base has to be part of the sculpture from the start. Agency is the word he keeps circling. He does not want the pedestal treated as neutral furniture. He wants control over the full object and the quiet charge around it. Green draws a sculptural comparison to Arlene, whose joined surfaces and uneasy constructions D'Othello clearly admires. The exchange stays precise but friendly. D'Othello says Arlene works on another level, while Green places her among the greatest living sculptors. Drawing comes in through painting. Asked when and why he began painting, D'Othello shifts the stress back to drawing and treats painting as an extension of it. The final turn moves to institutions, with progress and gaps in board representation still on the table. The O'Keeffe Museum's board is named as something outside the speakers' direct agency.

As heard by us

A precise museum-world conversation on D'Othello's sculpture, Tewa Country, and the institutional power behind display.

Woody D'Othello gives the episode its center: the Perez Art Museum Miami exhibition, with new ceramic and wood sculptures, tiled wall works, and a large-scale bronze concerned with body, earth, and spirit.

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Why you'd press play

For a thoughtful art interview that starts with Woody D'Othello's sculptures and stays with the museum context.

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