Podcasts are a fantastic way to further connect with the subjects you are passionate about, and arts podcasts are no exception. Whether it’s giving you insights to artists and galleries, helping you experience a piece of work you can’t visit in person, or uncovering hidden histories of art movements, there is plenty to dig into.

The Great Women Artists’ Podcast

Katy Hessel’s podcast (and Instagram, and book) gives glowing introductions to the lives and practices of great artists. We get new, alternative insights into the lives of well-known women like Paula Rego and Yoko Ono; for others – like Ruth Asawa, Augusta Savage, and Suzanne Valadon – the podcast pushes back against their posthumous obscurity. Hessel also interviews contemporary artists practising today. Her interview with Marina Abramović is a highlight (you get to hear how she realises that Earth is the ‘Glasgow of the Universe’ in a planetarium) and required listening ahead of this autumn, when the artist will be the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy. Listen on your podcast app >>

Womanica

This iHeartPodcasts show is a five minute daily dose, reinjecting women into the history books. Each episode focusses on an individual woman, grouped in series like ‘Dynamos’, ‘Mothers’, and ‘Ragers’ (with the help of some corporate sponsorship.) Broad in scope and subject, Womanica leans towards the US, covering from Lorraine O’Grady, Sister Mary Corita Kent to Carolee Schneeman – another performance artist, most recently on show at the Barbican. But the episode on Julia Margaret Cameron is a welcome introduction to the artist and photographer at the fore of Tate Britain’s rehang. Listen on your podcast app >>

Writers & Company

Eleanor Wachtel, presenter and co-founder of the Canadian radio programme Writers & Company, recently announced her retirement from the show after 33 years of broadcasting. The farewells bid to her by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Zadie Smith are a testament to her remarkable legacy – and give us an opportunity to go back into the archives. W&C is a deep dive into the the lives, thoughts and works of remarkable writers from around the world, including Bulgarian poet Kapka Kassabova, the multi-hyphenate Amit Chaudhuri, and artist William Kentridge. It considers the act of writing broadly, and delve as much into the guest’s history as the subject of the episode. The episode on the anachronism-filled 2022 film Corsage, Marie Kreutzer’s portrait of the nineteenth century icon, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is a must-listen. Listen on your podcast app >>

Talk Art

More contemporary is Talk Art, presented by actor Russell Tovey and Margate-based gallerist Robert Diament. Promising to ‘make art accessible, non-academic, non-elitist, gossipy and fun’, each episode feels like a warm conversation with a friend – and we’re in good company, with the likes of Lindsey Mendick, Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, and Ai Weiwei. Still, my favourites are those that platform younger, lesser-known artists, like Paula Siebra. Stepping into her studio in Brazil (by Zoom), we learn why she loves painting glass jars, hates any sort of technology, and paints to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel. It’s wonderful to hear other young people so driven by their practice: ‘I have a lot of work to do, I’m not dying today’. Listen on your podcast app >>

Arts & Ideas

Say what you will about the BBC – though some formats and presenters are a little staid, it still produces some of the best researched arts, culture, and history content in the field. The BBC Radio 4 shows might get the most attention, but it’s Arts & Ideas (sometimes called Free Thinking) from BBC Radio 3 that makes the boldest leaps. Some episodes explore well-worn subjects from alternative perspectives, like why we love to hate the Pre-Raphaelites, and what such hatred says about us. The series features a wide range of speakers, from Tate Modern’s Nabila Abdel Nabi talking about Hilma af Klint and the occult, to curator Craig Clunas, on what connects Freud and Chinese sci-fi films, and Rana Mitter, on how Artemisia Gentileschi shaped art and advertising. With its multidisciplinary panel, the recent episode on decadence dives into the art movement’s Orientalist foundations from different perspectives – and how ‘art for art’s sake’ has its origins in the colonial anxieties of nineteenth-century France, which feared a falling birth rate with the rise of women’s rights, contraception, and so-called ‘sex for sex’s sake’. Listen on your podcast app >>

EMPIRE LINES

EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way flows of empires through individual artworks – from theatre to architecture, painting to film. In fifteen minutes, we focus on one object as an artefact of imperial exchange, using art to understand the how and why, and challenge simplistic, monolithic understandings of empires. Recorded on location in the latest exhibitions, EMPIRE LINES features fascinating interdisciplinary thinkers in the field, with contemporary artists like Nalini Malini and Ingrid Pollard, curators from The Courtauld to the COBRA Museum in the Netherlands, and the team behind Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders. Listen on your podcast app >>

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Jelena Sofronijevic is an audio producer and freelance journalist, who creates content at the intersections of cultural and political history. They are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast that uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art, and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are. Their full works in print, including museum and exhibition reviews, can be found here. Follow them @jelsofron.

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Despite having no children to listen with, I’ve recently stormed through the catalogue of creation stories pulled together on In The Beginning. The show is made with children in mind (and with children in the cast!) and children will enjoy the playful way of connecting to other cultures through the sound design, acting and storytelling. But Producers Lucia Scazzocchio and Hawa Khan have created a show that is also perfect for adults wanting a light-hearted snippet of global culture in their podcast playlists.

I sent some questions over to Lucia to find out more about how the team pulled this show together…

What were the origins of this podcast – take us back to the Beginning of the show!

In the Beginning… Hawa Khan my co-writer/producer and I created a new family audio tour for the Tower of London where historical events are experienced through the eyes of two child ghosts. We had so much fun writing and producing together that we decided we would like to something else. Hawa is a natural storyteller and we are quite passionate about traditional stories and myths. We both come from quite mixed backgrounds and realised that many of these stories aren’t that well known in the UK. We wanted to tell these stories in a way that fully represented multi-cultural Britain in voices and styles of speech familiar to young audiences.

We pitched the idea to all the children’s networks we could think of, but kept hitting a wall. We then applied for an Audio Content Fund and partnered in Fun Kids who backed the idea from the start. We applied three times before the project was finally funded.

Did you take inspiration from any podcasts in particular before you started?

Not directly, I listen to many, many different podcasts and I did immerse myself in audio drama, especially the more immersive productions from QCode or Gimlet. There are some children’s podcasts that possibly inspired on a subliminal level, like Wow in The World, Radio Lab for kids and I was an avid listener of audio books when I was child. I bought by niece a Yoto player and rediscovered many of the stories I had listened to on cassette.

Co-producer and voice actor, Hawa Khan

The show was originally a radio show and made into a podcast – can you give us a little insight to how it worked between yourself as Producers/Writers and then the actors/the Fun Kids radio station.

The radio show and the podcast are the same format. I would say the big difference when producing for a radio station is that everything has to fit exactly into the time allocated, which isn’t the case for podcasts!

The process was: Hawa and I first selected, then researched the stories, gathering as much information as we could about the people and places these stories come from.

Many of these stories are from ancient indigenous cultures and have been passed down over generations and some are still very much part of religious and cultural life. We wanted to make sure we properly acknowledged the people who these stories belong to and spent a lot of time researching the names, places and religious aspects.

Leona Fensome did a brilliant job helping us contact academics and indigenous elders to make sure we used the correct language and terms.
The next stage was writing the scripts. Hawa and I co-wrote each script by trying to embody the characters, Hawa is a brilliant voice artist so she developed the characters as we went along, deciding what accents, intonation and personality each character would have. We had decided from the outset that the voice of each character would be decided by their personality rather than from where the story is from. This means a Chinese dragon has a West Indian accent, or the Taino Sun is based on an Indian Raj. Hawa then worked with the children and adult actors to develop their characters and give them voice. The children played themselves, but the adult actors are all experienced in channelling diverse accents and characters so they really brought that into the studio when we recorded. We had already worked with some of the children and actors on the Tower of London project so this was helpful.

Once everything was recorded I worked on the pacing and sound design. Fun Kids helped us hone the original application and concept but they didn’t intervene during production. They trusted us to produce these stories in our own way. The final addition to this series becoming a podcast, was the creation of the artwork by Delphine – each episode has its own image which is gorgeous.

One of the things I really liked in the series was the children’s voices in the show. How important was it for you to have that?

Children love listening to other children and the children’s voices provide a narrative thread through the series. The children in the series are being told the stories and ask the kinds of questions that children listening might also ask. There is also a little life lesson in each episode that connects to the children’s interaction at the beginning of each episode.

As Producers, how did you find doing that aspect? (Never work with children or animals comes to mind!)

Hawa Kahn is a creative school facilitator so she is very used to working with children and firing their imaginations. The children in the series aren’t professional actors and the script was written around them – they are two sets of siblings. Time and patience is the key, with plenty of breaks. These children were superb to work with and incredibly literate. The youngest were 5 when we recorded and they were all just amazing.

Have you seen a difference in the reaction from listeners since it became a podcast?

Fun Kids has a very specific audience – children! The difference now that the series is a podcast is that it can reach audiences beyond Fun Kids and I think adults will enjoy listening just as much.

Do you have any advice for budding producers for Children’s audio?

Test your concepts and ideas with children first. They will tell you if it’s good and engaging. We got the children involved to read through the scripts, they were quite vocal if they thought something didn’t make sense or wasn’t funny.

Do you have a creation story you haven’t told yet but would love to?

There are so many! I think we will have to do another series. For example closer to home is the ancient story of Queen Albina and her sisters who was exiled from Syria to an uninhabited island which is now Britain.

Lastly, is there anything we didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

It was important for us to have a space to share more detail about the creation stories so In The Beginning.. now has a bespoke website inthebeginning.world where you can learn about the different myths, where they are from and more about the people they belong to. We have also transformed the artwork into a colouring book and postcards.

And finally I would say have a listen, you will hear stories from all over the world, told in a very unexpected and humorous way by an incredibly diverse and talented cast.

Listen to In The Beginning on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

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