Boston, Mass. — July 26, 2021 — Tamar Avishai, creator and producer of the Hub & Spoke art history podcast The Lonely Palette, has been awarded the Gold prize in the Podcasts category by the American Alliance of Museums’ 2021 MUSE Awards program.
The prize was awarded for The Beholder’s Share—Anselm Kiefer, an episode of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Raw Material podcast that Avishai wrote and produced, and was also distributed as an episode of The Lonely Palette.
The Beholder’s Share was a mix tape series released in the summer of 2020, comprised of a mélange of art podcast episodes, including 99% Invisible, The Getty’s Recording Artists, MoMA’s The Way I See It, and others. Each episode related to the importance of the visitor’s role in experiencing a work of art—a theme that held particular resonance as museums were closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Avishai’s episode on Anselm Kiefer debuted as part of the series. It is an in-depth audio essay inspired by Kiefer’s paintings Margarethe (1981) and Sulamith (1983), both owned by SFMOMA. The enormous, mixed-media paintings refer obliquely to such textual icons as Goethe’s Faust and the Hebrew bible’s Song of Songs through the historical lens of the Holocaust, in dialogue with the 1947 poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) by Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.
The episode employs an audio version of the poem, produced by Avishai and recited by Professor Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi over an original recording by Celan, as both a launching point and a kind of mesmeric sound-pillar for illustrating Kiefer’s artistic aims.
The American Alliance of Museums is a 115-year-old coalition of art museums, science centers, arboretums, zoos, and other institutions that work together to advocate and develop best practices for museums. According to the Alliance, the MUSE Awards “recognize outstanding achievement in Galleries, Libraries, Archives or Museums (GLAM) media” and are presented to “institutions or independent producers who use digital media to enhance the GLAM experience and engage audiences.” The awards are meant to “celebrate scholarship, community, innovation, creativity, education and inclusiveness.”
In naming The Beholder’s Share as its 2021 Gold prize winner, the jury felt that the episode “moves podcasting to a whole new place, that of being an artwork in itself,” according to the Alliance.
“I’ve wanted to produce an episode on these Kiefer paintings for a long time,” Avishai says, “and was thrilled to have the opportunity with SFMOMA’s support. Truth be told, I had no idea what I was in for. This episode was one of the hardest I’ve ever written, from both an emotional and an intellectual standpoint. I’ve never put more of myself into an audio piece, and to receive this kind of validation is staggering.”
The Lonely Palette, launched in 2016, is a founding member of Hub & Spoke. In each episode Avishai picks an art museum object du jour, interviews unsuspecting passers-by in front of it, and then dives deeply into the movement, the social context, the anecdotes, and anything and everything else that will make the work exciting and accessible to non-expert audiences.
“The pandemic has pushed museums, like SFMOMA, to rethink their audio and online content to make their collections more accessible,” Avishai continues, “and I’ve been honored to be a part of that shift. I hope this award encourages more museums to consider commissioning episodes of The Lonely Palette to dig into their objects’ stories and potentially reach new audiences.”
Hub & Spoke is a nonprofit collective of independent podcasters dedicated to supporting and promoting one another’s work, growing the base of listeners for narrative nonfiction podcasts, and raising funds to help independent podcasters pursue their craft. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.