The Object

The Other Monet

16 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It's the Season 8 premiere! Claude Monet, by the 1900s, is the most famous artist in the world, a singular genius (if not exactly genial). But there i...

Encore Episode: Finding Fanny, the Model who Disappeared

09 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

New season begins March 16! Now, an encore episode that was our most popular story a few seasons ago. About a woman who was once of the most recogniza...

Fireside Stories: Bursting, Twisting, Sticking, Spilling

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Season 8 of The Object begins March 16! All-new episodes, bonus content, and more about the almost famous, the nearly lost, and more surprising true s...

The Object LOVE! Don't Go Breaking My Art!

12 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This rollicking, sold-out live show of The Object podcast was recorded February 7, 2026, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with host Tim Gihring and...

Encore Episode: The Curious Celebrity of God's Sculptor

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

One month to go until the new season of The Object premieres! Subscribe so you don't miss it, and in the meantime enjoy bonus and encore episodes like...

Encore Episode: A Woman Called Wanda

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Free tickets are going fast for the next live taping of The Object podcast with special guest jeremy messersmith on February 7 in Mia’s historic Pil...

Fireside Stories: The Gods of Compassion

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Free tickets are going fast for our next live taping of The Object podcast with special guest musician Jeremy Messersmith, quizzes, and storytelling—...

Letter from Van Gogh: A New Year's Minisode

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Big news: Free tickets are now available starting January 7 at 9:30 a.m. (CST) for the next live taping of The Object podcast. It's our vaguely Valent...

Encore Episode: How to Live Forever (or Die Trying)

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

NEWS! Tickets will be available starting January 7 for The Object LOVE!, our very Valentine's live show with special guest jeremy messersmith on Febru...

The Missing Tapestries of Helena Hernmarck

15 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big news! Tickets for the next taping of The Object LIVE! will be available starting January 7 on the Tickets page at artsmia.org. It's "The Object LO...

Encore Episode: A Christmas Conspiracy

01 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tickets will be available soon for The Object LOVE!, a very Valentine’s edition of our live taping of the podcast, happening February 7 at the Minne...

The Object LIVE! Great Gatsby's Ghost!

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This third sold-out live show of The Object podcast was recorded October 30, 2025, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with special guest Chan Poling ...

Encore Episode: The Photographer Who Unvanished

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1890s, B.A. Haldane sets up a photography studio in Alaska and begins documenting the vibrant life of his Tsimshian community—even as non-Nat...

The Lost City That Wasn't

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tickets for The Object LIVE! on October 30 are now sold out, but some tickets will be available at the door! And if you have tickets already, don't fo...

Encore Episode: Finding Unicorns

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tickets are going fast for our next exclusive live taping of The Object podcast on October 30 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, with special guest ...

Encore Episode: Frida and Diego's American Dream

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big news! Tickets are now available for the next edition of The Object LIVE! Our hour-long live taping of The Object podcast on October 30, with very ...

When Trees Could Talk

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Vienna in the early 1900s is a kind of paradise of power and beauty, the center of an empire that will seemingly go on forever. Only an eccentric youn...

Encore Episode: The Department of Missing Limbs

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Save the date: The next live taping of The Object podcast will be October 30 at 7 p.m. at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, absolutely free. Special g...

The Curator in the Wall

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Truth and fiction collide in two stories of museum life. One of a curator who goes missing in the 1950s. The other of a curator who finds himself in t...

Encore Episode: The Mountain That Came to Dinner

28 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Save the date: The next free live taping of The Object podcast will be October 30 at 7 p.m.! Special guests and ticket info TBA. Now, enjoy this enco...

That Got Weird: The Renaissance You Never Knew

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Renaissance, which began in Italy some 700 years ago, may be one of the last true ideals we have. It's this beacon of beauty and truth that led us...

Encore Episode: How to Break the World

30 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Truth, beauty, transcendence. For millennia, people think they know the rules of great art. Then, in the 1950s, a guy named Bob breaks every one of th...

The Box That Mary Left

16 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

New episode! In the 1920s and ’30s, Mary Sully makes her way from Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota to New York City and then around the cou...

Encore Episode: The Wonderful Wizard of Iowa

02 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kicking off Pride Month with a surprisingly epic encore episode about Grant Wood. In the 1930s, the Iowa artist is one of the most famous people in A...

The Object LIVE! Your Lobster is Ringing!

19 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This second sold-out live show of The Object podcast was recorded with an enthusiastic audience at the Minneapolis Institute of Art on May 11, 2025—...

Encore Episode: The Dragons Next Door

05 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The next live taping of The Object is May 11—the show is sold out, but don't forget to come if you have tickets and watch for the next live taping c...

The Ghost of Hokusai

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

New episode! It is the stuff of legend, how Claude Monet discovers Japanese art in the late 1800s and becomes one of the most famous artists in the wo...

Encore episode: The Making of Monet

07 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you snagged tickets to the next live taping of The Object, with Dessa, on May 11—nice work! They're now sold out. In the meantime, enjoy this enc...

Can You Hear Me Now?

24 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big news! It’s the first episode of Season 7 AND tickets are now available for the next live taping of The Object podcast, featuring musical guest D...

Encore episode: Yard Show: The World According to Joe

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The seventh season of The Object begins March 24! Today, an encore presentation of an episode about Joe Minter and the "yard show" artists of Alabama....

Encore episode: Love Among the Ruins

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Season 7 of The Object starts March 24! Here, a special episode from the archives about Love and Art in capital letters. When the young Italian artist...

The Object LIVE! Manet Touché!

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This first-ever live show of The Object podcast (recorded at the Minneapolis Institute of Art on January 23, 2025) features music and storytelling cel...

Fly Me to the Sun: A Bonus New Year Episode

16 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Most of us know the Icarus myth, of the young man who soars too close to the sun—or at least we think we do. But there's more to the story. And at v...

Cold Comfort: The Ghosts of Winters Past

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For our final episode of Season 6, it’s an ode to winter. A winter of frozen London rivers and snowy Japanese villages—the kind we rarely have any...

Yes, We Can-Can: How the Moulin Rouge Made Us Modern

25 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When the Moulin Rouge opens in Paris, in 1889—a faux windmill spinning over the entrance, a two-story elephant opening to reveal an orchestra inside...

Bonus episode: Talking Wanda Gág with Lizzi Ginsberg

08 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Lizzi Ginsberg is the Chicago-based writer and researcher who guest-hosted our recent episode on Wanda Gág, the Minnesota-raised artist who went on t...

A Woman Called Wanda

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Wanda Gág may be the talented, bob-sporting, fiercely independent, 1920s celebrity cat mom you didn't know you needed right now. Guest host Lizzi Gi...

Finding Buddha: The Collector at the Top of the World

30 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1959, a couple of young women from New York find themselves in the Himalayas—an unlikely story of adventure, royal romance, and spiritual awakeni...

Dog Days: What Our Pets Say About Us

03 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Art and dogs are like our shadows across time: whatever we're up to, whatever values we hold, eventually it all shows up in our art and our dogs. So w...

Endless Summer: Can You Really Leave it All Behind?

05 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Santiago Rusiñol is a newly married heir to a Barcelona textile fortune when he decides to become an artist in Paris instead, in the 1880s, influenci...

For Queen and Country: The Woman who Won Paris

11 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The daughter of a struggling artist, Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun wins the hearts of the French aristocracy—including Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI...

American Illusion: The Wonderful Wizard of Iowa

11 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1930s, Grant Wood is one of the most famous people in America, the artist behind "American Gothic"—the painting of the man, the woman, and th...

Encore episode: The Car that Killed

31 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On the 90th anniversary of the groundbreaking Tatra automobile, we bring you this encore episode from The Object's first season. A story of the last m...

Fire and Rain: The Dragons Next Door

06 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

People have always imagined dragons among them. But they have always imagined them very differently: helping or hurting, making rain or breathing fire...

Yard Show: The World According to Joe

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Thirty-five years ago, Joe Minter received a vision. Soon, his half-acre property outside Birmingham, Alabama, began to fill with sculpture—reflecti...

Wait for It

11 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The premiere of Season 6! When the work of a brilliant but forgotten artist falls into the lap of a curator, it suggests something uniquely human: ple...

Encore episode: The O’Keeffe We Never Knew

05 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One week until Season 6 begins (March 11)! Here's a bonus encore episode, a highlight from a couple seasons ago about Georgia O'Keeffe and the loner l...

Bonus Episode: Dance Like Everyone’s Watching

12 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It was a mystery: two dancers—one white, one Black—captured on stage in 1959 in a photograph found in a museum archive. Who were they? But a searc...

Encore episode: Secrets of the Veiled Lady

15 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

They are illusions, no more real than someone being sawed in half onstage. Yet the veiled ladies that Raffaelle Monti sculpts in the 1800s are very re...

American Epic: Looking for Ella Watson

22 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1942—years before becoming the first Black photographer for Life magazine, the director of Shaft, and a style icon the New York Times will hail a...

Give and Take: The Weird, Wonderful Art of the Gift

27 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From the gift of fire to Pandora’s Box to the original white elephant, the long history of giving is also the history of receiving—a relationship ...

Shooting Back: The Photographer Who Unvanished

23 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1890s, B.A. Haldane sets up a photography studio in Alaska and begins documenting the vibrant life of his Tsimshian community—even as non-Nat...

Goodbye, Columbus: Frida and Diego’s American Dream

25 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the fall of 1930, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera travel to the United States for the first time, welcomed as celebrity artists, ambassadors of an anc...

Water for Spirits: The Circus Star Who Became a Goddess

28 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

An ancient African water spirit, Portuguese slave traders, and a snake charmer traveling with the circus--incredibly, all of their stories collide in ...

Finding Fanny: The Model Who Disappeared

31 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

She was one of the most recognizable women in the world, her long copper hair filling painting after painting, even if few people knew her name: Corn...

Making Monet: The Invention of Genius

03 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

He rose from scorn and poverty to become one of the most beloved and wealthy artists in history—the original rebel with a cause, dedicated to showin...

Dangerous Liaisons: What Happened to the First Art Star?

05 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Simeon Solomon—bold, dashing, and openly —is a rising star in the Victorian art world when a scandal in 1873 supposedly forces him into obscurity,...

How to Break the World

01 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Truth, beauty, transcendence. For millennia, people think they know the rules of great art. Then, in the 1950s, a guy named Bob breaks every one of th...

Revealing History: The Naked and the Nude

03 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As long as humans have made art, they have made art of naked humans. But why? From Greek gods romping in the buff to saints au naturel to modern “ba...

Breaking Good: The Department of Missing Limbs

06 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The first episode of Season 5 is a story as old as life itself: things fall apart. But what really happened to all those ancient statues missing arms,...

Encore episode: The Black Musketeer: A Swashbuckling Tale of Race and Revenge

27 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Season 5 of The Object begins Monday, March 6! Until then, enjoy this encore presentation of "The Black Musketeer," first broadcast in May 2022. The m...

Bonus episode: When a Kiss is Just a Kiss

06 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1950, Robert Doisneau takes one of the most iconic photographs of Paris—a young couple kissing on the street—that eventually becomes a global s...

Do You Feel Lucky? A Bonus Episode for the New Year

19 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Many people dream of finding a masterpiece in the attic, a closet, or a thrift store. In 2007, it happened to a church in a small town, and the story ...

A Christmas Fable: The Sinner and the Saint

19 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In 1650, a less-than-holy artist is hired to paint a religious mystery even the pope isn't totally sure about. It's just one part of the Church's plan...

Photographer of Fortune: The Man Who Shot America

14 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the mid-1960s, Richard Avedon is the most famous photographer in the world, redefining fashion and celebrity while becoming an icon himself. But as...

Ghost Ships Of Xu Fu

10 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In ancient China, a royal sorcerer named Xu Fu is sent with some 60 ships to find the elixir of immortality. But on the second voyage, he and his crew...

Lost and Found: The Possibly True Story of America’s First Black Artist

12 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In 1798, a portrait artist named Joshua Johnson advertises himself as a “self-taught genius.” A few decades later, he will nearly be forgotten. It...

Seeing Ourselves in Animals: An Unnatural History

08 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As long as people have told stories, we have told stories about animals. Stories of slow turtles and fast rabbits, sly foxes and cunning monkeys, that...

Escape Velocity: The Woman Who Left the World

11 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Leonora Carrington has never felt at home in her wealthy, conservative family. But when she meets the Surrealists in the 1930s, and runs from everythi...

How to Live Forever (or Die Trying)

06 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

No one lives forever. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, and for a long time the noble way to avoid getting old and dying was to avoid gett...

Black Musketeer: A Swashbuckling Tale of Race and Revenge

09 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The man behind "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" was one of the richest, most popular authors in the world—an adventurous c...

Hiding in Plain Sight: The O’Keeffe We Never Knew

11 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1970s, Georgia O’Keeffe is supposedly the hermit savant of the New Mexico badlands, rarely heard and seldom seen, even as the outside world c...

King of Hills: The Mountain That Came to Dinner

14 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

(Season 4 premiere) It’s one of the largest jade sculptures in the world, a 640-pound mountain commissioned by the Chinese emperor. But in 1901, in ...

Life After Life: The Psychic Sculptor (encore episode)

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In 1852, Harriet Hosmer packs her pistol, her anatomy degree, and two pictures of a sculpture she made and moves to Rome. There, among other “emanci...

Young, Gifted, and Gone: The Woman Who Never Came Back (encore episode)

14 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Elizabeth Catlett, the granddaughter of enslaved African-Americans, is a struggling artist at the height of Jim Crow. But when she moves to Mexico Cit...

Bonus Episode: Take This Job and Fauve It (and Other New Year’s Resolutions)

17 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” wrote Tom Robbins, the novelist. He could have been referring to Henri Rousseau, the fin de siè...

A Christmas Conspiracy: The Family at the End of the World

20 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s good to be the pope in the 1600s. But staying pope is not so easy, as the famous Barberini family finds out when one of their own takes up the ...

Almost Famous: The Man Who Would Be Rembrandt

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Rembrandt and Lievens were friends and foes, two of the most promising artists of the Dutch Golden Age. But like Mozart and Salieri, one is remembered...

For Real: The Matter of Black Lives

18 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Gordon Parks becomes the first Black photographer at LIFE magazine, in 1949, he’s determined to show the full measure of Black lives in America...

A Photographer in Hitler’s Bath

13 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When World War II begins, Lee Miller is one of the most sought-after women in the world--a celebrated model, an irresistible muse, and an emerging pho...

Stealing Beauty: The Stolen Horses of Venice

09 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1800s, the four famous bronze horses of Venice are restored to their place atop St. Mark's Basilica, after a long and humiliating absence...

Revenge of the Artist

12 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Mademoiselle Lange is the first celebrity actress in France, as famous for her lovers as her looks. But when the French Revolution roils the country, ...

Life After Life: The Psychic Sculptor

07 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 1852, Harriet Hosmer packs her pistol, her anatomy degree, and two pictures of a sculpture she made and moves to Rome. There, among other “emanci...

Lost and Found: The Miracle of Saint Frida

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Frida Kahlo dies, in 1954, she is soon forgotten. And then, suddenly, she seems to be everywhere: on magnets, puzzles, underwear, flip-flops. How...

Secrets of the Veiled Lady

12 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

They are illusions, no more real than someone being sawed in half onstage. Yet the veiled ladies that Raffaelle Monti sculpts in the 1800s are very re...

Bonus episode: Love Among the Ruins

08 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When the young Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani moves to Paris, in the early 1900s, he soon meets a very talented (and very married) Russian poet. Wha...

Bonus episode: A New Year’s to Remember

31 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As the page finally turns on 2020, enjoy this bonus episode on the New Year's illustrations made by Winslow Homer for Harper's Weekly magazine in 1869...

Monsters and Marvels, Part III: The Mermaid’s Tale

30 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Mermaids had been surfacing in art for thousands of years when, in the 1880s, Edward Burne-Jones began painting them as avatars of a radical new femal...

Monsters and Marvels Part II: Finding Unicorns

26 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Artists have captured unicorns for thousands of years, and for most of that time people thought they were both magical and real. What can an imaginary...

Monsters and Marvels Part I: The Magic Shell

21 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

From narwhals to nautilus shells, dragon eggs to mermaid hands, the obsession with oddities in the Age of Discovery may seem, well, odd. But did the s...

Untamed Hearts: Rosa Bonheur’s Wild Kingdom

17 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The animalier artists love lions and tigers and bears — anything with teeth and no business being in Paris in the 1800s. No one more than Rosa Bonhe...

Romancing the Stone: The Secret of the Chac Mool

20 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

A mysterious stone sculpture, supposedly found in Mexico, is hailed as a Chac Mool, the iconic Mayan vessel of human sacrifice. It tours Europe as a m...

Unspeakable Love: The Rebel Who Went Too Far

15 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Simeon Solomon is a young art star in the Victorian era. But when scandal threatens his career, offering a cautionary tale to men like Oscar Wilde, h...

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Myth of the Starving Artist

11 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Long before Vincent van Gogh died young, poor, and under-appreciated, artists had gotten the message: you have to suffer for your art. But where did t...

Spirited Away: The Incredible Ghosts of Yoshitoshi

13 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Yoshitoshi is poised to be the greatest artist of the Floating World, the semi-fictional universe of and style in old Japan. But when Japan opens to ...

Young, Gifted, and Gone: The Woman Who Never Came Back

16 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Elizabeth Catlett, the granddaughter of enslaved African-Americans, is a struggling artist at the height of Jim Crow. But when she moves to Mexico Cit...

Miracles in Stone: The Curious Celebrity of God’s Sculptor

17 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

William Edmondson is a middle-aged laborer in Nashville, Tennessee, at the height of the Great Depression, when God tells him to carve a tombstone. So...

Gone Girl: The Case of the Missing Rembrandt

19 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In 1666, Rembrandt painted a masterpiece that disappeared almost as soon as he finished it. Where it went, and what it meant to its various owners, is...

True Colors: The Truth About ”White” Classical Art

10 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

He was the ideal man. Handsome, strapping, with unreal proportions. But ancient statues like the Doryphoros originally looked much different, a revela...

Flying Too Close to the Sun

10 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Kehinde Wiley, long before he painted President Obama's official portrait, went to Brazil. There, he was inspired by a monument to the great aviator A...