About Art

What if the divisions we see in the world are not actually there?

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with artist Mariko Mori as part of a special six-part series presented in collaboration with the Aspen Art Fair.

For more than three decades, Mori has created sculptures, installations, and immersive environments that bring together ideas we often consider separately: science and spirituality, technology and nature, the ancient and the future, the visible and the invisible.

Mori traces this way of thinking back to her childhood in Japan, her father’s work as an inventor and engineer, the death of her father while she was an art student in London, and the questions about life, death, and existence that followed. She discusses Buddhism and Shintoism, prehistoric cultures, contemporary science, meditation, tea ceremony, nature, light, and her belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

At the center of the conversation is an idea of oneness. As Mori says, we create divisions between nations and cultures, between people, and between humanity and nature. But when we look at the Earth, those divisions disappear.

Together, they consider art’s ability to make the invisible perceptible and to offer a different vision of the world—one in which connection, love, wonder, joy, and hope are forces with the potential to change how we see and how we live.

“What we see is very little of what is as a whole.” — Mariko Mor

What does it mean to understand ourselves as existing somewhere between the planet and the cosmos?

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with artist Lita Albuquerque as part of a special series created in collaboration with the Aspen Art Fair.

For more than five decades, Albuquerque has explored our relationship to the Earth, the cosmos, time, color, consciousness, and the natural world. Born in Tunisia, raised between North Africa and Europe, and based for much of her life in California, she describes how landscape became fundamental to the way she sees and makes work.

Together, they discuss the desert as a place of discovery, the relationship between nature and culture, ephemeral art and what remains after an artwork disappears, and Albuquerque’s understanding of the Earth as “a sculpture in space” and the cosmos as an installation in which we participate every day.

Their conversation moves between the immense and the intimate: astronomical time and everyday life, the movement of the planet and the feeling of the sun on our skin, creativity and freedom, remembering and forgetting. At its center is the possibility of another way of living—one grounded in attention, curiosity, presence, and the freedom to follow what we love.

As Albuquerque says, “The more you slow down, the more you can hear yourself.”

Patrick Martinez is a Los Angeles-based artist whose paintings, sculptures, and neon works transform the visual language of the city into layered reflections on memory, community, history, and belonging. Drawing on graffiti, signage, architecture, and everyday materials, his practice reveals the stories embedded in the urban landscape while asking us to look more closely at the world around us.

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman and Patrick Martinez discuss growing up in Los Angeles, graffiti as an artistic foundation, language as material, beauty and social reality, the importance of slowing down, and the ways artists preserve the experience of living through a particular moment in time.

This episode is part of a special six-episode About Art series presented in collaboration with the Aspen Art Fair.

In this special live episode of About Art, recorded in Aspen as part of a collaboration with the Aspen Art Fair, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with artist, architect, designer, inventor, and educator Ronald Rael.

Raised on a sheep and cattle ranch in southern Colorado, Ronald comes from a family that has lived in the region for seven generations. His work brings that history into conversation with the future, combining traditional adobe construction with robotics and new technologies while exploring borders, sustainability, cultural memory, and the meaning of place.

Heidi and Ronald discuss growing up in an adobe house, preserving historic buildings, his celebrated Teeter-Totter Wall project at the U.S.–Mexico border, teaching, technology, and his desire to practice being both a good descendant and a future good ancestor.

For more than four decades, Lily van der Stokker has challenged conventional ideas about beauty, decoration, humor, and value. Through her wall paintings, drawings, and installations, she embraces qualities that have often been dismissed as decorative or feminine, asking us to reconsider what we take seriously—and why.

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman and Lily discuss joy, beauty, feminism, decoration, humor, public art, and the freedom to make work that resists expectation. Together they explore why kindness and optimism can be radical artistic choices and why art remains a place for experimentation, curiosity, and adventure.