Tyler Green is a critic, author, historian, and longtime host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. He is a winner of the 2026Rabkin Prize. You can read more about Tyler here. 

We invited Tyler to have a conversation about his work and ideas. The interview is accompanied by a newly commissioned portrait of Tyler in the Edgar Shannon Library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va, by Kevin J Miyazaki.

The interview has been gently edited for length and clarity. 

Mentioned in this episode: 

• The Modern Art Notes Podcast

• A Return to Round Top by Tyler Green (Medium, Nov. 10, 2014)

• The Yosemite by John Muir (Dover Publications, 2018, reprint of Century Co., 1920)

• Artist Juan Gris

• Juan Gris exhibit curated by Mark Rosenthal (National Gallery of the Arts, 1983-84)

• When Richard Diebenkorn Worked Through Henri Matisse’s Greatest Painting by Tyler Green (Medium, Jan. 15, 2016)

• Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship by Jack Flam (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 2008) 

• Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibit (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2017)

• Artist Robert Colescott

• Gerhard Richter: ‘Post-remembering’ the Holocaust in German Contemporary Art by Kris Belden-Adams (European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2016)

• Uncle Rudi by Gerhard Richter (1965)

• Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi: Hidden History talk with René Block and Miloslav Vorlíček (Centre Tchèque Paris, 2026) 

• No. 769: Remembering Betye Saar The Modern Arts Notes Podcast (July 30, 2026)

• Carleton Watkins: Making the West American by Tyler Green (University of California Press, 2020)

• Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea by Tyler Green (Prestel Publishing, 2021)

• Photographer Carleton Watkins

• Artist Albert Bierstadt

• Lewis Hine’s photographs for the National Child Labor Committee Library of Congress

• The Ahwahneechees: A Story of the Yosemite Indians by John W. Bingaman (1966)

• Fire Over Ahwahnee: John Muir and the Decline of Yosemite by Eric Michael Johnson (Scientific American, Aug. 13, 2014)

• Artist Jacob Lawrence

• Jacob Lawrence: ‘The American Struggle’ exhibit curated by Randall Griffey and Sylvia Yount (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, fall 2020)

• Reckoning with American History in Jacob Lawrence’s ‘The American Struggle,’ abridged interview with historian Carroll Greene (Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, 1968)

• Historian John Hope Franklin (Library of Congress Resource Guide, 2024)

• Scholar Gary B. Nash obituary by Clay Risen (The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2021)

• Legal scholar Rogers M. Smith

• Scholar Benedict Anderson

• The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha (Routledge, 1994) 

• ​​National Parks movement EBSCO Information Services Inc.

• No. 387: American art and the Vietnam WarThe Modern Arts Notes Podcast (April 4, 2019)

• Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975curated by Melissa Ho (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2019)

• Second-wave Environmentalism

• Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Artist Marguerite Zorach

• Photographer Ansel Adams

• Artist Kay WalkingStick

• New River Gorge National Park & Preserve

• Legendary Teamwork of Moran and Jackson Puts Yellowstone on the Map by Christine Gianas Weinheimer (Yellowstone Quarterly, fall 2019)

• Photographer George Masa

• The Twisted History of the Gateway Arch by Fred Kaplan (Smithsonian Magazine, October 2015)

• Yosemite Museum

• American Indian Basketry California State Parks

• Artist and editor Wilson Butterworth

• Archives of American Art, Oral History Program (Smithsonian Institution)

• No. 748: Edmonia Lewis (The Modern Arts Notes Podcast, March 5, 2026)Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone exhibit (Peabody Essex Museum, 2026)

• No. 615: David Bindman (The Modern Arts Notes Podcast, Aug. 17, 2024)

• Frank Day: Memory and Imagination by Abby Wasserman (The Museum of California magazine, Oakland Museum of California, 1997)

• Artist Dalbert Castro Autry Museum of the American West

• Denver Art Museum

• Dawoud Bey: Elegy exhibit (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2023-2024)

• Writer Catherine G. Wagley (2019 Rabkin Prize winner) 

• Writer Carolina A. Miranda (2017 Rabkin Prize winner)

• Writer Siddhartha Mitter (2024 Rabkin Prize winner)

• Writer Paul Chaat Smith (2025 Rabkin Prize winner)

• Will L.A. County Give Its Art the Space It's Due? by Tyler Green (Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2015)

• Trump Is Missing the Entire Point of Arches by Tyler Green (The Atlantic, May 21, 2026)

• Artist Kerry James Marshall

• No. 86: Kerry James Marshall (The Modern Art Notes Podcast, June 27, 2013)

• Professor Saidiya V. Hartman

• 1933 International Conference of American States and the Good Neighbor Policy (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State)

• Artist Frederic Edwin Church

• Artist Stephanie Syjuco

• Inventing Peace by Lawrence Weschler (The New Yorker, Nov. 13, 1995)

• No. 754: Vermeer: An interview with Andrew Graham-Dixon and Rachel Burgess (The Modern Art Notes Podcast, April 16, 2026)

• Scholar Simon Schama

• How Is Trump Targeting Universities, and How Are They Responding? by​​ Alan Blinder (The New York Times, July 1, 2026)

• Panorama journal

• In The Tower: Kerry James Marshall [and Tyler Green](The Kojo Nnamdi Show podcast, Oct. 28, 2013) 

• Art historian and curator Franklin Kelly

• Trump orders warning about 'inaccurate information' be placed outside D.C. museum by Janet W. Lee (Morning Edition, National Public Radio, July 27, 2026)

• Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution Executive Order 14416 (July 24, 2026)

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• Oakland Museum of California

• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• Artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

• Henry Luce Foundation

• Terra Foundation for American Art

• Antebellum art

• America's Moral Volcano by Eleanor James Harvey (The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013)

• Joan Didion Archive

• To the American Indian by Lucy Thompson (self-published, 1916)

This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin  Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The interview was conducted by Mary Louise Schumacher, a journalist and the executive director of the Rabkin Foundation. The portraits were made by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. The production team includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer; Johnathon Olsen, editor; with research and copy editing by Danielle Yovino and Nan Williams.

Music is HaHaHa by Ariel Shalom, Present in the Past by Flint, Oh The Sunset by Just for Kicks, and cinnamonrolls by Out of Flux. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners.