Below is the story of Immaterial. If you’re just looking for the episodes: I produced Jade, Metals I and Metals II. I co-produced Paper. I co-produced and hosted Tarot. If you’re interested in how I made them, and what they meant to me, read on.
Hang onto your hats: this is a long meditation about an ambitious project that changed the course of my career. There’s lots of audio excerpts along the way, and some art, and some truly extraordinary people.
When I was approached to make the debut season of a show on art materials for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it took me a second to be convinced. I wasn’t a museum person, and who was I to engage with art authoritatively? But I had been in news for several years at that point, and wanted nothing more than to work on a show where I could write in the narrative voice that lived inside my head - the one I’d been chasing for my entire audio career.
And did I ever get to do that.
We had a lot of latitude to figure out how to tell this story and how to make the show, which is why every episode is so different. The two-part episode on the seven Metals of alchemy contains more than twenty art objects. But the episode about Jade contains just one.
Jade, Shells, and Concrete were the episodes where the show’s three producers taught ourselves how to make the show: what our ethos was, and how that would show up in the work. You’ll notice there are very few objects that you might expect in a Met podcast - no Roman statues, no Dutch masters. Where there are Roman coins, they tell a story of conquering the earth and its peoples… and what that cost. But for the Jade episode, I wanted to focus on a single solitary hei tiki made of pounamu, or nephrite jade.
That’s Lisa Ruaka Rewiti, a curator (and hei tiki keeper) at the Whanganui Regional Museum on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Museums are an inherently colonial institution, and at a place like the Met with over two million objects, many will have arrived without provenance. What happens to the material culture of a colonized people when it’s removed from its context and placed behind glass?
To answer that question, I spoke exclusively to Māori experts and curators. I wanted to include te reo Māori with a minimum of explanatory commas, and it felt important to me to include mātauranga Māori at its own speed. So much of today’s audio industry is built around American public radio conventions. I wanted to slow listeners’ ears down and ask them to sink into a story - like this one from geologist Dan Hikuroa, on how pounamu came to be found in southern Aotearoa New Zealand.
The episode also explored the role that art institutions - especially the Met, in this case! - can play as stewards and reanimators of things that may have been taken without consent. By bringing ancestors out from behind the glass, we may be able to breathe them back to life.
The Paper episode was a very different form of excavation. This is the one where we came closest to asking the question: what makes it art? Looking at ephemera, at valentines, airmail letters, precious ancient folios, and questioning museums’ role in deciding what has value (and how museums are different from hoarders’ collections!)
Unlike Jade, which is harder than diamonds and can carry the body’s warmth beautifully, paper is essentially in a state of decay from the moment it’s made. Which makes it uniquely human, says Met paper conservator Rachel Mustalish.
I recorded that interview in the Met’s paper lab, which is possibly one of the most amazing places I will ever go as a result of my career. Of the museum’s two million objects, one and a half million are made of paper - so Mustalish and her colleagues are BUSY. One of them casually asked if we wanted to see the original 1938 cels of Snow White? Another came by with a GORGEOUS box of pigments for illuminated manuscripts (which is what would drag me into a fight about colonialism in a later episode). As a former librarian and forever lover of books, I feel incredibly lucky to have been there. And as to whether or not paper is always art…
The Tarot episode came as a spinoff from Paper, which came in way too long but had this digression on a topic we couldn’t bear to give up. It walked the line between ephemera and art, asking the question of whether access for the masses automatically devalued something in a museum’s eyes. And it also has this esoteric history nothing else could quite touch.
That history, from plaything of the rich to parlor trick, took tarot pretty far. But in the past 40-50 years, they’ve become a divinatory tool and source of empowerment for women, queer folks, and people of color. A cult favorite deck that encapsulates this is the Slow Holler Tarot, which is a collective deck made exclusively by queer people, Southerners, and queer Southerners. The American South in general is looked down upon and misunderstood by a lot of the world: as a central Floridian and lover of this deck, I felt really honored to hear the artists tell me how tarot can uphold, subvert, transform.
Half of the materials in the show were decided on before we began, but the other half were decided on during production. (Hint: don’t do this! That’s how a production schedule that’s supposed to take eight months ends up taking 18.) Ideas kept bubbling up and then not having quite enough to sustain them. Ivory? Latex? Mercury? Silver? Gold?
The show required an incredible amount of research, and as I was reading along about individual metals I started running into more and more frequent mentions of alchemy: the idea that through strenuous transformation, you could turn lead into gold. The transformative quality of this felt deeply aligned with the show, and as I tried material after material I kept thinking: why don’t we just DO alchemy? And thus a two part story on the Metals of Alchemy was born. Met scientist-in-charge Marco Leona, who you heard in Tarot, was in many ways the spirit of this podcast. He was a fantastic guide through the periodic table, and for a self-proclaimed prosaic scientist he had some gorgeous thoughts about how metals allow you to dream things into being.
We started off in the basement of the Met in the Arms and Armor department, another incredible career high. (They have a WHOLE FORGE DOWN THERE—!) We saw the most incredible suits of armor, made to lay on the wearers like the latest court fashions.
Conservator and armorer Ted Hunter also told us about the role of iron in basic creation: including the iron in the anvil he uses every day.
Upstairs in the Asian art department, we dove into some incredible bronze bells. The sound of a bell is tightly controlled by the proportion of tin used in their making. These ones were found in a waterlogged tomb, more than two thousand years old, and hadn’t been played in over a hundred years. Until we asked, and Chinese Art curator Jason Sun gleefully broke out some mallets and carefully gave us a little warmup.
What I loved about this section is that the bell I found the cutest and most charming? Was a fake. Modern metal and green paint, passed off as authentic to the Met at a time before the technology existed to detect the deceit. And I loved how excited Jason was about the fact that we now know this bell was fake. It means that we’re moving towards deeper knowledge every day.
And then there’s lead, where all of this started. It’s heavy and necessary and has been known to us for a long time.
There’s a striking puppet head at the Met - a Sumatran si gale-gale. In its eyes sit great round eyes of lead: made for weeping. Toba Batak archaeologist Defri Simatupang says they’re made to mourn, and to remember.
When Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch, many artifacts were removed improperly from the islands: including many si gale-gales. It’s a story repeated around the world: beautiful artifacts going missing and then popping up in Europe or America. Such was the case with the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, a gorgeous illuminated manuscript of the tale of the Persian kings. The one the Met has was bought by its future president, split up ostensibly to reproduce each plate in slides, and then given away or sold in pieces. This episode is the aforementioned colonial fight, triggered by the deep green copper margins inlaid in the book. Persian Middle Eastern studies professor Ali Olomi says he grew up loving the stories of Rostam, an epic hero. In this one, his horse is kidnapped by a princess named Tahmina.
But he also points out that this book is essentially imperial propaganda. History itself, he says, is an exercise in mythmaking. And that repeats when something like this shows up in a western museum. Who gets to “own” the story of us? Who gets to own the narrative of what happened to the Shahnama, for that matter? The Met’s website very demurely says that it owns 78 of the 258 folios, the rest of which were “dispersed among museums and private collections.” Getting to decide what is and is not true is always an exercise in power.
And yet in a way it can also be an exercise in reconnection, as it was with Jade.
Metals hold so many versions of the truth - a million reflections. In some cases, it takes a toxic metal to hold the reflection itself. Daguerreotypes, for example, as I learned from photography curator Stephen Pinson.
The Met has a daguerreotype made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, father of the form himself. It’s incredibly meta, capturing this PT Barnum-esque figure who dreamed of recognition as an artist, but whose art form took a century to be recognized as more than the work of a mechanical hand. He found a way to infuse this famously mercurial metal with faces, in a way that would last: not unlike the Romans did with their coins. I was fascinated to hear the way that currency was the tip of the spear of empire.
To historian Ben Harnett, there was almost a magical process there - coins as a form of transubstantiation. This object, in exchange for your trust.
The last object I featured was the hardest to book. It’s a Ghanaian object, and was the first (but not the last) project to illustrate to me that Ghanaians are the single hardest group of people to book who I have ever worked with. If I thought my last name would get me in the door, I was incredibly mistaken. I hit so many dead ends, or flakey people with highhanded demands. But for Gold, it felt deeply important to me that the object be from Ghana. And I found it in the regalia of an Akan chief linguist: the okyeame’s staff. The Met’s is carved with an intricate pattern depicting Kwaku Anansi - a man, a spider, a master of weaving words.
Yaw Nyarko is an economist, but he’s also a sub-chief in an area outside Kumasi. He says the okyeame was a crucial piece of mediating the court.
So much in these five episodes is about the disruption of colonization. But for Yaw, all these metal artifacts carry stories that the British couldn’t erase. It felt fitting, to end on a note of how we endured.
I interviewed 51 people for this show, read an uncountable number of books, wrote what felt at times like a million drafts, and plastered post-its across three continents. While making Immaterial I was deciding where to live, and it was scripted in eight different cities - including a successful table read of the Tarot episode in the Dulles airport check-in counter area before I got on the plane to Portugal. It was an epic project that overlapped with an epic time in my life; I’m proud of both.
It’s been years, and I still reference things I learned making this show: from facts about how Concrete behaves to satisfaction when the museum is required to give a stolen artifact back. Our goal with this show was to offer listeners something thoughtful and intricate and beautiful. And - at least from this side of the microphone - it succeeded in changing the way I see.