Abbi Jacobson tours specific MoMA artworks with curators and guests like RuPaul.
A Piece of Work treats modern art as something to stand in front of, question, and laugh through before it starts to click. Episodes move from wall drawings, emojis, soup cans, performance art, and rooms of light into bigger arguments about authorship, bodies, technology, fame, and perception.
PRESS PLAY
A Piece of Work is a narrative interview show built around gallery visits rather than a studio-only conversation: host Abbi Jacobson looks at specific MoMA artworks in person, guided by a curator or educator, and the episode is structured around that close reading. A second guest — often someone from outside the art world, such as a comedian, writer, or television personality — joins to react to the work and connect it to their own field or experience. Recurring guest types include MoMA curatorial and education staff (Mark Joshua Epstein, Sarah Suzuki, Thomas Lacks), working artists whose pieces are under discussion (Martine Sims, Carolee Schneemann), and celebrities or comedians linked to Jacobson's own career, including former Broad City collaborators and guest stars like RuPaul and Tavi Gevinson. Recurring themes include authorship and collaboration in conceptual art, text and language used as visual material, pop art's relationship to mass media and self-promotion, and the body, consent, and nudity in 1960s performance art. The tone mixes explanatory narration with informal, sometimes personal conversation, as Jacobson connects historical works to her own anxieties or experiences (social media self-promotion, public performance). Episodes are short-form (roughly 20-26 minutes) and single-topic rather than survey-style. The show benefits listeners who want specific, object-level detail on individual artworks without a full art-history lecture, as well as listeners drawn in by Jacobson's comedy background or the celebrity guest pairing. Production is narrative documentary in style, built around on-site museum visits rather than a remote interview format. With only 11 episodes total, the show reads as a limited-run series rather than an ongoing weekly program.
Made for: Listeners with a casual-to-moderate interest in modern and contemporary art who want detail on individual museum objects rather than a survey course, including fans of host Abbi Jacobson's comedy work.
What sets it apart: Each episode anchors on one or two artworks viewed in person at MoMA, pairing a curator's close reading with a guest from entirely outside the art world to test how the piece lands with a non-specialist.
Hosted by Abbi Jacobson, it’s everything you want to know about modern art but were afraid to ask.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · July 2026
A Piece of Work turns MoMA centered art encounters into sharp, funny conversations about how viewers make sense of what they see.
A Piece of Work makes modern art feel like something a listener can walk toward, not something sealed behind museum language. The host brings curiosity, jokes, and a useful amount of doubt to MoMA centered conversations about performance art, Pop art, conceptual instructions,…
You want MoMA without the museum voice, with actual what-is-happening-here questions, and with better RuPaul follow-ups than your imaginary docent usually allows.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm, plainspoken look at instruction-based art, where scores, scripts, and museum exercises make words the material.
Abbi Jacobson treats instruction-based art as a wonderfully practical problem: if the artwork is a set of directions, who is really making it when someone else carries them out?
A bright, funny argument for taking emojis and the at sign seriously as design culture.
Questlove Hearts Emojis makes a brisk case for treating everyday digital marks as design culture, not disposable tech garnish. Abby Jacobson begins with Paola Antonelli, MoMA's senior curator in architecture and design, following the at sign from medieval manuscript shorthand…
A crisp, approachable look at Warhol's soup cans as handmade paintings already flirting with mass production.
Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans get treated here less as pop-art wallpaper than as a working problem: how can a painting look mass-produced and still be unmistakably made by hand?
A smart, uneasy art walk that treats confusion as part of looking.
Abbi Jacobson moves from her MICA art-school background and Broad City life into Howardena Pindell's Free, White, and 21, where a story about racist schooling gives way to gauze wrapped around the face and a white-faced character in a blonde wig, powdered makeup, and cat-eye…
Abbey Jacobson uses RuPaul and Carolee Schneemann to make performance art feel funny, bodily, and less easy to dismiss.
Performance art arrives here with a wink before it gets its teeth in. Abbey Jacobson starts from the familiar museum-floor bafflement, then uses RuPaul as the friendliest possible way in: someone who treats self-invention not as theory but as daily practice, and who makes a…
Abby Jacobson and Samantha Irby let a room of light turn looking into something funny, strange, and unexpectedly tender.
A room of colored light and a hole cut into the ceiling become the whole encounter here, with Abby Jacobson and Samantha Irby talking through the moment as the room goes egg-yolk yellow and the sky turns turquoise.
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins dissect Oscar races, new releases, and Hollywood news.
Layered audio documentaries on hidden histories, with some episodes hosted by Frances McDormand.
BBC World Service panel show tracing the global history behind jewellery, robots, and education.
Journalists Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb riff on TV, books, and celebrity culture between themselves.
Tyler Green interviews artists and curators about specific artworks, one exhibition at a time.
MJ Dorian's solo deep dives trace genius through Blake, McQueen, da Vinci, and Jung's Red Book.
Words turn into art materials.
Host Abbi Jacobson and curator Paola Antonelli explore the history and artistry of everyday design, from the at sign's medieval origins to the first emojis and video games, debating their place in museum collections with insights from Questlove.
Wait, handmade soup cans?
Two markers start fighting.
Name one performance artist.
Host Abbi Jacobson takes writer Samantha Irby to experience James Turrell's immersive light installation at MoMA PS1, exploring how light manipulates perception.
Abbey Jacobson visits MoMA’s conservation department with Ellen Davis to examine a 1961 Yves Klein monochrome made from a specially formulated ultramarine blue.