June 22, 2026 - Imari Paris Jeffries on the Embrace's new center, Imagined Nation at the Athenaeum, and the Tao of Lloyd

June 26, 2026 - Week in Review: The Reflecting Pool, Clive Davis, and Dolly Parton's truck stop

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines, which include: President Trump’s blue Reflecting Pool makeover has become a swampy spectacle in Washington, with algae, peeling paint and blame quickly giving way to parody songs and guerrilla projections. What began as a patriotic renovation ahead of America’s 250th has become an accidental canvas for satire. Clive Davis, the legendary music executive who died this week at 94, leaves behind a towering legacy in American music. With a golden ear for talent, Davis worked with artists from Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen to Whitney Houston. More than a century after the Titanic sank, a new fight is surfacing over what should happen to artifacts recovered from the wreck. RMS Titanic Inc., the company with salvage rights, wants to auction more than 100 objects, raising questions about preservation, profit and whether pieces of one of history’s most famous maritime graves should ever be sold. Cape Cod is becoming home to Bards on the Bay, a new Wellfleet retreat for playwrights and theatrical composers founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel and Michael Maso, who led The Huntington for more than four decades. Dolly Parton has gone from “9 to 5” to I-65. The country music legend has opened her first truck stop and travel center in Cornersville, Tennessee, complete with fuel, food, showers, Dolly merchandise and a coffee shop called “Cup of Ambition.”

June 25, 2026 - Ensemble Altera's "Declarations," Children's Art Carnival in Harlem, and a home for Les Bleus in Boston

Providence-based chamber choir Ensemble Altera [https://www.ensemblealtera.com/] joins The Culture Show live from GBH’s Fraser Performance Studio to perform excerpts from Declarations [https://www.ensemblealtera.com/tickets], a new work marking America at 250. The full world-premiere work will be performed Saturday, June 27 at 7 p.m. at Old South Church in Boston and Sunday, June 28 at 3 p.m. at First Baptist Church in Providence. Curator Souleo and artist Michael A. Cummings discuss Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists [https://wallach.columbia.edu/content/childrens-art-carnival-harlem-making-contemporary-artists], a new exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery tracing the Harlem arts center that helped shape generations of artists, including a young Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cliff Dever, owner of Warehouse Kitchen + Sports Bar, joins us to talk about running a downtown Boston sports bar during World Cup fever. Warehouse has partnered with the French national team to serve as the official bar for Les Bleus supporters, just steps from the FIFA Fan Festival at City Hall Plaza [https://www.meetboston.com/event/fifa-fan-festival%E2%84%A2-boston/89936/].

June 24, 2026 - Reynaliz Herrera & Ideas, Not Theories' with BIKEncerto, Parade: A Folktale, and the Boston Art Review

Percussionist and composer Reynaliz Herrera [https://www.ideasnottheories.com/about] returns to The Culture Show with excerpts from BIKEncerto [https://www.ideasnottheories.com/bikencerto-album-release], her four-movement concerto for solo bicycle and orchestra. Herrera turns the bicycle into a rich percussive instrument of rhythm, texture, machinery and music. The full album is also available on Bandcamp [https://reynalizherrera.bandcamp.com/album/bikencerto-a-concerto-for-solo-bicycle-and-orchestra-by-reynaliz-herrera]. Today  we hear excerpts from  I. Everything Movement,  III. Metallic Movement and IV. Tires Movement. Today’s performance full credits: “BIKEncerto: a concerto for solo bicycle and orchestra” Composer: Reynaliz Herrera Performed by: Reynaliz Herrera (Bicycle Percussion Soloist)& Ideas, Not Theories;  Ideas,  Not Theories Orchestra: Founder/Owner/Artistic Director: Reynaliz Herrera, David Flowers: Conductor, Nathaniel Kim: Concertmaster/Violin I, Hannah Rebeca Lopez Vega: Violin II, Emma Michaud: Viola, Thomas Rodman: Cello, Adam Gurczak: Double Bass, Vivek Patel: Flute, Mary O’Keefe: Oboe,, Shannon Leigh: Clarinet, Francesca Panunto: Bassoon Jill Medvedow returns for Big Little Books, The Culture Show’s book club series celebrating short books that can be read in one sitting but linger long after. This month’s selection is Parade: A Folktale [https://softskull.com/books/parade/] by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell — a 96-page novella about memory, guilt, imagination and the mythic creatures we carry with us into adulthood. Jameson Johnson [https://www.bostonartreview.com/team], founder and editor in chief of Boston Art Review, joins us to discuss the publication’s latest issue and how artists are thinking through history, America at 250 and the stories we choose to preserve. The conversation also looks at Art Radar [https://www.bostonartreview.com/shop/box-of-radar-maps], Boston Art Review’s map of Greater Boston’s art spaces, galleries, museums and artist-run venues.

June 23, 2026 - We Are Pat, Mahesh Daas on data centers, and A Night at the Disco

Filmmaker Rowan Haber joins us to discuss the new documentary We Are Pat, which revisits Julia Sweeney’s famously androgynous Saturday Night Live character through a 2026 lens. Once built around the question of whether Pat was a man or a woman, the film asks what that joke meant then, what it means now and whether Pat can be reconsidered or reclaimed. We Are Pat is available on Apple TV [https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/we-are-pat/umc.cmc.r1bwmj036xbfplmc6oi5qynm], Prime Video [https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0F9KP4X75Y97ZG7EF7PS09T3DN] and Fandango at Home [https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/We-Are-Pat/4952114]. Mahesh Daas, president of Boston Architectural College [https://the-bac.edu/leadership/office-of-the-president] and co-author of the graphic novella I, Nobot [https://oroeditions.com/product/i-nobot], returns for AI: Actual Intelligence. This month, he looks at data centers — the massive facilities powering the cloud and artificial intelligence — and the questions they raise about land, energy, water, noise and who pays for the infrastructure AI requires. Music journalist Christian John Wikane joins us to discuss A Night at the Disco [https://www.accartbooks.com/us/book/a-night-at-the-disco/], co-written with Alice Harris, a full-color look at the artists, producers and performers who turned disco from an underground club sound into a global movement. Wikane will appear at Provincetown Bookshop on Thursday, June 25 [https://www.provincetownbookshop.com/events], Mitchell’s Book Corner on Nantucket on Tuesday, July 7 [https://nantucketbookpartners.com/event/2026-07-07/book-signing-christian-john-wikane], and Edgartown Books on Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday, July 8 [https://www.edgartownbooks.com/events].

June 22, 2026 - Imari Paris Jeffries on the Embrace's new center, Imagined Nation at the Athenaeum, and the Tao of Lloyd

Imari Paris Jeffries, President and CEO of Embrace Boston [https://www.embraceboston.org/about/our-team/] and co-chair of Everyone250 [https://everyone250.org/about/], returns for AI: Actual Intelligence, The Culture Show’s recurring conversation with some of the region’s sharpest thinkers. This month, he brings his original, algorithm-free perspective on culture, civic life and the stories Boston is choosing to tell. The Boston Athenaeum’s exhibition Imagined Nation [https://bostonathenaeum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/imagined-nation/] looks beyond the familiar scenes of the American Revolution to ask how ideas of nationhood have been formed, recorded and revised across generations. Curator Reed Gochberg joins us to discuss the books, maps, images and objects that reveal America as an unfinished story. The exhibition is on view through November 14, 2026. In The Tao of Lloyd, actor and writer Dennis Trainor Jr. imagines Lloyd Dobler, the open-hearted Gen X icon from Say Anything, decades later — older, grayer and still refusing the program. The new solo show heads to the Edinburgh Fringe this August, and Trainor is raising funds to help bring the production to Edinburgh [https://www.gofundme.com/f/Tao-of-Lloyd-Goes-to-Edinburgh-Fringe?utm_source=chatgpt.com]. You can also see a workshop performance June 27 at Western Avenue Studios & Lofts in Lowell [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-tao-of-lloyd-workshop-performance-tickets-1990669370675?utm_source=chatgpt.com], before the show runs at the Edinburgh Fringe August 6 through 30 [https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/the-tao-of-lloyd?utm_source=chatgpt.com].