In this episode I speak with Dr. Tenley Bick who is an associate professor of art history at Florida State University and an art historian of global modern and contemporary art, with special interests in post-WWII and contemporary European (especially Italian) and African art (continental and diasporic), with a focus on social art history and cultural geopolitics. We peel back the veil around working in academia and getting tenure and we chat about her new book Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics (Yale University Press, 2025), the first English-language scholarly monograph on the Italian artist. We also touch on her research for her second book, on contemporary art and visual postcoloniality in and around Italy, focused on works of art by contemporary Italian, Afro-Italian, and East African artists that address histories and legacies of Italian colonialism in Africa.