National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced When the Earth Trembled, the fourth program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Diane Waggoner, curator of nineteenth-century photographs, National Gallery of Art. The first exhibition to focus exclusively on photographs made in the eastern half of the United States during the 19th century, East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography showcases some 175 works—from daguerreotypes and stereographs to albumen prints and cyanotypes—as well as several photographers whose efforts have often gone unheralded. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains, as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, the Civil War, and tourism, these photographs not only helped shape America’s national identity but also played a role in the emergence of environmentalism. Diane Waggoner introduces the exhibition in this opening-day lecture recorded on March 12, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. East of the Mississippi is on view through July 16, 2017.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 15, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced The Colorful World of Cinema, the third program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Over the past decade, American artist Theaster Gates (b. 1973) has explored the built environment and the power of art and culture to transform experience. For the second exhibition in the reopened East Building Tower 3 galleries, Gates presents a new body of work—The Minor Arts—featuring several pieces created for the Gallery. The installation examines how discarded and ordinary objects, including the floor of a Chicago high school gym and the archives of Ebony magazine, acquire value through the stories we tell. In this conversation recorded on February 26, 2017, Theaster Gates and guest curator Sarah Newman discuss the works and themes of his exhibition Theaster Gates: The Minor Arts, on view at the Gallery from March 5 to September 4, 2017.

Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and president of the Calder Foundation, in conversation with Harry Cooper, curator of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Perhaps no artist has a larger presence at the National Gallery of Art than Alexander Calder. His monumental mobile, commissioned for the opening of the East Building, has become nearly as iconic as the building itself. A part of the East Building renovation and expansion, Tower 2 now boasts the world’s largest display of works by Alexander Calder: more than 40 sculptures and paintings, spanning the period from the late 1920s through 1976 and including 19 long-term loans from the Calder Foundation. In addition to the works in the Tower 2 gallery and the atrium mobile, three Calder sculptures can be found around the Gallery’s campus: Obus (1972) was recently installed in the West Concourse Gallery; Tom’s (1974), on loan from the Calder Foundation, is on view outside the Seventh Street entrance; and another loan from the foundation, Cheval Rouge (197

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced Ladies First, the second program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced Up in the Air!, the first program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art; Joan Jonas, artist; and Jason Moran, pianist and artistic director for jazz, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. On February 4, 2017, pioneering performance and video artist Joan Jonas collaborated with pianist Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz, in a multimedia piece inspired by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier, which tells the story of a young emissary sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate paranormal activity surrounding a glacier. For this live-performance art experience at the Kennedy Center, Jonas and Moran interacted with one another through narration, painting, video projections, movement, and sound. To celebrate the performance, Jonas and Moran joined Lynne Cooke in this conversation held the following day, February 5, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. This program was held in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performi

Jamie Gabbarelli, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. On January 23, 2017, as part of a Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Jamie Gabbarelli provides a brief history of the Gallery’s recently expanded collection of Renaissance maiolica. As a means to introduce an upcoming exhibition, Gabbarelli highlights and analyzes these refined, beguiling, and brightly colored ceramics in connection with Renaissance prints and illustrated books, which played a key role in the development of ceramics decoration in early modern Italy.

Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture and deputy head of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art. A new art form emerged in fifteenth-century Florence through the genius of Luca della Robbia, exalting the humble material of clay with brilliant modeling and surfaces shining with color that seems to defy time. The first comprehensive exhibition of Della Robbia work in the United States, originating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and taking new form at the National Gallery of Art, shows how three generations of Luca's family of skilled artists and entrepreneurs, responding to international demand, created magnificent sculpture in glazed terracotta. To celebrate opening day on February 5, 2017, Alison Luchs explores the human sensitivity, spirit-lifting color, and technical ingenuity that secure the appeal of Della Robbia sculpture into the twenty-first century. Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence is on view through June 4, 2017.

Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Many of the artists associated with the photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz explored abstract portraiture in the early decades of the twentieth century. These artists included Marius de Zayas, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Stieglitz himself. But beyond a few watercolors made in 1917, Georgia O’Keeffe is not known to have extensively investigated this genre. In this lecture, held on January 22, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Sarah Greenough suggests that O’Keeffe made many more abstract portraits than have been previously identified, which have, as she herself admitted in the early 1970s, “slipped into the world as abstractions.”

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Douglas Crimp, art historian, critic, and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and professor of visual and cultural studies, University of Rochester. Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic who profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—a name Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, little is known about Crimp’s own formative experiences before the Pictures Generation. On January 8, 2017, Douglas Crimp joined Lynne Cooke to discuss the publication of Before Pictures. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s.

Tom Nichols, Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. This lecture by Tom Nichols, held on December 9, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, celebrates the publication of Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism. Nichols describes how the spread of Renaissance values led to the development of artistic invention in Venice. However, this inventiveness continued to relate to ideas of more traditional corporate and public ideal of “Venetian-ness.” Nichols also discusses some of the choices raised by writing a history of Renaissance art in Venice and how these were resolved.

Jane McFadden, department chair of humanities and sciences, ArtCenter College of Design. For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Jane McFadden describes how Virginia Dwan offered pivotal support to artists expanding the field of sculpture beyond the gallery in the late 1960s. Exploring these early endeavors, McFadden considers what unseen histories might emerge from understanding Dwan as a central collaborator in well-known works of land art. By tracing the resonance of key works like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative beyond established interpretations of site and land art, McFadden draws from the shadows the ghosts and other hallucinatory effects of this historical moment that are difficult to see.

Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, department of art history, department of cinema and media studies, University of Chicago. In this Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture recorded on December 4, 2016, Tom Gunning presented his research into the influence of the motion picture on both the visual arts and the act of perception. He states that “at the point of transformation from the projected film image to a projected electronic and digital one, we have an opportunity to reflect on what a revolution the moving image has sparked in our collective sense of what a ‘picture’ is. For nearly two centuries, images have moved and thereby introduced new visual relations to time and representation. This discussion searches for the roots and implications of the transformation, one that continues to this day.”

Emily Taub Webb, professor of art history, Savannah College of Art and Design. Supporting her stable of artists and their often-experimental practices remained Virginia Dwan’s primary aim as director of her groundbreaking New York gallery. Along the way, the field-expanding work she promoted required new possibilities for exhibition, both inside and outside the gallery walls, which advanced notions of site and reimagined the function of the gallery itself. For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Emily Taub Webb explores the contributions that Dwan Gallery made to site-oriented practices—including minimalism, conceptual art, and land art—through close analysis of several exhibitions held between 1967 and 1970.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Art. In this lecture held on December 11, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. introduces the exhibition Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, on view through January 2, 2017. More than 90 drawings and 27 paintings by such renowned Golden Age masters as Aelbert Cuyp, Pieter Jansz Saenredam, and Rembrandt van Rijn reveal the many ways Dutch artists used preliminary drawings in the painting process. The immediacy and the true-to-life character of 17th-century Dutch paintings suggest that artists painted them from life. These artists, however, painted scenes in their studios, often using drawings as points of departure. Wheelock examines the surprisingly various ways in which Dutch artists used drawings in the creative process.

Artists Joan Snyder and David Reed in conversation with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, distinguished professor of psychology and management and founding codirector of the Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University, and Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his well-known theory on flow the total involvement in any highly skilled, challenging activity, when self-consciousness and the sense of time dissolve into pure concentration. The creative process is a perfect illustration of this theory. In the East Building installation Flow: Modern Art from the Collection, the theme of flow can be found in the transit of brushed or poured pigment across objects, canvas, and floor; in the flux of color and composition; in the moving circuitry of words and pictures; and in images of fluidity, water, and migration. The recent renovation of the East Building, which opened many new paths of circulatio

Patricia Fortini Brown, professor emerita of art and archaeology, Princeton University. When we think of Venice, we think of a city in the sea, a city surrounded by water. And yet, before the modern era, the city had no source of fresh water other than the rain from heaven or barges from the mainland. Therein lies the paradox: Venice is in the water and has no water. In this 20th annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art recorded on November 6, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Patricia Fortini Brown addresses how the Venetians dealt with this deficiency of nature by creating a unique genre of public art: the Venetian wellhead. Also addressed are the change and the challenge that came with the expansion of the Venetian empire: the gift of running water and the need to harness it. Again, the Venetians seized the initiative and created fountains that transformed urban spaces from the Terraferma to the Stato da Mar into places of encounter and aesthetic delight.

Robert Hobbs, Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair, Virginia Commonwealth University, and visiting professor, Yale University. Among twentieth-century artistic styles, minimalism is remarkable for the great number of field theories developed to interpret it. For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Robert Hobbs analyzes some of the strategies artists employed to avoid interpretation as a primary means for reconsidering minimalism, using Virginia Dwan’s approach to this art as a starting point.