National Gallery Of Art | Audio

March 2012 - Joel Shapiro, artist. Following the installation of Joel Shapiro's Untitled (1989) in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden with other major post–World War II sculptures, the artist received an invitation to curate an exhibition of his work alongside the 19th-century sculpture of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. In this podcast recorded on March 9, 2003, Shapiro explains that the upcoming exhibition gave him on opportunity to focus on the continuity of thought in sculpture. Although certain ideas for form in sculpture seem radical and contemporary, their ideas have already been discovered and worked with in earlier times. Shapiro finds that the development of form seems to repeat itself, although it is ever-changing, more or less focused, and contextualized by the era in which it was created.

March 2012 - David Cannadine, director and professor, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. David Cannadine launched the U.S. book tour for his landmark publication, Mellon: An American Life—the first commissioned biography of the great American industrialist and founding benefactor of the National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon—on October 8, 2006, at the National Gallery of Art. Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1855 and over time established himself as preeminent in four different fields: business, politics, art collecting, and philanthropy. He died in 1937. In this lecture, Cannadine describes Mellon's life and work before creating the Gallery as a gift to the nation—"from the smokestacks of Pittsburgh to the matchless, stripped neoclassical [West] Building." In explaining the magnitude and range of Mellon's contribution to American history, Cannadine starts with his business career as banker and creator of iconic American companies, and his political career as Secretary of the Treasury

March 2012 - Bridget R. Cooks, associate professor of art history and African American studies, University of California, Irvine. In this lecture, recorded at the National Gallery of Art on March 4, 2012, Professor Cooks presents research from her book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, in which she analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical reception of the most significant museum exhibitions of African-American art in the United States. Cooks also exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural differences that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices.

March 2012 - Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art. Curator Mary Morton celebrates the reinstallation of the impressionist and post-impressionist paintings galleries in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in this lecture recorded on January 29, 2012. Among the world's great collections of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh, the Gallery's nineteenth-century French paintings are recently back on view after a two-year period of gallery repair, restoration, and renovation. Morton discusses the new installation and its thematic, monographic, and art historical organization.

February 2012 - Elliot Perry and Darrell Walker, collectors of African American art and art of the African diaspora and former players for the National Basketball Association, and Michael D. Harris, associate professor of art history and African American studies, Emory University. In this conversation recorded on February 26, 2012, as part of the National Gallery of Art lecture series The Collecting of African American Art, former National Basketball Association players Elliot Perry and Darrell Walker discuss their collections of African American art and art of the African diaspora with Professor Michael D. Harris. Perry and Walker began to collect art during their extensive travels for their professional sports careers, and both have amassed important holdings of modern and contemporary art that have been exhibited throughout the United States. Both have also dedicated themselves to educational and philanthropic causes to preserve and showcase African American culture. Professor Harris is an artist, curator,

February 2012 - Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. In this podcast recorded on January 15, 2006, Ruth Fine discusses the Harlem-based life and career of Norman Lewis in honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday weekend. Lewis was born in Harlem in 1909 and died in New York at the age of 70. Except for short periods spent elsewhere, New York and, in one way or another, the Harlem community remained Lewis' home base throughout his life. Harlem changed radically during the artist's lifetime, becoming the cultural center of black America. He is considered by many to be the first African American artist fully engaged by abstraction. Lewis' drawings, paintings, and prints date from the 1930s to 1970. Supporting himself as an elevator operator, house painter, short-order chef, merchant marine, tailor, and taxi driver, Lewis worked steadily at his art. "I have sustained myself in whatever the moment called for and done what has been necessary to just exist." Lewis

February 2012 - David C. Driskell, artist, collector, and emeritus professor of art history, University of Maryland at College Park; in conversation with Ruth Fine, consulting curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. Following The Art of Romare Bearden, on view at the National Gallery of Art from September 14, 2003, through January 4, 2004, exhibition curator Ruth Fine joined lenders David C. Driskell and Frank Stewart to discuss another collaboration—their visual biography of the artist. Bearden (1911–1988) worked closely with Stewart from 1975 until his death and allowed Stewart to photograph him in his studio, at art-related events, and during his personal time. The resulting book, Romare Bearden, contains introductory texts by Driskell and Fine as well as an interview Fine conducted with Stewart that serves as running commentary alongside the book's images. In this Conversations with Artists program recorded on December 11, 2004, the collaborators discuss their relationship with

February 2012 - Lou Stovall, artist, in conversation with Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. As part of the National Gallery of Art summer lecture series Five African American Artists: Johnson-Tanner-Johnson-Stovall-Thomas, Lou Stovall participated in a Conversations with Artists program with Ruth Fine on August 3, 2003. "Compositions and Collaborations: The Arts of Lou Stovall" is a rare opportunity to hear Stovall discuss his own work and his collaborations with other artists, and to listen as he responds to questions from the audience. Stovall has been a major figure in the Washington, DC, arts community since the early 1960s, when he arrived at Howard University for his BFA program. In 1968 Stovall founded Workshop, Inc., a professional printmaking studio, where he has collaborated with more than 70 artists over the years. In addition to his own drawings and silkprints, and his collaborative printmaking projects, Stovall is a published essayist and poet.

August 2012 - Nancy Yeide, head of the department of curatorial records and files, National Gallery of Art, and the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Curatorial Sabbatical Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The looting of cultural property by Nazi forces has been called the "Greatest Theft in History." In total, the Nazis looted more than 200,000 individual items, including paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, during World War II, primarily from Jewish owners in the occupied countries. In this lecture recorded on February 2, 2003, at the National Gallery of Art, Nancy Yeide provides the provenance of famous cases to explore how some looted art ended up in American collections and museums. Yeide also discusses how Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and commander of the German Air Force, used his political and military power to amass the largest private art collection in Europe.

February 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this sixth and final lecture of the series, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 11, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe returns to a question raised in lecture one: Can an argument be made for abstraction as a legitimate part of both our cognitive process and our nature as a modern liberal society? Varnedoe leads the listener through a tour of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, making an impassioned case for abstraction as an art of sub

February 2012 - James Walvin, professor of history, University of York, United Kingdom. To commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade on March 25, 1807, Professor James Walvin published two books: A Short History of Slavery and The Trader, The Owner, The Slave. Shortly before their publication, Walvin presented this lecture on February 18, 2007, at the National Gallery of Art, discussing his thoughts on what is remembered—and what is forgotten—about slavery and the slave trade. In it, he questions the kind of role the government and public memory should play in commemorating this extraordinary transformation in public policy two hundred years ago. The difficult history of slavery and the slave trade is both immediately present, as a documented part of human history with its descendants as part of the population, and everywhere in places where it can't be seen; just beneath the surface of the Western world its evidence is all around.

February 2012 - David C. Driskell, artist, collector, and emeritus professor of art history, University of Maryland at College Park, and Ruth Fine, consulting curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. Highly respected as an artist, art historian, curator, and teacher, David C. Driskell's life as a collector is less well known. In this event recorded on February 12, 2012, as part of the National Gallery of Art lecture series The Collecting of African American Art, David C. Driskell and Ruth Fine discuss publicly for the first time the expansive range of his art acquisitions, which he started to collect during his years as an art student at Howard University in Washington, DC. Among the treasures in Driskell's collection are old master and modern European prints, antique rugs, African sculpture, and works by African American masters from the 19th century through the present.

February 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 4, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe explores the 1980s, when Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenburg, and others confronted the ironic relationship between abstraction and the representation of man-made objects, thus producing a politicized critique of abstraction. Varnedoe concludes by looking at artists including Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly, whose varied approaches

February 2012 - Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. To coincide with the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday weekend, Ruth Fine describes the history and growth of the collection of works on paper by African American artists at the National Gallery of Art in this podcast recorded on January 16, 2011. The Gallery owns approximately 70,000 prints and 30,000 drawings, all of which have been acquired by donation or purchased with donated funds. The Gallery, which opened to the public in 1941, acquired its first works by African American artists in 1943, which is the starting point of Fine's presentation. She tracks the collection's riches by the chronological order in which the drawings and prints entered the collection. The earliest of them are Edward Loper's contributions to the Index of American Design, acquired in 1943, with the most recent being Norma Gloria Morgan's etching and aquatint Turning Forms, added in 2010. Throughout the lecture, Fine suggests the uniq

February 2012 - David C. Driskell, professor emeritus, University of Maryland at College Park; Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art; and Julie L. McGee, Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution and author of David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar. To celebrate the publication of David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar, Ruth Fine and Julie L. McGee discuss the first biography and comprehensive monograph of his work with David C. Driskell. In this podcast recorded on April 14, 2007, at the National Gallery of Art, the participants share the collaborative process behind writing the book, which traces Driskell's personal, artistic, and scholarly journey. A pioneer in establishing the study of African American art within the canon of American art criticism and theory, Driskell is also an artist whose work approaches questions of nature and culture, African and African American heritage, spirituality, family, and other su

January 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 27, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe marks 1968 as a turning point in minimalism, when a new organicism emerged in the work of Richard Serra and Eva Hesse. A change in scale and in relationship to the body and to landscape is epitomized in works such as Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

January 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 13, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe contrasts multiple forms of minimalism in the 1960s, as seen in the works of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and James Turrell, and examines, among other things, the degree to which this art is quintessentially American.

January 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 6, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe discusses the reactions of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns to prewar traditions of constructivism, and the initiation of new movements that utilized similar forms but with very dissimilar premises. While raising the question of whether abstract art can have a fixed meaning, he argues that abstraction provides no respite fro

January 2012 - Kimberly A. Jones, assistant curator of French paintings, National Gallery of Art. To celebrate the opening of Édouard Vuillard at the National Gallery of Art on January 19, 2003, coordinating curator Kimberly A. Jones introduced the career of Parisian artist Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). The exhibition—on view through April 20, 2003—presented 233 objects, some of which had never before been on public display, and included paintings, folding screens, theater programs, prints, drawings, photographs, and ceramics. A series of decorative panels, The Public Gardens (1894), were shown together for the first time since 1906. The exhibition was co-organized by the National Gallery of Art with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Réunion des musées nationaux/Musée d'Orsay, Paris; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

January 2012 - Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 30, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe begins with Jackson Pollock at a key moment in the emergence of a new form of abstract art in the mid-1950s. Building on Ernst Gombrich's Mellon Lectures of 1956, Varnedoe begins by asking: Can there be a philosophy of abstract art as compelling as Gombrich's argument for illusionism? What is abstract art good for? And finally, what do we g