National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Stephen Bann (professor emeritus, University of Bristol, and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses reproductive engravings by Léopold Flameng in publications such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which brought old master and contemporary paintings to a wide audience. Bann argues that the history of reproduction offers insight into how the work of masters, old and new, were received and circulated.

Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Sarah E. Thompson discussed The War of the Twelve Animals, a fifteenth-century narrative handscroll, also known in many later copies, that depicts a war between the Twelve Animals of the East Asian zodiac and the rebel animals led by the tanuki, or “raccoon dog.” According to Thompson, the original work was created at the court of the retired shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and refers to the events of the Oei Disturbance of 1399–1400, with animal characters representing the competing warriors; Yoshimitsu himself is the dragon. This interpretation counters the m

Barbara Rossetti Ambros, professor in East Asian religions and department chair, department of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-chair, Animals and Religion Group, American Academy of Religions Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Barbara Rossetti Ambros spoke on the variety of roles animals have played in religious rituals in Japan, such as offerings and instruments of divination at Shinto shrines as well as Buddhist mortuary rituals and “life releases,” in which the lives of animals destined for slaughter are saved. Ambros described how religious views of animals influenced human interactions with animals through the example

R. Keller Kimbrough, professor of Japanese, department of Asian languages and civilizations, University of Colorado, Boulder Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, R. Keller Kimbrough explored the roles and representations of animals in Japanese picture scrolls and illustrated books from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. In particular he addressed a series of questions pertaining to the nature of animals and humans. How should we treat animals, based on what we can learn about them in Japanese illustrated fiction? How might we choose to behave if or when we find ourselves reborn into the animal realm?

Rory A. W. Browne, director of the academic advising center and associate dean of Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition, Rory A. W. Browne discussed artistic depictions of unfamiliar animals in Japanese life. People in Japan’s busy cities and agrarian villages longed to see and possess strange and spectacular birds and beasts, whether from inaccessible parts of its far-flung archipelago or from overseas. Visitors and merchants from China, Korea, and the Netherlands often fed that hunger for the exotic with both domesticated and wild animals, whether as tribute and prestige gifts for rulers and aristocrats or as

Federico Marcon, associate professor of East Asian studies and history and director of graduate studies, Princeton University Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Federico Marcon discussed the fascination with animals that was characteristic of early modern Japan. Animals were the main attractions of street shows, theatrical performances, and illustrated fictions and were collected as pets and specimens. According to Marcon, scholars engaged in the study of birds, insects, fish, and beasts, and illustrations played a fundamental role in documenting research, conveying information, and aiding taxonomical precision.

Miwako Tezuka, consulting curator, Reversible Destiny Foundation Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition, Miwako Tezuka discussed how the relationship between animals and humans has changed since the premodern era in Japan. Tezuka examined select contemporary artworks and fashion designs from the exhibition and described uniquely contemporary approaches to animals, or in Japanese, dōbutsu—“things that move.”

Jarob J. Ortiz, is a large-format photographer with the Heritage Documentation Programs of the National Park Service (NPS). In the winter of 2015, the NPS commenced a job search for the next Ansel Adams (1902–1984), the landscape photographer commissioned by the NPS in the 1940s to document nature in US National Parks. Ortiz, a Milwaukee native, was selected out of 5,000 applicants as a staff photographer for the Heritage Documentation Programs. Through recordings from a lecture held on April 18, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, interviews, and an on-location shoot in the Shenandoah, Ortiz illustrates the story of the processes and photographs he has taken while serving in this important role and discusses his journey and experience as a photographer in the field.

Richard J. Powell (John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s painting Portrait of My Grandmother (1922). Powell describes the arresting power of the artist’s loving portrayal of Emily Simms Motley, a woman born in slavery and hardworking all her long life, asserting its place among the other Jazz Age paintings for which the artist is well known.

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In the first lecture, “Tintoretto in Context: Framing Tintoretto: Sixteenth-Century Venetian Painting,” held on April 16, 2019, Denker discusses Venetian Renaissance painting beginning with Giovanni Bellini, his workshop, and his followers, in the second half of the 15th century. Giorgione and Titian were among his most prominent pupils, developing out of Bellini’s linear style the more atmospheric color, light, and shadow characteristic of Venetian High Renaissance oil painting. Though Titian would dominate the painting of large-scale altarpieces and decorations in Venice during the first half of the 16th century, rivals influence

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this second lecture, “Tintoretto: The Early Work,” held on April 23, 2019, Denker investigates Tintoretto’s formative years as an artist. According to early biographers, Tintoretto only briefly studied with the eminent painter Titian early in his career. The ambitious young son of a cloth dyer drew his inspiration from both the older master’s works and from a variety of younger, more experimental artists during his formative years. Tintoretto’s work was informed both by the example of Pordenone as a kind of anti-Titian mannerist and by the experimentation of younger collaborators, including Andrea Schiavone and Bonifacio dei’ Pi

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this third lecture, “Tintoretto Central: The Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” held on May 7, 2019, Denker discusses the decorations for the charitable confraternity Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which occupied Tintoretto for more than 25 years. In 1564 his painting San Rocco in Glory won the competition for the central ceiling canvas of the Scuola’s board room. His greatest masterpiece, the 40-foot-wide Crucifixion, was painted the following year. In the 1570s he completed the Old and New Testament cycles for the upper level of the Scuola, and in the 1580s he finished the decoration of the ground floor with scenes from the life of the

Eric Denker, Senior Lecturer and Manager of Gallery Talks and Lectures for Adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this final lecture, “In Situ: Tintoretto in Venice,” held on May 14, 2019, Denker discusses the many masterpieces by the artist scattered throughout Venice. Tintoretto was both a superlative painter and an ambitious entrepreneur. As a native Venetian, he worked for the Republic of Venice, for the church, and for charitable confraternities throughout his long career, often for below-market prices. Without a carefully planned route through Venice it is difficult to understand the trajectory of Tintoretto’s career from his early experimental years to his mature work. This lecture offers a chronological itinerary that begins with the

Celeste-Marie Bernier, professor of United States and Atlantic Studies and personal chair in English literature, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh; in conversation with Walter O. Evans, collector. Walter O. Evans has spent decades collecting, curating, and conserving a wide variety of African American art, music, and literature in an effort to preserve the cultural history of African Americans. Part of his collection focuses on the nineteenth-century formerly enslaved statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895). In addition to inscribed books from Douglass’s and his descendants’ libraries and printed editions of his speeches, the collection contains letters, manuscripts, and photographs. Much of the material is of a personal nature: correspondence between family members, family histories, and scrapbooks compiled by Douglass and his children; the scrapbooks, with their personal documents and familial relationships, illuminate Douglass in ways never before s

Oliver Lee Jackson, artist; Marty Ehrlich and Oliver Lake, musicians; and Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with A.B. Spellman, poet, music critic, and arts administrator American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work that masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz. On view from April 14 through September 15, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings presents 18 paintings created over the past 15 years, many of which are being shown publicly for the first time. Jackson’s often large-scale paintings blend figural elements of bodies pointing, kneeling, drawing, and playing instruments with colorful abstract compositions and vigorously worked surfaces. To celebrate the exhibition opening, the Gallery h

David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner in history. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom sheds new light on Douglass (c. 1818–1895), particularly the last 30 years of his life, thanks to a trove of letters, manuscripts, and scrapbooks in a private collection that no other historian previously used in any full-length biography. Blight writes that the collection, owned by Walter O. Evans of Savannah, GA, “makes possible many new insights into the final third of Douglass’s life. The younger Douglass—the heroic escaped slave and emerging abolitionist—is better known, in part because of the author’s masterful first two autobiographies. The older Douglass, from Reconstruction to the end of his life in 1895, has never been so accessible or rendered so fascinating and complicated as in the Evans collection.” In this lecture held on Jun

Robert T. Singer, curator and head, department of Japanese art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the sixth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media—sculpture, painting, lacquerwork, ceramics, metalwork, textile, and the woodblock print. A selection of some 315 works, drawn from Japanese and American public and private collections, includes seven that are designated as Important Cultural Property by the Japanese government. The artists represented range from Sesson Shūkei, Itō Jakuchū, Soga Shōhaku, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, to Okamoto Tarō, Kusama Yayoi, Issey Miyake, Nara Yoshitomo, and Murakami Takashi. To celebrate the opening on June 2, 2019, Robert T. Singer introduces the exhibition curated with Masatomo Kawai, director, Chiba City

Sarah Battle, program administrator, department of academic programs, National Gallery of Art By the early 1970s, Washington, DC-based artists like Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, and Alma Thomas were associated with the nationally recognized art movement known as the Washington Color School. While Kenneth Young's staining technique and interests in abstraction and color were consistent with his Washingtonian neighbors, critics at the time labeled Young as an abstract expressionist. Recently, however, Young’s work has been more closely discussed within the context of the Washington Color School. In this lecture at the National Gallery of Art on April 8, 2019, Sarah Battle examines Young's educational background, profession, and artistic influences, and discusses the ways in which the artist’s practice aligns within—and outside of—the confines of the Washington Color School.

Anjuli J. Lebowitz, exhibition research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art In 1902 Booker T. Washington commissioned photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to record students participating in the curriculum at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Building on her previous projects in Virginia and Paris, Johnston created some of her most complex work to date on the Tuskegee grounds. On April 29, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Anjuli Lebowitz asserts that Johnston’s Learning Dressmaking, Tuskegee Institute, in particular, synthesizes methods of nineteenth-century visual anthropology with discourses surrounding African American citizenship that had been circulating since before the Civil War.

Robin Coste Lewis, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence, University of Southern California. In her National Book Award–winning debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, poet Robin Coste Lewis both narrates and investigates the experience of black women across time and geography. To create the section that gave the book its title, Lewis first conducted countless hours of research in museums and compiled the titles and descriptions of works of art and craft (dated between 38,000 BCE and the present) that featured the images of black women. She then rearranged the titles to create what is at once an elegy for the black women in these artworks and an indictment of the violence done in the writing of Western art history. For the keynote lecture of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Lewis presented “Boarding the Voyage,” the epilogue to a new edition of Voyage of the Sable Venus, discussing the ways her project blends poe