Artist Talks

In Conversation

Alex Da Corte’s vibrant installations and mesmerizing video works can be found just as readily at major international art ventures, such as the 2019 Venice Biennale exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times, as on an electronic billboard in Times Square, New York. His visually stimulating and intellectually compelling work spans across a variety of media, including video, installation, sculpture, and painting, and takes cues and inspiration from contemporary pop culture. As a self-proclaimed “anthropologist of the immediate past,” he mines everyday objects from consumer culture to transport viewers through otherworldly experiences created with otherwise mundane, familiar images and items. A long-time Philadelphia resident, Da Corte has an extensive, personal history with the Marcel Duchamp galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a connection that becomes clear through the elevated status of the everyday through his work.

Radical Acts: Alex Da Corte On Marcel Duchamp

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Outro

Joan Brown 
b. San Francisco, California, 1938–1990 
Nun with Staffordshire Terrier 
1961 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Joan Brown: Nun with Staffordshire Terrier

Mary Cassatt 
b. Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, 1844–1926 
Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant) 
c. 1894 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Mary Cassatt: Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant)

Janet Sobel 
b. Dnipro, Ukraine, 1894–1968 
The Attraction of Pink 
1945 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Janet Sobel: The Attraction of Pink

Aliza Nisenbaum 
b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1977 
Mis cuatro gracias (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge) 
2018 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Aliza Nisenbaum: Mis cuatro gracias (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge)

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Exster 
b. Białystok, Poland, 1882–1949 
Marionette
1926 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Exster: Marionette

Anni Albers 
b. Berlin, Germany, 1899–1994 
Under Way 
1963 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Anni Albers: Under Way

Lee Krasner 
b. Brooklyn, New York, 1908–1984 
Siren 
1966 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Lee Krasner: Siren

Flora Yukhnovich 
b. Norwich, England, 1990 
Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too 
2022 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Flora Yukhnovich: Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too

Intro

Georgia O’Keeffe 
b. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887–1986 
Goat’s Horn with Red 
1945 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Goat’s Horn with Red

Irish-born American artist Sean Scully joined the Hirshhorn for the opening of Sean Scully: Landline, an installation of oil paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that transforms the Museum’s Second Level inner-circle galleries into a current of color and energy. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of color, the Landline paintings mark a transition in Scully’s artistic career, uniting his earlier hard-edged minimalism with his richly constructed painterly abstractions. Largely comprised of horizontal stripes, these gestures toward the land, sea, and sky (and the indistinct borders between them) navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of those interactions.

In conversation with Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu, Scully discusses this remarkable series and explore the layers of his artistic practice, one that continues to impact the greater landscape of contemporary abstract art.

Artist Talk: Sean Scully

A special morning talk featuring Deane Madsen, former design editor of Architect Magazine and founder of Brutalist DC. Learn how Deane turned his love of Brutalism, a key DC architectural style, into a web platform and map of Washington’s most “raw” structures, including the Hirshhorn Museum, DC Metro, and the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Hirshhorn/AM: Brutalist DC

The Hirshhorn’s largest interactive technology exhibition to date features three major installations from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series. The show will be the DC debut for the Mexican-Canadian artist, who is known for blurring the lines between art, technology, and design. Lozano-Hemmer will fill the Museum’s entire Second Level with immersive environments that use heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors’ own biometric data. At a time when biometry is used increasingly for identification and control, this data constitutes a new way of representing both anonymity and community.

Artist Talk: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

One of the most inventive artists working today, Charline von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her artworks reconsider and challenge longstanding conventions of composition, color, abstraction, beauty, and narrative by employing a unique visual language.  Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates monumental paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”

More than thirty of her large-scale paintings are included in Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes, the largest US museum survey of her work to date. Organized in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this multinational exhibition highlights the significance of von Heyl’s dynamic and constantly evolving practice.

Artist Talk: Charline Von Heyl

Nato Thompson, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Pedro Reyes, and Paul Ramirez Jonas
In the spirit of Ai Weiwei’s commitment to driving social and political change, the first installment of “In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent” offered an exploration into the power of art to raise awareness and inspire action amid politically and culturally tumultuous times.  Nato Thompson, artistic director of Creative Time, led a wide-ranging conversation with artists Laurie Jo Reynolds, Pedro Reyes, and Paul Ramírez Jonas on how their art directly confronts legislative and social issues, and engages contemporary audiences.

In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent (Part I)

Evan Osnos, Tania Bruguera, Eric Gottesman, and Hank Willis Thomas
For the second installment of “In Conversation:  Awareness, Action and Dissent” the panel continued to explore the power of art to raise awareness and inspire action amid politically and culturally tumultuous times. The New Yorker journalist and former Beijing bureau chief Evan Osnos moderated a discussion between artists Tania Bruguera, Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman.  Bruguera, Thomas and Gottesman have made headlines in both the art world and political world, notably by standing up for freedom of speech and through the creation of the first art based Super PAC.

In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent (Part II)

Veteran New York art critic Jerry Saltz joined the Hirshhorn Museum to offer his latest take on the state of the art world and “How to Be an Artist,” with “rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively).” Saltz is senior art critic for New York magazine and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018.  His winning article, “My Life as a Failed Artist,” is a candid essay about his unsuccessful art career, the disappointment that came with it, and how it ultimately turned him into a critic. Saltz is known for his forthright insight into galleries, museums, and artworks and has been a pioneer among his peers in the adoption of social media as a platform for criticism in the twenty-first century.
For this program, Saltz offered his thoughts on criticism and the arts today in conversation with Charlotte Burns, executive editor of the In Other Words podcast. Burns was previously the US news and market editor for The Art Newspaper, as well as a regular correspondent for publications such as the Guardian and Monocle.

Critics in Conversation: Jerry Saltz

For the thirtieth anniversary of Banned in DC, join Cynthia Connolly, publisher and contributing photographer, for a discussion about documenting a pivotal time in DC’s music history. Released in 1988, Banned in DC, co-authored by Cynthia Connolly, Leslie Clague, and Sharon Cheslow, was one of the first books of its kind, illustrating and chronicling the now-legendary punk scene of Washington DC, with hundreds of photos, flyers, and stories about the bands, venues, and people who populated the shows. The DC scene embodied a spirit of DIY that has come to be synonymous with punk, and it has continued to influence many regional punk scenes around the world.

Talk + Book Signing: Banned In Dc

Artist Inge Mahn and Hirshhorn Curator-at-Large Gianni Jetzer take a close look at Schulklasse [School-class] (1970), a recent Museum acquisition and the newest addition to the exhibition What Absence Is Made Of. Mahn graduated from the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, where she studied under Joseph Beuys, and has exhibited internationally. Her stark plaster works reexamine everyday objects that are at once easily recognizable and hauntingly distant. In celebration of the first time Schulklasse is on display at the Museum, Mahn and Jetzer discussed the seminal sculpture and the experiences and historical moments that inspired the artist’s creations over the last forty years.

Artist Talk: Inge Mahn

Kyle McDonald is a contributor to open source arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks and builds systems that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways, such as the face detection code used in the software for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence. One of the most important creative coders working today, Kyle often shares ideas and debuts projects in public before they are completed. He creatively subverts networked communication and computation, explores glitch and systemic bias, and extends these concepts to confront everything from identity to relationships.

Artist Talk: Kyle McDonald

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Meet the Artist: Barbara Kruger

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts

In Conversation: Remembering Things Past: A Conversation Celebrating Anne Truitt

Exhibition Tour: "Anne Truitt"

Meet the Artist: Hiraki Sawa

Hank Willis Thomas, artist and co-founder of the For Freedoms artist collective, teamed up with Emily Shur, photographer and designer, to reimagine Norman Rockwell’s 1943 series Four Freedoms, inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address. Using the four freedoms articulated during Roosevelt’s speech—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear—For Freedoms created an updated tableau that highlights a much more inclusive America than what was originally styled in Rockwell’s iconic scenes.

In Conversation: Reimagining Norman Rockwell’s America

In this opening conversation, architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt joins University of Waterloo School of Architecture colleagues Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay, with The Evidence Room Foundation executive director Alan Ginsberg, to share the origin story of The Evidence Room. The co-creators drew inspiration from the architectural forensic evidence presented by van Pelt in a landmark libel case in 2000 as irrefutable proof that Auschwitz was purposefully designed for efficient mass murder. This groundbreaking research led to the proliferation of the use of architectural forensics, a discipline encompassing architecture, technology, history, law, and human rights.

In Conversation: Origins of the Evidence Room

What does time mean to urban, public sculpture? The desire for permanence is often cited as one of sculpture’s long-standing and defining characteristics. In the city, longevity of sculpture is often assumed to be part of its nature, creating capacity to give durable form to ideas and extend them publicly into the future. What, though, is the role of time in public sculpture? Is sculpture in the city or in remote landscapes fixed and intransient? The answer surely is no: Sculpture is always changing.

In Conversation: Time in Public Sculpture

Journalist Benjamin Wittes leads a conversation with author Deborah Lipstadt, historian Andrew Delbanco, and filmmaker Theodore Bogosian to explore how evidence lives beyond memory and experience of traumatic events. Confronting the Holocaust, slavery, genocide, and other ongoing denials of violence throughout history and across the world, this group of scholars will explore the evidence, facts, truth, and testimony that remain long after those who lived through the trauma.

In Converation: Memory, History, and Representation: Evidence and Denialism Across Boundaries

The 2016 feature film Denial and The Evidence Room are two works of art in dialogue with the same history. The movie and the installation, each in its own way, depict and remark upon the history of World War II and the legal history of a 1996-2000 libel case decided by the British High Court of Justice largely upon the basis of architectural forensic evidence. They confront terrible realities of The Holocaust and the persistent phenomenon of Holocaust denial.

Historian Elizabeth “Barry” White, filmmaker Theodore Bogosian, and attorney Amos Friedland will join Thane Rosenbaum, director of the Forum on Law, Culture, & Society to discuss the issues of fact and law argued in the case, the important implications of the legal precedent, differences between American and British libel law, and the ways that different media and genres of artistic expression affect the viewers and consumers of art.

In Conversation: Memory, History, and Representation: Denial

On the eve of the public opening of Pat Steir: Color Wheel, Steir and Hirshhorn senior curator Evelyn Hankins for a discussed her long career and the making of her monumental installation.

Artist Talk: Pat Steir

On the eve of opening the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection, the Levines will joined Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu in conversation about their obsession with Duchamp, from initial sparks of interest to the point of living with one of the most important collections of art by the most influential artist of the last century.

In Conversation: Living with Duchamp: Barbara and Aaron Levine

Laure Prouvost and Hirshhorn assistant curator Betsy Johnson discuss Prouvost’s multimedia practice that explores the blurred relationships between language and meaning, and fiction and reality. Utilizing a range of media that includes paint, video, sound, installation, and performance, Prouvost combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references, often in humorous and idiosyncratic ways. Earlier this year, as part of the Transport for London project “Art on the Underground,” Prouvost created posters that infiltrated the London subway system with messages such as “oh stay with us the party has just begun” and “ideally these words would pause everything right now”—empowering her words to invite commuters to pause for thought.

Artist Talk: Laure Prouvost

Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Garber-Maikovska joins Hirshhorn assistant curator Betsy Johnson for a discussion on his diverse work that spans drawing, painting, video, installation, and performance. His practice stems from an idiosyncratic vocabulary of movements that he has developed and refined over the past several years. In his paintings, this translates into frenzied, expressive lines and color that he applies flat on the ground with sweeping movements above the canvas. His performances are similarly indecipherable; often set in nondescript, semi-public spaces, such as restaurants or commercial parking lots, his choreography is an outgrowth of a desire to find ways to insert creative play and nonsensical communication into the sphere of everyday life.

Artist Talk: Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Acclaimed director, designer, performer, artist, and writer Robert Wilson joined Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu in conversation about his decades-long career of redefining art, design, and the theater experience.

Re-Setting the Stage: In Conversation with Robert Wilson

We explore the art and artists of our time through groundbreaking exhibitions, performances, and a world-class collection.

Hirshhorn Museum

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