Musician Rafiq Bhatia feels compelled to capture his improvisations—fleeting moments of sound—in recordings. Like sound, light is transient. But James Turrell’s works, which inspired Bhatia’s composition, contain and present light, allowing us to forge a deeper relationship with an ephemeral substance.

Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/rafiq-bhatia-james-turrell-new-light.html. 

Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nati…rt/id1552618916), Google Podcasts (podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly…AAAAAHQAAAAAQBA), Spotify (open.spotify.com/show/7cyalz9GPgP…8nTY6xdrUUGHn46A), Stitcher (www.stitcher.com/show/sound-thoughts-on-art), or your favorite podcast app (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NGAT6207729686).

Rafiq Bhatia and James Turrell’s “New Light”

In her 2021 Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture, Terri Simone Francis reflects on Josephine Baker’s influence within the visual arts and theorizes Baker as both an international cultural figure and an African American film pioneer. Recent restorations of her films of the 1920s and 1930s have allowed her work to be seen in the context of recent cinema and media, indeed almost as recent cinema and media. In Francis’s view Baker exemplifies what author Toni Morrison called a “rememory”—a remembered memory. Francis’s study of Baker addresses absences and silences in film history, and she draws upon Morrison’s concept of rememory and Baker’s career to reconstruct the global beginnings of Black cinema. Ultimately, Francis is concerned with the film histories of the future, in which Black cinema history will be full of new unknowns, and believes that Baker’s authorship can inform new vocabularies of film thinking, film writing, and film feeling.

Watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAuXzd-ApuA

Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture 2021: Josephine Baker as a “Rememory” of Global Black Cinema?

Introduction by former First Lady Michelle Obama; poetry reading and discussion with Ross Gay; and virtual exhibition tour with Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz.

Ross Gay, poet, gardener, professor, department of English, Indiana University Bloomington, founding board member, Bloomington Community Orchard, co-founder, The Tenderness Project, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; with Seth Feman, deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography, Chrysler Museum of Art, and exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; and Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art, Columbus Museum of Art, exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session presenter

John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art 2021: Session I: An Evening Celebration of Alma Thomas

Working at the intersection of event and art, Mark Bradford explores social and political structures through large-scale abstract paintings created out of layered paper. Bradford’s reimagining of modernist art explores how historical analysis and research affect form. Discover how his map-like, multilayered paper collages provide an opportunity to think about power, representation, and marginalized communities. 

Learn more about Bradford’s work Legendary in the National Gallery of Art collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-ob... 

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Elson Lecture 2021: Mark Bradford

Presentations on Thomas’s studio art training and involvement with galleries, museums, and universities by Renee Maurer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Rebecca VanDiver, followed with discussion moderated by Steven Nelson

Renee Maurer, associate curator, The Phillips Collection, and coordinating curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; Nell Irvin Painter, artist, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; and Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, Dean's Faculty Fellow (2019–2021), Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities (2020–2021), Vanderbilt University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor. Moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, the Center (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art

Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy
Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required.
https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html

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John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art 2021:  Session II: Alma Thomas’s Studio Practice

The final session of American University’s Feminist Art History Conference, cohosted by the National Gallery, brings together distinguished curators to discuss contemporary issues in museum practice.

Lauren Haynes, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Christine Sciacca, associate curator, European art 300–1400 CE, Walters Art Museum; and Christina Yu Yu, Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Moderated by Mikka Gee Conway, chief, diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer and EEO director, National Gallery of Art.
Held in collaboration with the National Gallery’s John Wilmerding Symposium on America Art and the traveling exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful.

In 1952, at age sixty-one, Thomas enrolled in graduate-level art history and painting coursework at American University to pursue “creative painting.” American University offers the Alma Thomas Award to an outstanding student studying painting.

For the Feminist Art History Conference, Melanee Harvey will chair a session titled ACTIVISM: MAKING SPACE and Jonathan Frederick Walz will present a lecture titled "Alma W. Thomas’s Moving Pictures."

Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy
Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required.
https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html

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American University’s Feminist Art History Conference 2021: Feminist Issues in Art Museums

Performed by: Niño Medina

Learn more about the exhibition “Sargent and Spain” on view October 2, 2022 – January 2, 2023.  For more information, visit https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/sargent-and-spain.html

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Seguidillas Gitana

Malagueñas

Performed by: Sr. Pavon

Learn more about the exhibition “Sargent and Spain” on view October 2, 2022 – January 2, 2023.  For more information, visit https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/sargent-and-spain.html

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Sevillanas

Garrotín

Performed by: Sr. Juanito Pardo

Learn more about the exhibition “Sargent and Spain” on view October 2, 2022 – January 2, 2023.  For more information, visit https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/sargent-and-spain.html

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Golondrina, Teruel y Tristeza

Jota que en Fuentes cantan los "bovecchos."

Zaragozanas Puras No. 1 - Jotas

Zaragozanas Netas - Jotas

Artists Rosana Paulino and Cameron Rowland explore the lasting legacy of slavery in their works of art. 

This is the first talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.

Watch the lecture: https://youtu.be/5n90V4Acg_w

Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website:      
https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html

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John Wilmerding Symposium 2022: Session I: “the afterlife of slavery”

Erica Buddington, Nona Faustine, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers  present archival research–based practices that create and uplift missing narratives.

This is the second talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/36aA_Mg7IZA

Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website:      
https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html

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John Wilmerding Symposium 2022: Session II: “I built this altar for them”

Clint Smith, Renée Stout, and Hank Willis Thomas present on the role of history and memory in shaping American culture and identity.
 
This is the third talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.
 
Watch the entire video by Hank Willis Thomas titled “A Person is More Important Than Anything Else…,” commissioned by NY Live Arts for the Year of James Baldwin: https://hankwillisthomas.com/WORKS/Video/2
 
Watch the lecture: https://youtu.be/oM6_4MmmzJU

Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website:      
https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html
 
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John Wilmerding Symposium 2022: Session III: “Blackness is not peripheral to the American project"

Howardena Pindell discusses how social issues and the prospect of societal change impact her art and life.  In her artistic practice, Pindell’s work reflects a fascination with gridded, serialized imagery and surface texture. She often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. Even in her more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses to address issues of homelessness, AIDS, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.  

Watch the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcw9iriBvU

Learn more about Howardena Pindell’s work in the Gallery’s collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.10097.html 

Pindell’s work “Free, White and 21" is featured in “The Double,” on view July 10–October 31, 2022: https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/the-double-identity-and-difference-in-art-since-1900.html 

The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the Gallery's permanent collection. The Honorable and Mrs. Edward E. Elson generously endowed this series in 1992. 

Find out more about the Elson Lecture Series on our website: https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/elson.html 

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Howardena Pindell on Social Change

Artists Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen in conversation with Niels Van Tomme, visiting curator, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Artists Harun Farocki (b. 1944, Germany) and Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, United States) will discuss their unique roles as artistic observers of global military operations with curator Niels Van Tomme. Investigating forms of surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen address the vast implications of such activities for image-making, and the media they are creatively working with, namely film and photography. In which ways have the realities they depict transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images? And, what is ultimately the responsibility of artists in capturing or revealing such processes? 

This program is coordinated with the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) in conjunction with the exhibition “Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen,” on view at the CADVC from October 24, 2013, through February 22, 2014.

Visibility Machines: A Conversation with Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen

Wtewael, a brilliant colorist as well as a master storyteller, rendered many of his works on small copper plates and wood panels. 

Joachim Wtewael: Pronunciation

Helen Frankenthaler, artist, in conversation with Ruth Fine, curator of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. Helen Frankenthaler’s use of radiant color and her capacity to manipulate a rich variety of materials and print processes have been widely admired throughout her career. Helen Frankenthaler: Prints, a survey exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art from April 18 to September 6, 1993, consisted of 77 prints and related drawings from the Gallery’s holdings, and loans from the artist's archive and other collections. The exhibition started with Frankenthaler’s very first print (1961), composed of calligraphic marks on an open field, and it closed with one of her most recent works (1992), an expansive composition of densely layered forms. In honor of the exhibition, Helen Frankenthaler discusses the distinctive nature of her working process with Ruth Fine in this conversation recorded on May 16, 1993.

Conversations with Artists: Helen Frankenthaler

Hopper painted this work in South Truro, Massachusetts, where he and his wife had built a home and studio in 1934. Despite its bright palette and seemingly serene subject, Ground Swell echoes the themes of loneliness and escape typical of Hopper’s oeuvre. The blue sky, sun-kissed figures, and vast rolling water strike a calm note; however, the visible disengagement of the figures from each other and their noticeable preoccupation with the bell buoy at the center of the canvas belie the initial sense of serenity. 

Ground Swell, Hopper (Verbal Description)

André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Hay Whitney Collection. This work is typical of the Fauvist style, which Derain developed alongside Henri Matisse, featuring vibrant and unblended colors. This scene was painted when Derain visited London and captured similar subjects to those Monet had famously painted just a few years previously, though Derain’s color palette and perspective on the scenes contrast sharply with the impressionist master’s work. 

Charing Cross Bridge, London, Derain (English)

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington. This work is a perfect example of Frankenthaler’s technique of making pictures entirely by "staining," a process in which she poured thinned paint onto raw, unprimed canvas. This method results in fields of the image. Her arrangement of colors and shapes often evoke the natural environment, and each work creates a unique visual space and atmosphere. 

Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler (English)

Walter Isaacson, president and chief executive officer, The Aspen Institute, and author of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992). In this lecture held on November 6, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Walter Isaacson discusses his newly published biography, Leonardo da Vinci, on history’s most creative genius. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, the book weaves a narrative that connects Leonardo’s art to his science. Leonardo produced the two most famous paintings in history: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. Isaacson demonstrates how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. The Gallery has in its collection the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas—Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1474/1478) is one of his three extant female portraits and is among his earliest experiments with the new medium of oil paint.

Leonardo da Vinci

Meryl Gordon, director of magazine writing, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University, and author of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (2014) and Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach (2008). Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon (1910–2014), also known as Bunny Mellon, was an American gardener, horticulturalist, philanthropist, and art collector. She represented the epitome of American aristocratic self-taught taste. With an unerring eye and an unlimited budget, she brought a modern sensibility to the extraordinary art collection that she and her husband Paul Mellon amassed, which included many works now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. Acclaimed for designing the White House Rose Garden for her friend John F. Kennedy and famed as a garden designer and fashion trendsetter, Mellon was press shy during her lifetime. To write Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend, the first biography of this influential woman, author Meryl Gordon drew on Mellon’s journals and letters and interviewed more than 175 people. In this lecture held on October 15, 2017, Gordon discusses the interplay between the public and the private Bunny Mellon, as well as her close friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Bunny Mellon: The Pursuit of Perfection

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Germany around 1900 was a volatile contradiction—modernizing rapidly, yet deeply conservative in values. This was fertile ground for the birth of German expressionism represented by the paintings and sculptures of Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Otto Müller, Emil Nolde, and others. With the rise of national socialism in the 1930s in Germany, many of these avant-garde artists and the movements of which they were a part came to be labeled “degenerate.” The recent gift of the Arnold and Joan Saltzman collection of German expressionist art has transformed the Gallery’s holdings of modern art in this area. In this lecture presented on May 4, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the nature of German expressionist art against the backdrop of two important exhibitions mounted by the Nazis in 1937: The Great German Art Exhibition, on July 18, and the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, on July 19. Through these two exhibitions and their related documents and propaganda, the Nazis sought to establish and support the reputation of the approved art of the Third Reich, while at the same time to unleash a destructive “tornado” (as Hitler referred to it) against modern art.

German Expressionism and Degenerate Art

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition in Paris dedicated to vanguard art, Henri Matisse showed Open Window, Collioure alongside works by his disciples of the moment, including André Derain, Albert Marquet, and Maurice de Vlaminck. One critic, seeing an academic sculpture in the middle of the room, exclaimed, “Donatello chez les fauves!”–Donatello among the wild beasts!–and the first “ism” of the 20th century was born. Today Fauvist paintings are celebrated as the epitome of pleasure, a virtual vacation to the south of France, where the movement was born in the summer of 1905. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the seminal roles that Matisse, his followers, and the short-lived Fauvist movement played in the development of 20th-century expressionism. This lecture was presented on July 19, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.

Henri Matisse and Fauvism

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. After shattering representational tradition with cubism, which he developed with Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso became the artistic visionary against whom most others measured their creativity throughout the 20th century. Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso attended art schools and aligned his sensibilities with bohemian writers and artists in Barcelona and Madrid. After early work inspired by El Greco, symbolism, and the sinuous curvatures of art nouveau, Picasso began to find his own vision. The art he made from 1905 to 1915 unleashed a torrent of originality culminating in the birth of cubism, among the 20th century’s most revolutionary art movements. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the contributions made to 20th-century modernism by Picasso, Braque, and their peers. This lecture was presented on July 24, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.

Early Picasso and Cubism

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Just as the years before World War I witnessed the birth of abstraction, the war itself brought Dada, equally international movement, but dark and mordant where abstraction was earnest and utopian. The name, plucked from a dictionary in Zurich in 1916, means “rocking horse” in French or “yes yes” in Romanian and Russian. But as the name of a movement it really means nothing at all. Sick of the culture that had produced the carnage of the First World War, Dada challenged every sacred cow, throwing expression and authorship out the window and celebrating chance and absurdity instead. Then surrealism came along to channel the anti-art energies of Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp back into the museum, triggering a wildly successful yet fractious movement that swept Europe between the wars and embraced many media. Artists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, Kay Sage, and Yves Tanguy, to name only a few, would follow the dictum of the movement’s founder, André Breton, and “seek to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the chaos of Dada and the revolution of surrealism. This lecture was presented on July 31, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.

Dada and Surrealism

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art, August 14, 2018. From the mid-1940s through the 1950s painters in New York imbued their work with a heady new confidence, scale, and energy. Before and during World War II European émigrés poured into New York, including artists Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and the writer and surrealist leader André Breton. Their influence led to the exploration of biomorphic forms, archaic themes, and accidental processes designed to unleash the unconscious, like dripping and scraping. It is in the large canvases of the 1950s, by Jackson Pollock and others, that what one critic called “the triumph of American painting” can really be felt. These paintings increased ambition and introduced new techniques: Pollock’s rhythmic pours and drips, Clyfford Still’s dry palette-knifing, Newman’s masking-taped “zips,” Franz Kline’s chiseled gestures, and Joan Mitchell’s flurries of strokes. This generation of artists revealed new horizons in the practice of painting and the experience of viewing. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the triumph of American painting in postwar America. This lecture was presented on August 14, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.

Abstract Expressionism

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 influenced by contemporary central Italian art appeared in Venice by the 1520s and ’30s. Artists including Pordenone and Andrea Schiavone provided alternative sources of style and imagery for both painters and patrons.

Tintoretto Lecture Series, Part 1—Tintoretto in Context: Framing Tintoretto

KIMBERLY JONES: //Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is an icon, pure and simple. It is one of the most famous sculptures in the world. There are at least 25 posthumous reproductions of this sculpture, but here we have the original.  

KAYWIN FELDMAN: It’s made of beeswax over a metal frame. Degas gave this dancer a cotton bodice, a cotton and silk tutu, and linen slippers. Her human hair is tied back with a silk and linen ribbon. She rests on a wooden base in fourth position with her hands clasped behind her back so as not to flatten her tutu. 

JULIE KENT: She’s thinking, she’s listening, she’s resting. And then she’s about to repeat it all, dance again. //She’s taking it all in, and then you can tell, like in five beats from now, she’s gonna close to fifth, plié and start dancing again.  

KAYWIN FELDMAN: The model is Marie van Goethem. She was known as one of the “little rats of the Opéra” a derogatory term used to describe the many young, working-class students in the dance school at the Paris Opéra. The teenager defiantly holds her head high, chin up. 

KIMBERLY JONES: You get the sense of this prepubescent body, the slightly knobby knees, the long, attenuated arms, the thinness and frailty of her body. 

KAYWIN FELDMAN: Soon after the sculpture was exhibited in 1881, Marie was expelled from the dance school for missing too many practices, and little is known of her life afterward. 

KIMBERLY JONES: In some ways, //who she is has been obscured. She is less Marie van Goethem, ballet rat, and more aspiring young dance student. She’s become something more symbolic, someone who is no longer tied to her biography, and has become something more. 

KAYWIN FELDMAN: For nineteenth-century critics, this sculpture looked too real, even ugly. They weren’t used to seeing sculpture that looked so lifelike, that wasn’t made out of durable materials like bronze or marble... Today that is what is most appealing. We recognize something authentic in her. 

KIMBERLY JONES: And that ultimately was what Degas was most after, the authenticity of the experience is much more important than the details. //Each and every image feels right. 

KAWYIN: And let’s have a dancer give us a final thought.

JULIE KENT: I find it very inspiring. I see young ladies like this every day. But she’s there for the world to sort of acknowledge. And inspire. //She’d be a great spokesperson for us.

Degas at the Opéra, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878-1881

 Photographer Robert Frank and Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. , an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, is the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the single most important book of photographs published since World War II. In this podcast of the annual Elson Lecture, recorded on March 26, 2009, Greenough speaks with the renowned photographer about his career before, during, and after .

Elson Lecture 2009: Robert Frank

Mary Morton, curator and head of French paintings, National Gallery of Art
Auguste Renoir rebelled against the standards of the official art world, like other impressionists, pushing the limits of painting and creating his distinct style. But Renoir, in particular, has become an all-too-easy target for museumgoers who find his late female figures contrived and his palette cloying. Marking the centennial of the artist’s death in 1919, Mary Morton counters the anti-Renoir movement by reaffirming the artist’s achievement and lasting significance within the history of Western art in her lecture on December 3, 2019.

The Problem with Renoir: A Hard Look at the Artist on the Centennial of His Death

Introductory remarks by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; conversation with artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems, moderated by Sarah Workneh, codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and Q&A joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw

Kaywin Feldman and Lonnie G. Bunch III introduce this artist conversation held on September 17, 2020, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, A Tribute to David C. Driskell. Moderated by Sarah Workneh, artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems gather to discuss Driskell’s impact on their own practices as artists and teachers. During a public Q&A, the artists are joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw, who prerecorded symposium tributes. This fourth annual symposium was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

John Wilmerding Symposium 2020, A Tribute to David C. Driskell: Part 6, Artist Conversation

David Bomford (former conservation chair, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and 2018 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses the importance of  Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873), painted at a pivotal moment both in the artist’s  life and for the city of Paris.  Identifying the setting and the sitters in the painting as well as Manet’s innovations in painting technique, Professor Bomford shares what makes this painting one he most admires in the collection.

The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art: David Bomford

Teju Cole, artist, curator, novelist, photography critic for New York Times Magazine (2015–2019), and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing, Harvard University, in conversation with Fazal Sheikh, artist and Artist-in-Residence at the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975. The son of Nigerian parents, he was raised in Lagos. He returned to the US to complete a BA at Kalamazoo College in Michigan followed by studies in art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as well as at Columbia University. Cole’s work examines race, gender, migration, culture, and privilege. Born in New York City in 1965, Fazal Sheikh earned his BA from Princeton University in 1987 and has since worked as a photographer documenting the lives of individuals in displaced and marginalized communities. Upon witnessing an increase in xenophobia and authoritarian politics on a global scale, Sheikh turned to Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to a compassionate global community and to the importance of individual courage. Through Cole’s words and Sheikh’s photos in the resulting book, Human Archipelago (Steidl, 2018), we are confronted with fundamental and pressing questions of coexistence. Their work asks us to consider, “Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me?” 

In 2020 Cole and Sheikh created a free, online version of Human Archipelago. Amidst a devastating pandemic and uprisings against racial injustice, its questions are more relevant than ever. In this conversation, recorded on January 19, 2021, Cole and Sheikh discuss their collaborative efforts “to find a new way of speaking to the startling reappearance of some very old problems.”

The National Gallery has been honored to present The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography since 2016 with the support of the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation. The National Gallery is thrilled to share that the Newman Foundation, which has funded the series annually since its inaugural offering, endowed it with a major gift in 2020 in order to make such conversations available to the public for years to come. We are deeply grateful for the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation’s generosity.

Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography: Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh

The National Gallery of Art was created in 1937 for the people of the United States of America by a joint resolution of Congress, accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. During the 1920s, Mr. Mellon began collecting with the intention of forming a gallery of art for the nation in Washington. In 1937, the year of his death, he promised his collection to the United States. Funds for the construction of the West Building were provided by The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. On March 17, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the completed building and the collections on behalf of the people of the United States of America.

The paintings and works of sculpture given by Andrew Mellon have formed a nucleus of high quality around which the collections have grown. Mr. Mellon's hope that the newly created National Gallery would attract gifts from other collectors was soon realized in the form of major donations of art from Samuel H. Kress, Rush H. Kress, Joseph Widener, Chester Dale, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, and Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch as well as individual gifts from hundreds of other donors.

The Gallery's East Building, located on land set aside in the original Congressional resolution, was opened in 1978. It accommodates the Gallery's growing collections and expanded exhibition schedule and houses an advanced research center, administrative offices, a great library, and a burgeoning collection of drawings and prints. The building was accepted for the nation on June 1, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter. Funds for construction were given by Paul Mellon and the late Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the son and daughter of the founder, and by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On May 23, 1999 the Gallery opened an outdoor sculpture garden designed to offer year-round enjoyment to the public. Located in the 6.1-acre block adjacent to the West Building at 7th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., the garden provides an informal, yet elegant setting for works of modern and contemporary sculpture.

The Collectors Committee, an advisory group of private citizens, has made it possible to acquire paintings and sculpture of the twentieth century. Key works of art have also come to the Gallery through the Patrons' Permanent Fund. In addition, members of the Circle of the National Gallery of Art have provided funds for many special programs and projects. The Sculpture Garden is a gift to the nation from The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.

National Gallery of Art

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