National Gallery of Art | Audio

December 2013 - Mary L. Levkoff, curator and head, department of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art. Media magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was one of the most powerful men of the twentieth century. His political influence, flamboyant lifestyle, and enormous wealth kept him constantly in the public eye, and Orson Welles's caricatured depiction of him in Citizen Kane only magnified his notoriety. In this lecture recorded on November 3, 2013 at the National Gallery of Art, Mary Levkoff, Gallery curator and author of Hearst the Collector, explores another aspect of Heart's life: his extraordinary art collections. Levkoff reconstructs Heart's vast collections of tapestries, classical antiquities, silver, arms, and armor that, at the time, were the largest in private hands. She argues that if half his treasures had not been sold off during the financial crisis of the 1930s, he would be readily recognized today not only for the quantity of items that he bought, but also for the outstanding quality of his collections.

December 2013 - Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), composer, multimedia artist, writer, and DJ; accompanied by cellist Danielle Cho, violinist Jennifer Kim and vocalist Rochelle Rice. In this performance recorded on November 24, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) presents a composition for string ensemble with live-mixed electronic music and video. DJ Spooky: A Civil War Symphony, originally performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, borrows images from the exhibition Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial. On view through January 20, 2014, the exhibition considers the legacy of the 54th and the Battle of Fort Wagner in art, examining nineteenth-century efforts to memorialize those who fought, Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial itself, and the continuing inspiration that the regiment, its defining battle, and the Shaw Memorial have been for twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists.

November 2013 - Julie Mehretu, artist, in conversation with Judith Brodie, curator and head, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. Julie Mehretu is best known for large-scale, densely packed paintings that combine meticulous rendering and seemingly spontaneous abstract gesture. Her work, including drawings and prints, is built up from multiple layers of archival, geographical, meteorological, and architectural imagery—designs, plans, diagrams, blueprints, ruins, charts, and graphs—traced and punctuated with calligraphic marks and obscuring erasures. She maps the histories of civilizations past and present, engaging with issues of social organization, globalization, and geopolitical connectivity. Mehretu has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across the United States, among them Gemini G.E.L in Los Angeles and Crown Point Press in San Francisco. For the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Mehretu joined Judith Brodie on November 17, 2013 to discuss her career and artistic process, which can be seen firsthand in two prints: Circulation, in the Gallery’s collection, and Circulation (working proof 9), on view through January 5, 2014 in the exhibition Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press.

November 2013 - Panelists include Kerry James Marshall, artist; James Meyer, associate curator of modern art, National Gallery of Art; Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Northwestern University; Hortense J. Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, English department, Vanderbilt University; Dan S. Wang, artist and writer. The central theme of the exhibition In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall, on view through December 8, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, is the Middle Passage—the violent journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas during the colonial and antebellum periods—and its traumatic impact in the lives and memories of African Americans in particular. Marshall's show begins with images of human beings and the open sea, of sailboats and an amusement-park water ride, evocative of the Middle Passage. Yet the exhibition also includes scenes of backyard pools, suburban lawns, and white picket fences, of children riding bikes and celebrating the Fourth of July. The memory of the slave ships seems remote from Marshall's paintings of suburbs, part of the artist's Housing series. In fact, all of these works examine the American Dream from an African American perspective: the middle-class children and adults depicted in these scenes are haunted by the memory of a trauma that they did not experience personally but which impacts them in ways that are not easily understood. In the art of Marshall, the past is never really past; history exerts a pressure, often unconscious, on the living. In this program recorded on October 27, 2013, Kerry James Marshall and exhibition curator James Meyer are joined by panelists Mary Pattillo, Hortense J. Spillers, and Dan S. Wang to discuss varying perspectives on race and class in contemporary America.

November 2013 - Carmen C. Bambach, curator of drawings and prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fortuitous rediscovery of documents in the Florentine state archive that have been greatly misjudged in the past led to a reevaluation and affirmation of the central importance of Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516) as a patron of the arts. Giuliano, the overshadowed son of Lorenzo de' Medici "The Magnificent" and brother of Pope Leo X, became Duke of Nemours on his marriage in January 1515. He touched the careers of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, the latter of whom immortalized the duke posthumously in the marble sculpture of his tomb in the Medici Chapel, San Lorenzo, Florence. He was the generous, carefree patron of uomini ingegnosi (brilliant men), whom he lavishly maintained in his household, according to the first-hand account of Francesco Vettori, brother to the duke's maiordomo. In homage to Professor Sydney J. Freedberg who published a book entitled Circa 1600, this talk takes a close look at the year circa 1515 in the careers of these famous artists and their patron.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In the sixth and final lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 12, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll presents a hopeful manifesto of the possibilities of architectural exhibitions, including a look at MoMA's innovative introduction of public laboratories and workshops in which designers, historians, and critics project new futures and new problems in architecture.

November 2013 - Sarah Kennel, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery of Art's exhibition Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, on view from September 29, 2013, through January 5, 2014, is the first retrospective exhibition in the United States on the renowned 19th-century French photographer Charles Marville (1813–1879). In this opening day lecture, Sarah Kennel discusses some of the 100 featured photographs that cover the arc of Marville's career, from his city scenes and landscape and architectural studies of Europe in the early 1850s to his compelling photographs of Paris and its environs in the late 1870s. The exhibition presents recent groundbreaking discoveries informing Marville's art and biography, including the versatility of his photographic talents and his true identity, background, and family life.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 7, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll, presents diverse techniques of architectural display developed since the mid-18th century. Far from being poor substitutes for the real experience of architecture as a spatial art in situ, these techniques have been integral to architecture's stake in the evolving discourses of modernity. This lecture considers the entry of architects into the exhibition venues of the mid-18th century and radical new ideas for architecture under the French Revolution.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In the second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 14, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll describes the rise of the architectural curator and the history of the museum of architecture assayed, born, and grown, if not always thriving. The history of architecture in the spaces of the architecture museum—represented in building fragments or in cork models—is shown to have been in dialogue with the emergence of the textual history of architecture.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In the third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 21, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll explores the idea of export architecture and outdoor exhibitions and the development of temporary exhibition pavilions from the world's fair to the open-air museum, including Colonial Williamsburg. The 19th-century debate on national identity as expressed in architectural style is shown to have been advanced by the changing valence of high-style pavilions and redeployed vernacular structures.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In the fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 28, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll considers the role of the exhibition as an instrument for reform in the movement for better housing for the working classes, in the institution of city planning as a modern discipline, and in the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in the years around 1900, all cases of projecting alternative futures.

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and professor, Columbia University. In the fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 5, 2013, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll discusses the establishment, by the 1920s, of exhibitions as a culture of architecture in which one exhibition served as a critique of another, and the exploitation of the propaganda capacity of the exhibition by political agencies, corporations, and the ongoing politics of diplomacy.

October 2013 - Binh Danh, artist, and Robert Schultz, John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Roanoke College. Binh Danh and Robert Schultz discuss their collaborative word and image exhibition War Memoranda (forthcoming in 2015) in relation to the exhibition Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial, on view at the National Gallery of Art from September 15, 2013, through January 20, 2014. In this conversation recorded on September 22, 2013, Danh and Schultz point to the question explored in common by the two exhibitions, namely, "How do we remember war?" War Memoranda is inspired by Walt Whitman's war poems and prose in in Drum Taps (1865) and Memoranda During the War (1875). Whitman serves as presiding spirit of the exhibition in which Danh and Schultz will bring together daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, and unique "chlorophyll prints" drawn from the Liljenquist Collection at the Library of Congress to contemplate landscapes, memorials, and Civil War portraits. The collaborators also plan to present memorials to wars in their lifetimes—in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—applying the techniques and media employed by Whitman and the great Civil War photographers.

October 2013 - Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art; Nancy Anderson, curator and head of the department of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; Lindsay Harris, research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art; Renée Ater, associate professor of art history and director of academic programs, University of Maryland, College Park. To celebrate the exhibition opening of Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial on September 15, 2013, the curators and catalogue authors discuss the individual stories and photographic portraits of the soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, as well as those of the men and women who recruited, nursed, taught, and guided them. On view through January 20, 2014, the exhibition considers the legacy of the 54th and the Battle of Fort Wagner in art, examining nineteenth century efforts to memorialize those who fought, including early works by African American artists Edward Bannister and Edmonia Lewis in addition to Saint-Gaudens' development of the Shaw Memorial itself. The lecture concludes with the continuing inspiration that the 54th, its defining battle, and the Shaw Memorial have been for twentieth and twenty-first century artists as diverse as Richard Benson, Ed Hamilton, Lewis Hine, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Earle Williams.

September 2013 - Judith Brodie, curator and head, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art, and Adam Greenhalgh, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. On view at the National Gallery of Art from September 1, 2013, through January 5, 2014, Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press features 125 working proofs and edition prints produced at this printmaking studio—one of the most influential of the last half century—by 25 artists between 1972 and 2010. The exhibition goes beyond celebrating the flash of inspiration and the role of the imagination to examine the artistic process as a sequence of decisions. In this lecture recorded on September 8, exhibition curators Judith Brodie and Adam Greenhalgh explain how the stages of intaglio printmaking reveal this process in very particular ways. Working proofs record occurrences both deliberate and serendipitous. They are used to monitor and steer a print's evolution, prompting evaluation and approval, revision, or rejection. Each proof compels a decision: yes, no, maybe.