National Gallery of Art | Videos

On November 17, 2013, Julie Mehretu discusses her career and artistic process, which can be seen firsthand in two prints, Circulation and Circulation (working proof 9), in the exhibition Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press, on view at the National Gallery of Art from September 1, 2013, through January 5, 2014. Representing 25 artists, the exhibition features 125 working proofs and edition prints produced between 1972 and 2010 at Crown Point Press in San Francisco, one of the most influential printmaking studios of the last half century. Mehretu has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across the United States, among them Crown Point Press and Gemini G.E.L in Los Angeles. 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. This interview precedes Mehretu’s participation in the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series.

Adam Greenhalgh, exhibition curator and lead author on the team producing the catalogue raisonné Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper, National Gallery of Art. For centuries artists have made multipart series, undertaking subjects on a scale not possible in a single work. This engagement was especially prevalent in the 1960s, as artists dedicated to conceptual, minimalist, and pop approaches explored the potential of serial procedures and structures. Many prominent artists since then have produced serial projects at the renowned Los Angeles print workshop and publisher Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited). In honor of The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L., an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art on October 4, 2015, Adam Greenhalgh provides an overview of 17 series created at Gemini by 17 artists over the past five decades. On view through February 7, 2016, the exhibition includes seminal early works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella as well as more recent serial projects by John Baldessari, Julie Mehretu, and Richard Serra.

Sidney B. Felsen, cofounder and codirector, Gemini G.E.L., in conversation with Lauren Schell Dickens, curatorial consultant, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art, and former assistant curator of contemporary art, Corcoran Gallery of Art. Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), the renowned Los Angeles artists’ workshop and publisher of fine art limited edition prints and sculptures, has collaborated with some of the most influential artists of the last half century, including Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Vija Celmins, Ellsworth Kelly, Ann Hamilton, Julie Mehretu, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and many more. On October 1, 2015, in advance of the opening of the exhibition The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. at the National Gallery of Art, Gemini G.E.L. cofounder and codirector Sidney B. Felsen joins Lauren Schell Dickens to discuss the genesis and growth of the workshop since its establishment in 1966. Felsen also shares behind-the-scenes stories about artists and their projects, and considers the future of contemporary printmaking. The conversation is guided by Felsen’s own photographs of artists at work. The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. is on view from October 4, 2015 to February 7, 2016.

Carrie Mae Weems, artist. For more than 30 years Carrie Mae Weems has made provocative, socially motivated art that examines issues of race, gender, and class inequality. Often producing serial or installation pieces, her conceptually layered work employs a variety of materials including photographs, text, fabric, sound, digital images, and most recently, video. By referencing past traditions—often through storytelling—Weems sheds light on those who have been left out of the historical record, aspiring to create a more multidimensional picture of the human condition. For the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Weems discusses her career and artistic process on September 12, 2015. Her work is represented in the Gallery’s collection by the chromogenic prints After Manet (2002) and May Flowers (2002), as well as Slow Fade to Black II (2010), a group of 17 inkjet prints. All are on view in the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund through September 13, 2015.

Don Perry, producer. Thomas Allen Harris’s 2014 documentary film Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People investigates black portrait photographers and artists who have profoundly reshaped the image of contemporary and historic African Americans, and continue to do so. Don Perry, who coproduced and cowrote the film with Harris, visited the National Gallery of Art on May 31, 2015 to introduce and speak about Through a Lens Darkly.

Deborah Luster, artist. In 1990, the National Gallery of Art launched an initiative to acquire the finest examples of the art of photography and to mount photography exhibitions of the highest quality, accompanied by scholarly publications and programs. In the years since, the Gallery’s collection of photographs has grown to nearly 15,000 works encompassing the history of the medium, from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, featuring in-depth holdings of work by many masters of the art form. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of this initiative, the Gallery presents the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund. On view from May 3 through September 13, 2015, The Memory of Time explores the work of 26 contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history. For more than 20 years, artist Deborah Luster has been engaged in an ongoing investigation of violence and its consequences. In this lecture held on the exhibition’s closing day, Luster discusses the evolution of her work from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana and Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, as well as her current project at Louisiana’s Angola Prison.

Jennifer Reeves, featured artist. Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves visited the National Gallery of Art on May 30, 2015, to introduce her film The Time We Killed (2004), a feature-length, experimental narrative that delves inside the mind of an agoraphobic writer unable to leave her New York apartment in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. In this talk, Reeves discusses her approaches to filmmaking and the specific ways in which this feature addresses themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism, sexuality, and politics.

"In the Tower: Mark Rothko," on view February 21, 2010 through January 2, 2011, featured the enigmatic black paintings of Mark Rothko. In preparation for this exhibition, Jay Krueger, head of painting conservation at the Gallery, investigated the layers and materials Rothko might have used to create the black paintings. These austere paintings—each presenting a single black rectangle on a black or nearly black field—are among the most mysterious of Rothko’s career. Black is a frequent, often imposing presence in Mark Rothko’s earlier paintings, from the figurative works of the 1930s and the surrealist-inspired canvases of the mid-1940s to the “multiforms” of the late 1940s. Black was rare in his work for more than a decade, but Rothko returned to it in 1964 for a key commission. That year the collectors Dominique and John de Menil commissioned Rothko to create series of paintings for a Catholic chapel in Houston, today the non-denominational Rothko Chapel. Having recently worked on multicanvas commissions for the Four Seasons Restaurant (1958–1959) and Harvard University (1961–1963), Rothko was already painting in the series format. He worked on the chapel commission from the fall of 1964 through the spring of 1967, producing 14 large paintings and four alternates, many of them direct successors to the black paintings of 1964. Comments

This video introduces John Russell Pope’s design for the West Building Rotunda, which opened to the public on March 17, 1941 with a ceremony led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The museum’s coffered dome and columns were inspired by the ancient Roman Pantheon. See the entire series: http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/video/asl.html

Interviews, highlights, and behind-the-scenes clips of the 2014–2015 High School Seminar offer a look inside this annual program, which meets over the course of ten sessions throughout the school year. Upper-level high school art students are introduced to the skills necessary to study art history, as well as to art-making techniques, publication design, and museum careers, using the collections and resources of the Gallery. As part of a community of like-minded students, participants learn how to explore the meaning of works of art through close observation, in-gallery group discussions, research on themes of their choice, and visual journaling. The program culminates with student-led gallery talks and the creation of a publication inspired by the students’ research that incorporates visual art and creative writing.

This panel discussion was originally presented as the conclusion to the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014. The six lectures given at the conference are available online as NGA videos. Paul B. Jaskot of DePaul University moderates this panel of conference speakers (from left to right on the stage): Ivo van der Graaff, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University; Christian Huemer, Getty Research Institute; Martyna Urbaniak, Scuola Normale Superiore; and James T. Tice, University of Oregon. The panelists and moderator discuss the successes and challenges of their own projects and the future of digital research in art history.

In this lecture, originally presented as part of the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014, Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University, discusses Visualizing Venice, a project that uses visualization tools to model Venice’s growth and change over time. For the Visualizing Venice research team, working with digital technologies prompted new kinds of questions about archival data and different approaches to scholarly research. Visualizing Venice has become a public-facing digital humanities initiative that seeks to engage users in considering ways in which social, economic, religious, and technological changes transform cities and their surrounding environments.

In this lecture, originally presented as part of the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014, Martyna Urbaniak, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, considers the methodology, functionalities, and research possibilities afforded by the use of digital archives in the study of the visual and literary culture of the High Renaissance. Urbaniak discusses the project “Looking at Words through Images: Some Case Studies for a Visual History of Italian Literature,” based at the Center for Data Processing of Text and Images in Literary Tradition at the Scuola Normale Superiore. The aim of this project is to create a multimedia digital archive to investigate the origins, evolution, and fortunes of the Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso’s editorial format and its powerful influence, in figurative and editorial terms, on reception dynamics in the age of printing.

In this lecture, originally presented as part of the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014, Ivo van der Graaff, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, discusses the Oplontis Project, an ongoing archaeological study of two Roman villas. Conceived from the outset as a “born digital” publication, the Oplontis Project utilizes a three-pronged approach to scholarly publication: a cloud-based 3-D model, an online database, and XML e-books. Van der Graaff explains how e-books, the cloud, and 3-D modeling software are transforming the distribution and publication of archaeological materials. Users can now access monographs, models of buildings and cityscapes, and even entire databases online. The sum of these technologies allows for a radical departure from print monographs as the established publication medium in this field.

In this lecture, originally presented in the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014, Christian Huemer, of the Getty Research Institute, discusses The Getty Provenance Index® as a tool for data visualizations. A pioneering project in the digital humanities, the Provenance Index is a collection of databases offering free online access to source material for research on the history of collecting and art markets. It currently contains 1.5 million records transcribed from sources such as archival inventories, sale catalogs, and dealer stock books. As an example of the data visualization possibilities offered by the Provenance Index, Huemer and his collaborator, Maximilian Schich (The University of Texas at Dallas), use 230,000 auction sales records to develop network diagrams of 22,000 agents connecting 130 sale locations in Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands from 1800 to 1820. The ability to map multiple records at once allows researchers to recognize relationships between numerous data points. Huemer argues that these data visualizations, addressing the flow of objects, money, and people over time and through space, have the potential to draw attention to evidence difficult to see otherwise and prompt new research questions.