By Eden
Slone, Intern, Office of Collections Information and Research, National
Portrait Gallery
A
native Californian, William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) began his career in
publishing when he obtained ownership of The
San Francisco Examiner in 1887 from his father, George Hearst. Over many
years, he added other newspapers to his growing business. In fact, “empire” may
be a more appropriate term, as approximately 25 percent of Americans received
their news from a paper owned by Hearst at his entrepreneurial zenith.
He later
expanded his empire to include other forms of media and entertainment,
particularly movies, television, and radio. In 1902, Hearst even dabbled in
politics, representing New York in the U.S. Congress and mounting a fruitless gubernatorial
campaign four years later. In 1904 he
even sought the Democratic nomination for president.
Despite his business genius,
Hearst’s most enduring legacy seems to be his designation as an art collector.
It is believed that Hearst, unaccompanied, “accounted for 25 percent of the
world’s art market during the 1920s and ‘30s.”
His collection was diverse, ranging from medieval Italian armor to Navajo
weavings to objects from South East Asia. Much of the art he owned and
subsequently sold is of museum caliber and can be found at many institutions
across the nation, including his Enchanted Hill in San Simeon.
The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, for example, credits Hearst as its “greatest individual
donor” and in 2008 organized an exhibition of nearly 170 objects in his name.
Other notable institutions that now own Hearst objects include the Louvre,
MoMA, the National History Museum of Los Angeles County, the University of
California’s Bancroft Library, and Long Island University’s C. W. Post campus.
The cartoon seen above caricatures Hearst and William
Jennings Bryan’s complicated political relationship. Hearst followed in Bryan’s
footsteps and ran for president in 1904. Hearst presumed he would receive
Bryan’s West and Midwest followers as well his endorsement, but he did not.Without Bryan’s support, Hearst could
not win the Democratic presidential nomination. However, the rivals allied in
1924 against Al Smith, “the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.”
The photograph below illustrates Hearst’s
intense focus and determination in both the political and business realms.
Hearst successfully developed an influential news empire and made his mark on
the Democratic Party of the early twentieth century.
Images: William Jennings Bryan and Willaim Randolph Hearst / Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell / Watercolor on paper, 1908 /
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
William Randolph Hearst / Erich Salomon / Gelatin silver print, 1930 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Hearst the
Collector.” Accessed April 9, 2013. http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/hearst-collector.
Muchnic, Suzanne. “Hearst, Off
the Hill.” Los Angeles Times,
September 7, 2008.
Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Robinson, Francis W. “A Gift of
Arms and Armor From the Collection of William Randolph Hearst.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts
33, no.1 (1953–54): 1–5.
The Frick Collection Archives. “Directory for the
History of Collecting in America: Hearst, William Randolph, 1863-1951.” Accessed
April 9, 2013. http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6219.
Whitaker, Kathleen. “Art from the Navajo Loom:
The William Randolph Hearst Collection.” African
Arts 22, no. 2 (February 1989): 98–99.
This is a continuing series of interviews with the
forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through
February 23, 2014.
Paul D’Amato, who participated in our interviews last autumn, was named
a commended artist of the 2013 competition.
Lillian, New Covenant Church of Deliverance, Chicago, 2011 / Paul D'Amato / Ink jet print, 2011 / Collection of the artist, courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?
A: Paul D’Amato. I’m from Boston, went to
college in Oregon, and now live in Chicago
Q: What medium(s) do you work with?
A: I’m a photographer who still works
with film and the amazing range of cameras that film allows, principally a 4 x 5
view camera or a 6 x 7 handheld rangefinder. I make work-prints in the darkroom
because it’s fast and gives me an idea of how the light wants to be in the
final print. Then for images I know I’m truly interested in, I scan the
negative and print digitally.
Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.
A: My
creative process involves throwing myself into communities that aren’t
technically where I live—that is, if we abide by narrow geographic definitions
of where we live. But I consider the whole country, the planet even, to be
where I live—I’m part of all of it and responsible to varying degrees for many
aspects of it.
“For as the body is one, and hath many
members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body” (1
Corinthians). My creative process begins
with truly believing that. That belief is my passport. After that my job is to
honor that experience with all the things that inspire me as an image-maker.
We’ll get to that later.
Q: What is your background (education, career,
etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?
A: Three
things from my past shape my values as an artist.
1. My
working-class family’s interest in politics, education, and the all the arts—musical,
literary, and visual.
2.
The value placed on the humanities at Reed College, where I received my BA.
3. What I learned from having to travel cross-country
either by hitchhiking, hopping freight trains, or cramming in a car for days
with other students who couldn’t afford to fly all the time between the West
and East Coast. I learned to talk with anyone and everyone and to quickly read
people I’ve just met. I learned, too, that everyone has a story. Not only was
this something that was a perfect antidote to any kind of elitism that may have
been festering from the schools I attended, but these lessons and skills are
things I use every day I photograph.
After
that, I’d say that attending Yale for my MFA, where we heard more about Robert
Frost than anything about career, where the emphasis was on how an image worked
rather than how it would work in the art market. And too, my students at Columbia College,
where it is such a pleasure to teach and have people interested in what’s taken
me a lifetime to know.
Photo by Paul Morigi for AP/National Portrait Gallery
Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the
competition.
A: The
portrait of Lillian was made in a church on the west side of Chicago in a
nondescript function room off of the sanctuary. I was principally interested in
Lillian’s friend, who I had arranged near the room’s large windows facing the
street. Lillian was just off to the side waiting for her turn in the spotlight.
But then I noticed that where she was, against that yellow wall, getting only
part of the direct sunlight coming into the room was, in fact, a lot more
interesting than what I had arranged.
I noticed too that she, Lillian, at that moment
looked a lot more striking than her friend who was more conventionally
beautiful. I told her to stay where she was and then, between poses that we
were inventing together, she stretched her fingers to relieve some of the
tension from being paid so much attention to. I asked her to do that again
which, in the end, restored some of the tension that had charged the whole collaboration
to begin with.
All of it—the picture and everything leading up to it—was the
result of looking outside of conscious intention. For me, it’s the things just
to the left or right of preconception that is always more interesting than what
I hope to do or find.
Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.
A: The
portrait of Lillian comes from a larger body of work that I have been working
on for the last eight years on the west side of Chicago called HereStillNow. It’s a community like a
lot of communities in every urban area of the country—African American and
poor—that thousands of people drive through, drive around every day of the
year. There’s a tacit acceptance that this is the way it is and that it will
probably always be that way.
And sure enough, through the last Bush administration
and the first term of President Obama, very little has changed here. These
communities are the collateral damage of capitalism, and even though I know
that I can’t change the economics that perpetuate this, I feel strongly that
there is inherent value in paying attention. I want every one of my photographs
to show that each of my subjects is as important as any that have ever been seen
in art.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I’m
trying to edit and sequence the thousands of pictures I have made here since
2004 into a coherent body of work. The project is composed largely of
portraiture, but there are also many detail images and the occasionally larger
view of things that set the stage for everything else. I am also in the process
of collecting written statements from my subjects, from the pastor of the
Original Providence Baptist Church, and from writers outside the community as well.
My hope is that, taken all together, there will emerge a sense of how
collaborative and multifaceted the process of imaging this community has been.
A large survey of this work with an accompanying catalogue will be at the
DePaul Art Museum next September.
Q: How has your work changed over time?
A: As I
have gone from photographing with a 6 x 7 (mostly) handheld range finder to the
much slower way of working necessitated by a view camera, my work has gone from
being candid and intuitive to being a lot more collaborative, thoughtful, and deliberate.
The work has also grown from seeing my subjects as part of a perpetual human
theater to seeing them as all having a unique psychological presence. Instead of
having the sense of how someone feels by the way they act, you now have that
sense by the way they look at the camera, by the way they hold their hands, by
the way the light amplifies a certain shift in mood and makes visible what is
essentially impossible to truly know from a picture.
Q: Who is your favorite artist?
A: I
don’t have a favorite artist; I’d be surprised if anyone could say they did,
since there are so many that we collect along the way. What I have done over
the years is found my tribe. And I bet if they were all able to be in the same
village that they’d all get along or fight like brothers and sisters. They
would all know that they’re up to the same game and either collaborate or
compete.
This tribe would include lots of painters, who early on were my
principal inspiration, painters like Francisco Goya, Caravaggio, Richard Diebenkorn,
Bruegel, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns and photographers like Helen Levitt, George Brassai,
Josef Koudelka, and Larry Sultan.
All of that sounds kind of highbrow, but if
I’m going to be truly honest, I’d say that what has always inspired me is the
music I grew up with, and that starts with the Beatles, the Who, the Stones,
the Band, Miles Davis, the Clash, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, John
Coltrane, Richard Thompson, the Allman Brothers, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong,
and Hank Williams. I’m fairly sure that Goya would love the Clash and be a huge
fan of Fellini and Truffaut too.
I
have a favorite living artist and it’s the one I live with, Anne Harris, who is
also in the show, and who every day comes in the house smelling of oil paint,
reminding me that if I don’t have the patience to be a painter then at least I
can be around her and we can do all of this together.
Q: If you could work with any artist (past or
present) who would it be?
A: Hanging
with Brassai in Paris during the thirties has always been a fantasy, but then
again being with the Beatles when they were recording Revolver and Rubber Soul
would be tough to beat, too. The only down side is that I wouldn’t be able to
call my wife and tell her what I did that day because she would be only four
years old.
Q: What inspires you?
A: To be
in awe, which is a feeling that is best defined as a moment that makes you
forget everything about yourself. To stand in front of someone, or something, or
to be in a situation and have that feeling and be conscious only of the need to
honor that moment with the best picture I’m capable of.
First Lady, Garfield Baptist Church, Chicago, 2009, from the "HereStillNow" series by Paul D'Amato
Merwin (Merf) Shaw / Mary Borgman / Charcoal on Mylar, 2009 / Courtesy of Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
It’s always exciting to open another window on the artistic
process. The new program series Studio Time offers adults the chance to take an
art lesson from a contemporary artist whose work the museum has collected or
displayed. The first three sessions—on May 11, June 8, and July 13—will be led
by, respectively, Mary Borgman (charcoal on Mylar, her work Merwin (Merf) Shaw is above), Mequitta Ahuja (collage
drawing), and Jennifer Levonian (animation).
Studio Time builds on the great momentum of our serial
exhibitions “Portraiture Now”and “Outwin
Boochever Portrait Competition,”which
show the current state of the art of portraiture and offer visitors a special
opportunity: the chance to discuss a successful artist’s inspiration,
materials, and technique with her (or him).
NPG programs, including the popular
Family Days, Be the Artist, and Gallery360, have made those discussions a
regular occurrence—indeed, a point of emphasis. For example, after presenting a
Gallery360 talk for us, artist John Kascht made a short film, Funny Bones,that reveals his process in rich and humorous detail. However, seeing so many
unsupervised adults in the line for child-friendly art-making activities made
it clear that the time had come for us to arrange a studio program of your own.
And so it begins this Saturday, when 20 visitors will have
the museum—and Mary Borgman (right)—to themselves for a memorable art lesson. Whether
you sign up to sharpen your own artistic vision, to experiment with unfamiliar
materials, or just to have as much fun as the kids at our last Be the Artist
program, carve out a little Studio Time for yourself this summer!
There is a $50 fee for registration and materials. The
program is limited to 20 participants per session. E-mail studiotime@si.edu for registration and
payment instructions. This program is
intended for adults ages 18 and over.
Studio Time is sponsored in part by The Reed Foundation,
Inc. Support also comes from the Reinsch Family Education Endowment.
A Pyrrhic victory is one that
arrives at a great cost, and is named in tribute to King Pyrrhus (318–272 BCE) of Epirus. Plutarch records that while the
king achieved a great victory over the Romans at Asculum, he sustained great
losses in the effort. Robert E. Lee’s victory over Union forces at
Chancellorsville is widely characterized as such a victory.
The plan seemed
like it was a sound one. General Joseph Hooker had led his men across the Rappahannock
in late April 1863 in order to catch Lee off-guard. Hooker’s plan was to take
Lee’s army from two sides and envelope him.
Lee, however, split his troops and
went around Hooker’s flank, and at the end of the day on May 2, Thomas
“Stonewall” Jackson (above)—Lee’s partner in this highly unorthodox plan—urged his own
soldiers to press the advantage. Hooker’s plan to crush Lee between two mighty
arms of the Union army had backfired, and instead Hooker and his 70,000 men
were about to be crushed between two substantially weaker Confederate forces.
As Jackson reconnoitered
the Union positions early in the evening on the second of May, his own troops
mistook him for the enemy and fired upon him. Jackson was wounded and would die
several days later, though every attempt was made to save him, including
amputating his left arm.* For the next two days, the Confederate troops pushed
Hooker and the Union army back across the Rappahannock.
Historian E. B.
Long notes, “Lee had triumphed over numbers and . . . had made Chancellorsville
a battle that would be studied the world over.” Lee had won the battle,
certainly. Confederate losses, however, told another story. In securing the
southern position between Washington and Richmond, Lee had lost about 20 percent
of those troops available to him in northern Virginia. Unlike the northern army,
which was replenishing its numbers with fresh recruits daily, the South could
not suffer such casualties.
Coupled with the loss
of Jackson, Lee’s strategic gem was tarnished by the grim fact of wartime
attrition—deaths, injuries, and men gone missing were hurting the South, and
the status quo of occupying Virginia was rapidly becoming a defensive liability.
As he had done in the summer of 1862, Lee decided to go on the offensive; he took
the token of a victory he had in his pocket and set his eyes toward Pennsylvania.
Inside of two months, the great armies would converge once again, this time at
a little-known hamlet called Gettysburg.
*Jackson’s arm
would receive its own burial plot. Retrieved from a pile of limbs outside the
battlefield hospital, it was buried in the family cemetery at Ellwood Manor
near Chancellorsville, and is marked by a stone.
—Warren Perry,
Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery
Photo by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery
Cited: E. B. Long, The Civil
War, Day by Day (New York: De Capo, 1971).
Thomas Jonathan Jackson, / Adam B. Walter, Copy after: Nathaniel Routzahn, / Mezzotint on paper, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Robert E. Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg in December 1862
was a thorough one, and enough to put the Union army to bed for a few months. By
late April 1863, however, it was time for a fresh campaign. The previous
January, General Joseph Hooker (above) had replaced the defeated Ambrose Burnside at
the head of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker remained encamped at Falmouth,
Virginia, until spring broke, which gave him time to organize his command and
to prepare to take his own offensive against Lee’s Army of Virginia.
Possibly
more critical than the Battle of Fredericksburg, the battle at Chancellorsville
would secure Lee’s legacy as a strategist; the victory in this small Virginia community
would propel him toward Gettysburg and rush the Confederacy into the war’s most
pivotal moment.
Chancellorsville would also serve as the first and only
installment in the command of Joseph Hooker. Hooker was a soldier’s soldier,
and he took care of his men. He was not as kind to his superiors, however, and
he had a reputation for being cantankerous, mouthy, and insubordinate. His
soldiering and leadership were products of his time at West Point; his
insubordination was a product of his time under leadership that neither rose up
to his vision nor equaled his tolerance.
Hooker’s goal was to confront Lee at the site of the
previous defeat, but this time from two sides—the north and the west. With a
sizable contingency remaining in Fredericksburg to face Lee’s troops, Hooker pushed
70,000 men across the Rappahannock well west of the town. This part of the
Union army hoped to surprise Lee on his flank and crush him into submission.
However,
as with any large logistical operation, the movement of troops in this war was
rarely a secret. As Hooker established his position on the ground at
Chancellorsville, Lee divided his troops, leaving a force to defend
Fredericksburg and taking about 40,000 soldiers to meet Hooker.
On May 1, Lee and his most dependable general, Thomas
“Stonewall” Jackson (right), created one of the gutsiest plans of the campaign in order
to thwart Hooker’s attack.
“That night,” historian E. B. Long states, “Lee and
Jackson talked. Out of that cracker-barrel conference came one of the most
daring decisions of military history. Lee would split his army once more,
disobeying the laws of strategy and tactics.” Lee and Jackson would further
segment the Confederate forces by sending Jackson, with 30,000 troops, around
the southern edge of Hooker’s line in order to outflank the would-be
outflankers.
The number of men who pitched war in this moment was great;
the Union army counted around 130,000 while the Confederates had less than half
of that many, placing about 60,000 soldiers in the field. The numbers, however,
would belie the result.
Next: Chancellorsville,
Part Two: The Confederacy’s Pyrrhic Moment
—Warren Perry, Natioanl Portrait Galery, Catalog of American Portraits
Images Stonewall Jackson / J. W. King, copy after: George W. Minnis / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; given in memory of Lieselotte Richardson
Joseph
Hooker / Mathew
Brady Studio / Modern albumen print from wet collodion negative, c. 1863
(printed 2011) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick
Hill Meserve Collection
Cited:
E. B. Long, The Civil
War, Day by Day (New York: De Capo, 1971).
One of the aims of traditional curatorial practice is to
display works of art so that the efforts of the curators, conservators, art
handlers, and installation team are invisible. Hiding those efforts is part of
the “museum magic.” Once the evidence of the museum team is gone, the viewer
ideally experiences the art without the distraction of hanging hardware,
exposed wires, and the trappings of engineering. Sometimes, however, getting a
piece of art onto a wall is an act of artistic and engineering merit on its
own.
In the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition “Portraiture
Now: Drawing on the Edge,” the works of Mequitta Ahuja compelled a treatment
that combined no small amount of smoke and mirrors. Ahuja’s larger works are
fragile and unwieldy; two of them—Mocoonama
and Meecoo Mocoo—are monumental,
each measuring more than five feet horizontally and six feet vertically.
Moreover,
handling them is something of a task, as they consist of collaged vellum paper with
acrylic, colored pencil, and enamel. Framing of works this size is cost-prohibitive
in many cases. Conservator Rosemary Fallon said that the works “could have been
displayed by traditional means but yes, it would have been expensive. In my
opinion there is something about the pieces that are almost mural-like, meaning
that they invoke a more immediate response from the viewer.”
Michael Baltzer, NPG exhibition designer, also recently
discussed the installation of the Ahuja portraits. Baltzer commented, “The
collage works by Mequitta Ahuja presented a challenge that’s common in
contemporary art installation: how to install large unframed/unprotected works
on paper at multiple venues in a way that doesn’t cause preventable wear or
infringe on the artist’s aesthetic sensibilities.” Of the process, Fallon said,
“This was a creative solution to make the drawings appear as if they were
floating; i.e., suspended in air.”
In this case, the answer was to suspend the works with a
support structure that is invisible to the viewer; the drawings were mounted with Japanese paper hinges and reversible adhesive at
regular intervals on the back. They were then attached to wood frames using
magnets covered with soft Tyvek and then mounted on the gallery walls.
The visual
effect of the installation is that of a portrait that seems to be floating away
from the wall. The paper hinges were aligned with metal plates inset along the
sides of the wood frame; the hinges were folded down onto those metal plates
and secured in place with the Tyvek-covered magnets.
“By creating a
support system that’s simple to assemble and disassemble with recessed steel
plates, and mounting the work with a series of hinges and magnets, we were able
to ensure that the work would be installed over and over with minimal risk and
wear,” Baltzer added.
--Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, with special
thanks to Rosemary Fallon and Michael Baltzer for their help in preparing this
article
Mocoonama
/ Mequitta Ahuja / Enamel,
acrylic, and glitter on stamped and collaged vellum, 2011 / Courtesy of the
artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France
A painter, a curator and an intern walk into a bar . . . If you want the punch line, join us at the
National Portrait Gallery for our monthly collections-based trivia game, Pop
Quiz, on April 23 at 6:30 p.m. in
the Kogod Courtyard.
Do you think you know the straight facts about history’s
silliest men and women? We’ll put you to the test. This month’s Pop Quiz theme
is “Comedians,” featuring sitters from our collection who have made audiences
giggle and guffaw. They range from vaudevillians like Charlie Chaplin to
stand-ups icons like Bill Cosby. Did you know that radio personality Jimmy
Durante was also the voice of the much-loved animated character Frosty the
Snowman? Or that the majority of Buster Keaton’s films were made without any
script?
The Courtyard Café will be open, and snacks and beverages
will be available for purchase.
Here is a sneak peek at the 10-point bonus question for this
month’s Pop Quiz trivia:
When
Woody Allen (above) transitioned from comedy writer to stand-up comedian in the 1960s,
his act emphasized monologues rather than traditional jokes. The result was the
development of a unique persona—that of a worried, neurotic intellectual which
he insists is different from his true temperament. Besides entertaining film
audiences and critics alike, Allen also has a passion for jazz music. He still
performs regularly with his band in New York. What instrument does Allen play?
a)
Clarinet
b)
Trumpet
c)
Saxophone
d)
Flute
Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene
Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery.
Ellen
DeGeneres, / Firooz
Zahedi / Chromogenic print on paper, 1997 / National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine
This is a continuing series of interviews with the
forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through
February 23, 2014.
Sequoyah Aono, who participated in our interviews last
autumn, was named third prize winner of the 2013 competition.
Self-portrait / Sequoyah Aono / Acrylic on wood with steel base, 2010 / Collection of the artist
Q: What is your name,
where are you from, where do you live now?
A: I’m Sequoyah Aono, and I was raised and educated in Japan. Since
2008, I have lived in Brooklyn, New York.
Q: What medium(s) do you
work with?
A: Mostly wood and stone.
Q: Tell us about your
technique/creative process.
A: Mainly I carve three-dimensional figures; my carving process
is not like carving surfaces of stones or woods. I regard each lump of material
as space, and from that space, I start digging up edges and sides out of images
in my mind.
Q: What is your
background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?
A: I was born in Naples, Italy, to an American father and a
Japanese mother, and raised by my mother in Japan. I have a BFA and an MFA in
sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2008 I came to New York to
broaden my carrier as a sculptor and to find myself and to understand my existence as half American.
Q: Tell us about the
piece you submitted to the competition.
A: I often carve myself to find my identity whenever I feel
unstable and unsteady. Besides self-portraits, I carve variety of people in New
York, all of whom become my alter ego. In order to be sure of myself, to find
my values and to record my existence, I keep on carving my alter ego.
Photo by Paul Morigi for AP/National Portrait Gallery
Q: What are you currently
working on?
A: From February 22 to March 8, I will participate in a group
exhibition at Nippon Gallery, and in March I have a solo exhibition that will
be held at P339 Gallery, both in New York City. In early May, I will
participate in a symposium in Turkey, so I’m thinking of what kind of outdoor
stone sculpture to carve. I am trying to find other symposia in which to
participate or museums to visit in other countries in Europe after Turkey; I am
checking summer sculpture events in Europe.
Q: How has your work
changed over time?
A: After I moved to New York, I began carving wood more than
stone for financial reasons and because of my working environment. I can pick
up wood from the park or elsewhere for free and my studio is small. I am adjusting
my work according to my present circumstances.
Q: Tell us about a
seminal experience you have had has an artist.
A: Before taking the entrance exams for oil painting at art
universities, I used to hunt for secondhand books on well-known painters. One day I ran into a
famous sculptor’s book and was very impressed by his work. At that moment I
switched from painting to sculpture.
Q: Who are your favorite
artists?
A: Michael Heizer, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, and Novello
Finotti.
Q: If you could work with
any artist (past or present) who would it be?
A: I would like to work with Novello Finotti and William
Kentridge.
Q: What is your favorite
artwork?
A: Novello Finotti’s piece Anatomie
Vegetali (1990). This three-dimensional stone piece shows
great use of materials, and the universality in his work attracts people of all
ages, I think. At the same time his piece pushes the possibilities of the materials he uses. He has
an innovative imagination.
Q: What inspires you?
A: In order to understand my circumstances, the world, and myself
at present, it is inevitable that I carve. I think carving is the media that
allows me to stand up for myself, to be alive, and to confirm my existence.
Watching Upon the Present / Sequoyah Aono / Marble, aluminium, steel, 2010
Hear widely acclaimed poets John Koethe, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Paul Muldoon read their work on Sunday, April 21, at the National Portrait Galley.
NPG
Historian David Ward is the curator of the current exhibition “Poetic Likeness:
Modern American Poets” (through
April 28, 2013). Recently he spoke with us about a poetry reading featuring
three award-winning poets to be held at the Portrait Gallery on April 21, 2013.
Q: John Koethe, Yusef Komunyakaa,
and Paul Muldoon are coming to town. These are three distinct and powerful
voices—first, can you tell us how you managed to reel in these poets for this
event?
DW: They are great poets, aren’t
they? Our immediate relationship with them is that I had asked them to be among
the twelve contemporary poets that we commissioned to write a new poem for Lines in Long Array: A Civil War
Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present, which NPG is publishing this fall. So we
wanted to have an event this spring to both close the “Poetic Likeness” exhibition
and pivot to anticipate this forthcoming publication. So I asked them if they’d
come down and debut their Civil War poems and read their own work.
I had a
prior relationship with these three poets (and some of the others who
appear in Lines of Long Array)
because I had put on a program in New York for a celebration of the Hudson
River. Since that event, sponsored by the Port Authority of New York, went
pretty well, I kind of had a foot in the door to get them to participate in
these projects. Also I’ve found if you ask people to do things for the
Smithsonian, they’re inclined to oblige!
Q: These poets each go in
different directions—language, philosophy, traditional themes, nontraditional
themes. Do you see any common denominators among them other than their shared
excellence and artistic merit?
DW: Hmmmm. I’m not sure there is any
immediate connection between them, either in terms of style or subject, except
that they’re all about the same age so they exemplify contemporary poetry at
its best. They all are very skilful and move back and forth from formal to free
verse across a range of subjects.
All three are very smart—I mean really smart—and
they all have a powerful command of the literature; I’d liken them, in a way,
to chess grand masters in how they’ve accumulated knowledge for their own use,
for their own “game,” as it were.
One thing
I like is that they are all pretty eclectic and write about a lot of different
things; you can’t pigeonhole any of them. They also span cultures in a number
of ways. Paul Muldoon is from a Catholic family in Protestant Northern Ireland and
now lives in New Jersey; Yusef Komunyakaa came back from Vietnam and changed
his name from James William Brown to honor his grandfather and the African
diaspora; John Koethe is a philosophy professor as well as a poet—I think
there’s a bit of his work on Wittgenstein in his poetry: the dilemma about how
the world can be wholly known, if it can at all.
All of this knowledge is worn
lightly, so all three of them are weighty without being leaden. The other thing
is that they all are really good readers of both their own work—and the work of
others. And they’ve all done us proud with the poems they’ve written for Lines in Long Array. It’s worth coming
out just to hear these new works!
Q: This event will coincide with
the closing of “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” an NPG exhibition that
you curated. What would you like the NPG audience to take away from these
experiences?
DW: Enjoyment, first of all. I want
the poetry reading to be fun. I don’t like the idea that poetry is Something
Very Serious and an arcane branch of knowledge. I think there’s a general
conception that poetry is very difficult—almost incomprehensible—and that it
can’t be understood without a lot of struggle.
Poetry is a different language
but I don’t think it’s a difficult language. Poetry is like driving a stick
shift: you have to do two things at once—in poetry’s case, pay attention to the
meaning of the words but also the rhythms and sounds the words make, and in
turn how that inflects the meaning. And one of the ways of getting into this is
to hear a really good poet read his or her work.
And as I said above, all of
three of these guys have a really strong stage presence when reading. If Yusef
reads his poem “You and I Are Disappearing”—and I’m going to ask him to—people
are going to fall apart because it’s so powerful.
Also, I
have to say that I’ve been gratified at the reception to “Poetic Likeness,” and
I think having an event like this to close it out is a nice way to celebrate an
exhibition that has meant a lot to me. It also will be an appetizer for the Civil
War book in the fall, for which I will be putting on another, larger, public
event, a combination of poets reading and scholars talking, I think, although
I’m not sure yet of the exact lineup. Plus I want one more big weekend for
attendance!
The third in a series of exhibitions marking the 150th
anniversary of the Civil War, “Bound for Freedom’s Light: African Americans and
the Civil War,” opened at the National Portrait Gallery on February 1. The
installation uses vintage photographs and historic prints to focus on the roles
that individual African Americans played during the course of the conflict.
According to Ann Shumard, NPG’s senior curator of photographs and the
exhibition curator, the starting point for the show was the desire to
“highlight the richness of NPG’s own collection,” rather than borrow the
majority of works from other institutions.
The exhibition includes images of well-known individuals
such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth (right). Rather than
highlighting their familiar prewar abolitionist activities, however, the images
and accompanying label text in this installation draw attention to the sitters’
wartime efforts, such as Douglass’s pressuring Lincoln on the question of
emancipation, Tubman serving as an army scout and spy, and Truth assisting
refugees from slavery and recruiting black men to join the Union army.
The
exhibition draws its title from the lyrics of a song that Truth performed at
recruiting meetings as a tribute to the First Michigan Colored Regiment, in
which she proclaimed,
We are going out of slavery, we are bound for freedom’s light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight!
While these famous figures certainly merit a place in the
exhibition, Shumard felt that it was crucial to have less recognizable names
included as well. As she explains, “the focus here needs to be on the
experience of ordinary people, the
less well-known figures who both affected and were affected by the events of
the era.”
Perhaps the most riveting
image in the show is that of Gordon (right), who escaped enslavement on a Louisiana
plantation to join a black regiment and whose scarred back became a powerful
testament to the brutality of slavery. Also represented in a photographic
portrait is Robert Smalls, the South Carolina bondsman who freed himself and
his family by seizing control of a Confederate ship and delivering is safely
into Union hands.
The NPG collection even turned out to contain a fascinating
story that was unknown to our staff. While sorting through some photographs for
a different purpose, Shumard happened across a carte-de-visite photograph of an
African American man known as Abraham. The portrait had been acquired some
years ago in an album of cartes de visite but had not been individually
researched.
When Shumard investigated, she discovered the amazing story of a
slave literally blown to freedom. Union soldiers tunneling below Confederate
defenses in the siege of Vicksburg (1863) had detonated powerful explosives
that buried in debris seven enslaved workers used by Confederates to dig
countershafts, but lofted an eighth—identified only as Abraham (below)—clear across the
Union lines, where he recovered from his injuries and joined the Union war effort.
Moving beyond these amazing biographies, Shumard discovered
that there were some facets of the African American experience that could not
be told using conventional portraiture. To cover these aspects, she turned to
historic prints that portray a scene or series of events.
One of Shumard’s
favorite pieces in the show is a print called (in the parlance of the era), Stampede among the Negroes in Virginia—Their
Arrival at Fortress Monroe.(below). While researching this exhibition, Shumard read
a New York Times Magazine article
about the fugitive slaves who were granted protection as “contraband of war” by
General Benjamin F. Butler at Union-held Fort Monroe in Virginia beginning in
May 1861.
The article mentioned that a print had appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in
June of that year showing vignettes of refugees from slavery arriving at the
fort. Shumard was delighted to discover that such a print existed and was
available for acquisition, as she had been struggling with how to include the
events at Fort Monroe in the exhibition. “We have a carte de visite of Butler
in our collection, but that’s a poor way to tell this particular story, with
just a picture of a white Union officer. And there were no formal portraits
made of the Fort Monroe ‘contrabands’ themselves.”
Similarly, the story of the July 1863 draft riots in New
York could only be told through periodicals, rather than traditional
portraiture, as the participants were generally anonymous. This gruesome and
little-known chapter of the Civil War era, when antidraft rioters looted and
burned the Colored Orphan’s Asylum and attacked African Americans in their
homes and on the streets, is represented in the exhibition by a wood engraving
from an August 1863 issue of Harper’s
Weekly.. “The image [in the engraving] of a man being lynched is grim,”
explains Shumard, “but we needed to include it in order to convey the African
American experience more fully.”
There were just a few stories that Shumard was not able to
tell with images from the NPG collection, such as the heroic performance of the
54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, the first black regiment to be
organized in a northern state. According to Shumard, “we have a carte de visite
of the commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, but that doesn’t capture the
experience of the African Americans who served with him.”
Shumard was able to
secure a loan from a private individual of a chromolithograph showing the
regiment’s storming of Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. Other
loans to the exhibition include a group portrait of emancipated slaves that was
sold to raise funds for their education; a print entitled Come and Join Us Brothers that was used to recruit black soldiers;
and a reproduction of a photograph of an unidentified slave/body servant in
Confederate uniform with a Confederate captain, which Shumard included to
broach the controversial and historically inconclusive topic of black
participation in the Confederate cause.
In putting together this exhibition, Shumard tried to find a
balance between the content she wanted to include in order to paint as complete
a picture as possible and the objects that were available. “Obviously we can’t
be encyclopedic in an exhibition of this size,” she reflects, “and we can’t
cover every aspect of the African American experience. But I am pleased that we
were able to find such compelling representations to flesh out this fascinating
story.”
—Miriam Szubin, NPG Department of Education
Images:
Sojourner Truth / Mathew Brady Studio / Albumen silver print, c. 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gordon / Mathew Brady Studio, Copy after: William D. McPherson
Copy after: Mr. Oliver / Albumen silver print, 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Abraham / Unidentified Artist / Albumen silver print, 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
“Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia” / Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper / Wood engraving on paper, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of Ann M. Shumard
NPG on Facebook 
NPG on iTunes 
NPG on YouTube 
NPG on Twitter 
NPG on Flickr 
Recent Comments