National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

NPG Profiles: Amy Baskette, Curatorial Assistant

As part of our ongoing effort to share the operation of the National Portrait Gallery with our readers, here is a short Q& A with one of our staff members, Amy Baskette. 

Q: Can you tell us a little about where you grew up, how you came to live in Washington, your educational background, and how you prepared for your career in museum work?

A: My dad was career military, so I grew up all over the place. I spent high school and college in New Mexico, where I attended New Mexico State University. (GO AGGIES!) I earned a dual degree in anthropology and history.

After graduating I spent a year in Indianapolis working as an intern with the Indiana State Library’s manuscripts department. That gave me a good baseline experience with working with paper objects. From there, I went to Savannah, Georgia, where I got my masters degree in public history from Armstrong Atlantic State University.

I spent a summer as an intern here in Washington with the National Park Service, working at Rock Creek Park. That summer I just fell in love with the city, so when my husband got a job here, we jumped at the chance to move.

Q: Do you have a story about your time at the NPG you would like to share with us?

A: One of my most recent projects has been working with caricature artist John Kascht on one of the Gallery 360 programs. Along with our public programs manager and the curator of prints & drawings, we have put together a short video about the process of creating a likeness.

While John was the creative force and much of the energy behind the project, it would not have been possible without the support from the NPG staff. John and I selected images from our collection and then cleared permissions to use those images in his film. This project took several months, but the finished product should be posted soon. It was very interesting to work so closely with John on this. He has a way of seeing the world and explaining what he does that is very engaging and his energy is contagious.

Another wonderful moment was when The Colbert Report filmed a segment at NPG just prior to the unveiling of Stephen Colbert’s portrait in the winter of 2008, I was lucky to be able to help our External Affairs staff manage crowds and try to keep the galleries quiet during filming (see photo, below). It took almost an entire afternoon to film all the different clips that went into a 4–5 minute segment. It was fun to see the crew of the show at work.

Q: What is your favorite object in the collection?

A: The Portrait Gallery has such a large number of beautiful, interesting, and inspiring portraits, and so many of them have great stories about their creation or acquisition. I could list ten must-see portraits, but my all-time favorite piece in the collection has to be the Ronald Reagan hologram by Hans I. Bjelkhagen, John Landry, Michel Marhic, and Fred Untersheher (below).

I think it's great that one of the oldest presidents wound up being holographed. It was done in 1991, after he left office, but the artists had spent five-and-a-half years trying to convince Reagan to sit for them. It’s just such a quirky image and the only hologram that we have of a president.

After viewing the result of the sitting, the former president was quoted as saying, “If I had known about this, I would have had it done sooner.” I hope we will have a chance to put it up on the walls during the centennial year of Reagan’s birth.

Q: What is the most interesting aspect of your job?

A: Since we have an active acquisitions and exhibitions program, the staff meets a lot of artists. It is always interesting to meet the folks who create the portraits.

Amy Baskette (left) with other NPG staff and Stephen Colbert.

 

Ronald Reagan / Hans I. Bjelkhagen, John Landry, and Michel Marhic / Hologram, 1991 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Holicon Corporation

Pedro Martinez on the Mound, in the NPG

Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery; Peter Gammons, ESPN (portrait donor); Susan Miller-Havens, artist; Pedro Martinez, and Gloria Gammons (portrait donor). Photo by Mark Gulezian, National Portrait Gallery.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has recently acquired a painting of Pedro Martinez; this is the first image of the Major League Baseball pitcher in the collection. The museum installed the portrait on March 25 in its “Recent Acquisitions” exhibition.  The archived webcast of the presentaton ceremony can be viewed here.

Born in the Dominican Republic and an American citizen since 2006, Martinez was impressive in his debut for the Los Angeles Dodgers in September 1992. He had been told that he was too small to be a major-league power pitcher, yet from his first appearance he consistently overpowered the best hitters in the world.

Martinez won three Cy Young Awards (1997, 1999, 2000) in a span of four seasons and to date has a record of 219 wins and only 100 losses. In 2000, the very heart of the home-run/steroid era, he had an earned-run average of 1.74—more than three runs a game less than the American League average; he allowed only seventeen home runs in 217 innings pitched.

Martinez will always be remembered for the seven-year period when he established, in the words of baseball commentator Peter Gammons, “the most dominant stretch of any pitcher in baseball history.” He is an eight-time All Star who has pitched for five teams in his career, most recently with the Philadelphia Phillies. In addition, Martinez was a member of the World Series–winning Boston Red Sox in 2004, the first Red Sox team to win a championship in eighty-six years.

“We are thrilled to include this portrait of Pedro Martinez in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection,” said Martin Sullivan, director of the museum. “Martinez is widely recognized as one of the great Major League Baseball pitchers who also is concerned for the well-being of his larger community.”

The portrait was created by Susan Miller-Havens in 2000 with oil and beeswax on Baltic birch, and measures 57 inches by 21 inches. Miller-Havens is a contemporary American painter who has depicted a number of prominent athletes, in addition to creating other figurative pieces. This is the second of three portraits of Martinez that she created in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio.

Miller-Havens titled this portrait El Orgullo y Determinación (Pride and Determination) as a statement of Martinez’s accomplishment in overcoming obstacles and becoming one of the most dominant pitchers of baseball’s modern era. The Portrait Gallery’s collection includes another painting by the artist of former Major League Baseball catcher Carlton Fisk.

The portrait of Martinez is a gift to the museum from Gloria Trowbridge Gammons and Peter Warren Gammons in honor of Martinez, whose baseball career is paralleled by his lifelong work promoting educational opportunities for less fortunate children in America and his own Dominican Republic.

Pedro Martinez and artist Susan Miller-Havens. Photo by Mark Gulezian, National Portrait Gallery

 

Pedro  Martinez / Susan Miller-Havens / Oil and beeswax on birch panel, 2000 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Gloria Trowbridge Gammons and Peter Warren Gammons in honor of Pedro Martinez, whose baseball career has been paralleled by his life-long work promoting educational opportunities for less fortunate children in America and his own Dominican Republic

My Three Moments with Elizabeth Taylor

By Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

Before I was a wandering teenager, I spent most Saturdays at home watching professional wrestling, Sons of Hercules, baseball (in season), and movies during the winter. One afternoon the feature was National Velvet. It was not my usual flavor, but I was glued to it anyway—I think I’d seen Mickey Rooney in Young Thomas Edison a few weeks before and I thought he was worth watching.

So I watched Mickey Rooney, and I watched the horse, and then I don’t remember much else except rooting for the horse to win. I certainly did not notice the color of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, because even though the movie was in Technicolor, I was watching it on a black-and-white television. However, I did notice Elizabeth Taylor. I am certain she entered my life a full year before Farrah Fawcett.

Even as an eleven-year-old, I remember thinking, “Wow. I want to be her boyfriend.” That was in 1974. I asked my mom who she was, and mom said she was a grown woman now, married to Richard Burton, she thought, or maybe Eddie Fisher. Later I understood why that might have been a difficult fact to nail down. “Too bad she’s married,” I thought. So, like all boys my age in the mid-1970s, I respectfully moved on to Charlie’s Angels and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

Half a dozen years later, college brought Elizabeth Taylor back into my life two more times. During an American drama course, I read the play and watched the film version (1966; Warner Brothers) of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard Burton was George, and Elizabeth Taylor portrayed Martha, in an odd meeting of allegorical and satirical nomenclature. In its devastating story of marriage-turned-maelstrom, Burton and Taylor were equal to the parts. The dialogue sometimes resembles fencing; at other times it is more like trench warfare as George and Martha battle in front of their guests, Honey and Nick (Sandy Dennis and George Segal).

GEORGE: Martha had her daguerreotype in the paper once . . . oh, ‘bout twenty-five years ago . . . Seems she took second prize in one o’ them seven-day dancin’ contest things . . . biceps all bulging, holding up her partner.

MARTHA: Will you put a record on and shut up?

GEORGE: Certainly, love. How are we going to work this? Mixed doubles?

MARTHA: Well, you certainly don’t think I’m going to dance with you, do you?

During the Albee class, someone mentioned that Elizabeth Taylor had a mighty range and that it was difficult to believe she was the same person who played Velvet just two decades prior to Virginia Woolf.  I had not put the two together, and I think that is when the word versatile entered my lexicon. Someone in class mentioned that she had been married once to one of the Hiltons.

Around the same time, the early 1980s, I had my third, more bizarre encounter with Elizabeth Taylor. Some afternoons I would stop by my grandmother’s house for lunch and catch parts of either One Life to Live or General Hospital. It was actually not possible to go by my grandmother’s house on a weekday and miss either of those soaps; she was especially fond of Luke and Laura on GH, and the early 1980s was their heyday.

At one time in the Luke and Laura odyssey, Helena Cassadine, the widow of Mikkos Cassadine, the wicked warlock of the weather machine, appeared in Port Charles to curse Luke and Laura on the eve of their nuptials—this after Luke, Laura, and Robert Scorpio had saved Port Charles and the rest of humanity from the evil Cassadine family plan to freeze the earth with their advanced atmospheric controlling and altering device. Elizabeth Taylor was Helena Cassadine. “She’s married to a senator from Virginia,” I remember my grandmother saying.

It was always surprising to see where she would show up and with whom. I don’t ever remember her appearing less than stellar, and when she tasked herself with humanitarian causes in her later years, it seems like she became all the more beautiful. There was no role she could not play.

Elizabeth Taylor was among the first iconic celebrities to publicly fight for AIDS research, and she did so in a time when it was a politically unpopular fight. She stayed by her friends during controversy—she was with Michael Jackson through his worst times—and she never gave up an inch of ground.

She was as compassionate and gutsy as she was beautiful. And now she’s married to the heavens. We’ll miss you Liz. And for every boy who had a crush on you after watching National Velvet, I think I can safely say we’ll always be proud to be your men, even though most of us never put a ring on your finger.

For more on Elizabeth Taylor’s work with AIDS and to sign her online memorial page, please visit the website of the Elizabeth Taylor Foundation.

Elizabeth Taylor / Sid Avery / Gelatin silver print, 1955 (printed later) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ron and Donna Avery, © 1978 Sid Avery

 

Elizabeth Taylor / Boris Chaliapin / Gouache on board, 1949 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin

A Whitman Poem for World Poetry Day

In 1999 UNESCO declared March 21 as World Poetry Day. As such, and also as part of our continued commemoration of the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, today we feature Walt Whitman’s “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.”  

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;

When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,

Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,

Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,

Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,

I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)

Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,

Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,

Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,

I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,

And buried him where he fell.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

 

Walt Whitman / Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins / Platinum print, 1891 (printed 1979) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

"Grover the Good" - Grover Cleveland’s Birthday

By Jordan Hillman, intern, National Portrait Gallery, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

When one is asked to name the former presidents of the United States of America, Grover Cleveland is often among the forgotten. Yet the twenty-second president, born Stephen Grover Cleveland on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, was an interesting character. At the age of eighteen, Cleveland left New Jersey for the West in hopes of striking a fortune; however, a pit-stop in Buffalo, New York, stretched into a nearly thirty-year residency. There, he became the sheriff of Erie County, serving simultaneously as public executioner. As such, he was the only president to personally hang a man, putting to death two murderers.

In 1881 Cleveland got his political start as a reform mayoral candidate for the city of Buffalo, winning by a landslide. He became known as the “veto mayor,” doing away with the corruption in the city government through his rejection of underhanded attempts to pass shady decrees. To this day, a bronze statue of Cleveland stands outside of Buffalo City Hall. His stint as mayor was cut short, however, by his nomination as the Democratic candidate for governor, which he won with the largest majority of any governor up to that point.

Leading up to the national election of 1884, Cleveland, nicknamed “Grover the Good,” was the shoo-in for the Democratic presidential candidate because of his reputation for honesty. Just a week-and-a-half after the Democratic National Convention though, a story was printed in the Buffalo News with the headline “A Terrible Tale,” exposing Cleveland as the father of an illegitimate son. This revelation began one of the most unscrupulous elections in history, creating a war of personal accusations between Cleveland and the Republican candidate James G. Blaine. In the end, however, Cleveland prevailed.

As president, Grover Cleveland was unique. He was the first Democratic president to be elected after the Civil War. He personally answered the White House phone. He was the only president to be married and to have a child born in the White House. The “Baby Ruth” candy bar was named after his daughter Ruth, not Babe Ruth as is often thought. He was also the first president to moonlight as an actor, starring in A Capital Courtship, a photoplay in which he was filmed signing a bill into law. In his first term, Cleveland vetoed more than 400 bills, twice as many as the number vetoed by all previous presidents combined (and earning him the new nickname of “veto president”). He was also the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms in office; he lost the 1888 election, but won in 1892 to become the twenty-fourth—as well as the twenty-second—president.

While Cleveland is not necessarily known for the deeds of his presidency, he is remembered for his honest reputation and his efforts to maintain that reputation, both for himself and the government of the United States. Perhaps this can be best seen in the words of Cleveland in his first inaugural speech:

“Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees who hold their places solely as the reward of partisan service, and from the corrupting influences who promise and the vicious methods of those who expect such rewards; and those who worthily seek public employment have the right to insist that merit and competency shall be recognized instead of party subserviency or the surrender of honest political belief.”

Grover Cleveland / Anders Leonard Zorn / Oil on canvas, 1899 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Reverend Thomas G. Cleveland

NPG Civil War Commemoration: Talking to the Scholars

As part of the National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services (CEROS) will be filming NPG curators and historians, as well as outside scholars, discussing the events and personalities of the great conflict. Beginning with David C. Ward’s commentary (above) on the Lincoln life masks by Leonard Wells Volk and Clark Mills, the NPG website will continue to showcase talks that illuminate the lives of those who conducted America through its greatest trial.

Benjamin Bloom, NPG web developer, said of the project, “We are really excited about this work. Our goal is to bring the museum’s collection to light in the context of the Civil War, and we have excellent living resources available to us in our scholars.”

The Patent Office Building—now the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture and home of the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum—will be the location of much of the filming. The building, which was the site of significant activity during the war, was first a hospital for the wounded of nearby battles such as Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Later, President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball was held in the building. Walt Whitman (right), who volunteered during the war, spent much time in Washington and in the Patent Office Building; he called it “that noblest of Washington buildings.” In his journals he describes quite viscerally how it was “crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded, and dying soldiers.”

The project will also take to the road to feature interviews and footage from area battlefields, cemeteries, and historic properties. Warren Perry, NPG researcher and interviewer for the series, said, “We have the chance to connect the personalities of the Civil War with the geography of the experience. Each small episode will contain the presence of the National Portrait Gallery and will coincide with a sesquicentennial commemorative moment. We will be actively participating in the larger Smithsonian commemoration, but tying our discourse directly to the Smithsonian’s largest Civil War property, the old Patent Office Building.”

The Patent Office Building—now the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture and home of the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

The Patent Office Building, circa 1846.

 

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892 / George C. Cox (1851-1902) / Platinum print, 1887 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Feinberg

Patent Office Building / John Plumba Jr. / Daguerreotype, c. 1846 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

March 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration

James Buchanan, among the lamest of lame ducks, presided over the White House in the last few days before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. Buchanan’s presidency had been marked by ineffectual progress toward keeping the nation together. While Lincoln was traveling to Washington from Springfield, Illinois, Buchanan was packing his bags and hoping that no further dissolution of the Union occurred on his watch. Buchanan would be marked until the day he died as a feckless and hollow president.

Lincoln’s train trip to the capital was an event-filled foreshadowing of his impending reign as head of state. He made speech after speech as he journeyed. Close to the eve of his arrival in Washington, rumors circulated that he might be in danger if he spent any public time in Baltimore, so he quietly entered the District of Columbia on February 23 and began preparing to take the seat of power. During this same period, Jefferson Davis had been building a government of the Confederacy in Montgomery, and he had seven states in his hip-pocket by the time Lincoln took his oath on March 4. Squaring off against those who would divide the nation, Lincoln stated in his inaugural speech:

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Lincoln closed his speech dramatically by placing the burden of keeping the nation together in the hands of all Americans, but specifically at those in dissent:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Though Lincoln implored those “better angels” of the collective American spirit to work through the crisis of secession and division, he would be in office less than six weeks before his summons would be torched by southern fire.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

For more on Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, please visit the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt039.html.

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution