Howardena Pindell discusses how social issues and the prospect of societal change impact her art and life. In her artistic practice, Pindell’s work reflects a fascination with gridded, serialized imagery and surface texture. She often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. Even in her more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses to address issues of homelessness, AIDS, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid. Watch the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcw9iriBvU Learn more about Howardena Pindell’s work in the Gallery’s collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.10097.html Pindell’s work “Free, White and 21" is featured in “The Double,” on view July 10–October 31, 2022: https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/the-double-identity-and-difference-in-art-since-1900.html The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the Gallery's permanent collection. The Honorable and Mrs. Edward E. Elson generously endowed this series in 1992. Find out more about the Elson Lecture Series on our website: https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/elson.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels?    National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS   National Gallery of Art Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks 

Artists Rosana Paulino and Cameron Rowland explore the lasting legacy of slavery in their works of art. This is the first talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies. Watch the lecture: https://youtu.be/5n90V4Acg_w

Presentations on Thomas’s aesthetic and social environment by Melanee Harvey, Margie Jervis, Marya McQuirter, and Thaïsa Way, followed with discussion moderated by Charles Brock. Melanee Harvey, assistant professor and coordinator of art history, Howard University, Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session chair; Margie Jervis, artist and scenic designer, Creative Cauldron of Falls Church; Marya McQuirter, independent researcher, writer, curator, and scholar, faculty member, department of history and director of the Public History Collaborative (PHC) at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment at the University Libraries, curator of the dc1968 project, author of the African American Heritage Trail Guide, Washington, DC; and Thaïsa Way, program director of garden and landscape studies, Dumbarton Oaks. Moderated by Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art. Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks

Presentations on Thomas’s studio art training and involvement with galleries, museums, and universities by Renee Maurer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Rebecca VanDiver, followed with discussion moderated by Steven Nelson Renee Maurer, associate curator, The Phillips Collection, and coordinating curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; Nell Irvin Painter, artist, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; and Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, Dean's Faculty Fellow (2019–2021), Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities (2020–2021), Vanderbilt University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor. Moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, the Center (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art. Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks

Elizabeth Alexander, poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, cultural advocate, and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, discuss their connections to Thomas’s life and work. This conversation was filmed at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery while Alternative Worlds, a group exhibition featuring the work of Alma Thomas, was on view. Celebrate . Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks

Presentations on Thomas’s studio art training and involvement with galleries, museums, and universities by Renee Maurer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Rebecca VanDiver, followed with discussion moderated by Steven Nelson Renee Maurer, associate curator, The Phillips Collection, and coordinating curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; Nell Irvin Painter, artist, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; and Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, Dean's Faculty Fellow (2019–2021), Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities (2020–2021), Vanderbilt University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor. Moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, the Center (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art. Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks

The final session of American University’s Feminist Art History Conference, cohosted by the National Gallery, brings together distinguished curators to discuss contemporary issues in museum practice. Lauren Haynes, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Christine Sciacca, associate curator, European art 300–1400 CE, Walters Art Museum; and Christina Yu Yu, Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Moderated by Mikka Gee Conway, chief, diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer and EEO director, National Gallery of Art. Held in collaboration with the National Gallery’s John Wilmerding Symposium on America Art and the traveling exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful. In 1952, at age sixty-one, Thomas enrolled in graduate-level art history and painting coursework at American University to pursue “creative painting.” American University offers the Alma Thomas Award to an outstanding student studying painting. For the Feminist Art History Conference, Melanee Harvey will chair a session titled ACTIVISM: MAKING SPACE and Jonathan Frederick Walz will present a lecture titled "Alma W. Thomas’s Moving Pictures." Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks

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

In this lecture, released on December 3, 2021, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), discusses her recent research and curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. Dr. Norby shares her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.

In this lecture, released on November 5, 2021, Babette Bohn of Texas Christian University discusses women artists in early modern Italy. Early modern Bologna was exceptional for its many talented women artists. Thanks to a long-standing tradition of honoring accomplished women, several attentive artistic biographers, strong local interest in collecting women’s work, and permissive attitudes toward women studying with male artists who were not family members, Bologna was home to more women artists than any other city in early modern Italy. Bolognese women artists were unusual not only for their large numbers but also for their varied specializations and frequent public success. They painted altarpieces, nudes, mythologies, allegories, portraits, and self-portraits, creating sculptures, drawings, prints, embroidery, and paintings. This lecture challenges some common assumptions about women artists, suggesting productive approaches for future research. This is the twenty-fifth annual lecture offered by the National Gallery of Art in this endowed series named after Sydney J. Freedberg (1914–1997), the great specialist of Italian art.

In an improvised musical conversation, jazz bassist Christian McBride introduces himself to David. Connecting over McBride’s walking bass line, they meet David’s friends, splash by the fire hydrant, play stickball. Through David, McBride recalls his own childlike innocence. Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/christian-mcbride-roy-decarava-david.html.

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Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts will focus on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this sixth and final lecture, “Alienation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 30, 2021, Roberts explores the intricate and often counterintuitive effort of creating matrices for printing (woodblocks, copperplates, etc.) has been a form of invisible labor for centuries. How do we think about the relationship between the time and skill put into the matric and the value of the image in generates? (Or: where does all the time go?) This final lecture investigates the misregistration of time in print, especially in terms of the conflicts—and convergences—between slow and fast media that are frequently staged in contemporary printmaking.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fifth lecture, “Interference,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 23, 2021, Roberts explores how the layering of images in printmaking, especially when grids and regular linework are involved, often results in the emergence of interference or moiré patterns. While printers usually work hard to keep these disruptive eruptions at bay, some artists have cultivated them, allowing unruly patterns to emerge from the combination of seemingly rational image layers. Moiré patterns also bring printmaking into conversation with the sound arts, which are built on the same waves, frequencies, and beats that are used to describe print interference.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fourth lecture, “Strain,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 16, 2021, Roberts explores how many modern printmaking processes involve passing ink or light through screens or meshes, especially when converting continuous-tone photographs into printable formats. These processes create the conditions in which most exchanges between the ink-world of print and the light-world of photography take place, and also link the practice of making images to a long history of straining, sifting refining, and filtering in material and political realms beyond the art world.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this third lecture, “Separation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 9, 2021, Roberts explores how in printmaking, color must be broken down and reassembled through separation, layering, sequencing, and registration. Most color prints are, in essence, piles of broken color: stratified, even geological affairs that bear little relation to the fluid spontaneity that is often associated with color in other media. Thinking through color separation suggests new models of the image as a structure of assembly and risk and opens a space for examining the intersection of print and critical race theory.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this second lecture, “Reversal,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 2, 2021, Roberts explores how every predigital print process produces some form of reversal—the entire history of printing is based on the reversal of information. Making prints thus requires a certain backwardness; the capacity to imagine things from the other side is compulsory. This is especially true for artists using text. An attunement to reversibility allows for unique ways of exploring communication and confrontation in bodily space.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this first lecture, “Pressure,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on April 25, 2021, Roberts explores how a print is an image transferred, under pressure, between two surfaces in direct physical contact. Every print is the record of a contact event: pressure followed by release. This makes print an especially subtle medium for exploring alternative models of the sensory image and for working through the social continuum of touch, from intimacy to violence.

Composer/producer Emily Wells sees us as the buffalo: frozen before downfall, but still alive—which is why she includes so much breath in her song. Wells, whose work deals with the climate crisis, looks to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism for lessons.

Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/emily-wells-david-wojnarowicz.html. Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app.