Hear about the lives and work of ceramicist and textile artist Anita Fields (Osage), muralist Leo Tanguma, painter and photographer Lenore Chinn, and painter Pat Steir as they've navigated their careers over the decades.  This trailer was narrated by Susan Cary, our registrar and collections manager.  Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Through many modes and for many aims, feminists have sought to improve equity in and through the visual arts. In this episode, hear from a variety of women as they describe the trajectory of feminism they’ve seen in their lives and careers, including stories from Faith Ringgold, Linda Nochlin, Judy Baca, and Joan Semmel among others. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence profoundly shaped the depiction of American history in art through their ambitious and insightful oeuvres. From generating new national traditions through the Harlem Community Art Center to capturing communal experience through paint and collage, they paved the way for subsequent generations of storytellers. In this episode, hear from the artists as they recount the social, political, and artistic currents that guided their paths. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

For more than 50 years, Joe Feddersen (Colville) and G. Peter Jemison (Seneca, Heron Clan) have been creating works that extend Native heritage and enrich the stories told by American art. Through an ambidextrous approach to craft and figuration, Feddersen finds consonance between contemporary life and traditional forms and iconographies, while Jemison highlights the continuities and ruptures of Native experiences in our shared spaces. With wide-ranging community education, preservation, and advocacy projects, Feddersen and Jemison show that new paths emerge from the old. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Throughout decades of protecting workers and their rights, the United Farm Workers union has been a significant nexus for artists and activists. In this episode, listen to three artists who have been instrumental in illustrating and activating the labor advocacy of the UFW, as Barbara Carrasco, Carlos Almaraz, and Ester Hernandez recount the importance of collective action and working alongside Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Artistic education takes many shapes, as artists pass down skills and traditions to see them transformed by new hands. In this episode, hear how the classroom shaped artists, both as learners and teachers. Stories include Anni Albers’s descriptions of lessons with Paul Klee at the Bauhaus and her own teaching at Black Mountain College, Carmen Lomas Garza on the activism that shaped her time as a student teacher, and Lee Krasner’s memorable training moments along her artistic journey among others. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

As mass media exploded and the American art scene bloomed in the 1950s and 60s, Rosalyn Drexler and Sturtevant pushed back on corrosive cultural assumptions. Drexler’s collage paintings dissect popular attitudes towards fame, violence, and women, and Sturtevant’s replicas spur questions around originality, reception, and perception. Hear how each artist made her own way in her own words. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

The fourth in a series on healing and belonging, this episode reflects on art as community care work. In her 2020 pandemic oral history interview, photographer Cinthya Santos-Briones describes tending for her Brooklyn neighbors during a harrowing time. She mentions the care and connection she experienced during sound baths performed by the artist Guadalupe Maravilla. Maravilla, also based in Brooklyn, spoke to us more recently about his sound baths and installations that aim to effect communal healing. This is a bilingual episode in English and Spanish; a full transcript and translations are available at aaa.si.edu/articulated. This episode was co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa, a National Endowment for the Humanities - Oral History Association Fellow. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Oral History Association or National Endowment for the Humanities. Show Notes, Transcript, and Translations available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Art emerges through communities within their environments, and in this episode, installation artists Carolina Caycedo and Lita Albuquerque reflect on creating in dialogue with the earth and its inhabitants. From ecological and cultural preservation to the transformation of our relationship with nature, Caycedo and Albuquerque discuss the potential for connection they hope to enable through their work. This is the third of four episodes that reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic, healing and the arts in conversation with the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project from 2020 co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa. This episode was co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa, a National Endowment for the Humanities - Oral History Association Fellow. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Oral History Association or National Endowment for the Humanities. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

This episode was co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa, a National Endowment for the Humanities - Oral History Association Fellow. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Oral History Association or National Endowment for the Humanities. In this episode, two New York-based artists, Firelei Báez Julia Santos Solomon, explore what it means to create for themselves and for their communities, and how empathy grounds their work while spurring new modes of creativity. Both artists have roots on Hispaniola, and their relationship to tropical landscape and family have profoundly shaped their practices. This is the second of four episodes that reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic, healing, and the arts in conversation with the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project from 2020 co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

New York-based artist Koyoltzintli describes her journey from photojournalism to healing through ritual and reclamation. From finding threads with her ancestral roots to linking medium with memory, Koyoltzintli discusses the importance of experimentation and listening in her practice, especially for thinking across time and lineage. New Mexico-based artist Erica Lord also describes creative expression during fraught times as a key to connecting across history. This is the first of four episodes that reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic, healing and the arts in conversation with the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project from 2020 co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

From 1942–1946, more than 125,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated at camps throughout the country. This episode traces the lasting consequences of incarceration through the familial and artistic lines of Wendy Maruyama, Mira Nakashima, Frank Okada, and Patti Warashina, while considering how we understand the incarceration within the American experience. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

From 1942–1946, more than 125,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated at camps throughout the country. Artists including Ruth Asawa, Miyoko Ito, Isamu Noguchi, and Kay Sekimachi were among them, and this episode tracks their experience in the camps and how their lives and work were transformed by a painful chapter of American history. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Willie Herrón’s murals enrich his East Los Angeles community by preserving history and planting seeds for the future. In this episode, New Mexico-based muralist Nanibah Chacon (Diné) celebrates Herrón’s precedent of recording and amplifying local culture through his work, and she reflects on the power of public art more broadly. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Artists often help us to break out of the paradigms to which we are knowingly and unknowingly accustomed. In this episode, New York- and Philadelphia-based artist Carolyn Lazard considers Emma Amos’s resistances to white supremacy in the 1960s and Bruce Conner’s disintegration of media’s spectacular thrall in the 1970s as well as the legacies each artist left in their wake. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

How do we understand our bodies in relation to the earth? In this episode, Columbus, Ohio-based artist Dionne Lee meditates on the wonder and danger of landscape through the work of Jerome Caja and Michelle Stuart, and their understandings of fragility, proneness, and seismic potential. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

In this episode, San Antonio-based photographer Mari Hernandez considers the social, political, and formal trails blazed by Kathy Vargas, another San Antonio resident. From her encounters with institutional racism and misogyny, to her radical experimentation with photography as a medium, Vargas’s vibrant career and activism have emboldened new generations of artists to expand and serve their communities.  Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

In this episode, Brooklyn-based painter Maia Cruz Palileo navigates Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick’s journey with family, art, and history. From grappling with heritage to creating art that transcends boundaries of all kinds, follow the evolution of WalkingStick’s practice along the path she has painted all her own. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

Native Hawaiian lauhala weaver Katherine Kalehuapuakeaula “Lehua” Domingo (1935-) and Hopi ceramicist Al Qöyawayma (1938-) are two elder Indigenous artists and practitioners that each embody lifetimes of experiences through their creative practices. In this episode, guest curator Lehuauakea, a Native Hawaiian artist, draws connections between their work through their shared challenges and celebrations, and how these elements might define the artists’ work as contemporary, traditional, or something else entirely. Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated

What does art make happen, and what can art make happen? Artists have adapted a variety of forms to encourage equity and advancement, creating art that serves as a forum for shared experience and growth as they spur new dynamics between creator and audience.This episode explores what feminist social practice has meant for Suzanne Lacy, particularly in her early performance work, and for Juana Alicia in her murals and paintings. 
 Show Notes and Transcript available at www.aaa.si.edu/articulated