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

Cited:
Hearst Castle. “William Randolph Hearst.” Accessed April 9, 2013, http://hearstcastle.org/history-behind-hearst-castle/historic-people/profiles/william-randolph-hearst/.

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

Woody Allen / John Kascht / Watercolor, colored ink and graphite on paper, 1997 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © John Kascht

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 54^th 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