Operatic soprano Renée Fleming has been called ‘the people’s diva,’ performing at key moments in our nation’s story, like when she sang at ground zero after 9/11. For this special episode, she talks with Kim about how music can help us mourn, heal, and celebrate as we send off a particularly tough 2020 and nestle into the holidays. She also describes a few portraits that hold special meaning for her, because portraits are what we’re all about!

See the portraits we discuss:

Renée Fleming by Annie Leibovitz is here.

Denyce Graves and Marc Mostovoy by Nelson Shanks is here.

Leontyne Price by Bradley Phillips is here.

Special thanks to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian National Board for making this podcast possible.

Holiday Edition: Renée Fleming on Music’s Special Place

Art, biography, history and identity collide in this podcast from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Join Director Kim Sajet as she chats with artists, historians, and thought leaders about the big and small ways that portraits shape our world.

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Visual Arts

From the Smithsonian's Sidedoor podcast, we bring you a special episode about the tiny new portraits appearing in our pockets and purses. The faces on our coins tell our national story. But until recently women were mostly absent. Host Lizzie Peabody follows the money to find out who gets to be 'heads' in a big new batch of women-only quarters.Guests:Jennifer Schneider, former program manager at Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, current assistant registrar of outgoing and government loans at the Smithsonian American Art MuseumTey Marianna Nunn, former director of the American Women’s History Initiative at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, current associate director for content and interpretation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American LatinoEllen Feingold, curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American HistoryJoseph Menna, chief engraver at the United States MintTim Grant, public affairs manager at the United States MintDave Clark, supervisor of blanking annealing and upsetting at the United States Mint

Bonus: Face Value

Kiki Smith says she didn’t really start making drawings of people until she was 40. Once she had aged a little, she looked in the mirror and saw lines— something “to hang onto” as an artist. At 70, she says it’s the hags and witches who attract her most.

In this episode, Kim speaks with Kiki about portraying older women’s bodies and how aging has influenced her work. Kiki’s female subjects sometimes evoke biblical figures or characters from fairy tales, and they’re often connected to nature— to wolves and birds and stars. “Society is always trying to shrink people’s sense of self or possibilities,” she says. “How they experience the world is much larger.”

This episode was inspired by a self-portrait of Alice Neel, who painted herself at her easel, naked, when she was 80 years old.

See the portraits we discussed:

Alice Neel self-portrait

Cradling Dead Cat (1999-2000), by Kiki Smith

Poisoned Witch (2012), by Kiki Smith

Free Fall, by Kiki Smith

Hags and Witches

We didn’t want to let Women’s History Month pass without a tip of the hat to one of the towering figures we’ve featured here on PORTRAITS.

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was a rockstar experimental physicist who worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. She also met the pope, and inspired a Chinese opera. But here in the United States, she didn’t always get the recognition she deserved. At least not until her granddaughter, Jada Yuan, took up her story. This episode originally aired in 2022.

See the portraits we discuss:

Dr. Wu in the lab

Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel Laureate

Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel Laureate

Dr. Wu on the forever stamp

Also, check out Jada Yuan’s article about her grandmother here!

From The Vault: The Woman Who Knocked Science Sideways

Paris in the early 1900s was a magnet for convention-defying American women. It offered a delicious taste of freedom, which they used to explode the gender norms of their day, and to explore new kinds of art, literature, dance and design. In the process, they became arbiters of modernism.

This episode, we raise the curtain on the National Portrait Gallery’s “Brilliant Exiles” exhibition with curator Robyn Asleson. It features 60 trailblazing women, including the dancer, singer and spy Josephine Baker, and the bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, who took a chance on James Joyce. Also in the lineup: Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, whose bustling nightclub became a hub for American jazz musicians, and Romaine Brooks, the painter who reinvented herself, and then reinvented herself again.

The exhibition runs from April 26, 2024, to February 23, 2025.

See the portraits we discussed:

Ada “Bricktop” Smith, by Carl Van Vechten

Josephine Baker, by Stanislaus Julian Walery

Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso

Sylvia Beach, by Paul-Émile Bécat

Romaine Brooks, self-portrait

Brilliant Exiles

The National Mall is a great canvas, in part because of all the history embedded there. It’s been a place of protest, celebration and mourning. It also hosts some spectacular monuments. But critic Salamishah Tillet says there is a lot of history missing from the Mall as a commemorative space, like desegregation and the displacement of Indigenous people.

Kim speaks with Salamishah about the ‘Beyond Granite’ exhibition she co-curated on the Mall, and also with Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, the artist who created the largest portrait ever to go on display there. It was a six-acre composite portrait of several anonymous young men who had one thing in common: They all identified themselves as Americans.

See the artwork we discussed:

Out Of Many, One, by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada

Of Thee We Sing, by vanessa german

The Soil You See…, by Wendy Red Star

America’s Playground: DC, by Derrick Adams

Holiday Edition: Renée Fleming on Music’s Special Place

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