Articulated: Dispatches from the Archives of American Art

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