Hosted by musician and journalist Celeste Headlee, each episode focuses on a work of art in the National Gallery’s collection. Learn about the work and its context and hear a musician respond to that work through sound, creating a dialogue between visual art and music. Sound Thoughts on Art tells the stories of how we experience art and how it connects us.

Teju Cole, artist, curator, novelist, photography critic for New York Times Magazine (2015–2019), and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing, Harvard University, in conversation with Fazal Sheikh, artist and Artist-in-Residence at the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975. The son of Nigerian parents, he was raised in Lagos. He returned to the US to complete a BA at Kalamazoo College in Michigan followed by studies in art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as well as at Columbia University. Cole’s work examines race, gender, migration, culture, and privilege. Born in New York City in 1965, Fazal Sheikh earned his BA from Princeton University in 1987 and has since worked as a photographer documenting the lives of individuals in displaced and marginalized communities. Upon witnessing an increase in xenophobia and authoritarian politics on a global scale, Sheikh turned to Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to a compassionate global community and to the importance of individual courage. Through Cole’s words and Sheikh’s photos in the resulting book, Human Archipelago (Steidl, 2018), we are confronted with fundamental and pressing questions of coexistence. Their work asks us to consider, “Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me?”

In 2020 Cole and Sheikh created a free, online version of Human Archipelago. Amidst a devastating pandemic and uprisings against racial injustice, its questions are more relevant than ever. In this conversation, recorded on January 19, 2021, Cole and Sheikh discuss their collaborative efforts “to find a new way of speaking to the startling reappearance of some very old problems.”

The National Gallery has been honored to present The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography since 2016 with the support of the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation. The National Gallery is thrilled to share that the Newman Foundation, which has funded the series annually since its inaugural offering, endowed it with a major gift in 2020 in order to make such conversations available to the public for years to come. We are deeply grateful for the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation’s generosity.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: poet and PhD in Law candidate, Yale Law School; Candice C. Jones, president and CEO, Public Welfare Foundation of Washington, DC; Richard Ross, artist and Distinguished Research Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara In a previously recorded conversation, artist Richard Ross; Candice C. Jones, president and CEO of Public Welfare Foundation; and poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts discuss the role of the arts in eliciting, supporting, perhaps demanding social change. Together, as activists and artists, they unpack the complex interplay between art, institutions, and advocacy. An award-winning memoirist and poet, Betts has written extensively on the American legal and justice system, telling his own stories of injustice and bringing to light those of others. He conceptualized and brought to life—through a joint partnership with Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory and support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the Million Book Project, which will distribute a curated 500-book collection to 1,000 medium- and maximum-security prisons across every state. “the artifice of justice” is a phrase from Betts’s poem titled “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” published in Felon: poems. Prior to Jones’s work leading the Public Welfare Foundation, which aims to build a justice system that is community led, restorative, and racially just, she served as director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, pushing major reforms to reduce the number of youth in state custody. Jones, as a White House Fellow, created the strategy that restored access to Pell grants to youth and adults in correctional settings. Award-winning artist Ross created Juvenile-in-Justice, a collection of photographs, interviews, audio documents, and texts created over a dozen years, drawn from the lives of more than 1,000 incarcerated kids. The project humanizes the statistics about children in the justice system and tells their stories. Relying on their experiences, Betts, Jones, and Ross describe how art can facilitate change by shifting the imagination and enabling others to be understood anew. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Mary Kelly, artist and Judge Widney Professor in the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, in conversation with Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. Mary Kelly is a conceptual artist and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. For four decades she has explored ideas concerning identity, sexuality, history, and memory through large-scale narrative installations. Kelly has been a central figure in discussions of feminism in art, and her practice incorporates the personal residue and material processes of daily life that inform her political reflections. Kelly, who was engaged in feminist theory and the women’s movement, began her critique of conceptualism after moving to London in 1968, at the height of the student movements and civil unrest throughout Europe. Her ground-breaking series Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), which explores the intimate relationship between a mother and her child, caused a media frenzy when it opened at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1976. In the 1990s, Kelly turned to issues surrounding war, which led to her investigation of the nature of collective memory. During this time, she developed the innovative medium of compressed lint with embedded text that she used to create My James (2008), which the National Gallery of Art acquired in 2018. This outsized postcard (measuring nearly seven feet wide) is from a suite of three, each addressed to one of the American civils rights workers—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—whom the Ku Klux Klan murdered in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. On June 15, 2020, during the Gallery’s annual Elson Lecture, Kelly presented an overview of her career and discussed her artistic practice with Shelley Langdale. This presentation was recorded early in the pandemic, which impacted the audio quality.

American film director, writer, and producer Julie Dash is a member of the L.A. Rebellion, a generation of African and African American artists who studied at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. These young filmmakers crafted a new Black cinema—an alternative to the classical Hollywood canon. Dash discusses her early life in New York City and her involvement with the art and politics of filmmaking through her association with the Studio Museum of Harlem, a connection that ultimately led to her participation in the L.A. Rebellion. Her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust, a fictionalized retelling of her father’s Gullah family roots, became the first full-length film directed by an African American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States.

In this lecture, released on October 30, 2020, Megan Holmes of the University of Michigan discusses the handled surfaces of panel paintings. Collections of Italian Renaissance panel paintings were in many cases assembled through a process of connoisseurial evaluation. The National Gallery of Art collection is no exception: a number of the paintings passed that evaluative scrutiny in spite of surface damage in the form of intentional scratches—noted in later conservation reports as “vandalism.” Defacement and disfiguration are, in fact, fairly common features of panel paintings, but they are rarely mentioned in art-historical accounts. The paintings, once installed in religious, domestic, and civic spaces in Renaissance Italy, were acted upon and transformed by the people who encountered and used them in their daily lives. The recovery of representational scratches provides a timely opportunity to tell the history of Italian Renaissance art differently, revealing the complex earlier “lives” of paintings in the hands of beholders.

David Bomford (former conservation chair, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and 2018 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses the importance of Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873), painted at a pivotal moment both in the artist’s life and for the city of Paris. Identifying the setting and the sitters in the painting as well as Manet’s innovations in painting technique, Professor Bomford shares what makes this painting one he most admires in the collection.

Introductory remarks by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; conversation with artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems, moderated by Sarah Workneh, codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and Q and A joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw Kaywin Feldman and Lonnie G. Bunch III introduce this artist conversation held on September 17, 2020, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, A Tribute to David C. Driskell. Moderated by Sarah Workneh, artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems gather to discuss Driskell’s impact on their own practices as artists and teachers. During a public Q and A, the artists are joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw, who prerecorded symposium tributes. This fourth annual symposium was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art The 2020 summer series of lectures presented by the education division explores the theme of Staycation. Many of us may be spending this summer close to home, but we can still dream and learn about beautiful places. In these talks, Gallery lecturers will present a tour of six of the world’s great cities. Few regions of Europe can rival the French Riviera’s combination of magical light, mild climate, colorful landscapes, and living history. Long a magnet for foreign artists—including Monet, Renoir, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall—the Côte d’Azur and its scenery, people, and traditions have inspired some of modern art’s most iconic paintings and sculptures. In this lecture, recorded on DAY, 2020, senior lecturer David Gariff discusses the historical significance and impact of the French Riviera on 20th-century art, examining the inspiration artists found in locations such as Nice, Saint-Tropez, and Collioure.

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. The 2020 summer series of lectures presented by the education division explores the theme of Staycation. Many of us may be spending this summer close to home, but we can still dream and learn about beautiful places. In these talks, Gallery lecturers will present a tour of six of the world’s great cities. Milan, Italy, is very much a tale of two cities—one that looks back to an illustrious past, while the other celebrates its present and reinvents itself for the future. In this lecture, recorded on DAY, 2020, senior lecturer David Gariff presents a survey of the city’s rich history and explores some of its contributions to politics, economics, religion, art, literature, music, architecture, fashion, and design. Milan’s native-born and temporary residents included at various times Saint Ambrose, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giuseppe Verdi, to name only a few. In 2020, Milan announced an ambitious scheme to carry the city into a new future, stressing sustainability and the reimagining of urban living in a post-pandemic world. This talk examines the dynamic city, from its ancient roots through its contemporary style.