PORTRAITS

After having to destroy her family pictures during the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Hung Liu treasures old photographs all the more. In fact, they’re foundational to her work. She has described her portraits like a memorial site for people forgotten to history-- comfort women, farm workers, refugees.

As the Gallery launches a retrospective of her artwork, we trace Hung's life through some of the images she's collected and created, from her rendering of a resident alien card in which she renames herself 'Fortune Cookie,' to her painting commemorating the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown.

See the images we discuss:

https://npg.si.edu/podcasts/Un-forgetting%20History

These last few weeks brought jolting discoveries at residential schools in Canada— unmarked grave sites thought to contain the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children who went missing. The news was a visceral reminder that systemic racism and discrimination can literally bury the past.

So we decided to revisit an episode about a woman who— unlike so many Indigenous people of her time— was celebrated by Colonial America, and actually had a portrait done: Pocahontas.

Curator and author Paul Chaat Smith sifts through what we know, and what we think we know, about this iconic figure.

See the portraits we discussed:

Pocahontas, painting

Pocahontas, engraving

Dr. Ellen Stofan is a planetary geologist who has spent a lot of time looking up at the stars and thinking about life outside our planet. But in this episode, she talks with Kim about the portraits of some of her favorite earth dwellers. Among the trailblazers she highlights: a judge who fought for women's rights and a marine biologist who challenged the way we see ourselves in relation to the natural world.

Rachel Carson and the Blue Marble Shot

The Four Justices

Althea Gibson

The 1862 painting "Men of Progress" depicts a group of inventors credited with "altering the course of contemporary civilization.” Between them, they found more efficient ways to sew clothing, harvest crops and even send telegraph messages. In fact, the Smithsonian’s first secretary stands in the middle.

But as cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin notes, many people have been left out of this tableau. To mark the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary, we ask current Sec. Lonnie Bunch to give the painting an update.

See the portraits:

Men of Progress

Solomon Brown

James Smithson

Frederick Douglass

Eleanor Roosevelt

Dorothy Height

Phillis Wheatley was a literary superstar around the time of the American Revolutionary War— a distinction she notched up while writing in bondage. But she never wrote an account of her own experiences, and there are gaps in her story. The Gallery’s Ashleigh Coren and writer Honorée Jeffers ask us to re-imagine her life, drawn in poetry.

See Wheatley’s portrait here.

When the early photographer William Mumler developed his glass plates, he sometimes found a ghost had slipped into the picture. Was he a fraud? A medium? A grief counselor?

Author and curator Peter Manseau explains how Mumler found himself at the crossroads of an emerging technology, and a wave of grief for those lost during the Civil War, and how his spirit photography eventually landed him in court.

See the portraits we discuss:

P.T. Barnum, by the Mathew Brady Studio

‘Cracked-Plate’ Lincoln, by Alexander Gardner

Mary Todd Lincoln, by William Mumler

Choreographer-in-Residence Dana Tai Soon Burgess traces his ‘hyphenated’ background— a journey that begins on a boat from Korea, disembarks at a Hawaiian pineapple plantation, meanders through Latino culture, and then arrives at a martial arts class in New Mexico… organized by Tibetan monks.

Dana also discusses the hyphenated artists featured in two of his favorite portraits at the Gallery. Both were pioneers, both were outsiders, and both had their ‘American-ness’ challenged.

See the portraits:

Michio Ito

Isamu Noguchi

(“Tracings” duet music courtesy of Aaron Leitko.)

Author Rick Atkinson brings to life two men who played outsized roles during the founding of the United States— one a rich slave trader, the other a pamphleteer who died penniless. They both stood for liberty and equality, but their stories illustrate how the democratic ideals written into the Declaration of Independence often clash with historical reality.

See the portraits we discuss:

Thomas Paine, by Laurent Dabos

Henry Laurens, by John Singleton Copley

John Laurens, by Charles Willson Peale

We look at the portraits on our money— the little history lessons we carry around in our pockets. But with such a limited array of people featured, what do our banknotes say about us? First up, curator Ellen Feingold takes us on a tour of our money’s vibrant early designs, including images of children, beloved pets, and George Washington in a toga. Then former Treasurer Rosie Rios tells us how she discovered that women have been missing from our bills for more than a century, and how she campaigned to get Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

See the images we discuss:

Sanford Bank (Maine), $2 note

Benjamin Franklin, by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

Martha Washington, copy after Gilbert Stuart

Martha Washington, $1 silver certificate

George Washington wearing a toga, National Bank (New York), $3 note

George Washington, Lansdowne Portrait

“History Instructing Youth,” $1 silver certificate

Indépendence des États-Unis, copy after Jean Duplessi-Bertaux

As the National Portrait Gallery works on its latest commission -- an official portrait of former President Donald Trump -- we take a spin through the ‘America’s Presidents’ exhibition. This episode draws back the curtain on earlier commissions that have drawn controversy and acclaim: a portrait of Bill Clinton with a shadow of scandal painted into it, and the Obama portraits that transformed the museum into a pilgrimage site.

Director Kim Sajet also digs into the thorny question of what a presidential portrait is meant to convey, especially if the president in question has been impeached. Should it carry the glow of prestige, or the markers of personal failings? Is this gallery hallowed ground, or a place to question power? "If you're in the business of showing these paintings," says Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott, "you want to send people out a little hungry."

Also featuring former deputy director Carolyn Carr.

See the portraits we discuss here:

President James Buchanan

President Richard Nixon

President George H. W. Bush

President Bill Clinton

President George W. Bush

President Barack Obama