Jamaica Kincaid on Being Kept In May 5, 2009

Edward Lamson Henry, Kept In, 1889, oil, 14" x 18", Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association

On a recent Saturday afternoon writer Jamaica Kincaid offered ninety minutes of personal remembrances in one of the most interesting and heartfelt presentations in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture series. Although she started, hesitated, then began again, you couldn't help but be on her side. "I'm thinking of this as a dress rehearsal," she said, after trying to get her powerpoint to behave, "because if this works, I'm taking it on the road."

Kincaid first became familiar with Edward Lamson Henry's 1889 painting, Kept In, when she was beginning her life as a writer in New York City, in the mid-1970s. "When I was a very young person, I lived in Soho. The rent was $275 per month and I was often late. There was a postcard shop on Prince Street and I collected postcards. I loved the [Henry] picture, but could not say why. I loved looking at it and thinking about it. It entered my very being."

Kincaid then took us back to her childhood in the exotic land whose name she took as her own. She was a precocious child who was taught by her mother to read at three and a half years old, and not for the reasons you might expect. "My mother, a poor woman in a poor place, took me to the library to read. I was upset that my mother found a book more interesting than me." And so, in order to get any reading done, Kincaid's mother taught her daughter how to read, and in effect, to "leave her alone." In fact, as the years wore on and Kincaid became a young woman and a writer in the United States, she "did leave her mother alone." But as Kincaid added, "That is a whole 'nother story."

In Henry's painting, it's as if we're given a window into the portrait of the writer as a young girl. Kincaid identified with the child left alone in Henry's painting while her classmates are outside in the brighter light of the world. Kincaid told us that as punishment for her misbehaving, she was once tasked to copy out books one and two of Milton's Paradise Lost. She dutifully did what she was told, but it had an unexpected twist. As Kincaid tells it, "I fell in love with Lucifer ... not what was intended."

The kept-in girl in the painting is the artist, writer, or dreamer, forced to grow in a different light. But it's a situation that will bring rich rewards. "She's a very intelligent person," Kincaid told us. "She's plotting a new way to be. She's plotting her own light. I find her a revolutionary figure. She's a philosopher. She's trapped in with knowledge. She doesn't know what to do with it, but will."

• Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Lamson Henry, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Paik for Everyone May 1, 2009

Nam June Paik with his televisions, 1991, © Nam June Paik Studios, Inc.

The American Art Museum has dedicated quite a bit of floor space to the incredible works of Nam June Paik, who is often called the "father of video art." The museum has several works by Paik on permanent public view, including an early work called Zen for TV (1963/1976) and two of his ambitious and massive video walls, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) and Megatron/Matrix (1995). Now American Art is home to the Nam June Paik Archive, the complete estate archive, which documents the artist’s fifty-plus year career.

I had the great fortune to talk about Paik and the Archive with one of the world’s leading experts on Paik, John G. Hanhardt, who is the Museum’s consulting senior curator of film and media art.

LB Congratulations on bringing the Paik Archive to American Art. What does this gift mean to you and to the Museum?

JGH Speaking personally from the perspective of a thirty-year career supporting the media arts, bringing this archive here is an extraordinary achievement—a dream come true!—representing an unprecedented opportunity to make ground-breaking advances in our understanding of the major developments in art and technology that have transformed contemporary art. I can’t wait to delve into this material more fully, and to share what I find with the art community.

LB How influential was Nam June Paik?

JGH Nam June Paik virtually single-handedly transformed video into an artist’s medium. His art and ideas embodied a radical new vision for an art form that spoke to contemporary issues through the exploration of time and memory and the creation of powerful visual metaphors.

Furthermore Paik is really a "hot" topic in today’s art world. Artists, in particular a new generation of Internet artists, have felt his influence for a while now, but the breadth of his reach is coming into focus in the critical and scholarly communities. He is a constant source of reference and inspiration to young curators and critics from New York to Los Angeles, Berlin, and Shanghai.

LB And how important is this Archive?

JGH The Paik Archive provides an opportunity to give a fuller picture of this seminal artist and that is essential to creating the yet unwritten global history of the moving image in twentieth-century art. We’ll have a chance to see how Paik rebuilt and programmed the hardware he used, how he invented new tools to achieve his artistic vision, and to trace his relationships with other influential figures such as John Cage and George Maciunas. Going through this material will be fascinating.

LB How did it come to the Museum?

JGH The Archive is a gift of the Paik Estate through its executor Ken Hakuta, the artist’s nephew, with the agreement of Shigeko Kubota, the artist’s widow. But the Museum had to compete to get the Archive. The estate invited selected museums to present proposals for how each would use it, and we’re grateful to Ken for allowing us to submit a proposal. American Art won out in the end, thanks in part to our strong commitment to artist estates and archives including those of Joseph Cornell and Christo and Jean-Claude among others.

LB How will this material be used by the public?

JGH Once the Archive is fully catalogued, it will be made available by appointment, and I’ll be developing a series of exhibitions using artworks and documentary materials from the Archive that will present different aspects of Paik’s creative process and tell the story of his groundbreaking ideas.

LB Thanks John. I’m going to let you get back to sorting through all this great stuff.

• Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, Video, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A Trophy for the Installation April 23, 2009

Jean Shin installing Everyday Monuments, 2009, sports trophies, cast and sculpted resins, digital projections, Courtesy of the artist and Frederieke Taylor Gallery, N.Y.

Last week, we began to install works by the artist Jean Shin for an exhibition titled Jean Shin: Common Threads that opens on May 1st. The artworks being assembled promise to be compelling. Jean uses a sophisticated process whereby she deconstructs, alters, and revives masses of objects, to create expressions of identities and communities. She fabricates complex installations from objects contributed by a given community. The installations in this show consist of prescription pill bottles, keyboard keys, neckties, lottery tickets, military service uniforms and, in a new figurative twist, trophies.

In a new work commissioned by the American Art Museum, Everyday Monuments, Jean is creating an installation with donated trophies. Nearly 2000 individual awards for hockey, tennis, and soccer (to name only a few) have been transformed into monuments to our everyday lives. She has altered the figurines so they perform daily tasks--like typing, painting houses, delivering newspapers, or vacuuming. These humble activities are celebrated on trophy pedestals, and in a sense, hint at past achievements as karate champs and diving experts.

But this is not recycled art. These are not merely found objects. The artist solicited contributions from family and friends as well as the Washington, DC community. Each donation brought its unique story, which has been woven into this collective portrait. Inscribed dates and award titles remain on the trophies. Individual pieces make up a critical mass presenting a 45 foot long installation, one that is undoubtedly larger than the sum of its parts.

Even with her team of 15 dedicated assistants and our museum staff, assembling Jean Shin's work in the exhibition space is very labor intensive and takes approximately two weeks. We have been documenting the process and posting images on Flickr. Expanding on Jean's process of amassing material from various communities and her interest in public participation, we invite you to share your experiences relating to Jean Shin's artworks. Join our Flickr Group at JeanShin: CommonThreads. There you can follow the installation process and upload images of your trophies or award ceremonies. Contribute stories of trophies in your life.

Related: Read more about our exhibition: Jean Shin: Common Threads.

• Jean Shin, Trophies, Flickr, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Abraham Lincoln 2.0 April 15, 2009

Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum

I recently discovered a side of Abraham Lincoln I didn't know too much about: our sixteenth president was a nineteenth-century technophile. Not only is he the only president to this day to have a patented invention (come'on President Obama, your turn), he used then-new technology to help win the Civil War. Obama may be glued to his Blackberry, but Lincoln had a thing for the telegraph, sending out and receiving transmissions that author Tom Wheeler referred to as "T-Mails" in his engaging talk.

The audience at the National Postal Museum was intrigued by Wheeler's insights into Lincoln's grasp of new technology. Even when young Lincoln was a lawyer in Illinois, he had a hankering for what was new and supported the rights of the railroad to lay track. As president, he would walk the short distance from the White House to the War Department to both send and read telegrams. This became particularly important during the Civil War when the messages enabled Lincoln to become the first president in history to use technology that, in effect, placed him with his troops on the field.

Lincoln didn't keep a journal, and according to Wheeler, the T-mails bring us as close to Lincoln's personal correspondence as we'll ever get. In addition to "watching" the Civil War through telegrams, Lincoln was able to communicate with his wife Mary and son Tad when they traveled without him to New York City. Lincoln received a message from Mary asking him to wire the sum of fifty dollars. In the same T-mail, Tad asks about the goats he was keeping on the White House grounds. Though it was a trying time for the president as the war was raging, he replied, "the goats and father are well—especially the goats."

So, not only did I learn about the techno side of Abraham Lincoln, the T-mails also gave me a glimpse into his humanity, humor, and life outside the public eye.

To pay tribute to the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, we've created Artful Abe, an online scavenger hunt that takes you from outdoor sculptures of Abraham Lincoln around America to discover related artworks in the collection here at American Art. In addition, we've put together a podcast and published a book about the Patent Office Building or "Temple of Invention," as it was also known, now home to the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. The building not only held the model of Lincoln’s patented invention, but also was the site of Lincoln's second inaugural ball on March 6, 1865. Check out our exhibition, The Pleasure of Your Company Is Requested: President Lincoln's Inaugural Ball, for more details about that event. The celebrations were short lived, as the president was assassinated five weeks later, on April 15—144 years ago to the day.

For additional information on Lincoln at the Smithsonian, check out goSmithsonian.

• Abraham Lincoln, T-mails, Temple of Invention, Patents, American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum

Collectors' Roundtable: Keith F. Davis on Collecting Photographs April 13, 2009

American Art's Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype: A Bride and Her Bridesmaids

The Hallmark Photo Collection (yes, that Hallmark) began in the early 1960s, and was even displayed in a gallery on the ground level of their flagship store in Manhattan. Keith F. Davis joined the Hallmark Fine Art Collection in 1979, when its holdings included about 2500 photos. By 2006, when Hallmark donated the collection to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (where Davis was named curator of photography), the collection boasted 6500 photos by 900 different photographers.

"Collecting is a reflection of when and where. One can only collect in the present moment," Davis told us early in the talk, and made reference to one piece by Cindy Sherman he bought in the eighties for a song, and regretted that he didn't buy more. When Davis began at Hallmark, their priority was to collect portfolios of work by major photographers. His initial goal was to build logically within that framework. "The goal I was working on was to have something original to say about American photography," he told us. The next period of building Hallmark's collection, roughly from 1995 to 2006 saw a shift of emphasis with a "major focus on nineteenth-century American work," chiefly the daguerreotype. According to Davis, "these works made between 1840 and 1860 lay the groundwork for everything that followed. The daguerreotype era was a primal, formidable, period." And some of the examples he showed us were just beautiful, including some fine examples from the Boston studio of Southworth and Hawes.

The collecting Davis does now for the Nelson-Atkins is based on "expanding the canon and the exhibitions that [he'd] like to do." All in all, Davis shared with us his thirty years of amassing one of the world's most important collections of photographs. It's a collection that benefitted from Davis's eye and one to which Davis feels strongly attached. "I always thought the Hallmark collection was mine," he said with a smile, "though not technically or legally mine."

When it came time for questions, members of the audience wanted to know how to start a photography collection. "Buy the things that people twenty years ago are going to be crazy about," he said to the amused crowd, adding, "2009 is a jolly good time to be collecting. The way to start is to go out and look. It's more important to look and to think than it is to write checks."

And lucky you, if you're looking at photos by the next Cindy Sherman.

• Photography, Hallmark Photo Collection, Keith F. Davis, American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum