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—...

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...

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...

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...

A globe turned to Haiti. A glove on the ground. A life-size portrait of President Abraham Lincoln contains intriguing details that can be read as a freeze-frame of race relations at the time of his assassination. It also may be the most lifelike depiction of the 16th president— standing to his full height and in full color. The oil painting by W.F.K. Travers was ‘hidden in plain sight’ for decades at a municipal building in New Jersey. Biographer Ted Widmer played a role in re-discovering...

There are not many portrait artists who get recognized on the street, but it happens to Devon Rodriguez all the time. After quietly honing his skill for a decade, Devon started posting videos of his live drawings of New York City subway commuters to social media. The videos took off, earning him some 50 million followers and placing portraiture in front of a huge new audience. Kim speaks with Devon about the mentors who had his back, and this new model for showing art— not in museums, but...

Copyright law is complicated, especially when it comes to visual art. So there was a lot of fanfare around the Supreme Court’s May ruling involving a celebrity portrait photographer, the pop artist Andy Warhol, and an orange silk screen of the late musician Prince. Would the decision give us some clarity around what’s ‘infringing’ in the world of appropriation art? Lauryn Guttenplan, former deputy general counsel for the Smithsonian, walks us through some high-profile copyright cases from...

Silhouettes were a hugely popular and democratic form of portraiture in the 19th century. So an old ledger book full of cut paper profiles at the National Portrait Gallery caught a conservator’s eye. It promised a rare glimpse at people from all different backgrounds who lived in early America. It also held a surprise: It was laced with poison. Lizzie Peabody, host of the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast, brings us the story of the book, the man who created it, and the web of overlapping...

Digital artist Amalia Soto, also known by the username Molly Soda, wants to show us how we portray ourselves, or perform ourselves, online. She says the images and videos we upload don’t necessarily lie, but they do pose questions about the ways we curate our lives for unseen others. She also believes there is a lot we don’t actually control when we hit the ‘post’ button. With Glenn Kaino. See the artwork we discussed: Who’s Sorry Now? (2017) Inbox Full (2012) My Apology (2022)

As AI art gets more and more sophisticated, how do we tell the difference between a portrait that’s created by a human being – with a soul – and art that’s created by a complex algorithm? And if we can’t tell the difference, will artists be out of a job? Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explains how AI art works, and why he thinks code can actually help artists to expand their creative universe. But there’s one big question that remains: What does AI art tell us about the inner world...

That glass of fine wine you’re enjoying so much.. What if you were told it came from a box? Would it taste different? According to art fraud investigator Colette Loll, yes, it would. Colette draws on brain science to explain why it’s so easy to be duped by a forged masterpiece, and why even the experts get it wrong sometimes. See the portraits we discuss: Francis Patrick Garvan, by de Philip de László Elmyr de Hory, in the style of Philip de László

The blockbuster Oppenheimer movie focuses on two portrayals of J. Robert Oppenheimer. One is the famous physicist known as the architect of the atomic bomb, and the second is a more vulnerable man, maligned as a communist sympathiser. Then there’s a third portrait. It makes a cameo in the film and it resides right here at the National Portrait Gallery. Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Kai Bird, whose book inspired the movie, takes a look with us. See the portrait we discuss: J. Robert...

Museum director Kim Sajet takes listeners to stand in front of a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, the revered commander who led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War. But it’s actually the frame that steals the show. According to conservator Bill Adair, “The frame gives us information that the painting simply cannot.” In this case, the frame showcases Grant’s major battlefield triumphs. Another, gifted to George Washington by the King of France, tells the story of a political...

When Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, she wanted a cover image that would break completely with the norms of the day. There would be no high-end models and no teasers for makeup tips. Instead, the preview issue featured a goddess with eight arms. And she was blue. Kim speaks with Gloria and also with the magazine’s first editor, Suzanne Braun Levine, about the ways women had been visually portrayed until their groundbreaking publication hit the newsstands, and how the staff at Ms....

Dr. Dorothy Andersen solved a vexing medical mystery by identifying cystic fibrosis. But the mystery of her missing portrait remained unsolved. This week, we're featuring an episode from the Lost Women of Science podcast about a physician who changed the way we understand acute lung and gastrointestinal problems in small children. But if she was such a medical heavyweight, why did her 1963 portrait disappear from Columbia University's Babies Hospital? The answer tells us something about the...

Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes says her profession serves as a canary in the coalmine for freedom of expression, a kind of oxygen monitor for democracy itself. When cartoonists are ducking for cover, she says, you'd better watch out. She also shares with Kim why she made the jump from Disney animator to thick-skinned political commentator, through drawing. Then Wendy Wick Reaves, who procured stacks and stacks of political cartoons for the National Portrait Gallery, explains...

Indra Nooyi grew up in a conservative Brahmin household in India, but that didn’t stop her from playing cricket with her brother’s friends, or from joining an all-girl rock band. Years later, when she ascended to the top job at PepsiCo, she would push the boundaries again as one of the few women running a Fortune 500 company. Nooyi talks to Kim about why she initially shrank from the press when she arrived in the C-suite, and how she wanted to be seen in her own portrait as an American...

From our fellow Smithsonian podcast, Sidedoor, the story of Edmonia Lewis— the first sculptor of African American and Native American (Mississauga) descent to achieve international fame. Her 3,000-pound masterwork, “The Death of Cleopatra,” commemorated another powerful woman who broke with convention… and then it disappeared. See Edmonia Lewis’s portrait here.

Before cable news and email and Twitter, it was the postal service that transmitted ideas and information across land, sea, and political divides. Kim speaks with National Postal Museum chief curator Dan Piazza about some of the messages that stamps themselves were communicating, including a few asides from Philatelist-in-Chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt. We also pair some noteworthy stamps to original artwork that lives right here at the National Portrait Gallery. See the portraits we...

José Andrés is the Michelin-starred chef known for jumping into action to feed people affected by hurricanes, wildfires, and most recently the war in Ukraine. But he’s also a huge admirer of a woman whose photograph lives at the National Portrait Gallery– the Civil War nurse Clara Barton. Museum director Kim Sajet talks with Andrés about his call for ‘longer tables,’ and also takes us down the block to Barton’s old digs to see how their stories overlap. See Clara Barton’s portrait here.

The House committee investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has generated a lot of interest in one of the National Portrait Gallery’s latest commissions -- an official portrait of former President Donald Trump. So we decided to revisit an episode that takes a spin through the ‘America’s Presidents’ exhibition. Director Kim Sajet 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...

Atlantic editor Vann R. Newkirk II talks to Kim about the mutability of memory, as seen through two portraits of the abolitionist John Brown. He also explains how a photograph of his mom helped him to appreciate the fragility of democracy in the United States, and why he tries to keep a garden wherever he goes. See the portraits we discuss: George Washington Carver John Brown daguerreotype John Brown painting Marylin Thurman Newkirk

Photography and the Civil War crashed into one another, making it affordable for soldiers to have their picture taken before going off to war. What Black soldiers communicated in these images was a desire not just for freedom, but for citizenship. But they didn't always control how their photographs were used. Drs. Deborah Willis and Rhea Combs talk with Kim about the photographs taken of - and for - Civil War Soldiers. Because it turns out there’s a big difference. See the portraits we...