PORTRAITS National Portrait Gallery

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— to wolves and birds and stars. “Society is always trying to shrink people’s sense of self or possibilities,” she says. “How they experience the world is much larger.”

This episode was inspired by a self-portrait of Alice Neel, who painted herself at her easel, naked, when she was 80 years old.

See the portraits we discussed:

Alice Neel self-portrait

Cradling Dead Cat (1999-2000), by Kiki Smith

Poisoned Witch (2012), by Kiki Smith

Free Fall, by Kiki Smith

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 2022.

See the portraits we discuss:

Dr. Wu in the lab

Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel Laureate

Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel Laureate

Dr. Wu on the forever stamp

Also, check out Jada Yuan’s article about her grandmother here!

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 Josephine Baker, and the bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, who took a chance on James Joyce. Also in the lineup: Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, whose bustling nightclub became a hub for American jazz musicians, and Romaine Brooks, the painter who reinvented herself, and then reinvented herself again.

The exhibition runs from April 26, 2024, to February 23, 2025.

See the portraits we discussed:

Ada “Bricktop” Smith, by Carl Van Vechten

Josephine Baker, by Stanislaus Julian Walery

Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso

Sylvia Beach, by Paul-Émile Bécat

Romaine Brooks, self-portrait

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 artist who created the largest portrait ever to go on display there. It was a six-acre composite portrait of several anonymous young men who had one thing in common: They all identified themselves as Americans.

See the artwork we discussed:

Out Of Many, One, by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada

Of Thee We Sing, by vanessa german

The Soil You See…, by Wendy Red Star

America’s Playground: DC, by Derrick Adams

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 the portrait and he speaks with Kim about its place in history.

Travers’ Lincoln is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, on loan from the Hartley Dodge Foundation, and courtesy of the citizens of the Borough of Madison, New Jersey.

See the portrait here.

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 on screens.

See the portraits we discussed:

Kim Sajet, by Devon Rodriguez

John Ahearn, by Devon Rodriguez

“The Rodriguez Twins,” by John Ahearn

María Elena Estrada, by Devon Rodriguez

Devon Rodriguez draws Kim Sajet, Instagram