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David Levinthal, Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998, Smithsonian American Art Museum
David Levinthal with his Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998, Smithsonian American Art Museum/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal, Untitled from the series Baseball, 2004, Smithsonian American Art Museum. This is Roberto Clemente, the first Latin American and Caribbean player to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. A noted philanthropist, Mr. Clemente died in a 1972 plane crash in Nicaragua while on his way to deliver aid to earthquake victims, the label notes. Reflected in the glass are other photographs in the exhibition/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal, Wagon Train, 2018/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal with his diorama, Wagon Train (in right background)/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
Detail from David Levinthal's Untitled from the series Wagon Train, 2018, Donald S. Rosenfeld Collection
David Levinthal, Untitled from the series American Beauties, 1990, Smithsonian American Art Museum, from creations of what were once deemed "beautiful" by male makers. The black background contrasts with the dancer's image and creates unease, notes the Smithsonian, while the shadowy snake shape at the dancer's feet adds to the tension.
David Levinthal, Helicopter from the series History, 2014, Smithsonian American Art Museum. If this reminds you of the Vietnam war, that's because the lifelike scene stems from the movie, Apocalypse Now.
From left, Joanna Marsh, Smithsonian American Art Museum curator and head of interpretation and audience research, David Levinthal, and Stephanie Stebich, SAAM director, at the opening of American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs Smithsonian American Art Museum/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal with his Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998, Smithsonian American Art Museum/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal with his Untitled from the series Baseball, 2004, Smithsonian American Art Museum. The photograph is of Lou Gehrig, dead at 37, from what is now known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He played 2,130 consecutive games, and his number "4" was the first to be retired by a baseball team/Photo by Patricia Leslie, June 6, 2019
David Levinthal (b. 1949) is one lucky dude: He's never had to
give up his childhood playtime with cowboys and
Indians. He's been able to saddle up and ride with them his whole life as they became objects in his lifelong photography career, a portion which is on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Monday.
Mr. Levinthal's photographs of figures from the old West and others cut from popular American history are from his collection of 400 which he's donated to the museum. In the exhibition, American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal's Photographs, 74 are shown.
Images of past ideals of American post-World War II society, the beauties, the pinups, the ball players, the wild west, and war, or, at least what artists and advertisers who shape our thinking would have us believe, are included.
At
first glance, all seems relatively well in this land of mostly make believe perfection, but not all is beauty and play. Unsettling backgrounds may escape a viewer's first glance.
Look and you shall find more stories and deeper meanings embedded in the images from yesterday's world.
Today's pictures of ideals have changed dramatically since the last century, and while we may not practice ideal acceptance and tolerance, at least most of us are aware of their concepts and the importance of trying to understand.
What: American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal's Photographs
When: Closing Monday, October 14, 2019. The museum is open from 11:30 a.m.- 7 p.m. every day.
Where: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F streets, N. W., Washington, D.C. 20004
How much: No charge
For more information: 202-633-1000 or visit the website.
Metro station: Gallery Place-Chinatown or walk 10 minutes from Metro Center
patricialesli@gmail.com
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953), Michael-Anthony Allen and George Washington, 2012,
The Birmingham Project, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The complete photo series may be found at the National Gallery website here.
When he was just a boy of 11, Dawoud Bey
(b.1953) saw a photograph in a book his parents brought home which
profoundly affected his life, haunting him, and laying the foundation
for his pursuit of photography as a profession.
Now, his works are collected throughout the world and are found at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland
Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit
Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, London's National Portrait Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington where an exhibition, the Birmingham Project, by Mr. Bey is displayed through tomorrow.
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) with Betty Selvage and Faith Speights, 2012, The Birmingham Project, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 11, 2018/Photo by Patricia Leslie
The life-changing photograph showed a girl near Mr. Bey's age who lay in a hospital bed, her eyes covered with cotton balls, blinded in one eye, her face embedded with glass, caused by the bomb explosion at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963.
The Ku Klux Klan attack on the church took the life of the girl's sister and three other young girls as they got ready to sing at church.
Dawoud Bey at the exhibition, The Birmingham Project, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 11, 2018/Photo by Patricia Leslie
The exhibition includes diptychs of photos of four adults who are the ages the children would be today, and four children at ages the victims were in 1963.
Mr. Bey spent seven years on the project which includes a video of two screens which shows scenes in slow motion the girls might have seen from a car on their way to church that Sunday
morning, and every day city sights from 1963 in Birmingham. Original music composed by Mr. Bey's son, Ramon Alvarez-Smikle, accompanies the presentation.
Dawoud Bey introducing the exhibition, The Birmingham Project, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 11, 2018/Photo by Patricia Leslie
The girls who died were Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Carol Denise
McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14). All but Ms. McNair were born in April, 1949 which would make them 70 years old this month.
Seven hours after the Ku Klux Klan's bomb killed the choristers, two more black youths, Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, were shot to death in Birmingham.
It took the U.S. government 14 years to prosecute the first murderer, and one of the four suspects was never tried.
The photograph of Sarah Collins is included in an 11-minute interview with Mr. Bey which is shown in a nearby gallery and may also be seen here. He says that the Sarah Collins photograph "shook me to the core." In his research, he discovered the two boys' deaths have mostly been overlooked.
The children's deaths outraged the public and helped produce more support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act the next year.
With continuing public exhibitions and education about the tragedy and infinite focus on the lives of innocents taken by intolerant extremists who live among us today, the legacies of six Birmingham children live.
What: Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
When: Now through tomorrow (Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m.to 6 p.m.). Open on Easter.
Where: Gallery 22 on the ground floor of the West Building between Third and Ninth streets at Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. On the Mall.
Admission charge: No charge
Metro stations closest to the National Gallery of Art are the Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Navy Memorial-Archives and L'Enfant Plaza.
For more information: 202-737-4215
patricialesli@gmail.com
Gordon Parks, Two Negro boys shooting marbles in front of their home. November, 1942, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Southwest of the U.S. Capitol, the area's homes were soon torn down in an urban renewal project and replaced by temporary government buildings and new housing, The destruction of housing for impoverished people still leaves a bad taste among many in the nation's capital and often comes up for discussion in local news, even today.
In conjunction with Black History Month, the National Gallery of Art
has hosted the first exhibition of early works by one of the nation's
finest social photographers, Gordon Parks (1912-2006), who overcame
poverty and discrimination to excel at photography, music, writing, and film making.
Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, private collection, courtesy of and copyright, the Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home, Somerville, Maine, February, 1944, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection
The exhibition, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, closes Monday with more than 150 pictures Mr. Parks made of glamour queens, coal miners, Langston Hughes, and black life. Documents from his own life are included.
Before Mr. Parks became the first black photographer at Life magazine, he worked for the U.S. government in Washington in the 1940s where he made life of black poverty visible to many through his pictures.
Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C. Young boy standing in the doorway of his home on Seaton Road in the northwest section. His leg was cut off by a streetcar while he was playing in the street, June, 1942, the Gordon Parks Foundation. Mr. Parks was shocked by the discrimination he found in Washington: young children forced to play in streets and excluded from "whites only" parks, playgrounds, and recreational centers.
Gordon Parks, a portion of Death Room, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1950, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection
Gordon Parks, a portion of Tenement House, Arsonia, Connecticut, 1949,
National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection
Gordon Parks, a portion of Death of Babe Ruth, Inside Yankee Stadium, New York City, August, 1948, the Gordon Parks Foundation. Photographing the funeral of Bath Ruth was one of Mr. Parks's first assignments for Life magazine which published three of his pictures but not this one. Why do you guess it was omitted?
Mr. Parks was a self-taught professional out of Kansas who was influenced by Charles White, Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. After his mother died, he moved to St. Paul to live with his sister, but her abusive husband drove Mr. Parks to the streets where he lived homeless and sought warmth in streetcars where he slept.
He was one of the first to join the Civilian Conservation Corps and worked as a waiter on a railroad where a fellow waiter gave him a magazine that changed Mr. Parks's life. In the magazine he saw photographs which awakened him to another life and a way up and out. He began reading everything he could find about photography and took classes.
On Sunday, February 17 at 2 p.m. in the National Gallery's East Building Auditorium, Harry Allen, Nelson George, Adrian Loving, Miles Marshall Lewis, and Vikki Tobak will discuss Hip-Hop’s Great Day: Gordon Parks and a Legacy of Photographic Inspiration.
Films made by Gordon Parks will be screened at 12:30 p.m. February 22, February 27, and March 8, 2019, also in the East Building Auditorium.
A signature catalogue ($48) of more 300+ pages and 168 of his photographs, which was produced and published by the Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl working with the National Gallery, is available. Included are an extensive chronology of Mr. Parks's life, copies of pages of his photographs which ran in the St. Paul Recorder in Minnesota, and papers of his application for a fellowship to the Julius Rosenwald Fund which made Mr. Parks the first photographer to receive an award.
Nearby in other rooms at the National Gallery are pictures by another black photographer, Dawoud Bey, who has his own show, The Birmingham Project, ending April 21, 2019:
Working in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, N.Y., the National Gallery of Art organized both exhibitions. Philip Brookman was the Parks's curator.
After Washington, the exhibition travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 23–June 9, 2019; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, August 31–December 29, 2019; and Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, February 1–April 26, 2020.
What: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950
When: Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.- 6 p.m. Open on Presidents Day.
Where: The ground floor of the West Building between Third and Ninth streets at Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. On the Mall.
Admission charge: No charge
Metro stations closest to the National Gallery of Art are the Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Navy Memorial-Archives and L'Enfant Plaza.
For more information: 202-737-4215
patricialesli@gmail.com
Nira Pereg, Five Calls (Sun Clock), 2015. American University Museum Collection, Gift of Tony Podesta who is above, in the left background/Photo by Patricia Leslie
Lobbyist Tony Podesta wants all his art eventually to be up in museums for the public to see, and we the people applaud opportunities to see it! Thank you, Mr. Podesta.
For decades he has given his art to D.C. museums, and on January 26 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Mr. Podesta was the star, surrounded by curators, artists, and a moderator on stage who came with several hundred to recognize the donations and the opening of a new exhibition, The Gifts of Tony Podesta.
Gyan Panchal, qqlos, 2009, American University Museum Collection, Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection/Photo by Patricia Leslie
It is the first major exhibition of Mr. Podesta's donations to the Katzen which are drawn from the museum's Corcoran Legacy Collection.
Curators Klaus Ottmann, chief curator and deputy director for academic affairs at the Phillips Collection, and Jennifer Sakai, an instructor in the department of photography at George Washington University, talked informally with Mr. Podesta at the event moderated by Jack Rasmussen, the Katzen director.
Let's discuss Katja Strunz' Form & Mal (in 7 parts)/Photo by Patricia Leslie
Katja Strunz, Form & Mal (in 7 parts), 2004. American University Museum Collection, Gift of Tony Podesta/Photo by Patricia Leslie
"I
talk with many people about art," Mr. Podesta said at the beginning of
the presentation. "It's not a formal process," and he uses no advisor.
"I read a lot and travel around the globe looking for art." (He was
headed to the art fair at Bologna and then to meet an Australian artist in Copenhagen for an opening.)
"I
feel like I'm a steward of the works, and the most important thing is
for people to see [the art] within a public institution. Every year I
give away a lot of things."
Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rape of Creativity, 1999, American University Museum Collection, Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection/Photo by Patricia Leslie
When
the Corcoran Gallery of Art closed in 2014 and the National Gallery of
Art took over its collection, the Gallery curators decided to keep half
of Mr. Podesta's gifts to the Corcoran and left it up to him to find
museums for the rest.
He
contacted the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian
American Art Museum, and the Katzen, which enjoys "the lion's share."
"I
thought the [Katzen] would be a good house for them," Mr. Podesta
said, and he recruited Dr. Ottmann and Ms. Sakai as curators.
At the opening of Gifts of Tony Podesta, the Katzen Arts Center, American University, January 26, 2019/Photo by Patricia Leslie
At the opening of Gifts of Tony Podesta, the Katzen Arts Center, American University, January 26, 2019/Photo by Patricia Leslie
Ann-Sofi Sidén, Fideicommissum, 2000, American University Museum Collection, Gift of Tony Podesta/Photo by Patricia Leslie
Said Ms. Sakai: "It was an exuberance of riches to go through." She curated the photographs, and Dr. Ottmann, the sculptures.
Said Dr. Ottmann: "Tony
is one of these very rare collectors, someone who is really not a
trophy collector. He's in a private position where he can see so many
wonderful works."
Dr.
Ottmann said he had known Mr. Podesta about 20 years: "Tony is an
extremely generous donor. He likes to connect people, likes to connect
artists. He does dinners at his house. [It's] an ongoing repertoire.
"It's a remarkable collection.
"Every time I come to Tony's house and I see things on the wall and I don't know what they are, I ask him.
"Museums today would be in a very bad place without Tony and collectors like him."
From left, Tony Podesta, Klaus Ottman, and Jennifer Sakai at the opening of The Gifts of Tony Podesta, Katzen Arts Center, American Museum Collection, Jan. 26, 2019/Photo by Patricia Leslie
From left, Tony Podesta and Klaus Ottman at the opening of The Gifts of Tony Podesta, Katzen Arts Center, American Museum Collection, Jan. 26, 2019/
Photo by Patricia Leslie
Brothers John, left, and Tony Podesta at the opening of The Gifts of Tony Podesta, Katzen Arts Center, American Museum Collection, Jan. 26, 2019/Photo by Patricia Leslie
At the opening of The Gifts of Tony Podesta, Katzen Arts Center, American Museum Collection, Jan. 26, 2019/Photo by Patricia Leslie
Most of the works in the show are by artists Mr. Podesta knows, "some [who] have become my friends," including sculptor Barbara Liotta, who with Ottonella Mocellin were the artists on stage. Ms. Liotta said she met the collector 20 years ago when she was doing a show in Italy and Mr. Podesta swooped in and bought every piece.
"It gave me security," she said, and they kept in touch. "He kept on buying works from me and other Italian artists."
When she and her husband visited Mr. Podesta, "we were astounded by all the works. He's not afraid of buying the wrong thing."
Installing the sculptures at the Katzen was not always easy, Dr. Ottman said: "It was pretty challenging," and Mr. Rasmussen agreed: "It was a mystery at times."
Said Mr. Podesta to audience laughter: "I had nothing to do with the installation."
Dr. Ottmann: "I always try to create interesting dynamics betwen the works of art."
Answering a question from a member of the audience, Mr. Podesta said he never tires of collecting.
It's "mostly Washington museums" he rewards.
Asked if he regretted not buying a particular piece, Mr. Podesta said: "There's always the one that got away. In fishing and in art." But nothing he may have missed keeps him awake at night.
"Everything will go somewhere." With his collections, he said, "I take everything down and put up fresh."
Mr. Podesta recognized his brother, John, in the audience noting that the latter once represented a group of artists.
Other works in the exhibition are by Darren Almond, Jenny Gage, Mads Gamdrup, Anna Gaskell, Margi Geerlinks, Siobhán Hapaska, Mwangi Hutter, Justine Kurland, Jone Kvie, Clare Langan, Malerie Marder, Ernesto Neto, Anneè Olofsson, Nira Pereg, Patricia Piccinini, Torbjørn Rødland, Jenny Rydhagen, Janaina Tschäpe, Hellen van Meene, and Tom Waldron.
What: The Gifts of Tony Podesta
When: Through March 17, 2019, Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Katzen Arts Center at American University,4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20016
Admission: No charge
Metro station: Tenleytown on the Red Line. From there, take a free AU shuttle bus to the museum.
Parking: Free in the Katzen garage after 5 p.m. and on weekends.For more information: 202-885-2787
patricialesli@gmail.com
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