PORTRAITS

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...

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 Devo...

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...

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 po...

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 t...

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 univer...

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...

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 ,...

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....

Season five kicks off Oct. 24, as director Kim Sajet takes listeners into the National Portrait Gallery to stand in front of some of her favorite artwork.

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 p...

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 portr...

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,...

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 sh...

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 origina...

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 blo...

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 por...

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 Br...

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 fo...

George Takei went boldly where no man had gone before when he broke racial stereotypes to play Mr. Sulu on Star Trek. But he's also lent his celebrity (and his sharp-witted Twitter feed) to a stack of social causes. George traces his activism to a single, searing injustice-- his internment as a Japanese-American during WWII. He was five years old. See the portraits we discuss: George Takei as Hika...

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was a towering figure in science whose parity experiment shattered our understanding of the physical world. She enjoyed rockstar status in China, met the pope, inspired an opera and even became a “Jeopardy!” question. But to Jada Yuan, she was grandma. See the portraits we discuss: Dr. Wu in the lab Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel Laureate Chen-Ning Yang , Nobel Laureate Dr. Wu on the for...

Grassroots organizer Dolores Huerta talks to Kim about her first encounter with the deep poverty of California farmworkers in the 1950s, and how she took on the status quo (in a wrinkled sweater) during the landmark Delano Grape Strike. All the time, she fought on two fronts: resisting exploitation and also resisting sexism, sometimes from within the very labor movement she helped to launch. See t...

Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery, examines the stories of people who say “No” to the status quo. Guests this season include Dolores Huerta, who fought chauvinism within the very farmworkers movement she helped to launch, plus chef José Andrés, who has been building resilience “one meal at a time” in battle zones and areas struck by natural disaster. Tune in starting May 17.

Since it was founded over a long lunch in Boston in 1857, The Atlantic has featured presidents and poets, abolitionists and suffragists— men and women set on advancing The American Idea. This episode, Kim takes the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on an ‘Atlantic alumni’ tour, stopping in front of a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. and a life-size painting of Mark Twain. Their conversat...