Articulated: Dispatches from the Archives of American Art
Since 1958, the Archives of American Art’s oral history program has preserved the distinct voices and human memory of the American art world in more than 2,500 interviews. Articulated draws on those interviews of the famous and the forgotten, featuring firsthand accounts from artists, dealers, writers, and other key figures, in dialogue with today’s thought leaders. Their expansive conversations and often surprising memories challenge us to see the world and our shared history in new and unimagined ways.
Credits:
Ben Gillespie, Arlene and Robert Kogod Secretarial Scholar for Oral History
Michelle Herman, Head of Digital Experience
Deanna Luu, Graphic Designer
Musical Theme: “Sound and Smoke," composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting
Articulated is supported by the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Images shape our sense of self, both as we receive and as we express them. Artists have interrogated the power of images for an array of feminist aims, and this episode tracks the work of Sarah Edwards Charlesworth and Celia Alvarez Muñoz as they examine, exploit, and explode the image.
Catherine Opie’s photographs examine the markers of human experience, how they individuate and connect us. Throughout her career she has foregrounded communities and spaces on the periphery, providing a forum to reformulate our relationships with places, materials, and bodies. Learn about her work and its reverberations in this episode.
Art reflects and shapes communities, and Jesse Treviño has made a career of enriching his lived environment in San Antonio, Texas. His work cherishes Chicano histories and futures by focusing on everyday life and heritage. This episode follows his journey from Texas to New York, Vietnam, and back to San Antonio, where he has made his home and legacy.
Artist, poet, activist, menswear designer, and renowned hugger Frederick Weston (1946–2020) found community wherever he went. Through collected ephemera, drawing, collage, and installations in the streets of New York City, he made Black and queer experience visible in a manner all his own. In this episode, learn about his work and the legacy of love he left behind.
Oral history provides a medium by which we can share our voices and stories. The Archives of American Art has one of the oldest collections of oral histories in the United States, and the largest related to the visual arts. In this episode, we reflect on how oral history enriches our understanding of art and the people who create it.
The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in America.
Find out how to give your papers, records, recordings, or other primary source material to the Archives of American Art.
Internship, fellowship, and volunteer opportunities provide students and lifelong learners with the ability to contribute to the study and preservation of visual arts records in America.
Original material can be consulted by appointment in our Washington, D.C. Headquarters.
Copies of unrestricted microfilm materials can be obtained through one of our affiliated research centers.
