Stephen Coburn

Transcription

(Music) Welcome to the National Portrait Gallery We would like to tell you about our very busy year. We've opened several exhibitions, hosted many programs and continue to bring you the history of the United States through portraiture and biography. Please come with us as we share a few of these highlights from 2013 "Dancing the Dream" is really about the past 100 years or so of American culture in motion. When the Ballet Russe performed in Paris a hundred years ago, there was a riot. In America, everything was new because here there was no tradition bogging things down and there was great opportunity. My collaboration with our Design and Production team has been phenomenal, it's what makes this exhibition come alive I said to our chief of design when we started "the exhibition has to move, you cannot have a static exhibition on dance." and the other thing is I don't like white walls. so what they did was they created this astonishing palette that is vibrant and dynamic. We are in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. This is our third installation of the competition it's triennial and so far we've had enormous success with this one, we've had over 3,300 entries we have 48 finalists in the exhibition and it has been extraordinary to watch these artists' careers take off with this exhibition The exhibition, "One Life: Martin Luther King Jr." was organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. and Martin Luther King Jr's iconic address on that occasion. The exhibition "Mr. Time: Portraits by Boris Chaliapin" Chaliapin was time's most prolific cover artist. He did more than 400 covers for time magazine of which the Gallery owns more than 300 so we have the great bulk of his work and although he wasn't really a household name, people that read time got to know his work. So on October 28th, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled the portrait of the four female justices of the Supreme Court Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. It was painted by Nelson Shanks, it is up for at least three years in the second floor rotunda and we used this picture in a really important way over the next year to 18 months, we will be using this picture as a platform to be talking about women's achievement, we wanna be reaching out to young people in particular to talk about what obstacles these particular four women overcame in order to rise to the Supreme Court. The National Portrait Gallery like all the museums that the Smithsonian has been intimately and deeply involved in covering the Civil War through exhibitions and other publications and we're very pleased at the Portrait Gallery to have participated in the Smithsonian's Civil War 150 book, in which 150 objects were chosen and which were then explicated and contextualized by historians, curators and others but we're especially pleased with the project that originated at the Portrait Gallery. Myself and our former curator Frank Goodyear conceived the idea of doing a combination of poetry and photography and what we did was we asked twelve contemporary poets to write about the war. It's a beautifully designed book, we're really pleased with it and we think it bridges the president with the past in a way that's very revelatory and I think quite moving. So we really felt that there's an audience out there of adults that wanna make art, so we developed a program called "studio time" where we have invited artists from the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and the last Portraiture Now drawing exhibition to come in for two hours on a Saturday and work with anywhere from 15 to 20 adults on art-making. We also produced over 20 new videos this year on portraits in our collection, the Civil War and interviews with artists from the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and we have two new apps, a mobile guide for the portrait competition for smartphones and an interactive tour of our collection of presidential portraits for iPads. We hope you liked our journey through the past months. Please join us in 2014 as we bring in more exhibitions, more portraits, more programs and more excitement from the rich collections of the National Portrait Gallery