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.
From 1942–1946, more than 125,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated at camps throughout the country. This episode traces the lasting consequences of incarceration through the familial and artistic lines of Wendy Maruyama, Mira Nakashima, Frank Okada, and Patti Warashina, while considering how we understand the incarceration within the American experience.
From 1942–1946, more than 125,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated at camps throughout the country. Artists including Ruth Asawa, Miyoko Ito, Isamu Noguchi, and Kay Sekimachi were among them, and this episode tracks their experience in the camps and how their lives and work were transformed by a painful chapter of American history.
Willie Herrón’s murals enrich his East Los Angeles community by preserving history and planting seeds for the future. In this episode, New Mexico-based muralist Nanibah Chacon (Diné) celebrates Herrón’s precedent of recording and amplifying local culture through his work, and she reflects on the power of public art more broadly.
Artists often help us to break out of the paradigms to which we are knowingly and unknowingly accustomed. In this episode, New York- and Philadelphia-based artist Carolyn Lazard considers Emma Amos's resistances to white supremacy in the 1960s and Bruce Conner's disintegration of media's spectacular thrall in the 1970s as well as the legacies each artist left in their wake.
How do we understand our bodies in relation to the earth? In this episode, Columbus, Ohio-based artist Dionne Lee meditates on the wonder and danger of landscape through the work of Jerome Caja and Michelle Stuart, and their understandings of fragility, proneness, and seismic potential.
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.
Select holdings are available on microfilm at the Archives' offices in Washington, D.C. and at our New York Office.
Copies of unrestricted microfilm materials can be obtained through one of our affiliated research centers.
