Season 1 Episode 9: Oral History at the Archives of American Art

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Duane Hanson: I mean looking back, you’re not that old and you know looking back ten years and I look back many more years than that, and you see tremendous changes.

Carmen Lomes Garza: It was so daunting to try to do anything with the mainstream art world and I just felt like I would not fit.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: I'm not going to survive this. I'm not going to live in the beautiful place that I can imagine in my head. But I will die trying. You know, I will die trying. Because I believe in us. And I know that we will survive this.

Liza Kirwin: Hello, and welcome to Articulated, I'm Liza Kirwin, interim director of the Archives of American Art.

Ben Gillespie: And I'm Ben Gillespie, the Arlene and Robert Kogod Secretarial Scholar for oral history.

Support for this podcast comes from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Liza Kirwin: Since 1958 oral history at the Archives has been a vital method for preserving the voices of the visual arts in the United States. While oral histories take on a variety of forms, we conceive of our interviews as complete life stories as we invite individuals to share the full range of their experiences, insights, and wisdom.

Over the years, we've conducted more than 2,500 oral histories with artists, curators, scholars, and more, and each interview allows the subjects to tell their own stories in their own words. In this episode, we will explore moments from interviews that reflect the power, challenges, spirit, and limits of oral history.

Ben Gillespie: The first major oral history initiative at the Archives began in the early 1960s with a concerted effort to collect the stories of the New Deal. The effort yielded nearly 400 interviews with the artists, administrators, and more who had made good on the largest infrastructure investment in American history.

One star whose career was catapulted by New Deal work was Dorothea Lange, a major figure in 20th-century photography. Her 1964 oral history covers her entire career from the New Deal and beyond; here's how she responded to interviewer Richard Doud when he asked about contemporary influences in her work:

Dorothea Lange: No, that's nothing. I later saw the connections, as now I see connections between what other people do: I understand their work, but I…it may sound like an immensely egotistical thing to say, but I don’t…I'm not aware photographically of being influenced by anyone.

Richard Doud: That's very interesting. Particularly in this case.

Dorothea Lange: Perhaps I would have done better had I been. But I haven't. Not now, either. It's my own handwriting. Sometimes it's a very weak statement that I make about something but I always have the feeling that it's mine. It isn't anything that I got from anyone else. That's why it's very easy for me to enjoy other people's work as much as I do.

Richard Doud: Sort of look at it with fresh eyes, and you feel it–

Dorothea Lange: Yes, I feel it. I don't say I'm highly original, but after all these years of work, I have a certain, well, not exactly a style, but a tonality that I recognize as my own. Now, I begin to recognize it. I'll say, "Well there's a Lange for you." I'll show you one. I just did one that I know is.

Richard Doud: Good.

Dorothea Lange: But it's only lately that I have begun to recognize this quality. People have told me about it. But I thought, well this is more of a, you know, as the Arabs say, "caloose caloose caloose caloose," that means talk talk talk talk.

Richard Doud: I think other people certainly can recognize a Lange.

Dorothea Lange: They tell me so, but I couldn't. Now I begin to be able to.

Ben Gillespie: To hear more stories from the New Deal and how it indelibly shaped American culture, go back to episodes one through four on this season of Articulated. Oral histories offer us the chance to hear creators as they dig into the bedrock of their work. Here's Maya Lin, the architect and artist who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the impetus for that work of public commemoration and mourning in her 1983 oral history:

Maya Lin: I started imagining: What is a war? What is death? Death is a very painful loss. It’s like an initial violence,

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like a wound that heals over with time like a scar, but is never quite forgotten. You can never quite forget someone you’ve loved who has died. So the idea of actually making a cut into the earth, taking a knife and just opening up the earth, that’s like the initial violence of war.

And then let time and the grass heal it over. And from that comes the black granite it’s like a geode, you take a stone that you cut and then polish its edge.

Liza Kirwin: These interviews are also opportunities for artists to explain their influences, methods, and techniques within the holistic scope of their careers. In 1989, I had the chance to interview Duane Hanson, a sculptor known for his hyper-realistic human figures that mirror the absurdity of the everyday in our lives. I've always been struck by the sense of melancholy I found in his work and here is how he explained it:

Duane Hanson: I mean looking back, you’re not that old and you know looking back ten years and I look back many more years than that, and you see tremendous changes. Like my 97-year-old aunt, I asked her what it was like to see the first car at the turn of the century and she said it was a little red car. There weren’t hardly any roads, just little trails. It was a red car and you could hear it coming five miles away going putt, putt, putt, putt, putt.

Then just think of, in her lifetime, then there came radio and then there came television and then cars all over. Of course, that’s a long life, but even our shorter lives, we look back and I remember when I saw my first television set. Hardly anybody had them, now everybody’s got them. Then they were all black and white. Then a few years ago, nobody had color TV. Now everybody’s got it. They used to be little ones and now there are big ones, and they come out with better models all the time. That’s just the technology, of course.

Then you look at the environment and you know what that was like. When I was a kid, we could go out and pick these little strawberries in the woods in Minnesota. I don’t think you’d find any anymore. Here, in Florida, I noticed when we moved in that house next door in 1973 in the winter they would have these little colored birds that would come, and I have a bird feeder, a little place where they come and sit, these buntings. I think they’re called colored buntings or something. They had red breasts and little green wings. I haven’t seen them now for about ten years. I don’t see any birds around here anymore that migrate through. Just the blue jays and they’re just here all the time. And you say, “Well, so what. You can live without them,” but as years go on, you can tell something’s wrong. It’s such a joy to see a little bird like that and there were other kinds. There was another kind of bird, a blackbird, that my neighbor said was very rare, and it had kind of a rounded-off beak. I don’t see them anymore, and a lot of other little tiny birds used to creep all over the orange trees. They’re not here. So when you think back even a few years how it was, you can imagine what it’s going to be ten years from now. That’s the sad part of it. That’s just the environment. Then there are other problems: population and all that.

Liza Kirwin: So these issues weigh heavily on your figures?

Duane Hanson: Pardon?

Liza Kirwin: These issues about ecology change, climate.

Duane Hanson: I mean, we don’t talk about it, but we know it’s there. Every day on television there’s something, or in the paper little by little. I have the tendency to turn off and I think everybody says, “Oh, I don’t want to hear about that anymore,” but it’s there and it’s in our mind. We can be happy but we still have to think of our children and future years. What’s going to happen to this planet if we don’t wake up? So I guess that’s some of it. That comes intuitively, you know. I just don’t try to stress it and make it more than it is because it’s a heavy burden for us all. So much of the world just goes on like nothing is ever going to end. It’s always going to be like it is today.

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Ben Gillespie: Interviews provide the space for narrators to reflect on their formative influences and the state of the art world. In his 1988 interview with Judd Tully, painter Paul Cadmus glossed his relation to art history and how he understood his own practice and its bounds:

Paul Cadmus: My limitations are that I only like the kind of painting that is in what I call our tradition. I mean, it's not our tradition, but it's a tradition that we would like to be connected with. Those are the only paintings I really like. I can admire other paintings. Henry James once described New York City as a big, bad, bold beauty and I think some pictures are big, bad, bold beauties, but I don't care for them. My limitations are that I'm interested in delicacy and refinement. Especially in technique. I mean, especially in handling of paint. I don't like anything that's coarsely done. I can appreciate Van Gogh whose painting is coarse…there's no doubt about it. It's wonderful, but I don't love it as I love Ingres, as I love Poussin, as I love the Italian Renaissance painters. Signorelli, who is my great favorite, of course, is a rather bold painter because…but he was a Fresco painter. I don't care for his oils particularly. My limitations I think are quite obvious. A lot of people would think I'm a very limited artist.

Judd Tully: How, though?

Paul Cadmus: [chuckles] I think it's so clear. I think every artist is limited to his own style. My subject matter is not as limited as some artists, I think. I think there's more variety in the pictures I've done. I can't remember how I said that. I think I was doing a little exhibition of how a painting is done in the movie when I said that. But I don't know how I can explain it any more clearly than that I am limited. Then I went on from that too to explain that most artists do have limitations. I think perhaps Tolstoy had very few, but certainly Ronald Firbank–They probably didn't continue that quote in the book, but it's in the movie–and Ronald Firbank was limited to his limitations. And the fact was, it was very hard to criticize Ronald Firbank. I think Forster in an essay said, "You can't break a butterfly on a Catherine wheel. It's just too delicate."

Judd Tully: What a great image.

Paul Cadmus: I'm not a butterfly; I'm not comparing myself.

Liza Kirwin: Influence also comes from family, community, and teachers. Joyce Scott, a mixed media artist based in Baltimore, described the significance of her parents and heritage for her work during her 2009 oral history:

Joyce Scott: Well, my mother told me that she was considered a bit different as a quilt-maker because she didn't like to stick to the old-fashioned designs. And when everybody did crazy quilts, her quilts were always just a little crazier than everyone else's.

That kind of improvisational skill, that kind of–real kind of dense storytelling all wrapped up in love, and all of the other things that happened when you were a child living under this kind of gross pressure of the South, being a have-not and the racism. I mean, I really think about the kind of work that she makes and how glorious it is, when I think about her youth where you were afraid to–you don't have running water and if you don't have a well that's super-close, you're afraid to go get the elixir of life, water. You're picking cotton and you're being bitten by the very things, but you can't not pick cotton because that's how your family has a livelihood to live. This is a–we don't know this. We don't really know this. But that informed then, the house that we lived in.

My father picked tobacco. He came from, I think, eight kids, maybe. My mother's darker-skinned, my father's lighter-skinned. His travails here were at Bethlehem Steel.

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I didn't hear this until maybe two years before. My godfather, who also worked at Bethlehem Steel, who was darker-skinned, told me this story. Wyatt, who was my godfather, who was a Pentecostal preacher–I did street ministry with he and his wife, who's my godmother. So it's Wyatt Brown and Lucille Brown. I'm on the street playing the tambourine with them while we're doing street ministry. I told them I was sure that they were responsible for a few of my emotional problems later in my life. [Laughs.]

But until he passed away, he would drive me to the airport because I was traveling around the United States speaking and teaching. And he told me this story driving, and remember, this all goes back to everything I talk in circles. He said, you know, you're a white girl. And I said, wait a second, back up. What do you mean? He said, "Well, people are not appreciated but they are designated by their skin color and your having an education makes you a certain kind of person in our culture." I said, "Well, but, you know, I understand what you're saying but I'm still that little Joyce." He said, "Yes, you are," and then he started telling me a story about what he meant.

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Ben Gillespie: While oral histories center the narrator or interviewee, they are still conversations that rely on the space that interviewer and narrator hold together. In 2017, interviewer Ted Kerr and narrator Julie Ault discussed some of the nuances of that dynamic:

Ted Kerr: But I'm always surprised doing some oral histories. Some of the people auditing the clips have said how much they mean to them. So I forgot to think that the audience is also everyone involved in the production.

Julie Ault: Right. And I think–that's why I probably haven't thought about who because mostly I would like it to be a meaningful conversation in the present tense for us, and draw things out, and, you know, achieve some kind of contextualization and bringing together of information, memory, atmosphere of what I imagine to be the times that you're going to be asking me questions about. But first of all, I just think it has to be meaningful for me and for you. And everything else is gravy in a way. Because if it is, then it will build a constituency. And I'm sure that this program of important oral histories has a constituency already and will keep building one. So to add to that is an important thing that I take really seriously.

Ted Kerr: Somewhat. Yeah. If I think about the interviews that I've done for this project specifically, some people have been very–one or two people have been very close to me, and I know their work and them very well. And so that was about thinking about, like, "What do I know that I take for granted?" Like, "How do I approach this with all the knowledge I have in my heart and mind?" And then with people that I've never met before–and I was familiar with everybody to a degree. So with people that I was familiar with to a degree, it was kind of parsing through, "What are the things that I need to go into the interview knowing so that they feel that they're going to be–that I respect and honor what we're here to talk about? And what things is just like actually let that come out if it comes out?" But no one was as, I would say, helpful and clear about the things that would be good for me to know beforehand.

Julie Ault: That's good. You know, I mean, I didn't want to give you too much. But I'm aware of the problematic of coming to a conversation, and I don't want to fall into just stating facts that can be found in other places. The general subject terrain, or what I expect to be the subject terrain,

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of our conversation is something that has been a layer or–sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background–for a long time in my work. And the collective work, and work that I've done individually.

So I feel like that's a good starting point. Not that you have to know all of it. But otherwise, we don't use our valuable time necessarily. I mean, we're dipping in without having a grounding or something. So I like to think of it more as, in general, maybe a more guided curatorial than a cafeteria-style taking some of this, taking some of that. And I wasn't–I'm not aware to what degree you've prepared, or are you in-quotes supposed to prepare or not.

Because I know the oral history is so much about the–I mean traditionally it's so much about the person giving the oral history. And that the interviewer recedes a bit in that, or is not as much of a figure. And so that's why I felt like I have–I didn't know your work. But I looked up a little bit before. And then you sent me some things which were helpful. Unfortunately, I didn't get to read them all. But it's helpful to have a grounding, you know.

Ted Kerr: Yeah. Also, you said something that is something that I think a lot about with these oral histories–is, like, for some people HIV/AIDS is something they think about every day, maybe all day. And for other people, it was a period of their life, or it is a period of their life, that can be discrete. I always want to make space for people to show up in relationship to HIV/AIDS how they want to show up.

Julie Ault: Right.

Ted Kerr: Is it something that's constant? Or is it something–

Julie Ault: Right. No, I think that's good, because also if someone's agreed already to do the oral–or to be part of the project, the oral history project, then there's a willingness. And it sounds like you're making space for it to be on their terms, which is good. [Laughs]

Liza Kirwin: These stories also give firsthand accounts of community and belonging. Carmen Lomas Garza, a painter from California, and key figure in the Chicano art movement talked about how she carved out her own niche in her 1997. Interview with Paul Karlstrom.

Carmen Lomas Garza: Well, I was always looking towards other Chicano artists, other Mexican American artists, for influence, for inspiration, for information, for technique, for camaraderie, for support, and most of the time it was from Chicano artists because that's who there was more of. There was very, very few Chicana artists. And it seemed to me that the Chicano artists were much more forceful and aggressive in what they were doing and much more bent on achieving their goals as artists. So I made friends with a lot of Chicano artists in Texas and then over here in California.

 Well, if you look at my resume, the more important exhibitions that I've been in have been curated by Chicanos that somehow or other ended up doing guest curating for an institution or were curators for a certain length of time, and then women-you know, white women-who were also curators in curatorial positions or were in education-department positions where they were given the opportunity to curate exhibitions. So I have benefited greatly-both from the feminist art movement putting pressure on the institutions and the Chicano movement putting pressure on the institutions.

 Well, it was so daunting to try to do anything with the mainstream art world and I just felt like I would not fit, and then I also had this need to fill my obligation to my community and also within the Chicano art movement and the Chicano movement, that I felt I needed to develop my own audience. You know, there was this group of people that were not getting artwork in their lives, and could be served with my artwork. So I started developing my audience, which was the Mexican American audience. My artwork was directed-and has been and still is, primarily directed towards Mexican Americans or Chicanos. And they also started to become my padrinos and madrinas, my collectors of art. Because that's where I was exhibiting, that's where I was having…that's who was seeing my artwork. So I have always felt support from Chicanos and Chicanas, especially Chicanas.

Liza Kirwin: And they also bear witness to history in flux. Here's Juana Alicia, a muralist in San Francisco speaking in 2000:

Juana Alicia: It brings up the issue of like sort of a generational thing that happens, whether it’s from our generation

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to our children’s generation or whatever, in this country, particularly around the struggles of the civil rights movement. You know, a certain level of taking for granted rights that we had to struggle for earlier on. And I do believe we’re born with rights, and that these are not privileges, they’re rights. That we should have autonomy over our bodies. We have the right to autonomy over our bodies. We have the right to housing and a safe life and an education and good health care, and all those things are inalienable rights everywhere on the planet, and that there are places where people have to struggle a lot harder to claim them than they do in places where there’s a long history of that struggle or a history of that struggle where certain advances have been made. I do think that…Yeah, some things are taken for granted in contemporary feminism in terms of like having the vote, certain levels of security, but I think it’s very tenuous, very fragile. And you look, see what’s happening with the Taliban of Afghanistan, or in different parts of the world where women’s rights have been ripped away, or if you read Margaret Atwood, and you read…What’s that one about the future.

Paul Karlstrom: The Handmaid. . . .

Juana Alicia: The Handmaid’s Tale, right? I think we’re [not, that] far away from that.

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Ben Gillespie: Oral histories can teach us about the past while remaining engaged with the present. Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee painter in Pennsylvania, told Mija Riedel about the substance, vitality, and elegiac nature of her work in relation to Native history during her 2011 oral history:

Kay WalkingStick: I’ve done some paintings–and I actually did an object–that are about the genocide that happened here. And there was a kind of genocide that occurred here, not quite as efficient as what went on in Germany but–nor as politically determined, but there was a kind of genocide that went on here. And it was mostly about land grab. You know, it was mostly about real estate. But the Ridge Party that I talked about–stop me if I’m giving you too much history, but that happened. The Ridge assassination happened because the tribe was split up, and part of the tribe blamed Ridge for their being moved–the Cherokees being moved to Oklahoma. And part of the tribe stayed in the South and part went West, and Ridge led it and then was blamed for it. And that was highly politicized. Oh, Jackson himself was involved in that–you know, Andy Jackson. He’s the one that put the final stamp on the removal. It was voted down by the Senate and he vetoed it and then sent them away. So, highly politicized history.

Mija Riedel: Yes.

Kay WalkingStick: And I did a piece–I don’t own it anymore but I think it’s in this.

Mija Riedel: So when you do paintings about, you know, Bear Paw, you don’t consider those social or political?

Kay WalkingStick: Oh, absolutely, in a historical way.

Mija Riedel: Yes.

Kay WalkingStick: But not in a–I don’t see them as political in today’s politics.

Mija Riedel: Right.

Kay WalkingStick: They have to do with the history–

Mija Riedel: Yes.

Kay WalkingStick: –of our country.

Mija Riedel: Right.

Kay WalkingStick: Absolutely.

Mija Riedel: Right.

Kay WalkingStick: Absolutely. But this is called Where are the Generations, and–

Mija Riedel: Right. This is ’91, I think, isn’t it?

Kay WalkingStick: This is–you know, absolutely, it’s about the Columbus Quincentenary and the genocide. I can’t quote it for you now, but anyway, yes, yes we–

Mija Riedel: And there was a poem that went with that, isn’t there?

Kay WalkingStick: Yes. “In 1492 there were 20 million of us. Now there are 2 million. Where are the children? Where are the generations never born?” The population growth is greater in third world countries

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with all their disease and with their problems than it has been among Native Americans. It’s the lowest population growth because they were decimated. I still find that very upsetting after all these years of dealing with it. I still get really upset talking about it.

Mija Riedel: And does that continue to inform your work, do you think?

Kay WalkingStick: Not really, not in that way. I had to stop making those things about the Quincentenary because I just couldn’t bear it any longer. I made a little sculpture of a funerary scaffold in leather. And what else did I make? I made a book that opened up that told about the massacre at Wounded Knee. And it was just too many things to deal with and I just stopped–just stopped making them. And, you know, these are–they do have a political input in that they are, you know, a statement of who we are. I’ve done a lot of paintings about the fact that we’re all still here. I mean, we’re only 2 million, but we’re still here. And most people think that the Indians are all gone, and they’re not. They’re not. So that idea has been prevalent in a lot of the works that I have done. And I think these are still about that notion of we’re still here. It’s still our land. You may own it and farm it, live on it, but it’s still our land. This is where we really come from.

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Ben Gillespie: In 2020, the Archives embarked upon the Pandemic Oral History Project, a series of 85 short-form interviews to document the effects of the covid-19 pandemic in the visual arts of the United States. It marked a new frontier in oral history for us, capturing a historical moment as the world spun. While oral histories recount what's past, they also give us opportunities to imagine the future.

Here's Cannupa Hanska Luger, a Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota ceramicist based in New Mexico, in conversation with Josh T. Franco:

Josh T. Franco: so in the last little wrap-up here, what do you want to tell the artists in 100 years about what it was like to be an American artist in 2020?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Yeah, well, there was a place called America. I want to start with that [laughter] And it was an experiment, you know, it was an experiment–that was desperate. It was a desperate experiment. And it was built on a lot of brutality. And, but a lot of that brutality was learned. America was an experiment to try to alleviate all of that pressure and that tension, but hurt people, hurt people. And 2020, we were really taking a hard, close look at the effect of that on each other and on the environment. And, you know, hopefully, you're living in the calm after the wake of this moment in 100 years. But I don't–I think it took about 500 years to get to the place that we are, and I don't expect change to happen radically overnight. I think it takes time. And like any good aspect of community and society, there should be consensus developed rather than majority rule. And consensus takes time. So, you know, at this point in history, I think it's important that we begin to talk to one another and actually use all of the incredible technology that we have to develop better protocols for communication. We're not–I'm not going to survive this. I'm not going to live in the beautiful place that I can imagine in my head. But I will die trying. You know, I will die trying. Because I believe in us. And I know that we will survive this.

Liza Kirwin: Thank you for joining us in celebrating more than 60 years

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of the oral history program, we look forward to preserving and amplifying the voices of American art for 60 more years, to learn more about the oral history program at the archives of American art. Visit

Michelle Herman: For show notes, works cited, and additional resources visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.

This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman from the Archives of American Art. It was edited by Hannah Hethmon of BetterLemon Creative Audio.

Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.

Special thanks to Liza Kirwin for narrating this episode.

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like Articulated. To support our work, please visit our website aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.

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