The 10 Best PORTRAITS Podcast Episodes
1) Discovering Pocahontas with Paul Chaat Smith
If the 1995 animated Disney film is your guide, Pocahontas was a free-spirited Native American heroine who sang to the wind. So why is she dressed like European royalty in her painting at the National...Show More
2) Sitting (Still) For History
Every time a president leaves office they're asked to do something that might not come naturally-- sit still, be quiet and surrender to someone else's work. In other words, they have their portrait pa...Show More
3) The Vanishing Bison
When William Temple Hornaday's exhibition of stuffed bison went on display at the Smithsonian Institution in 1888, it caused a sensation. Most visitors had never seen this majestic, hulking animal up ...Show More
4) Who Built This Place?
We follow a paper trail back in time to learn about the laborers -- some of them enslaved -- who put their backs into the graceful old building that now houses the National Portrait Gallery. When con...Show More
5) Brilliant Exiles
Paris in the early 1900s was a magnet for convention-defying American women. It offered a delicious taste of freedom, which they used to explode the gender norms of their day, and to explore new kinds...Show More
6) Lincoln Hiding In Plain Sight
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 as...Show More
7) A Shortcut Across Time
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 w...Show More
8) Glimpsing Freedom
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 de...Show More
9) Live Long and Protest
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...Show More
10) Un-forgetting History
After having to destroy her family pictures during the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Hung Liu treasures old photographs all the more. In fact, they’re foundational to her work. She has describe...Show More