Joel Shapiro, artist
On October 28, 2012 at the National Gallery of Art, Joel Shapiro presents a lecture on his nearly 50-year career as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series. Born in 1941 in New York City, Shapiro received BA and MA degrees from New York University. Since his first exhibition in 1970, Shapiro has become one of the most widely exhibited American sculptors and the subject of many solo exhibitions and retrospectives, and his work can now be found in numerous public collections in the United States and abroad. His work, from early minimal objects to increasingly expansive and complex forms, has always dealt with such central issues of the sculptural tradition as size and scale, balance and imbalance, figuration and abstraction. He believes that all sculpture is a projection of thought into the world, and he strives to create intimacy and vitality in all his projects. Shapiro lives and works in New York City. The Gallery owns 16 works by the artist, including drawings, prints, and sculptures.

Ann Hamilton presented a lecture on her nearly 30-year career as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art on September 16, 2011. Hamilton has made multimedia installations with stunning qualities and quantities of materials: a room lined with small canvas dummies, a table spread with human and animal teeth, the artist herself wearing a man's suit covered in a layer of thousands of toothpicks. Along the way, she has constantly set and reset the course of contemporary art. Often using sound, found objects, and the spoken and written word, as well as photography and video, her objects and environments invite us to embark on sensory and metaphorical explorations of time, language, and memory. Textiles and fabric have consistently played an important role in her performances and installations—whether she is considering clothing as a membrane or (more recently) treating architecture itself as a kind of skin. The Gallery owns 15 works by the artist, including photographs, prints, sculptures, and a video installation.

A centennial screening of the 1912 film Robin Hood and rare presentation of the Maurice Tourneur film Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) with live piano accompaniment are introduced by film historian Richard Koszarski, author of Fort Lee, the Film Town and Hollywood on the Hudson. Koszarski's presentation outlines the influence of French culture on early cinema production and investigates the history of the studios, the directors, and the stars established in Fort Lee, New Jersey, known as the "birthplace of the motion picture industry."

Multiverse, (2008), a site-specific LED sculpture by Leo Villareal, is on view in the Concourse walkway connecting the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture, which includes approximately 41,000 LED (light-emitting diode) nodes controlled by custom-designed software, is Villareal's largest and most ambitious work to date. Watch Gallery staff and volunteers install the LED nodes over the course of 65 days (the process was captured in 58,296 photographs). The sculpture was generously funded by Victoria and Roger Sant and Sharon P. and Jay Rockefeller.

The new ongoing film series American Originals Now focuses on the work of internationally recognized filmmakers from the Americas, and offers visitors an opportunity to interact with and share in the artists' production methodologies and current practices. The inaugural program brought recent short works by filmmaker Jem Cohen and a screening of his award-winning 1999 documentary Instrument, made in collaboration with DC-based band Fugazi. Cohen was present for both events; during the latter of the two he was joined by Fugazi frontmen Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto

The award-winning film The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg offers a fascinating portrait of a poet and photographer who helped define postwar American counterculture. Originally released in 1994, Jerry Aronson’s documentary was rereleased in 2005 with additional hours of interviews with numerous contemporary artists and cultural figures, among them Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and Norman Mailer. Two screenings of the film were held at the National Gallery of Art in September 2010, and the new edition of the two-disk set is available through the Gallery Shop.

Veteran Swedish director Jan Troell has been called one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. As part of the ongoing series New Masters of European Cinema, the director and his partner/screenwriter Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell visited the National Gallery of Art to discuss their latest project, the award-winning feature film Everlasting Moments (2008), and to share a rare screening of Troell's remarkable first short film Stop-over in the Marshland (1965), starring Max von Sydow.

Brice Marden continues to make some of the most surprising and ravishing paintings of our time. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was known for matte, monochromatic paintings, often with multiple panels. His 1984 visit to an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy triggered a dramatic shift in style that culminated in a masterful series of gestural paintings and drawings entitled Cold Mountain. Since that time, through several further changes in vocabulary, Marden has continued to explore linear networks as the basis for ambitious, allover abstractions. In this video, recorded in October 2009 in the artist's Manhattan studio, Marden discusses his technique, sources of inspiration, and works in progress with Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art.

Years after campaigns against minority Armenians in Turkey caused his family to disperse and his mother to die before his eyes, Gorky found a 1912 photograph taken in the city of Van upon which he based drawn and painted portraits of The Artist and His Mother. The video Ararat (Excerpts) investigates the fraught history of Gorky's lost childhood through his protracted work on the image of himself at age twelve, standing beside his mother Shushan. Derived from the feature-length film Ararat written and directed by Academy Award®-nominated director Atom Egoyan.

In her breakthrough 1990 work Ghost, Rachel Whiteread created a positive from a negative, making a plaster cast of the interior "void" of a Victorian parlor measuring approximately 9 feet wide, 11 1/2 feet high, and 10 feet deep. Whiteread has said of this sculpture that she was trying to "mummify the air in the room," hence the title. Whiteread created Ghost over a period of three months in an abandoned building at 486 Archway Road, North London, covering the interior walls with multiple plaster molds, each about five inches thick. When the plaster dried, she peeled the molds from the walls and reassembled them on a steel frame. In this interview Whiteread discusses the process of making Ghost and lends new insight to her work.

Multiverse (2008), a site-specific LED sculpture by Leo Villareal, is currently on view in the Concourse walkway connecting the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture, which includes approximately 41,000 LED (light-emitting diode) nodes controlled by custom-designed software, is Villareal's largest and most ambitious work to date. Learn more about the artist's programming method as well his conceptual and technological inspiration in this studio interview. The sculpture, which will be on view until November 2009, was generously funded by Victoria P. and Roger Sant, and Sharon P. and Jay Rockefeller.

Multiverse (2008), a site-specific LED sculpture by Leo Villareal, is currently on view in the Concourse walkway connecting the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture, which includes approximately 41,000 LED (light-emitting diode) nodes controlled by custom-designed software, is Villareal's largest and most ambitious work to date. Learn more about the artist's programming method as well his conceptual and technological inspiration in this studio interview. The sculpture, which will be on view until November 2009, was generously funded by Victoria P. and Roger Sant, and Sharon P. and Jay Rockefeller.

Multiverse (2008), a site-specific LED sculpture by Leo Villareal, is currently on view in the Concourse walkway connecting the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture, which includes approximately 41,000 LED (light-emitting diode) nodes controlled by custom-designed software, is Villareal's largest and most ambitious work to date. Learn more about the artist's programming method as well his conceptual and technological inspiration in this studio interview. The sculpture, which will be on view until November 2009, was generously funded by Victoria P. and Roger Sant, and Sharon P. and Jay Rockefeller.

Multiverse (2008), a site-specific LED sculpture by Leo Villareal, is currently on view in the Concourse walkway connecting the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture, which includes approximately 41,000 LED (light-emitting diode) nodes controlled by custom-designed software, is Villareal's largest and most ambitious work to date. Learn more about the artist's programming method as well his conceptual and technological inspiration in this studio interview. The sculpture, which will be on view until November 2009, was generously funded by Victoria P. and Roger Sant, and Sharon P. and Jay Rockefeller.

Over the course of seven hours, on June 5, 2008, Martin Puryear and 12 art handlers installed Ladder for Booker T. Washington at the National Gallery of Art in the East Building, Rotunda. This time-lapse movie demonstrates the process of hoisting the 36-foot-long ash and maple sculpture into the Rotunda in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Martin Puryear.

Over the course of three days, from February 14 to 16, 2007, Mel Bochner and his assistant Nicholas Knight installed Theory of Boundariesat the National Gallery of Art. The work, whose size is determined by the length of the wall on which it is installed, consists of four squares of equal size, each separated by a space equal to one-third of the width of a single square. Following the principles determined by the "language fraction" of each square (hence the work's title, Theory of Boundaries), dry pigment is applied directly to the wall, with each of the four squares demonstrating a different relationship of the color surface to its border and state of enclosure.

This excerpt is from a new documentary produced by the National Gallery of Art that includes archival footage of Edward Hopper (1882–1967), new footage of places that inspired him in New York and New England, including his boyhood home in Nyack and his studio on Washington Square, where he lived and worked for more than 50 years. Narrated by actor and art collector Steve Martin, this film traces Hopper's varied influences, from French impressionism to the gangster films of the 1930s. Artists Red Grooms and Eric Fischl discuss Hopper's influence on their careers. Curators discuss recent and diverse perspectives on Hopper's art. The 30-minute version of the film is on view and for sale at the National Gallery of Art. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Edward Hopper.