♪ >> Coming up on "NYC-Arts," a trip to the New-York Historical Society for a look at the exhibition "Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School."

>> "Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School" brings together two discreet sets of landscape paintings.

The question that the exhibition poses is what is the relationship between these two bodies of work?

And what story do they tell together about North American land and about landscape practice.

>> A visit to the American Folk Art Museum and the exhibition "Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North," which explores how stories of its people have often gone untold.

>> Black artists, Black makers, Black creators were very often excluded from the world of fine art.

Even when we see someone like a Joshua Johnson we see someone who says, "Well I had to teach myself."

To have access to Black artists and that legacy of Black artistic production, we have to look into the kind of art that would be considered folk art.

>> And a look at the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens on view at the Metropolitan's American Wing galleries.

>> The Metropolitan has 50 works by Saint-Gaudens and we're very fortunate to be able to present his work in such a comprehensive way from early cameo portraits to low relief portraits of his friends and fellow artists to models for and reductions after his great Civil War monuments.

>> Funding for "NYC-Arts" is made possible by Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation.

Jody and John Arnhold.

The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for dance.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.

Charles and Valerie Diker.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

Elroy and Terry kKrumholz Foundation.

The Nancy Widewater Foundation.

And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of thirteen.

And by Swann Auction Galleries.

>> Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.

♪ >> Good evening and welcome to "NYC-Arts."

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at ICP, with a bit of a cold, it compromises my voice, my apologies - the International Center of Photography is what ICP is.

It's now in its new home on Essex Street on the Lower East Side.

Here its museum and school are combined under one roof, making it a dynamic cultural center that offers exhibitions and programs in all aspects of photography and digital media.

With more than 700 exhibitions since its inception, ICP has provided a forum for the power of the image.

Its Permanent Collection contains more than 200,000 prints, negatives, contact sheets, glass plate negatives, cameras and related materials by more than 2,000 photographers.

They range from the earliest forms of photography to contemporary work, spanning the history of the photographic medium from daguerreotypes to silver gelatin prints and digital prints.

ICP has deep holdings of American and European documentary photography from the 1930s to the 1990s.

It includes the work of both Cornell Capa and his brother, war photographer Robert Capa,, as well as Gerda Taro and Jacob Riis.

Jacob Riis took up photography in the late 1880s to provide visual context for his reporting on the impoverished communities of New York City.

The collection also includes everyday photography, especially African American images from 1860 to 1940.

Shortly after the publication in 1952 of Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man," Gordon Parks collaborated with the author on a photo essay for the August 22, 1952 issue of LIFE Magazine.

Parks staged and photographed key scenes from the novel, such as the narrator, played here by John Bates, contemplating his invisibility following a Harlem A selection of past exhibitions includes -- Okwui Enwezor's Archive Fever; Snap Judgments; Rise and Fall of Apartheid.

Gerda Taro (2007).

America and the Tintype (2009).

The International Center of Photography's Triennials.

Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003).

Ectopia (2006).

Dress Codes (2009).

A Different Kind of Order (2013).

On our program tonight, a look at "Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School," now on view at the New-York Historical Society.

The exhibition features landscape paintings by the Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with highlights from the Society's own collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings.

Featuring more than 40 works-- including paintings as well as objects such as woven baskets and ceramic jars -- the exhibition explores the relationship between Indigenous Art and the standard history of art in America.

Curator Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto will be our guide.

The exhibition is on view through April 14th.

>> Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School" brings together two discreet sets of landscape paintings, one by the contemporary Cherokee artist, Kay WalkingStick and the other by a group of 19th century artists, primarily European American men known as the Hudson River School.

The question that the exhibition poses is what is the relationship between these two bodies of work?

Do they support one another?

Do they conflict with one another?

Do they tell the same story?

Do they tell different stories?

And what story do they tell together about North American land and about landscape practice?

Kay WalkingStick is a force in contemporary American art and one of the most renowned Native artists of her generation.

She is 88 years old and still building a remarkable career that at this point spans six decades.

The Hudson River School is generally credited with forging the American style.

As Kay said to me when we first met, "How can you be a landscape painter in, in the United States and not think about the Hudson River School?"

And the answer is, you can't because their legacy looms so large.

But that doesn't mean that the Hudson River School paintings are not problematic.

And Kay's work helps us to see some of those problems, including its representation or lack of representation of the Native communities already stewarding this land.

In Kay's current landscape practice, you will see that she often overlays her vistas with patterns, and she draws these patterns from Native objects.

We are looking at a painted landscape that is a window onto an illusionistic world.

And these patterns, as Kay described it, sit on the window glass, so they pop off just a little bit off of the representational landscape, and they act as a kind of barrier or speed bump, so they stop your eye just a little bit from going straight into the land.

And this is one way that Kay recharacterizes North American landscapes that have been upheld by Hudson River School artists as ripe for settlement.

As a part of a story of American colonizers, she reclaims this land as Indigenous homeland.

We opened the exhibition with her reinterpretations of a painting by Thomas Cole and a painting by Asher B. Durand.

The Thomas Cole painting that Kay decided to tackle is one of the most iconic paintings in American art history.

Every student of American art history knows this painting.

It's in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it's called The Oxbow.

The title of Kay's painting is "Thom, Where are the Pocumtucks"?

I love the interrogative of that title.

She is speaking across almost 200 years directly to Cole and asking, how can you paint this land?

How can you paint the Connecticut River Valley and not acknowledge, not honor the Native people who live there?

One of my favorite works in the exhibition is "Niagara."

This was painted by Kay in 2022.

We had invited her to view our Hudson River School paintings at our storage facility in Jersey City.

And she was immediately drawn to two paintings, in particular, both of Niagara Falls, but in very different formats, one by a woman named Louisa Minot, pretty square format, and another by John Trumball.

Just long and panoramic and all-encompassing.

It is a gorgeous landscape.

Kay positions the viewer at the brink of the falls.

She spills the water across these two square panels, we see this line where the water bends over the cliff that Kay describes as luminescent, like blown glass.

And we see the water falling in what she describes as clumps of cotton wool.

It's beautiful.

You can feel immersed in it.

It's 80 inches wide.

You can almost feel the famous spray of Niagara prickling your skin.

But it's also so much more than a rapturous landscape because of that pattern that she overlays on top of it.

And so she's taken Niagara Falls, which for decades has been upheld by so many European American artists as a monument to American grandeur and American power.

And she has recharacterized it as Indigenous homeland.

American art is a plurality, and I think that by attending to that plurality of voices, by looking at the conflicts, by looking at the connections between different groups and across time, we can push this field productively forward.

>> Next on our program, a visit to the American Folk Art Museum, located across the street from Lincoln Center.

Currently on view is "Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North."

The exhibition explores the untold stories of the Black experience behind the art of New England and the mid-Atlantic from the late 1600s through the early 1800s.

Featuring a diversity of media including painting, needlework and photography, the exhibition reveals the complexities of the region's history and invites viewers to focus on figures who appear inor are omitted fromthese early American images.

"Unnamed Figures" delves into themes including slavery, resistance, community building, and memory-making.

It provides a deeper understanding of the experience of Black individuals and the reasons their stories have often gone untold.

RL Watson, one of the curators of the exhibition, will be our guide.

>> This exhibit is titled "Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North."

When we look back on this period, it is very tempting to fall into an easy dichotomy of north versus south.

While slavery was something that was in the south, racism is something that is in the south, and the north becomes this land of the free.

What I can say about slavery and what I can say about the cultures of racism is that they do not develop overnight.

Looking into the experience of Black Americans in the North is very instructive for those wanting to study, like, hey, how did we, how did we get here?

What are some of the things in our northern heritage that we also need to reckon with?

When we look back into the record, we see that Black artists and Black makers, Black creators were very often excluded from the world of fine art.

Even when we see someone like a Joshua Johnson, three of whose pieces we have on display in the show, we see someone who says, well, I had to teach myself.

To have access to black artists and that legacy of Black artistic production, we have to look into the kind of art that would be considered folk art.

So if you look at John Bush's Powderhorn, for instance, or Thomas Comeraw's pottery, or Moses Williams' silhouettes, we are looking at art that would be considered, oh, well, that's not, that's not fine art.

That's not, that's not the art that we want to see on museum walls.

That's not what we're looking for.

We have that just wonderful opportunity to take a closer look at Black artistic production in the period rather than saying, oh, well, it didn't exist because we don't have fine art.

And I can say, you know, with much excitement, that some of these pieces are to me, fine.

They're very fine.

You know, in terms of, I was like, Ooh, this needle work, the intricacy, the attention to detail, um, we can see again and again and again in the works of these Black artists.

That experience of an exclusion from fine art is yes, part of the Black experience, but like all American things, we share some of these realities.

And so early American white artists also would've experienced a dearth of opportunities to go and get that training, to get that practice.

And so we see a lot of less trained artists producing images that give us insights into the time period insights into their lives.

The way that we look at art has to also be in step with the mission of the project, which is to uncover, recognize, and honor these folks who have been unnamed.

And so we considered not only images that featured Black presence, where there is a clear Black figure being depicted, but also images where there was no one.

You'll find images in the show where you might walk by and go, well, I don't see any Black people there.

I don't, how is this related?

Well, in those cases, it was useful to do the historical research by geographic area.

There are traces of Black presence in this town that we can find in these diverse documents that are not represented in this image of the same town.

Why is that?

What I hope for the show is that it can offer folks with an opportunity to raise questions.

When we look not only at the pieces we have displayed here, but also any work of art, what's missing, and is this authentic?

Is it intended to be an authentic representation?

And so asking these questions that may at first seem to be ancillary, became for us, the center modus operandi for our research.

And boy, oh boy, I did not expect us to find half as many names as we found.

The show features not only our research into each individual artwork, but it also features our research into the names of some of these figures that may have occupied those spaces and are either not pictured or are pictured but those pictures raise questions about the politics of representation, what it means to be represented, both by Black artists, what it means to represent yourself in a system that is extremely destructive towards one's productions of one one's own identity.

Who am I in this place?

Can I stand and give an account of myself that is going to combat some of the racist imagery, some of the racist perceptions of folks who look like me?

♪ >> Now a visit to the Metropolitan's American Wing galleries for a look at a work by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

The artist immigrated to New York from Ireland as a child and became one of the finest American sculptors and monument builders of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Saint-Gaudens was a master of the human form and his bronze statues reflected the physical attributes as well as the spirit of his subjects.

>> I'm Thayer Tolles, I'm curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we're standing in the new American Wing galleries.

26 new spaces devoted to art from the 18th century through the early 19th century.

I'm here today to talk about Augustus Saint-Gaudens who is arguably the greatest American sculptor of the late 19th century.

The Metropolitan has 50 works by Saint-Gaudens and we're very fortunate to be able to present his work in such a comprehensive way from early cameo portraits to low relief portraits of his friends and fellow artists to models for and reductions after his great Civil War monuments.

Saint-Gaudens was born in Ireland but came here to New York as an infant and was raised on the Lower East Side.

He began at age 13 working as an apprentice for a cameo-cutter and that really fueled his interest in becoming a sculptor.

In 1867 he went abroad to Paris to study and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts which was really the foremost training ground for students across the world at that time.

Saint-Gaudens also studied in Rome, he came back to New York and established a career as a sculptor of great Civil War monuments.

Some of the best-known works in New York are the "Farragut Monument" in Madison Square Park and the great gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at 59th Street and 5th Avenue in a space called Grand Army Plaza.

Here I am in front of one of our most recent sculpture acquisitions, Saint-Gaudens' "Standing Lincoln."

This is a really exciting piece for our collection because despite the comprehensiveness of the collection, we had no sculptures representing this great commission that he did for the city of Chicago.

Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to complete a full-length portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1883 and it was unveiled in Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1887.

For Saint-Gaudens' portrait of Lincoln, he relied on a number of different sources, but very interestingly he had first-hand experience with Lincoln because he grew up in New York City and saw Lincoln when he came to New York in 1861 on his way to Washington to assume the presidency.

Later, Saint-Gaudens was one of thousands of people who went through a line at City Hall to see the slain president lying in state in April of 1865.

So he said that these two times that he saw Lincoln really formed his impression of "the great man," as he called him.

Saint-Gaudens also read his speeches and writings and referenced photographs that were taken of Lincoln during the Civil War, but a very interesting opportunity arose for him in 1885 when an artist friend of his showed Saint-Gaudens plaster models of Lincoln's face and hands.

And these were models that his father, the sculptor Leonard Volk, had taken from life when Lincoln was running for president in the spring of 1860.

So, Saint-Gaudens was able to use the life mask as well as the models of the hands to incorporate into his sculpture.

Here's Lincoln in a transitional moment.

We can presume he's just stood up from this oversized chair of state with an eagle emblazoned on its crest rail and he is in this moment of contemplation where we presume he's about to lift his head to address the audience in front of him and say something meaningful and serious and profound.

And Saint-Gaudens captures the pensiveness and the solemnity of the moment and the burden that Lincoln felt during this great war.

Saint-Gaudens was known for his attention to naturalistic detail, not only to getting an accurate portrait, facial representation, but always thinking of little ways to enliven the compositions, to make them more interesting, whether it's attention to textural detail or just little narrative details that really bring the pieces alive.

I'm Thayer Tolles, curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum and I hope you'll come and visit our galleries and pay special attention to the installation of our sculpture collection.

♪ >> I hope you've enjoyed our program tonight.

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at ICP, The international Center of Photography.

Good night and see you next time.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on "NYC-Arts," visit our website at NYC-Arts.org.

♪ >> Leonard, what a privilege to be able to sit down and talk with you.

>> I love being with you here, too, paula.

>> Where are we?

>> We're at a moment to take nothing for granted.

>> Well it's a pleasure to be here with the curator of this exhibition full of hope.

We are in the midst of some of the greatest sculptures by the iconic names.

♪ ♪ >> Funding for "NYC-Arts" is made possible by Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation.

Jody and John Arnhold.

The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for dance.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.

Charles and Valerie Diker.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

Elroy and Terry kKrumholz Foundation.

The Nancy sidewater Foundation.

And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of thirteen.

And by Swann Auction Galleries.

>> Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.