- Two of the leaders of our National Portrait Galleries to reflect on the year that has passed, how they're guiding us through 2020 and beyond, and what future holds for our National Portrait Galleries. Beaming into us figuratively and literally from Washington DC, is Kim Sajet, the Director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Kim has been at the helm of their organization for seven and a half years, now. She was born in Nigeria, but she was raised here in Australia, and after doing a couple of stints at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and the MONA Art Gallery, she's traveled to the United States and taken up the helm of the National Portrait Gallery there. We can't thank her enough for joining us today amongst all of the drama and unfolding news that's coming out of Washington and the United States, at the moment. We're all glued to our television screens, I'm sure. Karen Quinlan AM took up the position of the Director of the National Portrait Gallery here in Australia, literally, almost two years ago, now, and ever since she arrived, the universe has thrown just about all that it can at her. We've had major building rectifications, catastrophic bushfires this year, which blanketed Canberra in toxic smoke. Followed by an Armageddon-style hailstorm, more building rectifications, and straight into the COVID-19 lockdown. So Karen has had to become a master of the perfect pivot. Just keeping with the little behind the scenes feel to this particular series, the first tidbit I'd like to drop in is that the staff here at the National Portrait Gallery affectionately refer to Karen as K.Q.. So if you happen to hear that throughout the course of the presentation, you'll know who I'm talking about. So welcome to Karen and Kim. Thank you, so much, to both of you for giving up your time to talk with us today. I'd like to hand it over to Karen now to kick over the conversation. Thank you.
- Thank you, Gill. It's great to be here. It's great to be part of this conversation, and, look, a big thank you to Kim.
- Hey.
- It's just fantastic to connect with you. When I did take on the job, it is two years ago, I remember thinking I so much want to connect with all the portrait gallery directors around the world, indeed, connect our organizations, so here's great step forward for us. Again, welcome to all of our viewers. It's great that's you're-- I see the numbers going up, and it's great to see so many, or know that so many people are watching us, and hearing our conversation today. I know that there'll be lots of similarities and differences between our organizations, but I guess, for us, it being the first conversation, we sort of decided in our preparatory work, that I would ask the questions and you would answer them. I'm going to answer my own questions first, and then flick over to you. So that's really the nature of this conversation today. So look, it has been a very interesting two years, but certainly the last 12 months, for me, have been challenging. And it's when you have to really ensure that you have strong leadership skills. And so as was mentioned, we started, in particular, well, last year with some work on the building. We moved out of the building and back into the building, but this year has been incredible. The bushfires, I was over in Bali, would you believe? For holidays, came back, and there were bushfires, but my car was so severely damaged by the hailstorm, the golf ball-sized hailstorm, and so coming back to that, and then bushfire season. We weren't impacted in Canberra, but certainly we felt it, and we felt for everyone around the country. And I think, as that was lifting, and the conversations were starting to become a little bit more positive, COVID started to be discussed, and before too long, it had actually reached Australia. So keeping the team together, and thinking on your feet, as you do, we all moved into that working from home environment, which was challenging, but I felt my team rose to the occasion and really connected well, particularly my senior management team. We moved really quickly to online programming, we postponed exhibitions, we had our inaugural Darling Portrait Prize on display, and we had to close that, which was sad. The National Photographic Portrait Prize was on display, again closed. So looking for the silver lining. Behind the scenes, staff got into the cataloging. They got into the photography of the collection. We did some repainting, we rehung spaces. So there was lots of times for planning, and opportunities to have conversations about the future. Loads of thinking time, really, which was great. And then we reopened in June, so I'm giving you the huge timeline, here. Made sure our spaces were safe for visitors and staff, and importantly continued to work online, but encouraged people to come back. One of the projects that worked really well for us online, was working with the artist who won the Darling Portrait Prize, Anthea da Silva. She did a live workshop for the public, and it brought in more than 500 people from young children right through to adults. It was a really warm event because of the connectivity, and at the end, as you can see, all of the artists showed their drawing. It was just so fantastic to experience this, and I sort of wonder whether we would have gone to that extent, or whether we would have had that response if it hadn't been for COVID. So I'm always looking for the silver lining. So my first question to you, Kim, is sort of about your experience, particularly in the last few months, and how this has all effected you, in Washington.
- Yeah, it's been a dumpster fire of a year. As everyone has said, what a disaster 2020 has been, and because I was watching what was happening with the fires, because of course, my family is in Australia, and I'm so sorry that you went through that. We went through different fires. We went through political fires. We had the issues about racial injustice and protests, the people who've died at the hands of police violence, but even before that, all the conversations about Confederate monuments, the Me Too movement, immigration. And like all good artists, our artists were responding to what was happening to them around the community. So in fact, if you want to go to the first slide, you can see that we, when we started going into the pivot, we immediately reached out to our artists to ask them to comment on what was happening. So you'll see, on the far left-hand side, some of our educators. There's Ashley doing some education around our portraits. We, because we're part of the Smithsonian, we had partnered with USA Today, to also make materials available to everybody through the newspaper, because not everybody has access to digital material. We, too, did a lot of art projects. So you can see, on the right-hand side, our artist there, showing people how to make portraits. But in the center, in fact, we started on our Instagram TV, we asked our artists who were at the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, that happens every three years, to respond to the current moment, and what they sent us was really remarkable. And if you have a chance, you can watch them. They're very little snippets about how they were feeling about what was happening around us. And so, you know, it's been really interesting. To your point about the staff, we sort of saw this coming. We sort of saw the winds of change, and one of the funniest moments was, one of my team said, "You know, let's test out an all staff meeting online before we all have to go home." And I said, "Well, this is never gonna work. This is gonna be a complete disaster." So there we all were in our offices, a couple of feet away from each other, and we did our first team meeting, staff meeting, and when I came out of my office, everyone told me that it was the best meeting that they've ever had. And it was the most well attended meeting, and I got instantly insulted. I was like, what do you mean? But I felt we did the, sort of, going home really well, and we pivoted to the online really well, but as time has worn on, and as you know, we're still very much in the middle of the COVID crisis, in fact, it's getting worse in the United States, it's really changed, it's fluctuated. At first, it was sort of adapting so that everyone, you know, knew how to work from home, but there's a whole psychological aspect, not just for our staff, but everyone at home. One of the worst forms of punishment is to put people in solitary confinement. And so we've all been going into our homes, but we're craving content, and connection with other people. And so the Portrait Gallery, here, has really tried to provide that, while at the same time, working out how to give ourselves the nourishment that we needed to have.
- Yeah, it goes against what we stand for, really, this isolation and lack of connection with people, and you know, opening the doors to the physical, the public. So thanks for your answer, Kim. That's really interesting, and I can see lots of synergies between us, in terms of our experience. So through our collection development and our temporary exhibition program, we both focus on identity. It's a big part of what we do, and we like to sort of say that we try to capture the heart and soul of every Australian through our collection development, and through our temporary exhibition programs. So at the gallery, it's a bit of a celebration of diversity, and gender, and inclusiveness, and importantly, our First Nations peoples. So I though I'd talk about an acquisition that came into the collection quite recently, which was a 36-paneled work by indigenous artist, Shirley Purdie, as you can see on the screen, there. Her cultural knowledge and artistic skills are complementary, and as an artist, she's very worthy of being in our collection. She's a prominent indigenous leader, and has become a cross-cultural communicator, who is really dedicated to passing those stories down to younger generations. The title of this work, it's really a self-portrait in many ways, it's "From My Women", so it's actually about country, and her own experience, her family, and it represents, really, herself through her collective knowledge, her values, and her culture. So rather than being a likeness, which we all expect, with the face being, you know, central to portraiture, this work challenges those notions, those preconceived notions of portraiture, and I think it's a really interesting acquisition for us, and very timely, at this point. So in terms of living in the US, in your nation's capital, Kim, what's the role of your portrait gallery in being a communicator to the public?
- I think about it in different ways, you know? Congress set us up in 1962, under Kennedy, who was then, of course, killed, and then we opened in 1968, under President Johnson. The brief was to collect the people who've changed America, made an impact, and that's good and bad, right? So as I said, there's no moral test to be in the Portrait Gallery, otherwise nobody would be there. I mean, the first 12 presidents enslaved people. But then, you know, portraiture, as we all know, has been an incredibly elitist art form, and it favored, in this country, those who could vote, white men who owned land. So if you were a woman, or once enslaved, or a migrant, or Jewish, or Muslim, you know, good luck, right? Getting your portrait done. They have that adage, "Well behaved women rarely make history." Well, you definitely didn't get your portrait made, either, unless you were a badly behaved woman. So this is an example of a conversation of, sort of, a panel that we're likely to be putting up in our first four galleries. We're rethinking how we tell the story of the United States, and we were all ready planning to do this. We lucked out in a couple of ways. When the pandemic hit, we were all ready scaling back our exhibitions program, because we had money to put in all new track lighting into the building. So luckily, you know, we had all ready scaled back. We had planned to do a slow roll out of a complete new look at portraiture, when, of course, the death of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and others came along. And we've now done, what we call, sort of a prelude, sort of a precursor to a much larger conversation about, what we would say, the presence of absence. So this is a good example. But then, you know, apart from just the collection, then it's the other activities. So for example, you might want to pull up the video that I have here, that was, it's a really brightly colored... Okay, I'm wondering if your team could find the video of the Maspaz, the Dia de-- There we go. If you could just play that for a minute. This was a project that we just did, screened on the outside of our building, and it was in reaction to the fact that so many members of the Latinx community have disproportionately died from COVID. And of course, they have the tradition every year of Dia de los Meurtos, the Day of the Dead. And so we did a project with these two artists, projecting images on the outside of our building. You can see a work of art, there, that they put up on our steps, and indeed, an altar to ancestors. So we've been pushing a lot of things outside of our building. We are now open, but as well as just thinking about new acquisitions, we also very much think about contemporary artists. And to your point, Karen, about who's having the conversations about identity, and what does it mean to be a part of "e pluribus unum." It's on the great seal of America, which means, "Out of many, one," but the country has never been united. It's always been a great promise that is an ongoing project. And so the other slide that you just saw there, with the truck with the images, is something we plan to do in the spring, there you go, where we're working with six local artists to show their works on the side of one of these LED trucks, that would drive through all eight wards of Washington. They've even designed a face mask that they can give out, and art materials, to people in the community. So sort of getting out of the ivory tower. Our building was literally modeled on the Parthenon in Greece, so it looks really imposing. It looks like the Supreme Court, really scary place. There it is lit up. This year was the anniversary of women getting the vote, 100 years, in 1920, the passing of the 19th amendment. On the anniversary of that day, all the Smithsonian museums lit the exteriors of their building in the colors of the movement, which was gold and purple, and you can see that. We had originally contracted with a local artist to do sketches that we would have on our social media, but he, Bradford, quickly turned into our Instagram artist-in-residence, and this is his rendition. So to your point about identity, for us, it's both, of course the collection, but also the programing that we're doing. And often the programs that we have don't actually fit into a collection scope, because they're not somebody who's changed America's history and culture. But it's an important conversation, because they were left out of the story. You know, portraiture is an extremely elitist art form.
- Yes. To respond to that, we have an exhibition that looks at love stories. So lots of couples, lots of relationships. We had a plan to bring in some international content to support that exhibition, and it fell through because of the border closures. So we actually made a bigger exhibition of Australian content, and that's happening next year, in March. But in the short term, we went online with that exhibition. It's been really well received, and I think, you know, we normally don't work that way. We would, you know, curate an exhibition, open the doors, allow the public in, and do some online programming. So in advance of that, we've got the exhibition available for people to look on our website. So tell us a bit about your virtual programs. Let's just dig a little bit deeper, and hear a bit more about that.
- You know, we're learning, I think, like everyone, you know, we all put up material fairly quickly. We were lucky, we all ready had a lot in the can, so to speak, that we were able to pass out. We did see an enormous jump in our numbers. So for example, the Google platform, normally it gets, our NPG Google Arts and Culture platform, it increased by 600% in total page views, and the number of viewers increased by about 500%, and then our overall growth in social media climbed nearly 200%. And there was also, at the same time that this was all going on, the Smithsonian had an open access program, where all of our content, as much as is possible, is available to anyone, at any scale, you know, have at it, because we're funded by Congress. And just as an example, you know, around March of this year, we had about 100,000 looks at our Wikipedia comments. We'd been putting a lot of our images on that. At September we had 650,000 people looking at that. It's just been enormous. One of the things that we also did, and this was a little bit, I have to admit, the staff kind of indulged me, because I wanted to do something, you'll appreciate this, Karen, that was more than just sort of saying yes, no, maybe, let me think about it, you know? I wanted to have a bit of fun, so I had to audition. I had to sort of audition, but I became the host of a podcast that we have launched, called Portraits, and that has been super fun. It allowed me to do something that I enjoy doing, which is to talk to scholars and thought leaders. We just finished up the second season. In fact, we're doing a holiday special with Renee Fleming, if you know her. She's an opera singer, here, in the United States, and that's all ready hit 330,000 downloads on that, which has been, you know, great. You can see me interviewing LL Cool J. I don't know if any of you guys know, but he's a hip hop artist, he's now an actor. And it was just around the time of Black Lives Matter, and we had a big conversation about what was happening in America, which was kind of fascinating. On the left-hand side you can see one of our curators, Taina Caragol, talking about two works in our collections. So to our point, you know, I think we all came out pretty strong, but as time's gone on, and screen fatigue has set in, we're all sort of wondering what we do differently. There's so many choices. We had our first virtual opening on Saturday. We learned a lot, but I gotta tell you, it was a lot easier when you just gave somebody a drink and a piece of cheese, you know? Now you've got to produce the whole thing. We spent money on it, you know, and so what we really need now, as well as curators, and writers, and historians, and registrars, and all the rest of it, I need filmmakers, and sound editors, and lighting technicians.
- It's a whole new world of problems.
- All of that stuff, right, we need to be a broadcasting department. So that is expensive, you know? People, I think, think that, oh, well, you know, it's gonna be so much cheaper, you can put it all online. It's actually not, I think if it's not as expensive, it might even be more expensive to do a lot of it.
- I take your point, too, about letting your staff have a bit of fun.
- Yeah.
- I'm gonna go off script, here. We have an exhibition called Pub Rock, which looks at music from the 60s right through to the 90s. I've had this fantasy that I'd love to do a radio program where I talk about music, because it's the era I grew up, having been born in the 60s. And I talk about music and play songs, more obscure songs, and sort of just thinking outside the square a little bit about what we are as an institution, and how we can engage with people. So let's talk a bit about the future, because everyone's interested to know what's next. For us, we've been looking very much at our collection development, as mentioned earlier, but in terms of programing, the National Photographic Portrait Prize, which is a huge winner for us every year. It brings in artists from all over Australia. In fact, we have close to 3000 entries, usually. As you can see it on the screen, there, some little snapshots of some of the imagery in that exhibition. And so we thought for next year, we'd look at the concept of Living Memory, which for many people, as a title for the exhibition, I think it's quite appropriate. We, in our own lifetime, have not experienced a pandemic. I think the people who have been largely effected by the pandemic are elderly. Maybe some of them lived through the Spanish Flu back in the 1919, 1920s. So Living Memory will actually capture the moment of this year. It's not a celebration, anyway, it's more of a reflection upon this year. So next year, that's what we're doing. We're doing an even better, a bigger and better portrait prize. We're regarding more artists, and inviting, certainly, a bigger shortlist of entries, and a great publication to match that. So that's towards the middle of next year. What other programs or exhibitions do you have in the pipeline for the future?
- Well, firstly, I have to admire you for doing, 'cause you do it every year, correct?
- Yes.
- We do ours every three years. I can't even imagine doing it every year, it's a lot of work.
- A lot of administration, but it's worth it.
- Sucks for you guys. You know, our portrait competition is all media, and we've had, one year we had a woman who made a self-portrait literally out of rice. It was a sculpture made out of rice. So that was quite interesting, but it's a lot of work. We started touring that, but kudos to you. We just opened our First Ladies exhibition, in fact, here's the book that matches the America's Presidents. So they've just gone up, and we did that deliberately two weeks after the election, and this is the website, resources on the First Ladies. We are still really looking at a reduced public schedule, because of COVID still being so prevalent. I mean, we are open, but are numbers are less than a quarter of what they were, and we're normally open seven days a week, and now we're actually only open five days a week. Our big focus is an exhibition we're doing in the spring by a Californian artist. Her name is, Hung Liu, and there's a slide in the deck, there, if you can pull that up, and so it's about her story of immigration. She was actually in China during the cultural revolution, as a young woman, and then came to the United States. And what's been interesting is that she lives in Oakland, California, where the archives of Dorothea Lange, who you may know as a photographer who was during the Dust Bowl era, the financial depression of the 1940s and 1950s. So she was looking at those images, and she's very much related to them, and has looked at Dorothea Lange in her own situation. This is her "Resident Alien" card, which, by the way, I had one of those, too. So this is what they call you when you're not actually a permanent resident, yet. You're a resident alien. So what I've asked my team to do is just try and get this open. We'll have a catalog, we'll have an exhibition, we're gonna do everything in our power to make that happen, and then everything else will likely still be changed, postponed, because we're not out of this yet. I mean, I think the one thing that has happened is that change has become our new normal, and so we've just have had to be flexible. We don't really have a choice.
- Yeah, I've watched online, and listened to conversations about the Obama portraits. I mean, I wanted to end with this, because I think it's a really interesting conversation. I'm a big fan of, I guess, those kinds of portraits, because especially, there seems to be a bit of a departure from the traditional mode of portraiture. If you look at, well, you would have looked at the George Bush, Laura Bush portraiture, and earlier, in the 1800s. So there's a real departure, do you think the success in terms of your attendances, is due to that departure from more traditional methods of portraiture?
- Yeah, I mean, I would have been incredibly depressed if our increase had just been because of these two paintings. I mean, the good news was that we had increased attendance by about 30% by the time this unveiling happened. So as you mentioned, I started in 2013. By 2018, we were all ready on the upward trajectory, but this blew everything out of the water. And I think it's interesting, both of them have broken with traditions, but they've also very much responded to traditions. So Kehinde Wiley, who did the portrait of Barack Obama, knows our galleries extremely well. And if you look at traditional pictures of Abraham Lincoln, for example, John Kennedy, even number 43, the younger President Bush, there you can see similarities, and he's definitely looked at this sort of canon of presidential portraiture. But it was a surprise to the president, and to us, to see him put into this sort of garden of his life, so to speak, where all the flowers mean something. So just very quickly, you probably can't see them, but there are these little rosebuds that mean love. There are those fluffy flowers that are chrysanthemums, that is the official flower of Chicago. The little white flowers are jasmine, which relates to the type of lays in Hawaii, where he grew up, and of course in Indonesia. You'll appreciate this, Karen, though, when I was first shown this picture, I said, "Oh, that's a agapanthus." The purple flowers, and everybody... I had instant cred with my staff, they go, "What?" And I said, "That's a agapanthus."
- Nice one.
- They call them African Lilies here, and of course it relates to his father's Kenyan background. But, you know, I used to be a bit of a gardener when I was in Australia, and I was glad that I could actually show a more multi-dimensional...
- Fantastic.
- Yeah, the Sherald, you know, she deliberately paints the skin color in this gray, grisaille color, and that relates to the fact that for most African Americans, portraiture doesn't happen until the advent of photography, the black and white photograph. And so again, she's hearkening all the way back, Amy Sherald, the artist, to this tradition. They're both incredibly powerful, but also much beloved, and we are sending them on tour, actually. They'll be going, starting next year, they'll go to Chicago for the president's 60th birthday, and then goes on to the other cities of Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta, before coming home.
- Fantastic. Well, if you're thinking of touring them internationally, call me. I'd love to hang them.
- I had a lot of friends, all of a sudden, who are museum directors, when they heard about the tour. I mean, what's really nice, I don't know if you guys get it, but we just had 60 Minutes. The president asked for the 60 Minutes shoot to happen in our galleries, and so that was just played this passed weekend, where he talks about, he's got a new book that's just come out, and he's sitting in front of the Lincoln, and walks past his picture, but he also stands for a long period of-- Actually, there was also another thing with CBS Sunday Morning, where he stands in front of that portrait of Michelle, and basically says it's kind of amazing that she still likes him, given what he put her through. So it's this really cute interview in front of our picture, so we were super happy.
- That's fantastic. I guess the question everyone wants answered is, are you working on the Trump portraits right now? Have you got a plan?
- We will be, we'll definitely be working on it. What happens is, it's a little easier with a second term president, because they know that they're heading out, and we know they're heading out. And so, as with the Obama's, you have those conversations in the last year. In this case, we'll be starting fairly shortly with the Trump administration, and we work closely with the White House, because they get a set of portraits done, as well, and so there are actually four portraits made. A POTUS and a FLOTUS for them, and one for us, and we work together, but in the meantime, we don't put up the current president until they've left office, in the president's galleries. We've just acquired a really nice photograph of President Trump in the Oval Office that will likely go up, while the commission happens. So all of that is yet to come, and it'll be interesting. It's always a dialogue between the first family, and us, and all the rest. The negotiations that go on, and the secrecy, I guess you can imagine, is pretty intense. So yeah.
- Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, in our collection, we don't actually collect portraits of our Prime Ministers. We do in an informal sense, but we're not the official collection for those. That work is done by the Parliamentary Collection here in Canberra. So that sort of takes us to the end of our conversation. It's been really fantastic talking to you. I think that's where we say goodbye.
- Goodbye.
- And say goodbye to our viewers, and everyone who's been Zooming in, and listening. It's been really fantastic, Kim. I hope to see you in Washington sometime, when the borders reopen, or maybe you'll be coming to Australia.
- Well, we were planning to come home for Christmas this year, and that's gone out the window, unfortunately. So at some point, yeah. I'm a Melbourne girl, so at some point we had hoped to get back to family.
- So am I.
- Yeah, exactly. But be well.
- Well, thanks so much.
- And it was lovely, thank you so much for the invitation. We really appreciate it.
- No problem. See you, bye-bye.
