I came across the Art Digest article in our file on the painting, and was surprised that little had been written on Harpo as an art collector. I had always loved the Marx Brothers (and highly recommend “Duck Soup” (1933) to the readers of this blog), but had never thought of any of them as the “gallery gazing” type. My curiosity was sparked, and I set out to find out more about Harpo’s collection. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, about his father’s interest in art.

LF: I’m curious to hear more about the Benton painting. It was in your family for so long, I’m guessing that you have some stories about it.

WM: Not really. There weren’t really stories. Dad and Mom were collectors, and they happened to consider Benton an important artist at the time. They collected—eclectically I might add—they had everything from Benton to Dalí to George Grosz and early LeRoy Neiman. Basically, they were interested in American artists.

LF: In your book, Son of Harpo Speaks!, you mention that your father painted as well. Could you tell me a little more about that?

WM: Dad started painting when he was in his thirties, and then he stopped painting because he had a lot of work. And then he had a heart attack, so went back to painting again and he painted numerous, numerous paintings for hospitals and charities. His stuff is all over the country. He went back to performing again, and then he had his second heart attack, and so he went back to painting. I do feel that it was a lifesaver for Dad. He would go into his studio for seven hours, and come out, and just had the best time. He had to have a creative outlet, and so he was pretty much always involved in the arts. He was painting all the way up to the very end.

LF: In your father’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, he mentions that he met Salvador Dalí. Do you know if he ever met Thomas Hart Benton when he was out in Hollywood?

WM: Now I can’t speak to that. Hang on. I’m going to send you something that will knock your socks off.

While still on the phone, Bill began emailing me images from his own personal archive—newspaper clippings about Harpo’s purchase of the painting, family photos of the work hanging over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo,” and (what really knocked my socks off!) a pen & ink study for the painting that Benton had sent to Harpo after the sale. The drawing was one of a series that Benton had made for a Kansas City newspaper to document a devastating 1937 flood.

Spring on the Missouri over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo.”

Before my e-mail to Bill, he had not known where the painting ended up (it had been sold after Harpo’s death in 1964) and he was delighted that it had found a home in a museum. Since its acquisition by the NCMA in 1977, Spring on the Missouri has become a favorite stop for visitors and school groups in our American art galleries. (I’ve noticed that on tours this work is the one that really gets people talking. The picture tells a story, and visitors—school children in particular, though adults as well—want to tell you what they think that story is.)

WM: That’s phenomenal. I never knew where it went, and to have kids come in and benefit from Benton’s extraordinary ability, it warms my heart. It keeps the world from going crazy.

To learn more about Harpo’s collection or to see examples of his own paintings, visit Bill’s website at “Harpo’s Place”.

Laura Fravel, GSK Curatorial Fellow

When I first visited 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art as it was being installed, it was a spare group of seemingly incongruent works. It was impossible yet to understand their conversation. I was struck by Lisa Hoke’s organic wall covering, emerging from itself in radiating curls and waves. Kyoung Ae Cho‘s woven pieces, made from silk from corn stalks, were lovely and meditative and focused.

Walking into the installation the following week was a surprise and a joy. Most of the pieces had arrived, and the works were beginning to speak to one another and to me. On my third visit, the exhibition was open to the public, and the show’s message was fully realized.

In the first room are Tim Hawkinson‘s clocks. The old banana peel that ticks struck me as humorous and a bit melancholy, as did the candle with the moving wick. My favorite of his pieces is the medicine cabinet. Each item—an open lotion bottle, dental floss, deodorant—keeps time. Each is disposable, without value, devoid of the preciousness and sentimentality that we attach to so many possessions. But these charming little timepieces speak strongly, advocating the smallest things, showing us how our temporary, quotidian belongings tell the story of us and are keepers of our time. And I loved peeking around back to see the wires and mechanisms that power Hawkinson’s delicate timepieces.

In the next room is Beth Lipman‘s newly installed tower of glass objects, called Bride. It projects solidity despite the fragility of the glass. It held me in both a timeless and a very present space. Because the objects are clear glass, they exist in a fantasy world that cannot be touched, a crystal-magic world of memories and remembered dreams. It is fantasy, but it draws the fantasy out of personal experience. We are responsible for giving the piece meaning, but it happens effortlessly, unconsciously. It’s partially inspired by paintings at the NCMA, and we are very fortunate to have this work joining our permanent collection.

Nearby are Dan Estabrook’s small works on paper. They walk a line between delicate and aggressive. Like mementos or found relics, they hold a dream world’s sense of time and place. They remind me of Dali, with their dreamy surrealism and utter lack of self-consciousness, but the muted and antique tones make them seem like the dreams of people long gone rather than the dreams of the artist.

David Shapiro‘s work is a revealing and piecemeal self-portrait. He saved each receipt and ticket that he got over the course of a year, and then meticulously replicated each one by hand on vellum. It is a type of self-portrait, but it is also universal. He has devoted an exhaustingly large effort to turning average parts of everyday life into art. In another example of tedious and immense effort, Peter Matthews created his works by wading in the ocean for six to 16 hours a day and drawing and writing on a waterproof board whatever came to his mind. The intimate and idiosyncratic worlds he creates are most solitary and an indistinguishable map of one man’s mind.

The exhibition took a turn for me with Do-Ho Suh‘s vinyl house. As I approached, it didn’t particularly grab my attention, but once I walked inside, the exact reproduction of the artist’s first studio apartment in New York City grabbed my heart. It is sweet—not at all in a syrupy way, but in a thoughtful, loving, gentle way. It is not a replica of a house or an apartment. It is a home. It is not our home, but it very much carries the feeling of being our own. And this home can be disassembled, packed into a suitcase, and taken with you. There is a lot of soul in this piece, and it is lovely.

Next I walked under Lisa Hoke’s now-fleshed-out carnival of colors and was struck by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Last Breath. This breathing machine takes a person’s single breath and recycles and perpetuates it as long as the work is left on. It so moved me, the idea of taking something as personal as a breath and keeping it eternally. The work made me think about the obsessiveness and madness of wanting to hold on to the people we love, and the pain caused by the lingering in some untouchable form after they are gone. Next to this piece is Lozano-Hemmer’s The Year’s Midnight, which I found dark and funny and intriguing.

From here I moved into the last room of the show. It hit me with the full (but quiet) force of the exhibition’s depth and weight. Caetano de Almeida’s pollution drawings are a beautiful and horrifying record of time, the patterns created by leaving stencils on paper on the artist’s balcony in Sao Paolo, the air pollution coloring the paper outside of the stencils. They are evidence of the thoughtless and irreversible scar we ourselves have left on time. David K. Chatt‘s beaded objects are full of melancholy and longing. A stack of letters is sewn into a net of glass beads, bound by padlock, with the key sitting just beneath, rendered inaccessible by the pretty white beads that trap all of the objects. Finally: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s pile of candy. It is sad, and also generous, and touching. Mortality and immortality collide and contradict one another. Taking a piece can feel greedy and destructive, but mostly it feels like a gift, and humbling.

Being acquainted with the artists and their work before the exhibition did not prepare me for what each piece, taken together and as a whole, would say. Time touches and works on us each in a different way. Yet these artists have found a way to harness their unique relationship with time and create experiences that can be understood by all. I found 0 to 60 melancholy, and also gentle and hopeful and universal. I hope it is as pleasant and rewarding an experience for you as it was for me.

Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

Artist Lisa Hoke installed a site-specific work of art over the course of ten days for the exhibition 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

In the summer of 1997, I was invited by Norman and Judith Topper to visit their home at Fearrington Village. Originally from New York, the Toppers had embraced the Triangle and especially the Museum. Both were dedicated, enthusiastic docents at the NCMA. They invited me over that August morning to talk about their art collection and specifically if there was anything of interest to the Museum.

Their collection was modest, mostly European and Japanese prints and Chinese export porcelain. While not for us, they would be welcome in the collections of several local museums, and I gave the Toppers names and phone numbers of the curators. However, there was one item that I very much coveted. Leaning on a shelf was a bronze portrait medallion of the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. That was a keeper! The Toppers happily offered to leave the portrait to the Museum in their wills. The next day Norman called to say that he and Judith had changed their minds: they wanted to donate the portrait right away. In such moments curators are allowed to be giddy.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) is arguably the finest American sculptor of the 19th century, famed for his heroic monuments to Civil War heroes. His most celebrated works are the gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at the bottom of New York’s Central Park and the incomparable memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the heroic African American soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry on Boston Common. Saint-Gaudens was also the unsurpassed master of the demanding art of relief portraiture. Working within a shallow plane, he managed to convey an illusion of space and a complexity of design as well as a vivid and personable likeness. The Stevenson portrait is regarded as one of the sculptor’s great triumphs.

Saint-Gaudens requested and received permission to create the portrait during Stevenson’s visit to the United States in 1887. As the artist recalled in his autobiography:

I began the medallion at [Stevenson’s] rooms in the Hotel Albert … not far from where I lived on Washington Place. All I had time to do from him then was the head, which I modeled in five sittings of two or three hours each. These were given me in the morning, while he, as was his custom, lay in bed propped up with pillows, and either read or was read to by Mrs. Stevenson.

The artist modeled the poet’s thin, elegant hands several months later. In the finished relief, he filled the background with Stevenson’s verse.

The Stevenson portrait achieved immediate and enduring success, and the sculptor had editions cast in several sizes.

The portrait arrived from the Toppers without a frame. We looked at examples of frame designs favored by the sculptor and initially tried a hexagonal design in dark walnut. That proved unsatisfactory. This past year Chief Conservator Bill Brown and I revisited the frame problem. This time we were inspired by an arts and crafts design frequently used by Saint-Gaudens for other casts of the Stevenson portrait. Instead of a dark wood molding, this design featured splined oak boards, decorated only by a carved bead border circling the inset relief and by three carved rosettes at the bottom, echoing motifs in the relief. We brought in local furniture craftsman Evan Lightner, who had earlier fabricated the imposing architectural surround for our mural study by John Singer Sargent. We showed Evan photographs of our chosen design. He then researched frame making of the period and came back to us with drawings. He also proposed using a tricky 19th-century technique to impart a rich golden tone to the wood by fuming the boards with ammonia—a process that required trial and error. Though lengthy, Evan’s description of the frame-making process makes interesting reading:

Once the design was agreed upon, I sourced lumber in the dimensions necessary to fulfill the specs of the frame—plus another plank for backup. As with most American arts and crafts furniture from that period, quartersawn white oak was utilized for its stability and uniform grain. Initial milling of my planks yielded grain directions and cosmetic characteristics. I selected the lengths with the straightest grain and lack of inclusions for the frame body. These were cut from the plank, remilled, surface scraped, and left to acclimate.

At the Museum a template of the bronze medallion was traced, noting its attachment points, depth, and deviations. Back at the shop, the frame sides were planed to thickness, ripped to width, and cut to length. These lengths were then mitered at 45 degrees. I then used the template to rout into the frame the exact ever-so-slightly oblong shape of the artwork.

At this point I temporarily assembled the frame. With a razor tool, I then scribed the two lines around the inside perimeter that would comprise the channel for the carved pea molding. Taking the frame apart into its four sections allowed me to carve the double row of inset 1/8-inch peas into the channel as well as the rosettes at the frame bottom. When completed, I glued the four corners of the frame together. A segmented ledge was installed in the frame interior to enable attachment of the relief.

Several rounds of finish sanding prepared the frame for coloring and sealing. I constructed a plastic tent to envelop the frame, leaving about 3 inches of airspace around it. Before sealing the tent, I poured one cup of 28% aqueous ammonia into a pie dish located in the center of the frame. After two hours of exposure to the ammonia fumes, the frame had darkened substantially. Following a light surface sanding, I applied three coats of a polymerized linseed oil based on a 19th-century coachmakers recipe. Once cured, a coat of paste wax was applied and buffed to a satin sheen.

In the meantime Bill Brown had cleaned the surface of the portrait relief and applied a thin protective wax to the surface. The original patination of the bronze had likely suffered over the years from overpolishing—think a polished doorknob. Bill used a colored French wax, Pâte Dugay, to impart a slightly darker overall tone and to highlight the subtle textural differences hidden within the shallow picture plane. When the frame arrived, Bill carefully set the relief into the recess, attaching it with bronze screws. The result is an elegant presentation: a frame that does not call attention to itself but only enhances the quiet beauty of the portrait.

The framed portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was reinstalled to the American Galleries on January 28, paired with Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Dr. Albert Getchell.

John W. Coffey

What separates a great photograph from a snapshot?

In our online Art of Photography course, students learn that good design doesn’t just happen. A snapshot captures a moment, whereas a great photograph captures it beautifully by being composed. All of the elements are chosen and arranged to fit together. Elements such as line, texture, and pattern can add visual interest and heighten a photograph’s drama.

The students discussed examples from photographers Pamela Pecchio and Aaron Siskind, whose work is in our permanent collection, exploring how actual and implied texture can create a visually engaging image, and also created photographs of their own.

Examine these images and consider students’ choices in composing each photograph. Whether you notice the skewed worm’s-eye view of brightly patterned ribbons or the rhythmic patterns of leaves growing between pipes, your eye is drawn through the composition.

The students’ work will be on display in the Museum’s Education Lobby from January 11 through April 14. Pecchio’s work is featured in the exhibition Dwelling: Interiors by Page H. Laughlin and Pamela Pecchio, opening February 10 in the adjacent North Carolina Gallery.

Art of Photography is one of five online semester courses offered through the Museum that students can take for high school credit.

If you have seen Beyoncé’s video for “Run the World (Girls),” you may remember her holding two hyenas on a chain.

She’s making reference to Hugo and his series The Hyena & Other Men. Hugo’s fascination with the “Hyena Men” came about after a friend e-mailed a picture he had taken of a man walking a hyena on a chain in Lagos, Nigeria. The men, called “Gadawan Kura” (rough translation: “hyena guides”), were surrounded by myth and mystery and largely assumed to be drug dealers, bodyguards, thieves, and debt collectors. In fact they are itinerant performers who tame and work with hyenas, monkeys, and rock pythons to entertain and to sell traditional medicine. They are all related, and the tradition is passed down generation to generation. Through a journalist friend and a Nigerian reporter, Hugo was put in contact with the Gadawan Kura, who agreed to let Hugo travel with them for eight days. Two years later, with the project feeling unresolved, Hugo returned to Nigeria and took more photos. These images are more intimate, more informal, and reflect the trust and understanding the artist had developed with the hyena guides two years earlier and maintained over the interim.

Hugo’s fascination with the men and their relationship with the animals—at times doting, at times brutal—led to this series. It was this paradoxical relationship, and not the spectacle that surrounded their performances, that led to Hugo’s portraits. Thematically, Hugo explores the hybridization of the urban and the wild; the interplay of dominance, submission, and codependence; and the fraught relationship we have with ourselves, nature, and animals. In his text on the series, Hugo writes:

When I asked Nigerians, “How do you feel about the way they treat animals,” the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals, but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalized. Or why Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

The NCMA has been fortunate enough to have one of Hugo’s hyena photos, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, on long-term loan. You can see it in the Modern and Contemporary Galleries in West Building.

Beyoncé’s use of the Hyena Men imagery raises questions about appropriation and exploitation, for the Gaduwan Kura and Pieter Hugo were never credited or compensated. The artist has said this about the singer’s video: “I don’t particularly like the Beyoncé song. It all seems so derivative—the music, the imagery … I’m sure the Hyena Men are wondering if they’re going to get paid!”

As for Beyoncé, she has released a statement acknowledging her use of “references” in her videos and stating, “I’ve always been fascinated by the way contemporary art uses different elements and references to produce something unique.”

Whatever your feelings on plagiarism, exploitation, and pop culture, I’m pretty sure we can all agree on the awesomeness of the original. We also have a second Hugo photograph, Naasra Yeti, from his series Permanent Error. It is equally as arresting, stirring, and beautiful. Come by and see them. You won’t be disappointed.

P.S. The New Yorker wrote about it first. So did The Guardian.

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

Image: Pieter Hugo, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007, chromogenic print, On loan from the collection of Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez

I’ve loved Nevelson since I was a kid, having seen her work in museums in Washington, D.C., particularly the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Nevelson’s balance of order and chaos—many different things contained within definite rectangles—always appealed to me. It seemed like a good way of thinking about aesthetic composition, history or politics, or even personal situations. Nevelson makes sense to me as a visualization of analytical thinking, which I equate to beauty.

Thank goodness Nevelson never used color. Black Zag CC is a uniform flat black. Her works are always monochrome—black, white, gold, even some clear Lucite. Color moves shadow into secondary consideration, and shadow is crucial to Nevelson’s boxes. Shadow conveys the tension between presentation and concealment, as well as whatever ambiguous intermediate levels she can establish between those poles. These are the compositional components of her sculpture, whether it’s freestanding or on the wall like this piece.

Black Zag CC comprises six rectangular areas, or boxes. Each is easily recognizable as a discrete element, although some protrude into or overlap the others slightly. But it’s not a tile game—you can’t imagine them rearranged. The particular box at the center must be the center box. This is a strictly composed work.

Still, I love how this piece divides neatly in several different ways according to how I choose to look at it. A modularity of vision, not of composition.

I can see it as having two parts. There’s the typecase on the right side, with its intense internal detail, largely presenting the shadows of its grid. So the rest of the piece becomes unified into one image, its convex faces reflecting light, conveying their flatness. The typecase seems like what’s inside all the other boxes, as if it’s been opened to reveal its inner workings. Only the very center of the work shows a compromise—a thin rectangular frame that echoes the fundamental unit of the typecase, floating atop a curved, 100 percent black depth.

Another way of seeing two parts is to concentrate on that central box. It images a camera, with the thin rectangular frame becoming the aperture and a set of vertical ribs in the shadows of the box becoming a large-format camera’s bellows. The five perimeter boxes almost become photographs of different subjects, spit out from the center like Polaroids.

From either of those dualities, I can then see the piece as having three parts. The complexity of the upper left area emerges as singular, with the protruding frame, the dangling, miniature column, and the secondary frame of a chair’s back. Certainly there are more levels behind even the chair back. It recedes almost infinitely.

And can I just say, I love the dangling miniature column. Is it the later “addition” to the work that the wall text mentions? I cannot get enough of the column. It bothers me that I can’t get down to its scale; I can’t get my vision in behind it to see what the back of it looks like. What a brilliant decision, to put a small dangling thing in this work, and to frame it so that it doesn’t simply protrude off the front and draw attention to itself as compositionally contrary to the rest of the work. It’s the only part of the work on the scale of one’s hand. Everything else is for the eye. But the column would fit neatly into your hand. You could carry it around. It wants touch, not gaze.

Once I am this far into the components of a few of the boxes, it’s easy enough to just decide to see all six boxes individually. The wonderful lower left box that looks like two vertical doors sliding open to allow a figure to step through. Its figure’s outline abstractly feminine—a skirt and a breast. The box captures a moment of excitement, a verge, an emergence, a single frame of a film. Then there’s the central lower box, playing organic leaf or frond forms across a background wall or lath. The play of curved line against straight line brings these two lower boxes together.

The central upper box becomes a cipher. It’s the least interesting box, on its own, but it anchors the others. They can seem to radiate out from it, since its two curves mimic a sun and a sky. Perhaps it’s a nod to landscape as the one underlying visual metaphor for all art.

Some of Nevelson’s body of work is overtly metaphorical or deals with gender norms, like Dawn’s Wedding Chapel. But I see this midcareer Black Zag CC as a sheer study in her compositional approach. How she decides to put this next to that, and how she builds different modes of correspondence between proximate things—the complexity just turns me on. It sounds stupid, but I get a little breathless sitting in front of it.

That complexity of thought, to me, is beauty. And it’s why I visit Black Zag CC whenever I can.

— Chris Vitiello is an arts and performance writer based in Durham.

Image: Louise Nevelson, Black Zag CC, 1964–71, final addition 1977, painted wood construction with fabricated, found, and bought elements; wire and metal hardware; and Formica frame, H. 48 x W. 59 x D. 9 in., Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Looking out across the Grand Canal, I’m reminded of two landscape paintings at the NCMA: Capriccio: The Rialto Bridge and The Church of S. Giorgio Maggiore (circa 1750) by Canaletto and Venice without Water, June 12, 1990 by Donald Sultan. Both depict the Rialto Bridge yet evoke completely different emotional responses. Canaletto painted a postcard-worthy fantasy to “sell” the city to visitors. His painting appears realistic, but the historic landmarks shown beside the bridge are actually located in different areas of Venice (think Photoshop, 1750s-style). North Carolina artist Donald Sultan takes a much different approach in his work. His foreboding, tar-splattered image of the Rialto Bridge (based on a 1990 newspaper photo of the bridge over a waterless canal) reads more like an environmental awareness PSA, showing us the barren wasteland that a city known for its beautiful canals could become if changes aren’t made to maintain its waterways.

Each artist, in his own way, distorts the reality of this architectural symbol of Venice and of the city itself. But what is the reality? I can only answer for myself. My reality here feels like a dream. Layers of peeling paint and rusty watermarks on vacant, flooded buildings are not signs of deterioration. To me, they’re magic; they’re tactile symbols of the passage of time. Without the distraction of “real life,” I’m free to find beauty in every detail, whether it’s a rare sculpture on display at the Salvador Dalí exhibition or the sock-and-shirt-shaped shadows dancing on the wall behind a clothesline.

Visiting a city so rich in history and art makes me wonder: isn’t “real” art almost always a distortion of reality to some degree? And this distortion—which I like to view as the artist’s interpretation—seems to be the very thing that makes us stop, lean in, and take a closer look.

These two landscape paintings are featured together in Art of Game Design, an online course we’ve developed in collaboration with the North Carolina Virtual Public School to empower high school students to make real-world connections between works of art at the Museum, commercial advertising media, and game design. These paintings are also featured side by side in the Museum’s European Galleries in West Building.

—Cindy Byrd Yandle is writer and editor for the NCMA’s teen and college programs.

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Capriccio: The Rialto Bridge and The Church of S. Giorgio Maggiore, circa 1750, oil on canvas, 66 x 45 in., Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina

Donald Sultan, Venice without Water, June 12, 1990, 1990, butyl rubber, acrylic paint, and plaster on vinyl composite tiles, mounted on four Masonite panels, 96 x 96 in., Purchased with funds from the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Art Trust Fund

This loan is one in a series of paintings Warhol made by screen-printing the image of Elvis Presley 28 times onto a roll of silver-painted canvas in different combinations—singles, doubles, triples, and superimposed images. He created the work for a show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963 and sent the entire roll of printed canvas with a set of variously sized stretchers to the gallery. He left it up to the gallery to cut the canvas to fit the stretchers, resulting in five single images, six superimposed images, and two diptychs of paired images, including this one. Melding high and low, Warhol used a mechanical silkscreening process to make these works, intentionally creating what he called “an assembly-line effect.” He presents Elvis life-size and dressed as a cowboy (from a publicity still for the 1960 movie Flaming Star) and multiplies his star power by four.

Image: Andy Warhol, Elvis I and II, 1963; 1964 (?), silkscreen ink and spray paint (silver canvas), silkscreen ink and acrylic (blue canvas) on linen, 208.3 x 208.3 cm (each of two panels), Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift from the Women’s Committee Fund, 1966, © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Don’t miss a special Art in the Evening celebrating Elvis I and II on Friday, January 11, at 6 pm.

Every day in our Museum, docents help visitors look closely at art. But how do they help someone with vision loss or blindness to look closely at those objects? Elizabeth Kahn, an NCMA docent, has worked with people who have vision loss. Museum Educator Diana Phillips asked her to tell about one of the methods she uses on her tours.

DP: What is audio description?

EK: Audio description is a technique designed to help people who are blind or have low vision to visualize the setting and action of stage performances, exhibits,and other arts and entertainment events. Audio description programs exist worldwide, and the prerecorded version known as “descriptive video” can be heard accompanying selected programs on television and specially formatted DVDs of films.

DP: How do you provide audio description for someone with vision loss who wants to look at a work of art?

EK: For the visual arts and exhibitions, specially trained describers begin by stating exactly “what is there” in a painting, sculpture installation, or display. The information is given in a very precise and organized way.

DP: How is that information different from what you might find on a gallery label?

EK: Audio description does not interpret the meaning of a work of art; nor does it give information about historical background, the artist’s life, or symbolism.

DP: So it just focuses on what is physically present?

EK: Yes, and for people who are blind, this description levels the playing field for a discussion of the meaning of the image. For people who have low vision, the description defines aspects of the image that may be unclear.

DP: Is there a difference between what a listener might hear in an audio description and what they might hear on an audio guide or cell phone tour?

EK: An audio guide program usually assumes that the listener sees the image discussed. On the other hand, audio description assumes that the listener cannot see the image or sees it imperfectly. If both were available, I would recommend that a visitor who has impaired vision listen to the audio description first, followed by the audio guide discussion.

Listen to Elizabeth Kahn’s audio description of the Jacob Lawrence painting Forward:

Download audio file (Forward-AD.mp3)

You can also hear a reading of the gallery label, which offers more interpretive information about the work of art:

Download audio file (Forward-label.mp3)