(In Person) Artist Talk: Nicolas Party

FREE
Tickets now available
We strongly recommend claiming a ticket to ensure your seat. This program is expected to be at capacity.

Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu
Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu

Artist Nicolas Party will join the Hirshhorn to share insights into the making of Draw the Curtain, his largest work to date.

Commissioned by the Hirshhorn to wrap the full 360-degree exterior of our building while its façade undergoes critical repairs, Draw the Curtain is composed of original pastel works digitally collaged and printed onto industrial scrim. The site-specific public artwork samples a rich selection of curtain images from across art history and combines them with the artist’s signature portraits. For the first time, the vibrant colors and rich texture of Party’s well-known pastels have been transposed into an entirely new medium.

Draw the Curtain has transformed the Hirshhorn’s façade into a unified canvas that stands out against the landscape of predominantly neo-classical buildings on the National Mall. Party’s magnetic imagery encourages visitors and passersby to “peek” behind the curtain, exploring the meaning of this historic, symbolic space. Through this work, Party addresses themes of dupery and illusion, inviting us to question what lies behind the façades of the buildings in our nation’s capital.

Party first worked with the Hirshhorn in 2017 to create a site-specific painting on our curved gallery walls—a 400-ft mural of dawn and dusk titled sunrise, sunset, inspired in part by the words of Barack Obama.

SCHEDULE 

6 pm EST | Doors open to Ring Auditorium

6:30 pm EST | Lecture: Nicolas Party

ASL translation will be provided for this program. If you have any questions about accessibility, please email hirshhornexperience@si.edu.

A video recording of this talk will be shared on the Hirshhorn YouTube Channel.

Image credit:

Nicolas Party with “Draw the Curtain” (2021) by Nicolas Party, commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. © Tony Powell

(Online) On Process with Laurie Anderson

FREE
This program is online only (via Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook Live).

Advance registration is required for Zoom participation, including the chance to ask the artist a question (time permitting). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the talk.

By the time most of us see an artwork, it’s “finished” and ready for the world to view. What we often don’t see is what the work went through to reach its final state. What was the initial idea? What did the first draft look like? How and why did it evolve to what it looks like now? Does it live up to the artist’s vision? What was it like to produce a major exhibition during a global pandemic?

Critically acclaimed artist, writer and perfomer Laurie Anderson has a constantly changing relationship with process in its many forms—from drawing sketches of video installations, to improvising large-scale wall paintings, to generating and editing language with artificial intelligence.

Anderson will join Hirshhorn curator Marina Isgro to explore the artist’s process and talk through the evolution of some of her biggest projects to date, many featured in The Weather

“I’m much more of a map person, to see how things relate to each other. Eventually I think it does help to have an overall shape and how you feel at the end is really important to me. But I don’t know that at the beginning, so I prefer to make a map and see how things push against each other.” – Laurie Anderson on the making of Chalkroom for On Virtual Realities: Artist Talk with Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang

ABOUT THE ARTIST

As a Grammy Award-winning musician, performer, writer, and artist, Laurie Anderson has an international reputation as an artist who combines the traditions of the avant-garde with popular culture. Anderson’s theatrical works combine a variety of media, including performance, music, poetry, sculpture, opera, anthropological investigations, and linguistic games, to elicit emotional reactions. As a visual artist, Anderson has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; SoHo, New York; and extensively in Europe, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to No. 2 on the British pop charts. She is currently Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.

SCHEDULE

5:50 pm EST | Zoom broadcast opens

6 pm EST | Laurie Anderson in conversation with Marina Isgro

ASL translation will be provided on Zoom and CART (real-time captioning) will be provided across all platforms. If you have any questions about accessibility for this program, please email hirshhornexperience@si.edu.

Image credit: Portrait of Laurie Anderson. Installation view from Laurie Anderson: The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt

 

(Online) On Joy: Artist Talk with Derrick Adams

FREE
This program is online only (via Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook Live).
Advance registration is required for Zoom participation, including the chance to ask the artist a question (time permitting). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the talk.

Artist Derrick Adams is driven by his dedication to uplift Black joy and culture. This commitment takes shape in the artist’s diverse range of approaches to artmaking, from traditional media—such as painting, sculpture, and performance—to broader creative endeavors such as fashion, NFTs, and community engagement projects. Among his celebrated works are the more than one hundred paintings of Black subjects relaxing on bright, fantastical pool floats that make up his Floater series, and a new series titled Beauty World that features large, colorful, semi-abstracted portraits of mannequin heads adorned with sculptural wigs and eye-catching makeup. Currently on view at the US Embassy in Nouakchott, Mauritania, are Head #12 and Head #17 from Adams’s Deconstruction Worker portrait series, in which Adams collaged together wood-grain-patterned vinyl and wallpaper to convey gradations in skin and hair color. The richness of his formal techniques for artmaking are married to the complexity of Black history and culture, with the emphasis on line and color as strong as his historical references.

Adams also founded The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a series of both artist and non-artist residencies that bring together Black creatives for an invitation-only escape from the world. In a swing into the digital world, Adams was commissioned by hip-hop icon Jay-Z to create an NFT marking the 25th anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt.

Adams will be joined in conversation by Rhea L. Combs, who is director of curatorial affairs for the National Portrait Gallery.

This program is presented in partnership with the US Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies and the National Portrait Gallery.

SCHEDULE

5:50 pm EST | Zoom broadcast opens

 6 pm EST | Derrick Adams in conversation with Rhea L. Combs

ASL translation will be provided on Zoom and CART (real-time captioning) will be provided across all platforms. If you have any questions about accessibility for this program, please email hirshhornexperience@si.edu.