Two columns ago, I told you that I had two resolutions, neither of which strictly constitutes a New Year's resolution. I shared my first one—not speaking negatively about a particular person—and promised to tell you my second one. The second one is totally different and, while less high-minded, actually probably harder to keep. It is to go into the District once every two months—at a minimum—and do something cultural. We have had a subscription to Arena Stage for five years, which I love, but since we've been doing that for a long time, those theatre evenings don't count. Our first activity in fulfillment of this pledge was a visit to the American Portrait Gallery in December (prior to January 1—and the shutdown—proving that it's not really a New Year's Resolution). Having friends visit from out-of-town helped me keep the resolution, since they wanted to go the Museum of American Art and the Botanical Garden.
Seeing the Obama portraits (which we hadn't viewed previously) motivated our visit to the Portrait Gallery. Barack Obama's portrait, which now hangs among all his predecessors', looks like the photographs shared in the press when it was unveiled, but its very large size did strike me. In terms of style, only Bill Clinton's, which Chuck Close painted, departs more markedly from the traditional realism of the others. Perhaps most interesting, though, was observing the steady stream of visitors coming to view the 44th president.
After some time immersed in presidential images, we headed to an exhibit of notable 20th- and 21st-century Americans (this is where, by the way, Michelle Obama's portrait now hangs). I found this more interesting from a historical and curatorial perspective than an artistic one. Indeed, my favorite aspect of the exhibit was learning about the many people with whom I was unfamiliar. For example, I have long wondered whose imagination we can thank for the gecko in the GEICO ads. Turns out it was a man named David Martin who ran an ad agency far from Madison Avenue, in Richmond, Va. I am not an aficionado of movies, though I love them, so it is probably not surprising that I had never heard of Miiko Taka, a Japanese-American actor featured in the poster for the 1957 film, Sayonara, in which she starred with Marlon Brando. I had also never heard of another Japanese-American actor, Kintaro (Sessue) Hayakawa, one of the most well-known stars during the silent-film era. Despite the widespread racism of the period, he was extremely popular among white American women. After a period away from the US (during which, of course, Japanese were interned), he returned to Hollywood in the '50s, earning an Academy Award Nomination for his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
On the subject of Japanese-Americans, a photograph of Soichi Sakamoto with one of his swim teams introduced me to this legendary Hawaiian swim coach. Sakamoto, who was quite a poor swimmer himself, began coaching the children of sugar plantation laborers in an irrigation ditch. Completely self-taught, he developed highly effective coaching techniques that produced numerous nationally ranked and Olympic swimmers from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Indeed, every unfamiliar named provoked my curiosity. Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New Yorker of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, was a neo-expressionist artist who did graffiti, wrote poetry, painted, and made music. He died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27, but his painting of a skull sold for $110.5 million in 2017, the most ever paid for an American artist's work. Richmond Barthe was a well-known sculptor whose work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum (NYC), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, with Jacob Lawrence, he was the first African-American artist to be represented in the permanent collection. A wonderful Edward Weston photograph showed Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican-born muralist and caricaturist whose work regularly appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair in the 1920s. He influenced many other artists including Al Hirschfeld (an influence that is very obvious when you see Covarrubias' caricatures). Rudolfo Anaya, a prolific author perhaps best known for his first work, Bless Me, Ultima, is one of the founders of Chicano literature. Charles Drew was a pioneering physician and surgeon whose work on preserving blood in blood banks during World War II saved countless lives. An African-American (from Washington, DC), he protested the racial segregation of blood as scientifically unsupported and resigned from the American Red Cross when they persisted in their racist policy. Percy Julian, a chemist, did extremely important work with hormones, work that allowed for the creation of an economical version of cortisone and enabled the development of the birth control pill. Also African-American, he faced numerous challenges related to race during the course of his life, including having his family's house fire-bombed when they moved into Oak Park, Ill., the first African-American family to do so.
I feel pretty well-informed on the subject of notable women, but this exhibit added some people to my repertoire. I read Cheaper By The Dozen, but I didn't remember who Lillian Moller Gilbreth was, nor had I understood the full extent of her contributions to psychology and scientific management. I can't begin to recount her long lifetime of work, but will tell you that she invented the foot-pedal garbage can and the "work triangle," which serves as the basis for kitchen design to this day. However, to focus on those achievements, ones that would be familiar to all of us, does not do justice to her years of finding ways to make management and manufacturing more efficient, particularly through "time and motion" studies that she and her husband invented. One of the first women to earn a doctorate in engineering, she is recognized as the first industrial/organizational psychologist. I knew nothing about the black women's club movement that began at the end of the 19th century and created opportunities for women like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a journalist, activist, and sought-after public speaker, and Laura Wheeler Waring, a painter who did Dunbar-Nelson's portrait, to become friends and work together for women's and African-American rights.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of all the individuals I didn't recognize, but it gives you a taste of the exhibit and what I learned. We returned to it again with our visitors, and I sought out portraits of those whom, on reflection, I wanted to know more about. At the same time, it felt a little like galleries of old friends. We also visited a show of New Deal painters, whose pictures offer a multi-faceted lens into the America of the 1930s. I had never been to the Botanic Garden and I enjoyed seeing the building, learning about the restoration of public gardens around the country, and breathing in the tropical scents. I discovered that oregano, thyme, and rosemary are all members of the mint family—random and not terribly important but nonetheless interesting information, while the medicinal uses of plants definitely piqued my interest. For example, toxol, an important drug for the treatment of breast cancer, comes from the yew bush. As you can tell, I'm enjoying this resolution and getting a lot out of it. Do you have suggestions of where we should go on our next expedition?
