Join us for a conversation on the important relationship between museums and the creative process with internationally renowned artists Janine Antoni and Byron Kim, moderated by Molly Donovan, the National Gallery’s acting head and curator of contemporary art.
This talk is held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery’s Collectors Committee. Founded in 1975 to build the collection for the new East Building, the group has brought over 600 works—from paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, and time-based media works —into the nation’s collection for the public to enjoy.
About the Presenters
Janine Antoni (b. 1964, Freeport, Bahamas) received her BA in 1986 from Sarah Lawrence College in New York before earning her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. In the early 1990s, she began to perform mundane rituals—eating, sleeping, and washing—and transformed them into sculptures, centering attention on creative processes. Over a nearly 40-year career, her conceptual works have utilized an expansive variety of materials (from food to stone) and mediums (including photography, solo and collaborative performance, sculpture, and video) to emphasize the meanings attached to artmaking. Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Irish Museum of Modern Art/Glen Dimplex Artist Award (1996), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award (1998), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011), a Creative Capital Artist Grant (2012), and Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2014). A gift of the Collectors Committee, Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993) is a set of 14 self-portrait busts, seven in chocolate and seven in soap. Initially the busts looked identical to each other, and to Antoni, until the artist licked the chocolate busts and bathed with the soap, effacing them to create a collective portrait of artistic presence and absence, likeness and alienation.
Byron Kim (b. 1961, La Jolla, CA) is a senior critic at Yale University and a co-director at Yale Norfolk School of Art. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986, where he later taught and served on its board for years, receiving the school’s highest honor in 2022, the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. Kim’s other numerous awards include the Louise Nevelson Award in Art (1993), the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), and the Robert de Niro, Sr., Prize (2019). Kim's work explores the history of abstract painting, the problems of color and vision, and issues of human identity and existence. The National Gallery is fortunate to hold two works in its collection by Kim: Belly Painting: Prussian Blue (1993), and Synecdoche (1991–present), an ongoing project of portraiture that now comprises more than 560 panels, each a single hue ranging from light tan or pink to dark brown. Finding sitters among strangers, friends, family, neighbors, and fellow artists, Kim records each person's skin color in oil paint mixed with wax on a single 10 x 8-inch panel, a common size for portrait photography. Synecdoche was a watershed for the artist and has received much acclaim since its first showing in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. The title—referring to a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole or vice versa—makes clear that issues of representation, both visual and democratic, are in play. Kim’s work is presently featured in the exhibition (Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardina Pindell amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection at the Asia Society in New York.