In Plain Sight: The National Gallery x The Lonely Palette
Episode 1: Look Longer
Tamar: Do you like art?
Visitor 1: Yes.
Tamar: What about it do you like?
Visitor 1: Uh, the colors and how it looks? It's nice to look at. And it's it's challenging if you make art. And when you're done, you feel like you look at it and you like it.
Visitor 2: Paintings that I love are the ones that capture emotion. For me, um, the ones that really know how to play with light doesn't necessarily have to be realistic. Most of these are really boring. To me, I'm like, oh, great, it's got on a horse.
Lara: Did you like anything in this room?
Visitor 3: Um, I don't know.
Visitor 4: Sometimes you're sort of told what you're meant to like, what you're meant to be drawn to, I think. And you can get quite tick boxy sometimes going around different museums.
Tamar: What brought you to the museum today?
Visitor 5: Guess who made a five on their AP Art history course?
Tamar: Congratulations! Oh, no wonder you know Picasso's evolution.
Visitor 6: It's been very interesting to see, because when you're taking that class, all you really have is the generic images. And those do not do the art justice at all. And just seeing the scale and the size and the detail in the piece and being able to see every individual brushstroke. I love it.
Visitor 7: I always head to the Rothkos. Oh my God. My heart goes out to that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, what can I say, I get teary. All I can say is... It is so hard to explain it.
Tamar VO: How do you feel when you walk into an art museum? I can remember how I felt as a kid. I would hear the squeak of my rubber soled velcro shoes echoing off the marble floors and high ceilings, and I wanted to shush them the way that I felt like the space wanted to shush me. Art museums have a kind of gravitas. They're grown up spaces, which means that to a little kid, or really to anyone, they can be grand and thrilling. And they can also be really intimidating. Maybe both at once. What if I don't get the art
Sometimes it all depends on who you're there with. Is it a parent or is it a docent? Are they trying to get you excited? Is it a security guard or a staff member sternly telling you to quiet down and back up? And sometimes it depends on the art that you see. Do these paintings feel familiar? Did they invite you in? Are they colorful and resonant? Or are they boring? Can I say boring? I'm going to say boring. Because even if you're an art historian, sometimes they're boring.
My point is, there is no one way to experience a museum either for the first time or the hundredth. And I am an art historian and an art history podcaster. I am someone who is excited about art museums, and I aim to make other people excited. But that doesn't mean that all art makes immediate sense to me. It doesn't mean that I don't sometimes look for benches instead of Botticellis. But it does mean that I try to walk into an art museum with a sense of open, not shut.
I'm Tamar Avishai, host of The Lonely Palette podcast and a visiting storyteller at the National Gallery of Art. And this is In Plain Sight. In these three episodes, we're going to explore this idea what it means to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork or conversation at a time, and how the tools to do this have been here for you all along. Literally in plain sight, just waiting for you.
I camped out at the National Gallery for a week in June of 2024, and I talked to as many people as I could: curators, museum staff, visitors, in order to understand what brought them to the museum and what keeps them there, what makes that whole experience feel transcendent, and, bluntly, what can get in the way of that. What can make them feel like they don't belong? And we'll also be pulling back the curtain to the inner workings of the museum itself, more specifically, the folks who work behind the scenes and who are thinking about how to make this space more welcoming every day. And sometimes that can even start with the physical space of the building.
Tamar: Yeah, okay, so orient us.
Isabella: Okay. So we're in the east building, built in 1978.
Tamar VO: This is Isabella Bulkeley, part of the museum's content team.
Isabella: We have the largest public collection of works by Mark Rothko and then also works by Barnett Newman. We have this amazing Calder mobile, um, which is the largest Calder mobile in the world, as you can imagine, because it's enormous, which slowly kind of rotates throughout the day by there's different actual like wind vents that help kind of push it to continue to move.
Tamar: Oh really? Oh cool!
Isabella: Yeah, yeah. I.M. Pei really designed the building, and I think one of the most amazing parts of the building is the light and the way that the light changes and creates shadows over the course of the day. You know, I've worked here for eight years, and I don't ever really tire of that.
Lara: My name is Lara Ghelerter, and I'm a visitor's experience representative at the National Gallery of Art, and I've worked here for 18 years.
Tamar VO: Visitor experience representatives greet and direct visitors when they arrive at the museum, but they do more than that. They're kind of museum psychologists, and they have to work in real time. They have to read visitors when they arrive. They have to try to understand the headspace they're in, and all the different reasons why a visitor came to the museum that day. And there are a lot of reasons. Sometimes people just want to feel cultured. Sometimes they're visiting from out of town. Sometimes they need air conditioning. Sometimes the light and airy architecture is the most perfect distraction or reset from daily life. And it's the job of a visitor experience representative to direct a visitor to the experience they came to have, even if they didn't even know it at the time.
Tamar: Okay, so you describe people coming in kind of wearing their day.
Lara: Yes.
Tamar: They walk into this space. How do you see them transform?
Lara: Especially for this east building, the fact that we you walk in and it's a giant atrium and the light. So I, I see people's mood lift and I do see people just sort of like their, their faces relax. Some people just start to smile automatically, which is lovely. I also like to say, do you have any favorite artists? Is there somebody that you've never seen that you've always wanted to see? Um, so that's also the really nice and sort of enriching part of my job is like being able to get people to see things, because we've all seen photographs of things. But when you go see it in person, I think it's really transformative.
Tamar VO: I love this idea of a museum space being transformative. It's why we're all here. Museums sound distinct. They smell distinct. They can change your entire mood. And from an art standpoint, nothing can replace seeing these objects in person in this transformative light and space. But think also about what people come to the museum with. What these artworks mean to visitors before they even step foot inside these buildings. Of course, they've seen these works as photographs online, even as memes. So many of them exist in the larger world outside the museum in pop culture. In fact, it's some people's whole jobs to figure out how to reach people through those channels, either to bring them into the museum, or at the very least, to get them interested in art.
Sydni: I think social media is a really important tool for the museum, just because it's an opportunity that the museum has to build relationships and in-roads to people who don't have art history knowledge, um, and who are often overwhelmed or intimidated to go into fine art museums.
Tamar VO: This is Sydni Myers, the museum's social media manager.
Sydni: So it's a great connector to people who are creative, who might not know about art history, who are interested in learning about it, or, um, something that we've done on social media use art as a tool to connect people to humanity and remind us that art is just a conduit to the human experience. We want the average person on the street to be able to engage with us, or connect or relate to us in some way. Um, because what we're trying to foreground is the lived experiences of our artists rather than just the creations that they make. Right now we're trying to help people understand that they can be a little bit more free. Here, for example, we started a series called Beautiful Moments and we just share pictures of people just being themselves dancing, couples kissing. Um, and that has really drawn a lot of new traffic to our channels.
Tamar VO: This is what museum social media channels can do. Make it clear that the art in their museums has actual relevance and resonance with our daily lives. Sometimes it's through humor, like Museum Bowl, my favorite annual holiday where the two biggest art museums in the city is competing in the Super Bowl throw fine art related shade at one another. But sometimes it's more impactful. Like last year at the Grammys, when Chappell Roan hit the red carpet wearing a gown printed with Degas ballet dancers, which is both a recognizable symbol of fine art. And if you know a bit about Degas, drew a line between working class ballerinas and Roan's demand for livable wages for artists. Really, if you think about it, what Lara and Sydni have in common is to make this big, beautiful, but intimidating space feel more human sized to resonate more with you, the visitor, individually to make this huge space your space. Just ask Josh, another Visitor Experience representative.
Josh: The museum is really big and I think like people get overwhelmed. And there's also a lot of people who don't know a lot about, like art history or like artists. I mean, I'm like one. I think sometimes the job is really about trying to simplify things in the way of just like allowing people to feel like they can have some kind of handle on their own experience. You know, a good art museum experience is finding something you don't know and connecting with that.
Tamar: Have you had an experience where somebody has been really, like closed to an artwork and you've kind of opened them up or you've watched them open up?
Josh: Well, I had kind of that experience a little bit with, um, with this artwork actually, the Moment of Calm.
Tamar VO: We're standing in front of the surrealist Max Ernst's A Moment of Calm from 1939 on the upper level of the East building. And if you've never seen it, it's a large horizontal painting of a forest against a sun setting sky. But it's abstracted, layered with colors, various greens, but also silver, cobalt reds, pinks. The lines of the trees look almost overlaid or like it was created with one of those kids drawing pads where you scratch out the black to reveal the vibrant colors underneath. It's dynamic and at the same time, yeah, really calm.
Josh: Somebody had walked around the galleries and asked me, you know, about like, what my favorite piece was. And I was like, oh, have you seen this one? And they were like, I walked past. I didn't like it so much. And I was like, I was like, oh, really? I wonder why? And he was like, oh, maybe I'll go back and look at it. And so he went back upstairs and he came back 15 minutes later and said that he loved the piece because he had gone back up to look at it more, but again, spent more time with it. Right. It rewards you for engaging. So it's almost like that. It's like sometimes people just need time to connect with a piece, even if they don't understand it. You gain the familiarity and I think it helps you connect further. Always. Even if you end up not liking the piece, you'll understand it more and that helps.
Tamar VO: There is something about Josh and Lara that just sparkles. You can see in their eyes how excited they are to talk about the work that they're drawn to, and how genuinely happy they are to welcome visitors into this space that they love so much. These are the kinds of people who literally and sometimes figuratively, take down the velvet rope between a visitor and an artwork. They pluck it from the ages and hand it directly to you. And like Josh says, they do it by inviting you to look and look again. The magic of seeing these objects in person is that we can slow down our eyes, so used to barely glancing as we swipe and scroll past on our screens. We take a deep breath. We trust those eyes. And why shouldn't we? Why do we do this weird thing where we think that the person with the badge must be looking at a different painting than the rest of us? That because they're trained to. Maybe they see things that we don't. It's the same painting. You're seeing what's there. Your perspective is just as valid. Sometimes you just need a Josh or a Laura or a docent like Estelle to show you what you already know.
Isabella: How was your tour?
Estelle: Oh, it was good. You know, I had 16 people. Isn't that amazing? Last Tuesday, I did the same tour I had four. Yeah. You can't tell.
Estelle: My name is Estelle Quain, and I'm an adult docent at the National Gallery since 2018. I think in being a docent, um, in a place like this, they were looking, I think, for people not necessarily that had an art history background to be. Most of the docents, the adult docents, they don't have art historical backgrounds.
Tamar: How do you think that helps?
Estelle: Oh, I think it helps tremendously. Um, there are different ways of communicating with people. And I think if you gather a group of people from different types of professional training. They'll have had different experiences in communication. And that's really what this is, I think, because they don't want us to give lectures. We're just the people who get people into art. So I keep saying no. Estelle, you're not getting another PhD. You're trying to just get people interested. And there's a big difference. I started out in teaching, and so that feels wonderful, actually, because, um, I, I like communicating ideas to people and seeing their response. And I just get a lot of pleasure from teaching. And I think on some level, this is teaching giving people ways into things. And that's what I like about it.
Tamar: Draw me in. Be my teacher. So imagine that I'm somebody who's not interested in art at all. Okay. It's just okay. Here, I'll play the role.
Tamar VO: Just for context, we're looking at Matisse's Pot of Geraniums from 1912. It's located on the ground floor of the East Building, and it's a smallish still life of a terracotta pot with a pink geranium in it. That's pretty much it.
Tamar: So it's a pot with geraniums. It's just a flower. So what. I could see flowers at home.
Estelle: What's the mood of that painting?
Tamar: What feeling does it give you?
Estelle: To me, it feels celebratory and happy. Um, maybe because the purple and the green, you don't see together that often. And they're both very bright and very deep colors that have a lot to say about just being next to each other. Sometimes you want people. It's interesting to start at one level of what do you see or what comes to mind, and then to go beyond that level. That's really where you want to go. Um, so often in a painting, you just ask folks, what do you see here? Not just what words come to mind, but what do you see? We looked at a the Faith Ringgold on the upper level. Um, "The Flag is Bleeding." And first you have to make sure that people see what's in the painting. I didn't see in that painting for a while that the woman in the middle is linking arms with the white man and the black man. And so you have to first make sure you're looking closely enough. There's different levels of looking, um, and it's exciting to take people to the different levels.
Tamar VO: Art museum staff are thinking about these different levels all the time, and specifically how to facilitate them, how to manipulate the way that visitors look at and experience and process the artworks. It's funny because one of the first things you learn when you work in an art museum is that the staff offices are usually in the basement or otherwise squeezed into some pretty tight quarters, and you can understand why. I mean, save the airy spaces, a natural light for the galleries. But from these small, airless offices, people are spending so much time thinking about how visitors walk through these incredibly beautiful spaces and how crafted and curated these spaces have to be for the visitor to experience the art in its best possible context.
And art will tell you how it needs to be displayed. Sometimes it's greedy. It needs its whole entire wall. Sometimes it shines in close proximity to other works. Sometimes it demands a spotlight. Sometimes it best breathes in the ever changing ephemera of natural light. And sometimes it's a giant hunk of bronze that needs its own freaking garden. For monumental sculptures that populate the sculpture garden, that's Brett McNish's concern, as the National Gallery's grounds manager. It's his job to take the visitors, who were just walking from one space in DC to another and suddenly transport them to a kind of Narnia, because he knows what these objects need.
Brett: I think more often than not, our garden is discovered on accident. Visitors might be coming from natural history, traversing the mall to go to Air and Space, and oh, well, this will cut through here. Oh my goodness, look at this place. And what a what a great place to maybe take a break. Uh, sit by the fountain, take a seat. Put your feet up for a minute, because, you know, you come to DC, get ready to walk. Uh, and, uh.
Tamar: Uh. It's incredible. Like Alice in Wonderland feel to it.
Brett: Oh. Thank you.
Tamar: Just you don't know what's around every corner, but it's...everything is, um, unexpected. And they don't go together. Which maybe is that kind of feeling of, uh, of, like, surreal wonderland. But the the plantings bring them together, right? The horticulture kind of ties them together.
Brett: Well, and thank you for noticing that. And I think that's some of the genius of the original plan is these meandering paths. And so with curves you have these corners. And so you can leave one experience and then travel into another. Meandering paths slow people down, speed people up, turn these corners a new experience, those types of things.
Tamar VO: And it's not just outside. Inside, curator Emily Pegues walked me through the cool marble garden courts.
Tamar: Can you describe the walk that we're taking?
Emily: Oh, yes. We're coming down to the end of the long, cool marble hallway, which is lovely on these hot summer days and coming in to the West Garden Court. And these spaces were designed to give you a place to rest your eyes after seeing all the art, to come in and have some tranquility, and then get up and go see some more art from here.
Tamar VO: Of course, we've been hearing from people who work at the National Gallery who feel like it's practically their second home. They're here every day or close to it. And at a museum, familiarity breeds confidence. Even when I worked an internship a couple days a week or gave monthly gallery talks. I was amazed at how intimately I began to know the museum I worked at, and how at home I felt its winding corridors and ever changing gallery wall colors and priceless paintings as reference points. It was like visiting friends. But most people do not spend that much time at a museum. So the time that they do spend is pretty powerful, and often times they want to take a piece of it home with them. They want to take that familiarity with them. And so no museum visit is complete without swinging by the gift shop. Again, here's Lara, the visitor experience representative who used to work in the National Gallery shops.
Tamar: What did people buy?
Lara: Oh, all kinds of everything. A lot of mugs. A lot of scarves. Um, a lot of mugs. A lot of mugs.
Tamar: Yeah. Let me ask, then, because we were talking earlier about the importance of coming in and seeing something in real life-
Lara: Right.
Tamar: -and not seeing the reproduction, but really kind of, you know, sitting with the object, right? Experiencing it in a way that no textbook and no slide ever could write. But then they want to take the reproduction with them.
Lara: Yes.
Tamar: And like, we never bat an eyelash. Like, we know that that's beautiful.
Lara: Right.
Tamar: So what has changed from one to the next?
Lara: That's a good point, I think, because at least for myself personally. Like, once you've had that experience, you can kind of replay that experience at home when you take it. I think it also is that sort of nostalgia, bringing up the reminder of that moment of when you saw that real work. And for me, I can still bring that back up and I can bring up things that I felt when I was looking at that work. I know that sometimes people will have that feeling and they'll want to share that with somebody, but they can't bring them here and have that experience with them. They take a little tiny piece of it with them.
Tamar VO: In our next episode, we're switching buildings, and we're going to be looking at what's magical and mystifying about historic paintings. Centuries old horses, white men, weird babies. Even cows. All in plain sight.
In Plain Sight was written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai. The senior editor is Annie Yi. Our executive producer is Isabella Bulkeley. The music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and you can see all the images at the www.nga.gov/inplainsight or at www.thelonelypalette.com. We'll see you next time.