Exploring the papers of San Francisco Bay Area portraitist Lenore Chinn at the Archives of American Art is like experiencing a lifetime of art and activism as a moving collage. The 75-year-old artist’s postcards, letters and scrapbooks reflect a rich career as painter, photographer and organizer. But it is Chinn’s voice, recorded as part of the Archives’ longstanding oral history program, that gives texture to these documents and the people who shaped the artist. The contemplative woman in a black-and white photograph from the late 1960s, for example, was the high school friend who “infused some of my social political consciousness.”
At the Archives of American Art, the longest oral history runs 36 hours—a daunting record for even the most dedicated researcher. To make its oral history content more accessible, the Archives offers a podcast, ARTiculated: Dispatches from the Archives of American Art, which features firsthand accounts from artists, art dealers, writers and other key figures in American art. Sponsored by the Denver-based foundation Next50, the podcast’s current season highlights four artists—including Chinn—who reflect on their long artistic journeys. Muralist Leo Tanguma, for instance, encourages younger artists to “to bear in mind always the human experience, to become familiar, to study it and to see the wondrous things that we have been through.”
Click here to read more about oral history projects happening across the Smithsonian.
Published Winter 2025 in IMPACT Vol. 11. No 1
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