Face-to-Face, from the National Portrait Gallery

Warren Perry, researcher at NPG, discusses Leopold Stokowski's portrait by Edward Steichen. This 1928 portrait was taken during the second phase of conductor Leopold Stokowski's career, that is, after his divorce from Olga Samaroff and during a period of increasing fame. Recorded at NPG, July 2008. Image info: Leopold Antoni Stanislaw Boleslawowicz Stokowski / Edward Steichen, 1928 / National Portrait Gallery / Acquired in memory of Agnes and Eugene Meyer through the generosity of Katharine Graham and the New York Community Trust, The Island Fund

David Ward, historian at NPG,discusses Octavius V. Catto. Octavious Catto was an African American teacher, civil rights activist, and organizer of one of America's first baseball leagues.

Born in Baltimore, Shinique Smith trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Today she lives in Brooklyn and works in a variety of artistic mediums, including painting, sculpture, collage, and video. The creative manner in which she incorporates materials--found, bought, and created--into bundled sculptures and three-dimensional installations is a hallmark of her art. While not a portrait in a traditional sense, each object resonates with personal significance or recalls something of the individual who owned it. Smith has found inspiration from a diverse range of sources. Japanese calligraphy and abstract expressionism have been important to her, although as a former member of a graffiti crew she has developed a body of work that owes much to the tradition of tagging public space. No Thief to Blame, Smith's installation for "RECOGNIZE!," was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery and represents Smith's creative response to Nikki Giovanni's poem, "It's Not a Just Situation." See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Interview recorded February, 2008. Image info: No Thief to Blame / Shinique Smith, 2007-08 / Mixed media installation (fabric, cardboard, carpet, paper, ink, spray paint, used clothing, found objects, and collage)

For most of Kehinde Wiley's very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects. In 2005, VH1 commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of the honorees for that year's Hip Hop Honors program. Turning his aesthetic on end, he used his trademark references to older portraits to add legitimacy to paintings of this generation's already powerful musical talents. In Wiley's hands, Ice T channels Napoleon, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five take on a seventeenth-century Dutch civic guard company. See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Recorded at NPG, February, 2008. Image info: LL Cool J / Kehinde Wiley, 2005 / Oil on canvas / LL Cool J / Copyright Kehinde Wiley

Since 2000 David Scheinbaum has photographed more than a hundred hip hop performers, both in concert and backstage. His black-and-white images present a nuanced and ultimately uplifting picture of this creative tradition. Scheinbaum has explained, "I am trying to give the viewers both a visual feel for the music and the musicians, a feel for the audience and crowd, and to give a face, an identity, to the many dedicated artists who perform this music and poetry." Scheinbaum has more than thirty years' experience as a photographer, a teacher, and an art dealer. While serving as an art professor at the College of Santa Fe, he has published five books of his photographs. Scheinbaum's portraits are a celebration of hip hop and serve to demonstrate that the negative stereotypes regarding hip hop represent only a small part of its larger significance. See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Recorded at NPG, February, 2008. Image info: Jean Grae, Indio, California / David Scheinbaum, 2005 / Gelatin silver print / Copyright David Scheinbaum

Using the tags "CON" and "AREK," local graffiti artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp began writing together in 2000. Conlon brought a flair for figures to their collaborations, and Hupp excelled at quick, complex lettering. Since graffiti is performed without a public audience, a writer's pseudonym, or "tag," is the face he presents to the world -- his self-portrait. The sophisticated lettering style, color combinations, and patterning of these pieces reveal the expertise of Conlon and Hupp, who are members of the national "crews," Burning America (BA) and Never Show Faces (NSF). Graffiti became a recognizable form of urban expression in Philadelphia in the late 1960s before quickly spreading to the streets and subways of New York City. Now considered one of the four elements of hip hop expression-along with MC-ing, DJ-ing, and break-dancing-graffiti has moved beyond its original negative perception to become a legitimate and vibrant form of visual art around the world. See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Interview recorded January, 2008. Image info: CON/AREK / Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, 2007 / Montana spray paint on Sintra panel / Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

Jefferson Pinder sees his art as a form of sampling, mixing, and remixing his own experience and that of others. Drawing on hip hop culture and his interest in African American identity, Pinder is emerging as a video and film artist of great talent. The videos exhibited in "RECOGNIZE!" are Car Wash Meditations, with its references to cleansing living and mechanical bodies; Mule, in which Pinder literally drags the weight of his own struggles; and Invisible Man, a reference to the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's great novel. Each features Pinder dressed in a suit (his "work clothes") and each may be read as a self-portrait. And yet in each work, Pinder also stands aside, allowing the self to project a larger meaning: "I tap into the well of the public subconscious, seeking to find poetry in the everyday-the mundane." See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Recorded at Jefferson Pinder's studio, January, 2008. Image info: Invisible Man / Jefferson Pinder, 2004