Amy Henderson, Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, offers a virtual tour of One Life: Kate, a NPG multi-media exhibition on the life of Katherine Hepburn.
Patricia Bosworth, the acclaimed biographer of subjects including Diane Arbus and Marlon Brando, and cultural critic, Greg Tate, whose work includes a volume on the life of Jimi Hendrix and whose current work in progress is a biography of James Brown, joins Henderson in a conversation moderated by Emily Braun.
Bio
Patricia Bosworth
Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography inspired the motion picture FUR, starring Nicole Kidman & Robert Downey Jr. Her other books include acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, as well as her memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires. Ms. Bosworth is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. She has taught literary non-fiction at Columbia University and Barnard College and is the winner of the Front Page Award. A long-time Board Member of the Actors Studio, she is currently completing a biography of Jane Fonda for Houghton-Mifflin.
Emily Braun
In addition to her work on modern Italian art and fascist culture, Professor Emily Braun has published on renaissance architecture, late nineteenth-century European painting, twentieth-century American art, women's studies, Jewish history, and contemporary painting and sculpture. She was awarded a Senior Research Grant from the Getty Foundation (1993), the Hunter College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2001), and a Fellowship from the New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (2002). As a contributing author, she has twice received the annual Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts (Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting (1982) and Gardens and Ghettos. (1990) In 2005 she won a National Jewish Book Award for The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name.
Amy Henderson
Amy Henderson has been a cultural historian at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery since 1975, specializing in 20th and 21st century music, movie, and theater history, and in the history of American celebrity culture. Her books and exhibitions include On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (1988); Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical (1996; the SITES traveling version of this exhibition went to 28 venues); Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian (1997); the six-part PBS American Masters series Broadway (2005); "The Changing Face of Celebrity Culture" (2005); KATE: A Centennial Celebration (2007-08); and Elvis at 21 ( forthcoming SITES exhibition, 2009- ).
Greg Tate
Greg Tate is widely acclaimed as one of the most compelling, provocative, insightful, and original cultural critics writing today. An essayist and longtime staff writer for The Village Voice, Tate has published widely, with writings on art, music, and culture appearing in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Spin, Artforum, The Nation, and DownBeat.
His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk (Simon and Schuster, 1992), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Acapella, 1993), and Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (Random House, 2003). He is also a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the conductor and music director of Burnt Sugar, a band, formed by Tate in 1999, that binds jazz, rock, funk, and African music in a lyrical, exploratory and improvisational manner. James Brown Body, a biography of the American music icon is Tate's current work in progress and will be published by Riverhead Books in 2010.
Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery profiles the final years of the legendary actress Katharine Hepburn, still the only woman to win four Academy Awards for acting.
