Corcoran Gallery of Art

Um, the show was packed the next day and museums came.

And in fact, uh, very interestingly, uh, Terry Sultan, who was the, the c- at that time, the curator of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC, um- She came and saw the show and helped acquire one of my large drawings for the Corcoran Museum at that point, and that was a very big deal for a young artist not, not long out of art school.

Um, and little did I know that Terry and I would cross paths much later, and she would become the chief consultant on this museum project we're working on.

So it's k- a full circle kind of story there.

William E. Scott, the colored artist, has several pictures in the exhibition of the Society of Western Artists.

Henry O. Tanner has two paintings in the special exhibit department of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. One is The Three Marys, and the other The Return of the Holy Women.

George W. Walker, the well-known comedian, is dead.

Crime.

William E. Scott, the colored artist, has several pictures in the exhibition of the Society of Western Artists.

Henry O. Tanner has two paintings in the special exhibit department of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. One is The Three Marys, and the other The Return of the Holy Women.

George W. Walker, the well-known comedian, is dead.

Crime.

William E. Scott, the colored artist, has several pictures in the exhibition of the Society of Western Artists.

Henry O. Tanner has two paintings in the special exhibit department of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. One is The Three Marys, and the other The Return of the Holy Women.

George W. Walker, the well-known comedian, is dead.

crime negro farm laborers are being driven out of turner county georgia and all negroes have been warned to leave the town of butler oklahoma three negroes were lynched in shelby county kentucky one was accused of throwing kisses at white girls the colored man who was arrested in new york on the charge of killing servants in the home of dr cannon a hundred and twenty third street has been finally released in the ohio lynching the only lynching that occurred in the north during nineteen ten one of the mob leaders has been sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary and this one man is a black man If no other of the Ohio lynchers are punished, it will appear that Ohio picked the black man for the scapegoat, and that suggests what is probably true, that the North, if it had the blacks to deal with on as large a scale as in the South, would give them the worst of it in the administration of the law.

William E. Scott, the colored artist, has several pictures in the exhibition of the Society of Western Artists.

Henry O. Tanner has two paintings in the special exhibit department of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. One is The Three Marys, and the other The Return of the Holy Women.

George W. Walker, the well-known comedian, is dead.

Crime.

We were out covering stories.

I happened to be at the Corcoran Gallery covering an exhibit that morning with my photographer.

And all of a sudden, we heard some scrambling going around with staff there that we had to leave the building.

And I said, oh, sure, let me just call back to our desk.

and um and i think probably what i uh what i got my takeaway from his his style of teaching was um i listened he played and i listened and i could hear what he was doing and he would explain what he was doing but i could hear it too and so that's what i do in my studio as well i you know um and also he also had a um He was in a very famous string quartet.

And he would sometimes, he had a Guarneri cello, and he also had a Stradivarius that was on loan to him from the Corcoran Art Gallery.

His quartet had, well, he was in the Cleveland Quartet.

This was Paul Katz.

William E. Scott, the colored artist, has several pictures in the exhibition of the Society of Western Artists.

Henry O. Tanner has two paintings in the special exhibit department of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. One is The Three Marys, and the other The Return of the Holy Women.

George W. Walker, the well-known comedian, is dead.

Crime.

And the title of your book, The Perfect Moment, comes from the name of the retrospective show of the artist Robert Mapplethorpe that was at the heart of one of the skirmishes in the 1980s culture wars.

Remind us or introduce people to what was at stake with that show, which came to the center of attention when it was open at the Corcoran Gallery uh or about to open at the corcoran gallery in washington in 1989.

so basically you know robert maplethorpe is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century he is not single-handedly but one of the major figures responsible for the fact that we take photography on its own terms as seriously as a real art form And early in his career, he shot a number of photos of people displaying their S&M fetishes.

There's one of a man urinating in another's mouth, for example, that people were pretty upset by.

And so there was a retrospective work, sorry, a posthumous retrospective of his work that was due to come to Washington DC to the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

And that show had received direct funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

And so the religious right and its key ally in the Senate, Jesse Helms, saw this as an opportunity to really pounce.

And, you know, because the photographs were so upsetting to so many people, to really use it to kind of beat up on the NEA and to try to reign the National Endowment for the Arts in.