S3E13 Kate Clarke Lemay - National Portrait Gallery

Our guest today is the artsy, funny, and brilliant Kate Clarke Lemay. Kate is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She was the lead historian for the signature exhibitions America’s Presidents and Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. and is currently curating a major exhibition titled 1898: American Imperial Visions and Revisions, which will open on April 28, 2023! Kate also serves as director of PORTAL, the National Portrait Gallery's Scholarly Center. She was Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University at Montgomery and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Brigham Young University. Kate earned a BA in Art History and French from Syracuse University and a PhD in Art History and American Studies from Indiana University.

Kate's publications include Triumph of the Dead: American WWII Cemeteries, Monuments and Diplomacy in France (Alabama, 2018), which was awarded a Terra Foundation in American Art publication. In 2019, she published the eponymous catalog for the Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence exhibit with Princeton University Press. The book received the 2021 Smithsonian Secretary’s Prize for Excellence in Research as well as the 2020 Amelia Bloomer Book Award from the American Library Association. Kate was a guest editor for a special issue on transatlantic diplomacy and war cemeteries for The International Journal of Military History and Historiography. 

Kate is a Fulbright Scholar and her work has been supported by the Terra Foundation in American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Caen Mémorial Museum in France. She is a Presidential Counselor to the National WWII Museum, an advisor to the National Women's Suffrage Monument Foundation, and sits on the Advisory Board of the Association of Historians of American Art’s Panorama Journal.

Join us for a fun and interesting chat with Kate Lemay. We'll talk Delaware, boarding school, researching at the American Battlefield Monuments Commission offices in France, suffering Friend-of-the-Pod Brian Linn's critique of Imperial Visions and Revisions, Foo Fighters, and being BBQ-adjacent. Speaking of which, shout out to Dinosaur BBQ in Syracuse, New York!

As always, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods, and check out the Swag Store on Zazzle! Rec.: 04/14/2023