IDENTIFY: Martha McDonald

The Portrait Gallery’s first-ever performance art series, IDENTIFY, focuses attention on activism, visibility, and experimentation in portraiture. This Saturday, Oct. 17, artist Martha McDonald will perform Hospital Hymn: Elegy for Lost Soldiers, which seeks to remember those who lost their lives when the museum’s building served as a Civil War hospital.

McDonald notes:

My performances in historic house museums and gardens explore how these public places connect with private histories and emotional states. Portraiture is often used to memorialize a public figure and convey aspects of the sitter’s character or personality. My work can be seen as a kind of portrait of the site—revealing forgotten histories and remembering the people who lived and worked there. I am fascinated that the National Portrait Gallery was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers during the Civil War and how Walt Whitman ministered to the sick and dying. My performance seeks to conjure the memory of the hospital and memorialize those who died there.

Doors to the Great Hall will open at 12:30. This special standing-room-only performance begins at 1 p.m. and ends at 1:40 p.m. No late arrivals or early departures will be permitted. Associate Curator Dorothy Moss will introduce the performance. For more information, visit our website. Also, be sure to check out McDonald’s interview with Portrait Gallery senior historian David C. Ward in Smithsonian Magazine.

Martha McDonald (b. 1964, Pittsburgh, PA) features handcrafted costumes and objects that are activated by the acts of singing, making, and ultimately undoing of her handwork as “women’s work.” Her work at the Portrait Gallery is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859–1872.”

Support for the IDENTIFY performance art series has been provided by an anonymous donor, the Philip and Elizabeth Ryan Fund, the Director’s Visionary Fund, and other individual contributions.