Lois Dodd expected to go to secretarial school. A student teacher told her about art schools, suggested the entrance test at Cooper Union, and helped make another path imaginable. Dodd recalled that turn in a 1988 interview now available to read online.
Her account is among 89 oral-history transcripts digitized in a Smithsonian Archives of American Art project described in a November 4 announcement. The interviews span artists, art historians, dealers, collectors and patrons. Three offer particularly different views of how a life in art takes shape.
What changed in the archive
The transcripts were previously public, but readers had to request scans of typescripts, including interviewees' edits. They can now read digital versions online. Archivists also expanded biographical information and subject tags and added women's full names where some records had identified them only by their husbands' names.
The museum does not identify which interviewees had those name omissions. The November announcement also does not establish a single first-online date for every transcript: the individual records below describe retranscription work in 2024 and 2025.
Lois Dodd: the route into painting
Dodd's interview with Barbara Shikler runs to 209 transcript pages, from four sessions in October and November 1988. The recorded interview totals six hours and nine minutes.
The painter, educator and Tanager Gallery co-founder begins with childhood in Montclair, New Jersey. She remembers an art classroom with a banana plant in the middle, encouraging teachers and an assumption that secretarial school would follow high school. At about eight minutes into the transcript, she explains how the student teacher suggested Cooper Union to her and another girl. Both took the test and got in.
She describes arriving at Cooper Union as veterans returned after World War II, among older, serious students. Later subjects include her window paintings, materials, exhibitions and teaching. The archive's preface dates its retranscription from the original audio to 2025.
Dorothea Tanning: making time for the work
Tanning's 1990 conversations with Shikler fill 187 pages and represent five hours and 16 minutes of recordings. They cover painting, commercial art, ballet sets and costumes, sculpture, collage and writing.
In the opening conversation, Tanning admits that she criticizes herself for not working enough. Counting her recent exhibitions makes her feel better. She also describes thinking through a waiting painting while having breakfast in bed, so that she has some idea of what to do before entering the studio. The exchange gives her working day a texture that an exhibition list cannot.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts' account of her career follows her development from early Surrealist paintings into prints, stage design, fabric sculpture and writing. It also records her resistance to labels that confined her to an earlier artistic identity. The archive's transcript was retranscribed in 2024.
Emily Tremaine: learning what to collect
Collector Emily Hall Tremaine's January 24, 1973 interview, conducted by Paul Cummings, is the shortest of these three: 47 pages and one hour and 38 minutes of recorded conversation.
She starts by calling herself a "magpie." Her recollections connect collecting to family influences, visits to museums and galleries with a tutor in Paris, and the encouragement of museum director A. Everett Austin. She describes becoming interested in abstract painting in the 1930s and buying a Braque after seeing pictures at collector Wright Ludington's home.
Later topics include Piet Mondrian's Victory Boogie Woogie, the Miller Company collection and Pop art. The account follows taste as something learned through looking, conversations and purchases. Its preface records a 2024 retranscription of the original audio.
For the dealer's side of collecting, Getty's Stendahl archive supplies letters and invoices about the trade in Mexican antiquities.
Reading the transcripts
Each linked interview page has an Overview and a Transcript tab, plus a Download Transcript link. The overview lists the interview dates, interviewer, length and subjects. The text includes timestamps, making particular passages easier to locate.
The visible audio player offers an excerpt; it should not be confused with online access to the entire recording. The archive also notes that the transcripts are lightly edited spoken language. Dodd and Tanning's prefaces mark later editorial additions in brackets with an editor attribution.
