Originally published on March 26, 2020 (Episode 152)
Introduction
Martha Graham has been described as the “Picasso of modern dance”; she was and remains an icon of modernist high culture. But she was also received at the White House by every President from Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush, and was a cultural ambassador sent abroad by the United States to demonstrate, as today’s guest writes, a “freedom of expression that was available only in a democracy in which artists were not tools of the state and thus not subject to totalitarian intervention or suppression, be it Nazi or Soviet.”
About the Guest
Victoria Phillips is Lecturer in History at Columbia University. She has been a dancer, a portfolio manager on Wall Street, and now a historian of cultural diplomacy and the arts. She is author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy. She also serves as an editor of American Communist History and Dance Chronicle and is a member of the board of the Society of Dance Historians.
For Further Investigation
Victoria Phillips, Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2020)
On cultural diplomacy: Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain
Listen & Discuss
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