How the National Gallery of Art Used Video to Take an Exhibition Beyond Its Walls

LaToya Hobbs filmed working in her Baltimore Studio

A multi-platform video strategy built around artist Elizabeth Catlett shows how documentary storytelling, time-lapse filmmaking, and digital installation can turn an exhibition into a living, cross-cultural conversation.

When the National Gallery of Art’s production studio started planning content around its Elizabeth Catlett exhibition — a travelling retrospective that opened in Washington, D.C. in March 2025 — the team wasn’t simply asking how to promote a show. They were asking something more fundamental: how do you honour a legacy this powerful in a way that feels equally powerful?

The answer they arrived at, presented at the Museum Digital Summit 2026 by Sarah Turner, Chad Lawrence, Adam Enatsky, Karla Carnewal Torallas, Amelia Mylvaganam, and colleagues from the NGA production studio, offers a thoughtful model for any museum grappling with the question of how digital content and physical exhibitions can genuinely strengthen each other.

Starting with a Track Record

The NGA production studio came to this project with momentum behind it. Their Like a Great series — which invites contemporary artists to engage with iconic historical works and captures the process on film — had already demonstrated serious audience appetite. A project centred on the sculptor Antonio Canova had generated over three million views across the gallery’s channels, with viewership still growing.

That success reinforced what the team already believed: people want to see how art is made. Process, craft, and the human stories behind finished works create a kind of engagement that conventional exhibition content rarely achieves. The Catlett exhibition gave them the opportunity to take that insight further than ever before.

Elizabeth Catlett: An Artist Whose Work Demands Context

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1915, Elizabeth Catlett studied at Howard University before earning her MFA from the University of Iowa — the first woman to do so. A Rosenwald Fellowship brought her to Mexico in 1946, where she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a workshop that produced thousands of prints used in posters, newspapers, books, and political materials. By 1962, Mexico had become her permanent home, and her work had become inseparable from her commitment to what she called her “two peoples” — Black and Mexican communities.

The exhibition brought together more than 150 works, including rarely seen paintings and drawings. For the production team, the challenge and the opportunity were the same: Catlett’s art is deeply rooted in place, politics, and process. To understand it fully, audiences needed more than wall labels.

One of the defining artists of the 20th century, Elizabeth Catlett 

Building an Intergenerational Narrative

The creative concept at the heart of the project was developed with the gallery’s curators and interpretation team. Curator Rashieda Witter proposed a collaboration that would bridge generations: Baltimore-based artist LaToya Hobbs — whose printmaking practice centres on women of the African diaspora — would create a new linocut portrait of Naima Mora, Catlett’s granddaughter. Decades earlier, Catlett herself had made a sculpture of Naima as a teenager, inspired by watching her twin granddaughters braid each other’s hair.

The project was, in other words, a literal intergenerational dialogue: a contemporary artist reimagining a subject already shaped by a master, within the same medium Catlett made her own.

LaToya Hobbs’s two-month printmaking journey became the backbone of the film. The team captured the process in high-resolution time-lapse — a deliberate choice for social media, where the ability to condense weeks of work into seconds grabs attention quickly and makes complex processes feel approachable. But they also knew that some audiences would want more depth, so they developed a short-form documentary that weaved together LaToya’s practice, Catlett’s legacy, and Naima’s own story.

Taking the Film Across Borders

Production took the team well beyond Washington. They filmed in LaToya’s Baltimore studio, in the sunlit rooms of Catlett’s former workspace in Cuernavaca, and inside the print studio of Raul Cabello in Mexico City — a colleague of Catlett’s from her years at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Ana Iturbe, Armando Huerta, Sylvia Tinoco, and Catlett’s son Juan Mora also appeared, offering firsthand accounts of her world and her working methods. The team even filmed the original plates from Catlett’s Black Woman series — a rare look at one of her most significant bodies of work.

Not everything went to plan. The final print turned out to be too large for the concept that called for printing it at Cabello’s Mexico City studio, requiring a last-minute change of location. Thanks to LaToya’s connections, the final printing was filmed instead at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. It was an example of the adaptability the team came to see as central to the project’s success.

When the Video Became Part of the Exhibition

Curators were so impressed with LaToya Hobbs’s finished print, Dahlias for Naima, that they made the decision to include it in the Catlett exhibition itself. The finished videos were then displayed alongside LaToya’s work and Catlett’s originals, creating a dialogue between physical art and digital storytelling that neither could have achieved alone.

The effect on visitor behaviour was tangible. Rather than moving through the exhibition, visitors lingered — drawn in by the stories behind each piece and by the added context the video installation provided. The content was not supplementary. It had become an integral part of the exhibition experience.

For audiences who couldn’t attend in person, the digital content carried Catlett’s legacy across devices and borders. And while the project generated fewer overall views than the Canova film — around 300,000 at the time of the presentation — posts shared by LaToya Hobbs and Naima Mora on their own channels were among the top performers, reaching distinct audiences that the gallery’s own channels might never have found.

The final artwork by LaToya Hobbs hanging in The National Gallery of Art

What the Project Teaches

The NGA team drew out several lessons that travel well beyond this particular project. Bringing together artists, family members, scholars, and curators produces something richer than any single perspective can. Institutional partnerships — in this case with MICA — can provide not just technical support but access to space, equipment, and community. And showing audiences how work is made, whether through time-lapse or documentary, makes the art and the artists feel more human and more relevant.

Perhaps the deepest lesson, though, was about what video can do that a gallery wall cannot. Catlett’s work was made to travel — printed on cheap linoleum, in large quantities, for trade unions and schools and communities, not for galleries or museums. A production strategy that took her work back out into the world, across social platforms and devices and languages, was in some sense the most fitting tribute of all.

As Sarah Turner put it in closing: “Elizabeth Catlett believed art could change the world. LaToya Hobbs shows us how that legacy continues. And we museums are in the unique position to bring those messages to the world.”

This article is based on a presentation given at the Museum Digital Summit 2026 by John Conway, Adam Enatsky, Scott Keiner, Chad Lawrence, David Goto McCagg, Amelia Mylvaganam, Karla Carnewal Torallas, and Sarah Turner of the National Gallery of Art.