Articoli

The artwork captions at a museum seem like such a small thing. Yet those short texts provide essential information: the identity of the artists. What would happen if we stopped and read them carefully?

We might realize the significant lack of space and voice given to women artists. That’s one of the reasons behind the National Gallery of Rome’s radical six-year program, Women Up. It brings together many of our works by women artists, while also focusing on the representation of women and the damage done by residual stereotypes. It also highlights what happens when we bring in a more balanced perspective on gender.

Making a meaningful contribution to the visibility of women in the museum means thinking outside the confines of our physical space, and exploring new curatorial techniques. That’s why we’re excited to partner with Google Arts & Culture to bring the entire program online, along with access to one of the most important Italian feminist archives and the new exhibition “lo dico lo — I say I,”  which brings together the works of 40 Italian women artists from different generations.

To introduce the women behind the works, we’ve compiled more than 130 of their stories. You can explore unsettling collages made by Hannah Höch; the brilliant photographs of Dora Maar; the incredible surrealist canvases of Meret Oppenheim; and even the artistic performances of Marina Abramovic, in which the body becomes a powerful expressive language.

We’ve also digitized over 16,000 documents from the Carla Lonzi Archive: The photographs, critical essays, invitations to exhibitions and writings for Rivolta Femminile guide us through the life and work of the noted art critic Carla Lonzi to understand the reasons for a radical position that changed the history of Italian feminism. For the first time Google Arts & Culture automatically transcribed over 4,000 documents using OCR (optical character recognition), transforming the experience of archival materials by making them text-searchable.

And finally, there’s the exhibition “Io dico Io — I say I,” which opens today at the National Gallery and on Google Arts & Culture and features the work of over 40 Italian women artists. Eleven of them turned the camera on themselves, from their homes, and talked about their work and participation in the display. As they speak, the digital exhibitions of their works allow us to enter their world and get up close to every detail.

By curating these projects and exhibitions, and partnering with Google Arts & Culture to make them widely accessible, the National Gallery of Rome is proud to be making itself more and more socially responsible and inclusive.

In this post: Rich Jones, who works in people operations at Google, is the host of a personal finance podcast called “Paychecks & Balances.” He hopes his show can help people learn from his mistakes — and now he’s helping others start podcasts, too.

Several years ago, Rich Jones was on the hunt for personal finance podcasts. But none were right for him. “It felt like every podcast that I listened to either made me feel dumb, or made me feel like I was being lectured by an old white guy in a suit,” he says. “Or it just was really boring.” So he decided to create his own. 

These days, his podcast, “Paychecks & Balances,” has been downloaded more than two million times and recently won an award from the Plutus Foundation, which highlights excellence in financial media. He often records episodes from his Mountain View home in the early-morning hours, then logs on for his job working in People Operations at Google. 

For years, Rich has turned to the internet to express himself. But even though his name is, well, Rich, he didn’t first think of money as a topic to talk about. In fact, he had first blogged about relationships for several years, and then co-hosted a podcast called “2 Guys, 1 Show,” that was about more general topics, including money. 

Rich realized that if he felt lectured by finance podcasters, other people like him — and possibly younger people learning about money for the first time — likely felt the same way. So he and his co-host decided to focus on finances and rename the podcast “Paychecks & Balances.”  They wanted to reach out to younger versions of themselves — and Rich also wanted to represent people like him as well as reach them. “Even now, you won’t find a whole lot of Black men in the personal finance space in particular,” he says. “I think it’s important to be out there as a Black male and show a perspective that you might not be getting elsewhere.” 

For the current season of the show, Rich is hosting the show solo, and he’s continuing to share his own financial progress while also teaching others. When he started the show, he was grappling with credit-card debt after treating his cards like “free money.” Because of his experience, he knows to talk about money in a way that’s relatable and simple, for people just starting to manage their finances. “I don’t call myself an expert,” he says. “Podcasting is a medium for me to talk about my experience. And not just my successes, but the mistakes I’ve made along the way as well.”

Rich is constantly surprised that he keeps getting the same questions over and over — like how to balance a budget, or why not to sign up for a credit card in exchange for a free T-shirt. And over the past year, he’s seen friends fall prey to get-rich-quick scams and even try to sign him up. Rich says this is a symptom of a lack of financial education. “The interesting problem to me is: How do we close that gap where this information feels accessible to everyone, and people are accessing that information a lot sooner?” he says. 

With the growth of his podcast, Rich says people have come to him asking for advice on starting their own podcasts. So this month he launched a YouTube page, The Show Starter, which breaks down advice for people who might not have a technical audio background. “It’ll be a combination of tutorials, reviews and some motivational content, but not the cheesy, corny kind,” he says. “It’s very similar to the approach I take with personal finance topics, where I try to simplify things as much as possible and take out the jargon.” He hopes to one day expand his work into a multimedia company, with multiple brands under the “Paychecks & Balances” umbrella.