John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West were born in 1738; Charles Willson Peale, some two and one-half years later. Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, born in 1755 and 1756, respectively, belonged to the next generation. Their paths crossed and recrossed throughout their uniformly long lives. They formed friendships, influenced each other both through their art and personally, competed for clients, and eventually drifted apart, or, in the case of Copley and West, became bitter enemies. This lecture by Jules David Prown focuses on the artists’ personal and professional encounters and interactions to tell the story of how they affected each other’s lives and work.

Kathleen A. Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art delivers the second biennial Wyeth Lecture in American Art, originally presented on October 27, 2005. Codified in the late 18th century as a full-length, life-size portrait with impressive costume and attributes of rank and identity, the Grand Manner portrait evolved in the 19th century to suit the status-consciousness of a new, bourgeois era. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), born and educated in Philadelphia and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris,  painted about two hundred fifty finished portraits in his lifetime (apart from portrait-related figure subjects), most of which depict the sitter at life size but on a small canvas that shows less than half the figure. But from the very outset of his career, and with increasing frequency after 1889, he essayed full-length portraits in the Grand Manner. Between 1870 and 1909, when he all but ceased painting, Eakins produced 36 full-length portrait figures, either seated or standing. A closer look at the choice and treatment of these relatively few sitters teaches us much about Eakins, his methods, and his values. If, as Oscar Wilde remarked, every great portrait is a picture of the artist, this “grand” series reveals in the most ambitious format the identity of the artist, covertly buried in the elaborate perspective coordinates of each composition, or enacted in a private pantheon of colleagues—artists, scientists, and teachers—that embody his grandest aspirations and mirror his sense of self.

Edward Hopper's paintings often show people and places in states of enigmatic isolation, loneliness, and contemplation.  These are among the fabled Hopper themes-so fabled it would hardly seem possible to go beyond them to give another account of his art. Focusing on one Hopper painting, Ground Swell of 1939, this lecture tries to provide a thicker, denser, more surprising story of what it meant for Hopper to make a painting, especially in the year 1939. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Edward Hopper.

Recorded on November 4, 2009, this podcast presents the fourth Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Richard J. Powell focuses on Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) as uniquely empathetic among the many 19th-century artists who depicted African American performance and entertainment. Eakins' Negro Boy Dancing (1887; Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows a young banjo player, an elderly teacher, and an adolescent dancer, evoking the American rage for the form of musical theater known as minstrelsy. Eakins' watercolor, along with two oil-on-board studies at the National Gallery of Art, challenged the tendency of minstrelsy to employ racial ridicule and physical exaggeration. Instead, Powell argues, Eakins adhered to a painterly realism as well as his own brand of empathy and ethics.

Speaker Bryan J. Wolf of Stanford University here presents the fifth Wyeth Lecture in American Art. In the years between 1967 and 1970, Philip Guston scandalized the New York art world by renouncing abstraction and turning instead to figurative modes of painting characterized by cartoonish images that mixed Ku Klux Klan hoods, idioms of popular culture, and a private vocabulary of cigars, light bulbs, legs, shoes, and other assorted—and often hairy—body parts. Buried within these often outlandish works are three recurring concerns: questions of pilgrimage, revelation, and epiphany that link Guston to Hudson River School painting of the nineteenth century; a covert interest in writing as a cultural logic that informs his painting practices; and an obsessive focus on line that distinguishes his art from the drips and gestural forms of Jackson Pollock. Ultimately, each of these concerns points to what can be seen as the real focus of Guston’s figurative work: the history and memory of the Holocaust. Recorded on October 19, 2011.

In this lecture originally presented on November 20, 2013, speaker Jennifer L. Roberts of Harvard University explores one of the fundamental operations of printmaking—reversal—in order to trace its impact on American art across a spectrum of media. Behind every print lies a matrix (from the Latin for mother): a plate or block or stone or screen from which the print has been "pulled." And in most printing processes, the final print is a reversed version of the matrix. Although reversal may seem at first to be a simple geometrical switching operation, its material and philosophical complexity is profound; indeed, one may posit a kind of "negative intelligence" that informs any work of art that deploys reversal. To focus on reversal is to open up new ways of thinking about connections among the fine, decorative, and industrial arts in America, not least because so many prominent American artists from the 18th through the 20th century had backgrounds in print and printmaking. "Apprenticed as an engraver"; "trained as a lithographer"; "found initial success as a commercial artist": such are the typical preludes of American artists' biographies. A rigorous analysis of reversal offers an opportunity to expand the adventure of print from the preludes into the main narratives of the stories we tell about American art. The lecture addresses reversal in several contexts, from the nature prints of Joseph Breintnall in the 1730s to the handprints of Jasper Johns in the 1960s, with a core focus on the later 19th century in the work of James McNeill Whistler and the American trompe-l'oeil painters.

In this lecture, presented on October 21, 2015, speaker Kirk Savage of the University of Pittsburgh discusses the massive physical displacement of bodies during the Civil War, the scale of which was unprecedented in U.S. history. Equally if not more troubling, the war caused a shocking metaphysical displacement of bodies from their names, creating legions of the “unknown” (bodies without names) and the “missing” (names without bodies). This lecture examines how art was invoked and deployed to come to terms with what Savage calls the "metadata crisis" of the war dead. At once material and immaterial, the art of the name provides a lens through which to plumb the transformations in personal and national identity wrought by the catastrophe of mass warfare.

Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine. In this lecture, presented on October 25, 2017, speaker Cécile Whiting of the University of California, Irvine, analyzes the ways in which artists depicted landscapes joining the national and the international. Whiting's research focuses on how American artists recast the terms of landscape painting as it had been practiced in the 1930s, broadening its scope from the local to the international and from the pastoral to the antipastoral. During World War II, maps that pictured troops advancing and retreating across national borders, along with photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in locations around the world (including the naval base of Pearl Harbor, the tropical rain forests of Guadalcanal, and the beaches of North Africa), prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. In particular, the lecture examines paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, who adopted a panoramic mode, literally and metaphorically widening the horizontal scope of their paintings to encompass both the United States and Europe. As a counterpoint, Whiting discusses The Rock , the painting in which Peter Blume attempted to fit the globe into his landscape

Kellie Jones, Columbia University. In this lecture, presented on November 6, 2019, Kellie Jones, of Columbia University, looks at international conceptual art networks and the making of global community in the late twentieth century. The lecture considers moments in the global reach of performance art in the 1970s in locales from Mexico City to London to Los Angeles, considering projects by artists including Felipe Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi, and David Lamelas.

Steven Nelson, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, introduces Patricia Marroquin Norby, associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who will deliver the 2021 Wyeth Lecture in American Art. Watch the 2021 Wyeth Lecture in American Art on the National Gallery’s YouTube channel.

In this lecture, released on December 3, 2021, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), discusses her recent research and curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. Dr. Norby shares her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.

Mark D. Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery. The genre of still life has enjoyed unexpected power in America’s artistic tradition. Its periodic resurgence provides distinct perspective on the nation’s cultural development hewn to individual experience. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Mark D. Mitchell offers a new look at still life, its meaning in America, and its potential for future study. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Wendy Bellion, associate professor, department of art history, University of Delaware. Trompe l’oeil art challenges viewers to make perceptual distinctions between things that look extraordinarily similar. It stages lessons in perception, imitation, and deception while piquing our delight in the pleasures of wit. Drawing upon the National Gallery of Art’s important collection of American still life painting, Wendy Bellion explores the serious fun of illusion in a lecture from the inaugural John Wilmerding Sympsoium on American Art, held at the National Gallery of Art on October 22, 2016. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Jennifer Raab, assistant professor, department of the history of art, Yale University. What does it mean to see a work of art “in detail”? Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Jennifer Raab considers broader questions of detail, vision, and knowledge in 19th-century America by looking at a few of Frederic Church’s most famous landscape paintings. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Rachael Z. DeLue, associate professor, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University. The modern American artist Arthur Dove (1880–1946) drew inspiration from the natural world when making his paintings and assemblages, but he also played around with found objects, popular music, sound technology, aviation, farm animals, meteorology, language, and script, including his own signature. The circle motifs that appear persistently across Dove’s art serve to signify and connect these disparate things, creating a vital and unique form of abstraction, one resolutely if paradoxically bound to objective reality and material existence. As Dove himself said, “there is no such thing as abstraction,” preferring the term “extraction” to describe the essential relationship between his work and the world. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Rachael Z. DeLue discusses some of the chief characteristics of Dove’s extractions, focusing on examples from the Gallery’s collection. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Randall Griffey, associate curator, department of modern and contemporary art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) entered the modernist canon as a result of the abstract paintings he created in Germany in 1914-1915. But the paintings he created of his home state of Maine late in his career beginning in 1937 brought him his greatest acclaim during his lifetime. In fact, Hartley began his career in 1909 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery as a painter of Maine. Previewing a major exhibition to open in March 2017 at the Met Breuer and in July 2017 at the Colby College Museum of Art, Randall Griffey illuminates the painter’s dynamic, rich, and occasionally contradictory artistic engagement with his native Maine. Maine was to Hartley a springboard to imagination and creative inspiration, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a means of communion with previous artists who painted there, especially Winslow Homer. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Griffey showcases Hartley’s impressive range, from early post-impressionist interpretations of seasonal change in the region to late, folk-inspired depictions of Mount Katahdin, the state’s great geological landmark. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Justin Wolff, associate professor of art history, University of Maine. In November 1937 Life magazine featured four lithographs by the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) in the article “Four Ways in Which the World May End.” In this lecture from the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held at the National Gallery of Art on October 22, 2016, Justin Wolff analyzes the so-called “End of the World” lithographs, part of the National Gallery of Art collection, in the context of scientific theories about cosmic cataclysm, suspicions that European fascism portended an apocalypse, and Kent’s solidarity with a radical leftism that anticipated capitalism’s disintegration. Wolff considers looking beyond their political meaning to what the lithographs tell us about Kent’s renowned emotional intensity and wanderlust—specifically, what they reveal about his tenacious quest to acquire psychic integrity in barren lands at the ends of the world. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Nancy Anderson, curator and head, department of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art. When the National Gallery of Art opened in 1941, only ten American paintings were on view. Almost all were portraits. Of these, only one was of a woman—the regal Catherine Brass Yates by Gilbert Stuart. Elegantly dressed in white silk, Mrs. Yates represents the essence of elite society in America following the Revolution. Seventy-five years later, another portrait of a woman in white has joined the collection. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Nancy Anderson shares how Archibald John Motley Jr.’s moving portrait of his grandmother, Emily Sims Motley, a former slave, speaks to a very different American story. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Anne Whiston Spirn, author, photographer, landscape architect, and Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many of Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the recent, important gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser appear in her books An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939) and The American Country Woman (1967), in which she paired photographs to expand meaning. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Anne Whiston Spirn looks at a selection of images from this collection in the context of the pair to which they belong and the captions that Lange wrote for them. “I used to think in terms of single photographs. The Bull’s-eye technique. No more. A photographic statement is what I now reach for. Therefore these pairs, like a statement of 2 words.” By the time she wrote this in 1958 Lange had been experimenting with pairing, sequencing, and captions for more than two decades. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Terence Washington, program assistant, department of academic programs, National Gallery of Art. In the poem “Joy,” Poet Laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith describes the body alternately as memory, as appetite, and as this question: “What do you believe in?” Using works from the Gallery’s collection as examples, Terence Washington, at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art held on March 23, 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, considers different ways the body has been framed in American art. How have the nation’s artists articulated responses to the body’s question? What is at stake in the presentation of those answers here, in the nation’s gallery? The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with artists Janine Antoni, Byron Kim, and Glenn Ligon. At the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art held on March 23, 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, Janine Antoni, Byron Kim, and Glenn Ligon, whose works are featured in the special installation Bodies of Work , discuss their art with Molly Donovan. The conversation rounded out the symposium’s focus on portraiture and the histories and processes of representing the human figure in the nation’s collection. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

David C. Driskell, artist, curator, and Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, University of Maryland at College Park. Archibald Motley Jr.’s paintings of African American subjects underwent drastic changes in style and reception during the artist’s long lifetime. After including Motley’s paintings in his Two Centuries of Black American Art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, David Driskell visited Motley at his home in 1979 and 1980. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, David Driskell presents his recollections of those conversations as well as other impressions of Motley’s work formed during Driskell’s career as an art historian and curator. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Sarah Cash, associate curator, department of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art. Sarah Cash presents a brief history of Hiram Powers’s marble sculpture The Greek Slave at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art. In particular, Cash considers the work’s changing display and reception, both public and private, in Washington, DC from 1848 onward. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

R. Tess Korobkin, PhD candidate, history of art, Yale University, and Ellen Holtzman Fellow, Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, 2017–2018. The fact that Frederick Douglass, a former slave and an outspoken proponent of abolitionism, owned a statuette of Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave raises difficult questions. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Tess Korobkin highlights other examples of reproductions of the sculpture in a range of media to more fully explore the layered and sometimes contradictory political materialities of Powers’s work. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Karen Lemmey, curator of sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Karen Lemmey draws together the two replicas of The Greek Slave commissioned by William Humble Ward: one completed in 1846 and preserved in the Corcoran Collection at the National Gallery of Art, the other completed in 1848 and lost since the early 20th century. Sculptor Hiram Powers cleverly satisfied Lord Ward’s insistent demands for a unique version of the famed composition, revealing his ability to simultaneously entice and manage his patron’s desires. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Charles Brock, associate curator, department of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art. When Both Members of This Club by George Bellows was placed on view at the National Gallery of Art in January 1945 at the behest of Gallery benefactor Chester Dale, it became the first significant work by an American modernist painter to be featured in the permanent collection. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Charles Brock discusses how this unsettling depiction of a violent interracial boxing match was acquired when there was little American or modern painting of any kind at the Gallery and established an important precedent for later efforts to better represent the diverse achievements of American modernism. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

John Fagg, lecturer, department of English literature, University of Birmingham. Robert Henri was referring to a cadaver he and his brother had just dissected when he confessed in an 1886 diary entry: “You put your self in his place.” Over the next two decades Henri developed and taught an approach to painting the body that emphasized breathing, feeling, and moving with one’s subject in reciprocal exchange. George Bellows, one of his students, embodied Henri’s theories in his fleshy, intuitive art, drawing on the experience of his own athletic body to picture the raw physicality of street kids, workers, and boxers. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, John Fagg explores the possibilities and limits of Bellows’s painting as a way to know and represent the bodies and lives of others. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Holly Bass, artistic director, Holly Bass|360. At the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, local artist Holly Bass discusses the importance of audience engagement as it relates to her current practice and the larger national conversation on equity, diversity, and inclusion. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Judith Brodie, curator and head, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. Recent additions to the Gallery’s collection have sparked new discussions and new ways of thinking about “fine” art. Speaking at the second annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on March 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Judith Brodie looks at some examples, including works by Winsor McCay, Saul Steinberg, and the Guerrilla Girls, and considers how they both challenge and conform to established thinking and in what way they reshape the conversation. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Robin Coste Lewis, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence, University of Southern California. In her National Book Award–winning debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus , poet Robin Coste Lewis both narrates and investigates the experience of black women across time and geography. To create the section that gave the book its title, Lewis first conducted countless hours of research in museums and compiled the titles and descriptions of works of art and craft (dated between 38,000 BCE and the present) that featured the images of black women. She then rearranged the titles to create what is at once an elegy for the black women in these artworks and an indictment of the violence done in the writing of Western art history. For the keynote lecture of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Lewis presented “Boarding the Voyage,” the epilogue to a new edition of Voyage of the Sable Venus , discussing the ways her project blends poetry, art history, and autobiography.

Maséqua Myers, executive director, South Side Community Art Center. The South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) is the last of 110 community art centers started by the Works Progress Administration. Founded in 1940 by a team of artists that included Margaret Burroughs and Eldzier Cortor, SSCAC offered early support and instruction to writers and artists, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Gordon Parks, in fulfillment of its mission to support the work of African American artists and to educate South Side residents on the significance of arts and culture for life. In recognition of the center’s decades of relevance to its Bronzeville neighborhood, in 2017 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure, ensuring SSCAC’s survival for the next generation of Chicago residents. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, SSCAC director Maséqua Myers discusses the center’s legacy and its continued relevance for 21st-century artists and residents in Chicago.

Devin Allen, artist and 2017 fellow, The Gordon Parks Foundation; Eric Gottesman, artist and co-founder, For Freedoms, and assistant professor of art, Purchase College, State University of New York; Rick Lowe, artist, founder, Project Row Houses, and clinical professor of art, University of Houston; Maséqua Myers, executive director, South Side Community Art Center; moderated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art For artists Devin Allen, Eric Gottesman, and Rick Lowe, art is inextricable from community.  As a photographer, Allen’s ethic considers what he owes his subjects; Gottesman’s For Freedoms project uses art to engage with citizenship; and Lowe’s Project Row Houses embrace the art of community development. As director of the South Side Community Art Center, Maséqua Myers orchestrates connections between residents of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and art. The four discuss the stakes of the relationship between artists and communities, as Philip Brookman moderates, in this panel conversation at the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019.

Melanee C. Harvey, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University. In a talk focusing on photographic examples of black church iconography from the 1920s through the 1940s, Melanee Harvey compares images of Washington, DC churches by Scurlock Studio photographers with Office of War Information photographs by Gordon Parks. Delivered as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Harvey’s talk describes the context and social function of these photographs, considering the repetition of visual themes used to represent African American religious spaces and practices. By deconstructing reductive visual tropes of the black church, Harvey finds diverse experiences within church experience and explores the diverse aesthetic traditions of black religious expression across denominations, regions and historical periods.

Kellie Jones, professor, department of art history and archaeology, and faculty fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University. The African American women in Charles White’s artworks possess tremendous physical capability and rich interior lives. These depictions of women contributed to an artistic conversation around feminism between White, Elizabeth Catlett, Gordon Parks, and others from the 1930s through the 1950s. Even writers and activists engaged with White’s work; activist Esther Cooper Jackson published White’s drawings in her journal, Freedom Ways , as if to illustrate her central idea that the state of American democracy could be seen in the living conditions of the black women. In her talk from the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Kellie Jones describes how White’s contemporaries helped to shape his work and to provide feminist images of black women in the mid-20th century.

Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Archibald Motley’s painting Black Belt (1934) managed to do more than simply capture the ambience and tempo of Bronzeville, a predominantly African American neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Black Belt also made Bronzeville’s performative and transactional nature palpable, especially in the years of the Great Depression and in response to the mass migration of black Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Richard Powell’s talk, given as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, recognizes Motley’s place in the history of African Americans describing their lives and communities in art.

Laura Wexler, professor of American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, affiliate faculty in ethnicity, race, and migration, cochair, Women’s Faculty Forum, director, The Photographic Memory Workshop, and primary investigator, The Photogrammar Project, Yale University. In 1942, Gordon Parks began working for Roy Stryker, head of the photographic division of Farm Security Administration, or FSA, during which time Parks traveled to Washington, DC, on assignment, documenting life under segregation in the nation’s capital. The next year, the FSA was absorbed into the Office of War Information, which sent Parks to photograph the Tuskegee Airmen. This assignment signaled for Parks a shift from making projects about internal national politics to documenting the war effort, and it had a profound effect on him. In her talk from the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Laura Wexler describes Parks’s experience of segregation in the District and his transition from making. Here Wexler considers whether and how this transition experience might have influenced Parks’s later commitment to photography.

Melanee C. Harvey, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University; Kellie Jones, professor, department of art history and archaeology, and faculty fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University; Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Laura Wexler, professor of American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, affiliate faculty in ethnicity, race, and migration, co-chair, Women’s Faculty Forum, director, The Photographic Memory Workshop, and primary investigator, The Photogrammar Project, Yale University; moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz, exhibition research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art Throughout his career, Gordon Parks explored many issues, including segregation, feminism, and nationhood, through writing, photography, and film. Much of Parks’s early photographic output came through his affiliation with government programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Office of War Information. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, art historians Melanee C. Harvey, Kellie Jones, Richard J. Powell, and Laura Wexler discuss Parks’s work for the government and how his photographs participated in a larger social conversation. This panel discussion is moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz.

Devin Allen, artist and 2017 fellow, The Gordon Parks Foundation. In April 2015, widespread protests in Baltimore, Maryland—locally termed the Baltimore Uprising—erupted after an African American man named Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered while in police custody. Photographer Devin Allen, a native of Baltimore, immersed himself in the protests and made images of both civil unrest and community solidarity in his home city. The events in Baltimore corresponded to a larger national frustration around civilians being killed by police; soon, a mere two years after taking to photography, Allen became the third amateur photographer ever to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now” held on February 8, 2019, Allen, a 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow, discussed the ethics of photographing his community and the influence of Parks’s work on his own.

Eric Gottesman, artist and cofounder, For Freedoms, and assistant professor of art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Eric Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, and teaches, using art to explore aesthetic, social and political culture; his work has taken him to countries like Ethiopia and Jordan and to indigenous communities in Canada with projects that have questioned nationhood and investigated local histories. With For Freedoms, “a platform for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action” founded in 2016 in collaboration with artist Hank Willis Thomas, Gottesman partners with institutions and communities all over the United States to facilitate meaningful political discourse and engaged citizenship through art. Gottesman spoke about his use of art for community-building at the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019.

Rick Lowe, artist, founder, Project Row Houses, and clinical professor of art, University of Houston. In its 25-year history, Project Row Houses has grown from 22 houses on a block and a half in Houston’s Third Ward to six blocks and 40 properties. Artist Rick Lowe and his team have, among other things, renovated shotgun houses to provide homes for single mothers, built new structures for affordable housing, reinvigorated a historically black ballroom, and opened spaces for creating and displaying art. On February 8, 2019, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” Lowe describes the past and future of Project Row Houses and the continuing importance of its founding principle: “That art—and the community it creates—can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed inner-city neighborhoods.”

Julie L. McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and art history, and director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware; author of David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar; and curator of David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History (High Museum of Art, February 6–May 9, 2021; Portland Museum of Art, June 19–September 12, 2021; and The Phillips Collection, October 16, 2021–January 9, 2022). For this keynote address recorded on August 21, 2020, Julie L. McGee reflects upon the artist’s studio as a place of professional mark-making. As Driskell once noted, “The studio is a place of joy, comfort, reassurance, as well as a place to meditate and pray. It is my sacred grove.” Centering Driskell’s impact as an artist, educator, and curator, McGee observes ensures that we see American art more comprehensively, and that we more insistently mark the contributions of historically Black colleges and universities to American art history. The fourth annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Curlee Raven Holton, artist, art historian, master printmaker, David M. and Linda Roth Professor of Art Emeritus, and director (2012–present), David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to his appointment as director of the Driskell Center, Curlee Raven Holton had a long-standing relationship with David C. Driskell as a friend, fellow artist and academic, and master printmaker. During this behind-the-scenes filming at Raven Fine Art Editions on August 19, 2020, Holton shares the history of their printmaking journey through works created together—beginning in 2003 with Driskell’s request to make Brown Derby and later Woman in Interior, both in the Gallery’s collection. Driskell modeled a generous sense of humanity in his practice as a scholar and teacher, as well as in the studio. He valued works by African American artists as reflections of the past and as deserving of greater illumination and significance in the present. Driskell understood these as records of achievement and expression of existential reality that these artists are here, seen, and celebrated. For Holton, Driskell’s “life and career were a reaffirmation of the goodness of spirit and goodness of creative genius, and how it could serve us.” The fourth annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and David C. Driskell Prize recipient (2011). In this presentation recorded on August 26, 2020, Valerie Cassel Oliver traces David C. Driskell’s career from the mid-1950s at Howard University—arguably the birthplace of African American art history—through to his influence on contemporary artists and scholars who are ensuring that this legacy continues. A Howard University alumna and David C. Driskell Prize recipient, Cassel Oliver elucidates the particulars of Driskell’s education and work, while demonstrating his role as a nurturer, standard-bearer, and torchbearer of knowledge. She concludes with a discussion of the deep responsibility of being custodians of the living history of African American art. The fourth annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Alvia J. Wardlaw, professor of art history, department of visual and performing arts, and curator and director of the University Museum, Texas Southern University In this presentation recorded on August 31, 2020, Alvia J. Wardlaw discusses how David C. Driskell laid the critical groundwork for the study of African American art through his tireless study of past scholarship and contemporary artists, as well as his meticulous archiving and documentation. Wardlaw considers Driskell's awareness of the importance of each moment, past and present, as a means of forging new paths and discoveries, creating roadmaps for those that follow. She began referring to Driskell’s roadmaps when she was a graduate student of African American art, with the work of James A. Porter as a starting point, and later with Driskell himself serving on her dissertation advisory board. Wardlaw describes the importance that Driskell’s landmark exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art held for her as an aspiring scholar and how Driskell created opportunities for her as a young professional. She points to Driskell’s direct impact on the growth of institutional collections of African American art as one of his final, lasting contributions as a cultural cartographer. The fourth annual John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Jefferson Pinder, artist and professor of sculpture and director of academic affairs for diversity, equity, and inclusion, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Jefferson Pinder’s work provides evocative commentary on race and forms of struggle. He aims to investigate aspects of personal identity through the materials of neon, found objects, performance, and video. From uncanny video portraits using popular music to durational works that put the black body in motion, his practice offers an exploration of the physical conditions that reveal emotional responses. Pinder creates space for observers to directly confront the contemporary, material consequences of racial oppression in the United States. On September 17, 2020, in honor of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: A Tribute to David C. Driskell, Pinder premiered a new performance piece that speaks to his interest in bodies in motion in this time of social distancing and protest. In Prowl , black and brown drivers slowly circle through a historically white Chicago neighborhood in which many police officers call home, the choreography of their vehicles documented by people on foot. The work hopes to spark conversation about propriety of space and to embody ideas of surveillance. Pinder was Driskell’s assistant (1999–2003) and the first Fellowship Recipient in Art from the David C. Driskell Center (2002–2003). The fourth annual symposium was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This performance was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Introductory remarks by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; conversation with artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems, moderated by Sarah Workneh, codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and Q&A joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw Kaywin Feldman and Lonnie G. Bunch III introduce this artist conversation held on September 17, 2020, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, A Tribute to David C. Driskell. Moderated by Sarah Workneh, artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems gather to discuss Driskell’s impact on their own practices as artists and teachers. During a public Q&A, the artists are joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw, who prerecorded symposium tributes. This fourth annual symposium was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Virtual introduction by former First Lady Michelle Obama; poetry reading and discussion with Ross Gay; and virtual exhibition tour with Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz. Ross Gay, poet, gardener, professor, department of English, Indiana University Bloomington, founding board member, Bloomington Community Orchard, co-founder, The Tenderness Project, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; with Seth Feman, deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography, Chrysler Museum of Art, and exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; and Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art, Columbus Museum of Art, exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session presenter

Presentations on Thomas’s studio art training and involvement with galleries, museums, and universities by Renee Maurer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Rebecca VanDiver, followed with discussion moderated by Steven Nelson Renee Maurer, associate curator, The Phillips Collection, and coordinating curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; Nell Irvin Painter, artist, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; and Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, Dean's Faculty Fellow (2019–2021), Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities (2020–2021), Vanderbilt University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor. Moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, the Center (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art

Presentations on Thomas’s aesthetic and social environment by Melanee Harvey, Margie Jervis, Marya McQuirter, and Thaïsa Way, followed with discussion moderated by Charles Brock. Melanee Harvey, assistant professor and coordinator of art history, Howard University, Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session chair; Margie Jervis, artist and scenic designer, Creative Cauldron of Falls Church; Marya McQuirter, independent researcher, writer, curator, and scholar, faculty member, department of history and director of the Public History Collaborative (PHC) at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment at the University Libraries, curator of the dc1968 project, author of the African American Heritage Trail Guide, Washington, DC; and Thaïsa Way, program director of garden and landscape studies, Dumbarton Oaks. Moderated by Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art

Elizabeth Alexander, poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, cultural advocate, and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, discuss their connections to Thomas’s life and work. This conversation was filmed at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery while Alternative Worlds, a group exhibition featuring the work of Alma Thomas, was on view.

The final session of American University’s Feminist Art History Conference, cohosted by the National Gallery, brings together distinguished curators to discuss contemporary issues in museum practice. Lauren Haynes, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Christine Sciacca, associate curator, European art 300–1400 CE, Walters Art Museum; and Christina Yu Yu, Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Moderated by Mikka Gee Conway, chief, diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer and EEO director, National Gallery of Art.

Artists Rosana Paulino and Cameron Rowland explore the lasting legacy of slavery in their works of art. This is the first talk of the three-part series  "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies. Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html

Erica Buddington, Nona Faustine, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers  present archival research–based practices that create and uplift missing narratives. This is the second talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies. Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html

Clint Smith, Renée Stout, and Hank Willis Thomas present on the role of history and memory in shaping American culture and identity. This is the third talk of the three-part series “John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories,” which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies. Watch the entire video by Hank Willis Thomas titled “A Person is More Important Than Anything Else…,” commissioned by NY Live Arts for the Year of James Baldwin: https://hankwillisthomas.com/WORKS/Video/2 Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock , is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 30, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe begins with Jackson Pollock at a key moment in the emergence of a new form of abstract art in the mid-1950s. Building on Ernst Gombrich's Mellon Lectures of 1956, Varnedoe begins by asking: Can there be a philosophy of abstract art as compelling as Gombrich's argument for illusionism? What is abstract art good for? And finally, what do we get out of abstract art?

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock , is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 6, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe discusses the reactions of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns to prewar traditions of constructivism, and the initiation of new movements that utilized similar forms but with very dissimilar premises. While raising the question of whether abstract art can have a fixed meaning, he argues that abstraction provides no respite from interpretation or retreat from the contingencies of art history.

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock , is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 13, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe contrasts multiple forms of minimalism in the 1960s, as seen in the works of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and James Turrell, and examines, among other things, the degree to which this art is quintessentially American.

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock , is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 27, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe marks 1968 as a turning point in minimalism, when a new organicism emerged in the work of Richard Serra and Eva Hesse. A change in scale and in relationship to the body and to landscape is epitomized in works such as Walter De Maria's Lightning Field , Michael Heizer's Double Negative , and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty .

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock , is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 4, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe explores the 1980s, when Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenburg, and others confronted the ironic relationship between abstraction and the representation of man-made objects, thus producing a politicized critique of abstraction. Varnedoe concludes by looking at artists including Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly, whose varied approaches shifted abstract art from its position as the ultimate modern art to one of many options.

Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study. This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this sixth and final lecture of the series, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 11, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe returns to a question raised in lecture one: Can an argument be made for abstraction as a legitimate part of both our cognitive process and our nature as a modern liberal society? Varnedoe leads the listener through a tour of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses , making an impassioned case for abstraction as an art of subjectivity- an art dependent on experience, human invention, and constant debate.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University. This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 27, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard introduces the prejudices, conventions, and disagreements that underlie the identification and reception of Roman imperial portraits beginning with Julius Caesar.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 3, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard traces the emergence of imperial portraits, their role in the iconography of Roman power, and their shifting interpretations and latent significances in the modern world.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 10, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard shows how portraits of emperors took part in the transmission of power, legitimizing in marble an authorized genealogy of descent.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 17, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard discusses the role of female members of the imperial court in terms of dynastic succession, the transmission of power, and their representation in antique and post-antique art.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 1, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard considers the fluid, dynamic, and productive category of emperor groups, which became a popular theme of Western art following the first printing of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars in 1470.

Mary Beard, Cambridge University This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this sixth and final lecture of the series, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 8, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard summarizes the complexity of the reception of images of Roman imperial life and power as they have been altered, combined, redefined, and proliferated in all media.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this first lecture, entitled “How Jesus Celebrated Passover: The Jewish Origins of Christianity,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 30, 2014, Grafton explores how the pictorial form of the Last Supper, a central theme in art, was radically transformed after the beginning of the Reformation in 1517. He shows how writers with great archaeological and historical learning delved into Roman antiquities and Jewish texts from the time of the origins of Christianity in order to bring back the world in which the Last Supper actually took place.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century.  In this second lecture, entitled “Bearers of Memory and Makers of History: The Many Paths to Christian Antiquity,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 6, 2014, Professor Grafton argues that the history of knowledge was for millennia a history of books, the production of which established new standards of study and argument and ultimately the great libraries of Europe. Knowledge about the early church took the form of immense books—the work of learned scholars rich in erudition and impassioned by their beliefs, whose scholarship was often deeply prejudiced but sometimes reached original, prescient, and unexpected conclusions.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this third lecture, entitled “Christian Origins and the Work of Time: Imagining the First Christians,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 13, 2014, Professor Grafton extols the religious imagination of the humanists who plumbed the early sources of Christian and Jewish traditions in order to write histories of the early church, producing unprecedented and radical visions of Christian origins.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this fourth lecture, entitled “Relics and Ruins: Material Survivals and Early Modern Interpretations,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 27, 2014, Professor Grafton reveals Catholic and Protestant sensibilities as extremes that touched when scholars of both denominations feared the loss of tangible evidence of early Christian practice and ritual threatened in the course of modernization and destroyed in the wake of religious wars. Even as critical attitudes arose regarding the authenticity of these material remains, the past was seen in a new light in which they were acknowledged as witnesses to the pious traditions of the early church rather than as sources of corruption and deception.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this fifth lecture, entitled “Martyrdom and Persecution: The Uses of Early Christian Suffering,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 4, 2014, Professor Grafton shows that early Christian martyrs were seen as the core of the true church and thus were used in the Renaissance by Catholic and Protestant scholars alike to defend either the status quo or reform agendas. Visual and textual references to ancient and modern martyrs were tightly linked in this period. Ancient martyrdom resonated with both the devout and the radical at a time when the theater of violence created by the first ideological wars in Europe made martyrdom not a distant, but a living experience, melding past, present, and future.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe , Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this sixth lecture, entitled “Constantine and Conversion: The Roles of the First Christian Emperor,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 11, 2014, Professor Grafton argues that in their retelling of the dramatic and exemplary life of Constantine, scholars and artists forged new forensic, historical, and multidisciplinary approaches. They used philological and antiquarian evidence to unpack a layered and incoherent body of evidence that exposed the apocryphal legends of what has been called an “inherited conglomerate.” Protestant and Catholic writers concurred in their assessment that Constantine’s reign marked a radical transformation of art and religion and was thus a historical moment of great consequence—yet one or two began to see Constantine in less dramatic terms, as the human, political figure that he was. The erudition and imagination of these scholars and artists in the early modern period produced sophisticated and acute views of the early church, from which we can still profit today.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this first lecture, entitled “Moscow Burns / The Pope Comes Home, 1812‒1814: David, Gros, and Ingres Test Empire’s Facade,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 15, 2015, Professor Crow describes how key works by David, Gros, and Ingres, fashioned during this tumultuous two-year period, convey the tensions and fissures engendered by the unsustainable character of Napoleon’s foundering empire.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this second lecture, entitled “At the Service of Kings, Madrid and Paris, 1814: Aging Goya and Upstart Géricault Face Their Restorations,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 22, 2015, Professor Crow examines how Goya and Géricault were similarly moved to transform artistic antecedents, dislodging even the primacy of the human subject as an adequate vehicle for expressing the violent uncertainties of their moment in history.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this third lecture, entitled “Cut Loose, 1815–1817: Napoleon Returns, David Crosses Borders, and Géricault Wanders Outcast Rome,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 29, 2015, Professor Crow examines the displaced and wandering existences of David and Géricault, both in geographical and psychological exile, during which each was forced to reexamine and reconfigure the fundamentals of his artistic life.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this fourth lecture, entitled “The Religion of Ancient Art from London to Paris to Rome, 1815–1819: Canova and Lawrence Replenish Papal Splendor,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 12, 2015, Professor Crow shows how Rome, where both Italian and English artists served as agents in the repatriation of ancient art, became an international nexus in post-Napoleonic European culture. The difficulties of this endeavor, captured by Lawrence in his portrait of the reigning pope, came to symbolize the larger conflicts underlying dynastic restoration across Europe.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this fifth lecture, entitled “The Laboratory of Brussels, 1816–1819: The Apprentice Navez and the Master David Redraw the Language of Art,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 19, 2015, Professor Crow demonstrates how the exiled David seized the medium of drawing to foster new ways of selecting and reorganizing fragments of a discarded past.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820 , Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this sixth lecture, entitled “Redemption in Rome and Paris, 1818–1820: Ingres Revives the Chivalric while Géricault Recovers the Dispossessed,” originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 26, 2015, Professor Crow extols Ingres’s and Géricault’s achievement in reconciling the immensity of inherited pain and loss in post-Napoleonic France with the established discipline of painting on monumental canvas. Their efforts transformed for a generation what a painting could be and could do.

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian Art, Columbia University. In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280 , art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. The first lecture, held on April 3, 2016, entitled " Gods on Parade: Sacred Forms of Copper," focuses on the extraordinary concept of the deity as an active participant in a range of temple festivities, celebrating a wedding anniversary or enjoying the fresh breeze at the beach. It examines the introduction of copper to produce these many bronzes, whose method of creation allows no replicas; each Chola bronze is a singular, unique image, solid and weighty.

In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280 , art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. The second lecture, held on April 10, 2016, entitled "Shiva as 'Victor of Three Forts': Battling for Empire, 855 – 955," considers the first bronzes, created in the mid-ninth century at a time when the early Chola kings were still struggling to establish their dominion in south India. The lecture discusses the most favored form given to the god Shiva during these politically unstable times: his manifestation as Victor of Three Forts. It also reviews the extraordinary manner in which patrons and donors placed inscriptions on every available space on temple walls, base moldings, and even grille windows.

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian Art, Columbia University. In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280 , art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. In this third lecture, entitled "Portrait of a Queen: Patronage of Dancing Shiva, c. 941–1002," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 17, 2016, Professor Dehejia explores the patronage of the 10th-century queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, whose bronze workshop created stunning images. It asks how she achieved the status of “Ruby of the Chola Dynasty” in a male-dominated society and what led her to introduce a special image of Dancing Shiva that to this day is the quintessential Tamil icon.

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian Art, Columbia University. In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280 , art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. In this fourth lecture, entitled "An Eleventh-Century Master Sculptor: Ten Thousand Pearls Adorn a Bronze," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 24, 2016, Professor Dehejia describes how a master sculptor of the early 11th century worked in wax to create spectacular bronzes for a temple at Tiruvenkadu, along the Bay of Bengal, and highlights the fact that royalty had no hand in these commissions. Drawing on the many epigraphs inscribed on Emperor Rajaraja’s great temple at Thanjavur, it examines the rich jewelry created entirely to adorn the bronze images and questions whether the Cholas’ obsession with pearls motivated them to annex Sri Lanka.

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian Art, Columbia University. In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280 , art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. In this fifth lecture, entitled "Chola Obsession with Sri Lanka and the Silk Route of the Sea in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 1, 2016, Professor Dehejia examines the bronze images of deities created in Buddhist Sri Lanka after it became a province of the Chola empire. Artists there, accustomed to creating relatively sedate forms of the Buddha, were baffled by a Dancing Lord whose very essence was movement. The lecture also reviews the Chola expeditions to southeast Asia in the context of the lucrative trade route between Aden and China.

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian Art, Columbia University. In this six-part lecture series entitled The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes from South India, c. 855–1280, art historian Vidya Dehejia discusses the work of artists of Chola India who created exceptional bronzes of the god Shiva, invoked as “Thief Who Stole My Heart.” Graceful, luminous sculptures of high copper content portrayed the deities as sensuous figures of sacred import. Every bronze is a portable image, carried through temple and town to participate in celebrations that combined the sacred with the joyous atmosphere of carnival. In these lectures, Dehejia discusses the images as tangible objects that interact in a concrete way with human activities and socioeconomic practices. She asks questions of this body of material that have never been asked before, concerning the source of wealth that enabled the creation of bronzes, the origin of copper not available locally, the role of women patrons, the strategic position of the Chola empire at the center of a flourishing ocean trade route between Aden and China, and the manner in which the Cholas covered the walls of their temples with thousands of inscriptions, converting them into public records offices. These sensuous portrayals of the divine gain their full meaning with critical study of information captured through a variety of lenses. In this sixth lecture, entitled "Worship in Uncertain Times: The Secret Burial of Bronzes in 1310," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 8, 2016, Professor Dehejia looks at the dramatic secret burial of bronzes in temple after temple in 1310, an attempt to safeguard them from armies of the Delhi sultanate that marched south to seize the fabled jewels of the Chola temples. These buried bronzes emerged in the 20th century when unsuspecting laborers began temple expansion projects. The lecture concludes with a look at today’s art market and the transformation of beloved sacred bronzes into highly prized works of art.

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The first lecture, held on March 26, 2017, “Herodotus among the Trees,” considers the questions: How does life get into art? What were the definitions of life and of art in the United States in the 1830s? How might life and art have met and diverged there and then—for example, in two landscape paintings by Thomas Cole?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time.  The second lecture, held on April 2, 2017, The Tavern to the Traveler: On the Appearance of John Quidor’s Art,” focuses on the work of John Quidor. Quidor made fine-art paintings in the 1830s; he also was a sign painter. How are Quidor’s fine-art depictions of Ichabod Crane and Natty Bumppo like tavern signs? Do they appear as such a sign might have to a traveler—as a promise of succor and rest, of welcome if temporary relief to a wayward soul? How might art have imagined itself as a destination, a short-lived home, surrounded and even stained by the emptiness of American life?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time.  The third lecture, held on April 9, 2017, is entitled “The Aesthetics of Superstition.” According to legend in 1830s Michigan, if you were bitten by a rattlesnake, the skin around the bite would resemble the pattern of the snake’s skin.  How might the world then have been imagined as a poisonous pattern that entered into individual bodies? How might art, returning the favor, have bitten the world in such a way that the world eerily resembled it? And how might artists and writers, such as the youthful Francis Parkman, greatest of all historians of the American forest, have believed in this magical identity between world and image?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time.  The title of the fourth lecture, held on April 23, 2017, is “Animals Are Where They Are.” A tobacco bag made from the skin of a black-footed ferret, created by an Eastern Plains tribe around 1840, both is and is not a creature that once roamed through the woods. Augmented by leather, festooned by porcupine quills, wool cloth, silk ribbon, bird claws, brass bells and buttons, metal cones, a feather and animal hair, the ferret is exalted beyond its padding, ravenous life on the forest floor. Yet it is still itself, the same as it ever was. What is the special quality of animals that remains “in” works of art, even after they have been primped and styled and transformed into sacred and separate objects? As in the scholarship of Jennifer Roberts, how might John James Audubon’s depictions of birds have explored this same idea—that the creature, no matter how represented, always remains what and where it is?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time.  The fifth lecture, held April 30, is entitled “Emerson, Raphael, and Light Filtering through Trees.” On March 28, 1833, in Rome, Ralph Waldo Emerson first saw Raphael’s Transfiguration . “What tenderness & holiness beams from the face of the Christ in that Work,” he wrote later that year, avowing that Raphael’s picture was the greatest he had ever seen. Transposed to the American woods, Raphael’s Jesus suggested the transfiguring glories of nature. Yet on the dark forest floor, in the woods of Hawthorne and Cooper, what Pan-like god lurked, idling in isolated pools, sullenly reflecting only on itself?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s , Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time.  The title of the sixth and final lecture, held May 7, 2017, is “The Forest of Thought: On the Roof with Robert Montgomery Bird.” Bird, author of the bloodthirsty frontier novel Nick of the Woods (1837), turned late in his life to photography, making pictures in 1852-1853 from the roof of his Philadelphia home. Austere and eerie, Bird’s depopulated photographs of Philadelphia rooftops ruminate in Poe-like fashion on artistic isolation and private thought. They also strangely call to mind Bird’s fascination with split skulls and brains—the preferred mode of murder in Nick of the Woods . How do the heights of the head and the heights of the building both portray the attic of the mind, the (seemingly unrepresentable) forest of thought? The greatest dream of representation, if it would portray life itself, would be to catch fleeting thought on the wing.

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of Jean Dubuffet, Georges Bataille, Asger Jorn, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Claes Oldenburg. In the first lecture, “Walter Benjamin and His Barbarians,” held on April 8, 2018, Foster probes how modernist art “teaches us to survive civilization if need be.”

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the second lecture, “Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes,” held on April 15, 2018, Foster asks why Dubuffet invented the notion of art brut and how the artist could imagine an art “unscathed” by culture.

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the third lecture, “Georges Bataille and His Caves,” held on April 22, 2018, Foster asks what Bataille saw in the “enigma” of the cave paintings of Lascaux.

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the fourth lecture, “Asger Jorn and His Creatures,” held on April 29, 2018, Foster considers how Jorn saw the beastly figures of his CoBrA paintings as expressions of political crisis.

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the fifth lecture, “Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods,” held May 6, 2018, Foster discusses how Paolozzi found a path to postwar survival in industrial debris.

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period , Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the sixth and final lecture, “Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns,” held May 13, 2018, Foster examines how Oldenburg staked his hope for metamorphosis in the transformation of urban scrap.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the first lecture, “The Emergence of Dynastic Time in Chinese Art,” delivered on March 31, 2019, Wu Hung begins by introducing the concept of dynastic time and its sustained role in narrating the history of Chinese art then traces this narrative mode to the fourth century BCE, when a body of texts associated visual and material forms with a succession of archaic dynasties.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time , Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the second lecture, “Reconfiguring the World: The First Emperor’s Art Projects,” delivered on April 7, 2019, Wu Hung introduces an alternative “dynastic history” of art that emerged in the fourth century BCE, and then explores the relationship of the First Emperor’s various art projects, including the legendary Twelve Golden Men and the sculptures in his Lishan Necropolis, to this historic narrative.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time , Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the third lecture, “Conflicting Temporalities: Heaven’s Mandate and Its Antitheses,” delivered on April 14, 2019, Wu Hung discusses the art of the Han dynasty, which evolved through complex interactions with a new political ideology and historiography rooted in the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, either by legitimating dynastic power or by challenging it with antithetical visual modes.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time , Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the fourth lecture, “Miraculous Icons and Dynastic Time: Narrating Buddhist Images in Medieval China,” delivered on April 28, 2019, Wu Hung examines the introduction of Buddhist art during the Period of Division and the reunification of the Sui and the Tang, when “miraculous icons” became a central subject in both historical narrative and art making, and the concept of dynastic time remained, while its meaning and utility underwent constant negotiation between religious and political authorities.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time , Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the fifth lecture, “Art of Absence: Voices of the Remnant Subject,” delivered on May 5, 2019, Wu Hung focuses on the moment after the fall of a dynasty and examines its relationship with artistic creation and the construction of art history.

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time , Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the sixth and final lecture, “End as Beginning: Dynastic Time and Revolution,” delivered on May 12, 2019, Wu Hung examines the end of China’s dynastic history in 1912 through an exploration of the concept of time at this interim moment, the transformation of a person’s body and image, and an emerging modern visual culture that exhibits its newness against the traditional modes of self-representation.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this first lecture, “Pressure,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on April 25, 2021, Roberts explores how a print is an image transferred, under pressure, between two surfaces in direct physical contact. Every print is the record of a contact event: pressure followed by release. This makes print an especially subtle medium for exploring alternative models of the sensory image and for working through the social continuum of touch, from intimacy to violence.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this second lecture, “Reversal,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 2, 2021, Roberts explores how every predigital print process produces some form of reversal—the entire history of printing is based on the reversal of information. Making prints thus requires a certain backwardness; the capacity to imagine things from the other side is compulsory. This is especially true for artists using text. An attunement to reversibility allows for unique ways of exploring communication and confrontation in bodily space.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this third lecture, “Separation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 9, 2021, Roberts explores how in printmaking, color must be broken down and reassembled through separation, layering, sequencing, and registration. Most color prints are, in essence, piles of broken color: stratified, even geological affairs that bear little relation to the fluid spontaneity that is often associated with color in other media. Thinking through color separation suggests new models of the image as a structure of assembly and risk and opens a space for examining the intersection of print and critical race theory.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print , Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fourth lecture, “Strain,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 16, 2021, Roberts explores how many modern printmaking processes involve passing ink or light through screens or meshes, especially when converting continuous-tone photographs into printable formats. These processes create the conditions in which most exchanges between the ink-world of print and the light-world of photography take place, and also link the practice of making images to a long history of straining, sifting refining, and filtering in material and political realms beyond the art world.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print , Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fifth lecture, “Interference,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 23, 2021, Roberts explores how the layering of images in printmaking, especially when grids and regular linework are involved, often results in the emergence of interference or moiré patterns. While printers usually work hard to keep these disruptive eruptions at bay, some artists have cultivated them, allowing unruly patterns to emerge from the combination of seemingly rational image layers. Moiré patterns also bring printmaking into conversation with the sound arts, which are built on the same waves, frequencies, and beats that are used to describe print interference.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts will focus on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this sixth and final lecture, “Alienation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 30, 2021, Roberts explores the intricate and often counterintuitive effort of creating matrices for printing (woodblocks, copperplates, etc.) has been a form of invisible labor for centuries. How do we think about the relationship between the time and skill put into the matric and the value of the image in generates? (Or: where does all the time go?) This final lecture investigates the misregistration of time in print, especially in terms of the conflicts—and convergences—between slow and fast media that are frequently staged in contemporary printmaking.

Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, introduces Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, who will deliver the 70th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Richard J. Powell of Duke University traces the visual and conceptual synergies of colors in the works of selected painters. Color does more than serve artistic goals and capture the attention of viewers; it assaults one’s equilibrium.  In the case of painters—for whom hue and pigmentation carry surplus associations—color performs extra duties, especially when prismatic interactions and the sociocultural dynamics of race collide in unanticipated ways. This is the first talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

The Bauhaus artist and theorist Josef Albers declared that a color’s quintessence “is of less concern than what it does.” Richard J. Powell’s talk revisits this idea through the cool and relatively modern color viridian. A dark green-blue hue, viridian and its professed theatricality were not only commented upon by Albers, but also “cast” in countless paintings by artist Jacob Lawrence, a looming 20th-century figure of narrative art and visual modernism. This is the second talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

This talk takes part of its title from a painting by the acclaimed Washington, DC, artist Alma Thomas. The source for this titular and material intensity is celestial and joins the chromatic attractions and inflections that also energized countless other artists. Encapsulating this solar affect in the phrase “fire light and heat for the world,” the poet-playwright Amiri Baraka connected Thomas’s luminous palette and the noun and verb “glow” to a modern Black consciousness, and to allusions to human agency, volition, and life’s radiant possibilities. This is the third talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Works by the renowned painters Raymond Saunders and Sam Gilliam employ an array of colors, but their art featuring red and blue communicates something not only axiomatic, but also synthetic, volatile, and aspiring to what the literary critic Marina Warner described as a quest for a universal message, or a panacea. Some of Saunders’s and Gilliam’s hued statements are ocular and seemingly derive from scientific color analyses, while others are improvisational or symbolic, evoking combustive and alchemical effects. This is the fourth talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Works by the renowned painters Raymond Saunders and Sam Gilliam employ an array of colors, but their art featuring red and blue communicates something not only axiomatic, but also synthetic, volatile, and aspiring to what the literary critic Marina Warner described as a quest for a universal message, or a panacea. Some of Saunders’s and Gilliam’s hued statements are ocular and seemingly derive from scientific color analyses, while others are improvisational or symbolic, evoking combustive and alchemical effects. This is the fifth talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

This talk probes a shared passion for brown silhouettes in art, whose proxies for Black bodies do more than pictorially nod toward a racial verisimilitude: they reorient the paintings and their audiences in cultural and chromatic terms and endow the works with catalysts that produce a special kind of affect, a psychological frisson, especially in Black audiences. Richard J. Powell closely examines the sensations that arise from the color brown in the paintings of the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the American artist Nina Chanel Abney. This is the final talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Chair of American Studies and History, University of Virginia. Bringing together some 115 photographs from across four decades of the artist’s career, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings offers both a sweeping overview of her achievement and a focused exploration of the continuing influence of the American South on her work. In her keynote address for a public symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition, Grace Elizabeth Hale explores how return—as a practice, a process, a subject, and an aesthetic—structures time and thus marks and makes history. Hale discusses how Sally Mann and other photographers working in the South employ return to render history visible: the way they photograph the same place or people or event; restage old images or return to places photographed by others; employ old photographic processes, formats, and materials; and consciously go back to former histories—to older Souths, to the lies that passed for truths, and to the relationships people constructed with these pasts.  What, Hale asks, can the work of these photographers tell us about the changing meaning of history? This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

LeRonn P. Brooks, assistant professor, department of African and African American Studies, Lehman College. Bringing together some 115 photographs from across four decades of the artist’s career, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings offers both a sweeping overview of her achievement and a focused exploration of the continuing influence of the American South on her work. For a public symposium held on April 14, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, LeRonn Brooks further explores Mann’s treatment of history. Mann’s landscape photography reimagines land as a facet of memory and narrative; Brooks examines how these themes are intertwined and relevant to this moment in our nation’s history, revealing that the past contains every part of whom we have become. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Katherine Henninger, associate professor, departments of English and women's and gender studies, Louisiana State University. Bringing together some 115 photographs from across four decades of the artist’s career, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings offers both a sweeping overview of her achievement and a focused exploration of the continuing influence of the American South on her work. For a public symposium held on April 14, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Katherine Henninger explores visual legacies of the southern gothic in literature and photography, and contemporary southern artistic engagement with those legacies vis-à-vis figures of childhood. The southern gothic has powerfully registered American violence around race, class, sexuality, and gender, while figures of childhood register anxiety about the South’s—really, the nation’s—innocence and guilt in relation to such violence. Henninger demonstrates how Mann’s photographs evoke and disrupt these twinned representational traditions. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Shawn Michelle Smith, professor and chair, department of visual and critical studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bringing together some 115 photographs from across four decades of the artist’s career, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings offers both a sweeping overview of her achievement and a focused exploration of the continuing influence of the American South on her work. For a public symposium held on April 14, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Shawn Michelle Smith examines the role of photography as a tool of self-construction for African Americans after slavery. Smith discusses the numerous photographic portraits of abolitionist Frederick Douglass as well as his early lectures on photography in the 1860s, presenting his thoughts on the medium as a novel theory of it as well as a new model of personhood. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Maurice Wallace, associate professor, department of English, and associate director, Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia. Bringing together some 115 photographs from across four decades of the artist’s career, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings offers both a sweeping overview of her achievement and a focused exploration of the continuing influence of the American South on her work. For a public symposium held on April 14, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Maurice Wallace argues for sound as a neglected consideration in photographic criticism. Every photograph, insofar as photography is defined by its soundless condition, represses the sound necessarily attending to the picture-taking event. Examining the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in pictures, especially those that capture him in the art of speech-making or preaching, Wallace vividly demonstrates how photographs record sound’s memory, if not its audibility. Further, Wallace suggests a set of sounds, black sounds , that not only haunt some of Mann’s compelling photographs, but also belong to the very soundscape that shaped King’s own resonantly remembered voice. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Miguel de Baca, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art, University of Oxford, and associate professor, department of art history, Lake Forest College. The studio life of Anne Truitt (1921–2004) is explored in the focus exhibitionIn the Tower: Anne Truitt, on view from November 19, 2017, through April 1, 2018. The first major presentation of Truitt's work at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition celebrates the museum's acquisition of several major artworks by Truitt in recent years, including seminal works from the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as several outstanding loans. Bringing together nine sculptures, two paintings, and 12 works on paper representing the different media in which the artist worked, the exhibition traces Truitt's artistic development from 1961 to 2002. One of the most original and important sculptors to emerge in the United States during the 1960s, Truitt is unique in the field of minimalist art. She hand-painted her sculptures in multiple layers to create abstract compositions of subtle color in three dimensions. Her art is infused with memory and feeling, unlike much minimalist art, and while most of her peers were based in New York or Los Angeles, she worked alone and independently in Washington, DC. For a public symposium held on January 19, 2018, Miguel de Baca further explores ideas first introduced in his bookMemory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculptureby considering Truitt’s oeuvre in the context of the cultural practice of historic preservation and the idea of the 20th-century “monument.”

Anna Lovatt, Marguerite Hoffman Scholar in Residence, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. The studio life of Anne Truitt (1921–2004) is explored in the focus exhibitionIn the Tower: Anne Truitt, on view from November 19, 2017, through April 1, 2018. The first major presentation of Truitt's work at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition celebrates the museum's acquisition of several major artworks by Truitt in recent years, including seminal works from the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as several outstanding loans. Bringing together nine sculptures, two paintings, and 12 works on paper representing the different media in which the artist worked, the exhibition traces Truitt's artistic development from 1961 to 2002. One of the most original and important sculptors to emerge in the United States during the 1960s, Truitt is unique in the field of minimalist art. She hand-painted her sculptures in multiple layers to create abstract compositions of subtle color in three dimensions. Her art is infused with memory and feeling, unlike much minimalist art, and while most of her peers were based in New York or Los Angeles, she worked alone and independently in Washington, DC. For a public symposium held on January 19, 2018, Anna Lovatt focuses on Truitt's writings, particularly those passages concerned with artistic materials. These passages move between a relatively straightforward, practical documentation of materials and techniques, and a more subjective identification with substances such as wood and water. Referring to Gaston Bachelard'sWater and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter,Lovatt argues that Truitt is an artist who “dreams with substances,” and that by considering her approach to materials rather than the formal properties of her sculpture, we can gain some new and surprising insights into her work.

Jem Cohen, filmmaker. The studio life of Anne Truitt (1921–2004) is explored in the focus exhibition In the Tower: Anne Truitt , on view from November 19, 2017, through April 1, 2018. The first major presentation of Truitt's work at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition celebrates the museum's acquisition of several major artworks by Truitt in recent years, including seminal works from the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as several outstanding loans. Bringing together nine sculptures, two paintings, and 12 works on paper representing the different media in which the artist worked, the exhibition traces Truitt's artistic development from 1961 to 2002. One of the most original and important sculptors to emerge in the United States during the 1960s, Truitt is unique in the field of minimalist art. She hand-painted her sculptures in multiple layers to create abstract compositions of subtle color in three dimensions. Her art is infused with memory and feeling, unlike much minimalist art, and while most of her peers were based in New York or Los Angeles, she worked alone and independently in Washington, DC. For a public symposium held on January 19, 2018, filmmaker Jem Cohen shares his portrait Anne Truitt, Working (2009), an interview and 16mm footage made in and around her studio at the Yaddo artist colony and from her home studio in Washington, DC. Cohen describes the genesis of the film and his memories of Truitt from their time together at Yaddo.

Rachel Harrison, artist. The studio life of Anne Truitt (1921–2004) is explored in the focus exhibition In the Tower: Anne Truitt , on view from November 19, 2017, through April 1, 2018. The first major presentation of Truitt's work at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition celebrates the museum's acquisition of several major artworks by Truitt in recent years, including seminal works from the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as several outstanding loans. Bringing together nine sculptures, two paintings, and 12 works on paper representing the different media in which the artist worked, the exhibition traces Truitt's artistic development from 1961 to 2002. One of the most original and important sculptors to emerge in the United States during the 1960s, Truitt is unique in the field of minimalist art. She hand-painted her sculptures in multiple layers to create abstract compositions of subtle color in three dimensions. Her art is infused with memory and feeling, unlike much minimalist art, and while most of her peers were based in New York or Los Angeles, she worked alone and independently in Washington, DC. For a public symposium held on January 19, 2018, artist Rachel Harrison discusses the perception of color and shape and the experience of time in Truitt’s sculpture.