Continuing the Fair’s tradition, five leading American Art specialists will present lectures during the Fair:
Saturday, May 11 at 11:00 am
The ever-experimental work of Emil Bisttram
Claire Mosier
Registrar
American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection
“Great Western Sky” by Emil Bisttram. I can send a TIFF of the image if that would work better. Here is the full image credit: Emil James Bisttram, Great Western Sky, 1930, oil on canvas. Courtesy of American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection.
Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) started his art career in New York at a time when modernism was becoming popular. He brought modernist sensibilities with him to the American Southwest in the 1930s, establishing himself as an avant-garde artist and teacher. Throughout his career Bisttram experimented with visual styles and art media, exploring how best to represent intellectual and theological concepts as well as the world around him. He is still renowned for his skill with representative, abstract, and non-objective works, as well as artistic exploration.
Saturday, May 11 at 2:00 pm
The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury
Shirley Reece-Hughes
Curator of Painting, Sculpture, and Works on Paper
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Lunar Landscape, 1959-60. Painted wood, 86 x 49 x 14 inches. Amon Carter, Purchase with funds from Ruth Carter Stevenson Acquisitions Endowment, 1999.3.A-J, Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Shirley Reece-Hughes discusses the various threads of Louise Nevelson's practice relating to the social and cultural meanings of the environment in the middle of the twentieth century. Describing the sculptor's creation of her signature wall assemblages against the backdrop of the Space Race, along with the burgeoning science of ecology, planetary consciousness, and installation art, this lecture reveals how Nevelson connected her work to discoveries about earth and space and forecasted movements such as land art.
Saturday, May 11 at 4:00 pm
Fashioned by Sargent
Erica E. Hirshler
Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Mrs. Charles E. Inches (Louise Pomeroy), 1887, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Anonymous Gift in memory of Mrs. Charles Inches' daughter, Louise Brimmer Inches Seton, 1991. 1991.926
John Singer Sargent manipulated fashion—and his sitters. His paintings are performances, negotiated between the model and the artist, often with an audience in mind. Look behind the scenes at the exhibition “Fashioned by Sargent” to consider how portraits—whether truthful, aspirational, or imaginative—are made, and who controls the image. Clothing is selected, poses devised, and the results judged. How did Sargent turn a simple likeness into a work of art?
Sunday, May 12 at 2:00 pm
Mary Cassatt at Work
Kathleen A. Foster
Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art
Director, Center for American Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Driving, 1881. Oil on canvas, 34 15/16 × 51 1/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1921
The first major survey of the career of Mary Cassatt in twenty-five years, the exhibition Mary Cassatt at Work, opening May 18 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, takes a fresh look at the only American member of the French Impressionists. Centering on her own sense of professional status and her interest in “serious work,” this exhibition examines the realities of a career as a woman artist, the complexities of the women’s work that she depicted throughout her oeuvre, and the new findings about her materials and methods that underlay her working process.
Sunday, May 12 at 4:00 pm
Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French
Thayer Tolles
Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Daniel Chester French, Spirit of the Waters, first model for the Spencer Trask Memorial, 1913-14, cast 1914. Bronze, 32 ¼ x 24 ½ x 12 inches. Chesterwood, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Stockbridge, MA, Gift of the Daniel Chester French Foundation, NT 69.38.272. Photo by Paul Rocheleau.
The traveling exhibition Monuments and Myths presents the work of Saint-Gaudens and French in dialogue, offering a well-timed opportunity to assess the intersecting contributions of the two leading American sculptors at the turn of the twentieth century. Their sculptures, both private and public, serve as dynamic visual barometers of political, social, and artistic conditions, past and present. Focusing on selected examples from some 70 works in the exhibition, this lecture will consider them as multifaceted signifiers of national identity and sociocultural networks.
Admission to the Fair and lectures is complimentary; seating
is on a first-come basis.
