Upcoming Events › Lecture

David Brashear, Director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, will set the stage for our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. As the United States worked its way through the Great Depression, an artistic energy was developed in New York, in part driven by the WPA's public art program. A group of artists, working both uptown and downtown, began to move away from representational art and focus their efforts on new approaches to abstraction. Some were more established, and some were relative newcomers. Some were older, and some were younger. Many were men, but some were women…

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur joins us from Yale University for our second talk in the spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Painters such as Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb and Dorothy Dehner looked to notational stand-ins for meaning. The stick figures and simplified marks were graphic interfaces developed to be capable descriptors of more complex language systems. Following the research of post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead in the 1940s, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them these rational and id-based notation systems were places of universal sympathetic convergence. As…

Art historian and scholar Gail Levin will join us for the third talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Lee Krasner once said, “I think my painting is so autobiographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it.” Her friend and biographer, art historian Gail Levin, who first interviewed the artist when she was a twenty-two year-old graduate student, guides us on an illustrated journey from Krasner’s birth in 1908 Brooklyn to her love of nature on the Eastern End of New York’s Long Island. Levin will not only give art historical analysis, but…

Art historian and scholar Gail Levin will join us for the fourth talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Imagine a story of an artist who escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself, landing on an enchanted island, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. She went so far as to write to a friend what her dealer could tell collectors who inquired about her: “advise them I’d become a hermit — an eccentric one and that I come to…