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November 19: 2:00 pm

Join us for an illustrated lecture by Charles Palermo, professor of art history at William & Mary. Contemporary art theory takes very seriously the idea that an artist can make anything art by choosing it. Photographic theory takes similarly seriously the idea that a photographer makes the world into a picture by pointing a camera at it. This lecture aims to complicate these ideas by discussing work by two contemporary photographers, Tacita Dean and Phil Chang. This lecture will take place in Tucker Hall Auditorium (127A). Reserved parking for attendees will be available on James Blair Drive. Street parking is…

Join us for the first lecture in our spring Selected Topics in Architecture series, which will focus on museum design through the ages. David Brashear, Director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, will present "The Invention of the Museum as Public Institution in the 18th and 19th Centuries." The concept of the modern museum was born in the Enlightenment that swept across Europe in the 18th century. The idea of a public museum gained traction in France in the 1770s, and designs by Étienne-Louis Boullée and Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand paved the way for the remaking of the Louvre as a public…

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, Mark Rothko, 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 pictorial descriptors of more complex language systems. Interested in the research of anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead and post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them this pairing of rational and id-based notation systems were places of…

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…