Past Events › Lecture

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…

Dr. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Curator of Native American Art at the Muscarelle, will present the final talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins, with a talk about artist George Morrison. Born and raised near the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in Minnesota, George Morrison (Ojibwe) had a long and distinguished career as an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor. This presentation will follow Morrison's life story and his foray into the inner circle of some of the most prominent American expressionists of the day, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and his return to Minnesota during the…

After many years of planning, ground was broken in March 2023 for the Martha Wren Briggs Center for the Visual Arts. Designed by Bill Butler of the world-renowned firm Pelli Clarke and Partners, the Center will be the new home of the Muscarelle Museum of Art when it opens in fall 2024. The design features a grand entry atrium, new education spaces, a tripling of gallery space, and many other important features. Join us for this program hosted by David Brashear, Director of the Muscarelle, that will include an update and progress report on the construction underway. This talk will…