Washington Hall

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…