Wendy Graham

Simeone Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 1864 Watercolour on paper, Tate Britain

February 19, 2020.

Wendy Graham, Professor of English and Chair of  the Department of English at Vassar College, talks about her latest monograph, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia University Press, 2017.)

Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity sheds new light on Victorian discourses on sexuality and masculinity through a thick description of literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and homoerotic frissons among the creators and reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism. Graham threads together the qualities that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Gabriel Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic celebrity in the 1850s; Algernon Swinburne and Simeon Solomon in the 1860s; and Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater in the 1870s. The book documents the symbiotic relationship between periodical writers and the artists and poets they helped make famous, demonstrating that the origin myth of Bohemian artistic transcendence was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists. Graham shows that the Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena now associated with Oscar Wilde, arguing that they were foundational for him in forging an artistic and personal identity with a full-blown publicity apparatus. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

Listen

Nicholas Adams

Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University

February 5, 2020.

Nicholas Adams discusses his biography of the 20th century architect whose work defined the built environment of corporate modernism: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (Yale University Press 2019).

Gordon Bunshaft’s (1909–1990) landmark 1952 design for Lever House reshaped the Manhattan skyline and elevated the reputation of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the firm where he would spend more than 40 years as a partner. Although this enigmatic architect left behind few records, his legacy endures in the corporate headquarters, museums, and libraries that were built in his distinctive modernist style. Bunshaft’s career was marked by shifts in material. Glass and steel structures of the 1950s, such as New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank, gave way to revolutionary designs in concrete, such as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Bunshaft’s collaborations with artists, including Isamu Noguchi, Jean Dubuffet, and Henry Moore, were of paramount importance throughout his career.

Nicholas Adams explores the contested line between Bunshaft’s ambition for acclaim as a singular artistic genius and the collaborative structure of SOM’s architectural partnership. Bunshaft received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988 and remains the only SOM partner to have achieved this distinction. Adams counters Bunshaft’s maxim that “the building speaks for itself” with necessary critical context about this modernist moment at a time when the future of Bunshaft’s iconic works is very much in question.

Emily S. Warner

April 18, 2018.

Emily S. Warner, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about the exhibition she composed with her students in Art 385,  Surveys and Souvenirs: American World's Fairs 1876-1939, on view in the Vassar College Art Library March 12-June 29, 2018. 

"Sell the cookstove if necessary," novelist Hamlin Garland wrote to his parents in 1893; "You must see the fair." Garland's comment captures the excitement and urgency that drew 27 million visitors to the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, one of several world's fairs that dominated American cultural life around the turn of the century.  From 1876 to 1039, over 15 world's fairs opened in American cities, showcasing the nation's industry and art, and introducing Americans to a world of foreign goods and accomplishments.  Drawn chiefly from materials in the Archives and Special Collections Library at Vassar College, this exhibition presents the rich material culture of American world's fairs, from surveys and guidebooks to photogaphs, children's literature, poster stamps, and souvenirs.  Many of these objects tell official stories from the fairs, promoting messages of American progress, imperial expansion, or scientific advancement.  They also tell more personal stories, as material objects that were used, gifted, inscribed, and collected.  Together, they paint a vivid picture of American world's fairs during a time of intense national growth and consolidation, as the country celebrated its centennial, closed its Western frontier, and arrived at the eve of World War II.

Gargoyle Bulletin post with images from the exhibit.

American World's Fairs 1876-1939 videos on Youtube 

Mary-Kay Lombino

February 7, 2017.

Mary-Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, discusses the exhibition on view January 29 - April 15, 2018: "People Are Beautiful, Photographs, Prints, and Films by Andy Warhol."

People are Beautiful explores shifting notions of beauty in Warhol’s portraits, with a focus on such themes as Celebrity and Stardom; The Artist–Patron Relationship; Fashion, Models, and the Party Scene; and The “Most Beautiful” Screen Tests. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is part of a consortium of five academic museums in the Hudson Valley each hosting thematic exhibitions of Warhol’s art in 2018. The group of exhibitions, collectively titled Warhol x 5, will feature works lent from the collections of the participating institutions.

Maxine McClintock

Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, Riverside Park, New York by Penelope Jencks

April 27, 2016.

For our last discussion of the season in our series on the value of liberal arts education in contemporary society, historian Maxine McClintock, emeritus teacher at Trinity School in New York, talks about her book Letters of Recommendation (Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, 2014) and the role of the liberal arts in secondary education.

"This is a remarkable and rewarding book. In the best tradition of John Dewey's vision of education as a journey that makes for more fully formed, flourishing human beings as well as a more informed citizenry, Maxine McClintock has constructed an intricate and compelling account not just of the fictional student Emilia's winding "senior year odyssey" toward college (and beyond) but also of the mentor-mentee educative process by which both share insights, learn, and develop through intellectual exchanges. The erudition here is striking and subtle. William James, Randolph Bourne, Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, and scores of other major thinkers appear and serve to propel the narrative as well as the analysis, provoking much bigger questions and concerns than simply: where should Emilia go to school? This is a book that interrogates the proper and best role of intellectuals and educators in society. It ponders the city "as educator." It critiques and embraces the drawbacks as well as the opportunities provided by Emilia's elite private school. It investigates the history of ideas and the "purposes of a liberal arts education" in a democracy. And it challenges readers to consider how self-awareness is and might be enabled via education as the book probes how and why this is not happening more in the U.S. At the core of this book, then, lies the so-called "education crisis" and the "crisis of the humanities" as integral to the "dysfunctional meritocracy" endemic to the contemporary educational landscape." -- Christopher M. Nichols.

54:57 minutes.

Listen

Mindell Dubansky

February 24, 2015.  

Mindell Dubansky, Preservation Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, talks about her collection of "blooks" -- objects disguised as books -- on view at the Grolier Club in New York through March 12 entitled "Blooks -- The Art of Books That Aren't."

58:26 minutes.

Listen

About Blooks:  http://aboutblooks.blogspot.com/

Grolier Club:  http://www.grolierclub.org/

Arthur H. Groten

November 18, 2015.

Ephemerist/Philatelist Arthur H.Groton discusses the collection of poster stamps he assembled and recently gifted to Vassar College and the exhibit "Posters in Miniature: The Ephemeral Cinderella" on view in the Vassar College Art Library through December 16.

40:40 minutes.

Listen

Nicholas A. Basbanes

March 26, 2014.

Writer, journalist, cultural historian and bibliophile Nicholas A. Basbanes talks about his book On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History (Knopf), winner of the Amercian Library Association's Best Book of the Year award for 2013. 

"A consideration of all things paper—its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousand-fold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers—written by the admired cultural historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: A Gentle Madness; Patience and Fortitude; and A Splendor of Letters." 

54:17 minutes.

Listen

James Karl Fischer

November 20, 2007

Architect and architectural historian James Fischer, AIA, RIBA, talks about pathologies of professionalism and his exhibition: The Suspension of Disbelief: Advertising and Architectural Ethics, now on view in the Vassar College Art Library October 9-December 21, 2007.


60:20 min.

Listen | View | Screencast

John Willinsky

October 23, 2007

Public knowledge advocate John Willinsky discusses his book The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, winner of the American Library Association's 2006 Blackwell Scholarship Award, published by MIT Press.

47:53 min.

Listen

Nicholas Adams

SEASON OPENER:
September 18, 2007

Nicholas Adams, architectural historian and Professor of Art at Vassar College, discusses his landmark survey and history of the Twentieth Century's most prolific architectural collaborative: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: SOM Since 1936.

57:33 min.

Listen

Grace Roosevelt

January 30, 2007

Grace Roosevelt, Professor of History and Education at Metropolitan College of New York and author of Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age, talks about the history of the liberal arts curriculum, the encroachment of market forces on higher education, and the relation between liberal education and liberal politics.

42:12 min.
Listen