Jessica D. Brier

September 21, 2022.

Jessica D. Brier, Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, talks about her exhibition and takes us on a tour through the galleries of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print, on view at the Center from August 20 through December 22, 2022.

The grid often hides in plain sight, from notepads and spreadsheets to halftone photographic reproductions. It dominates the organization, perception, and representation of the modern world, especially in print. Deeply embedded in a Western worldview, the grid visualizes control, mastery, and order. As an invisible framing device, it has become so pervasive that we habitually ignore it. Yet when artists call our attention to the grid, its layered meanings come fully into view. On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print surveys photographs, prints, artist’s books, and printed sculptures from the dynamic permanent collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. From 19th-century scientific and portrait photography to avant-garde and conceptual photography; from mid- 20th-century Minimalist, Pop Art, and Op Art printmaking to experimental bookmaking and photography in the 21st century, this richly illustrated volume explores how artists have embraced, rejected, and reclaimed the grid. By altering and challenging perception, they offer new ways of seeing the world. 

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Laurie Lisle

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918.

 October 14, 2020. 

Author Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about another of her landmark artist biographies: Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe (Seaview 1980).

"Portrait of an Artist is a sensitive and beautifully documented biography. It moved me deeply--I can't remember when a book involved me so totally."
Patricia Bosworth, author, Diane Arbus: A Biography

 

"What a personality emerges from these pages!...Portrait of an Artist is filled with riches."

Joyce Carol Oates, Mademoiselle

"Through interviews with O'Keeffe's friends and acquaintances, by delving into the published an unpublished sources and letters...she gives a fine and poignant accounting of the relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz...Above and beyond the personal portrait, Lisle's biography is a marvelous evocation of the American places that have been important in the development of O'Keeffe's character and her art."
James R. Mellow, The Saturday Review

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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.

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Michael Joyce

September 18, 2019 (SEASON OPENER).

Michael Joyce, acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, media wayfinder,  and Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about his most recent novel, Remedia: A Picaresque (Steerage, 2018), and about creative writing, teaching, hypermedia and other conceptual wormholes, and about his relationship with media and literature. 

Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre of the picaresque novel in a mode suited to the 21st century! With a light touch and sure sense of prose rhythm, he introduces a leitmotif of randomly appearing doorways, thresholds into and out of the world, to puncture the narrative space of this engaging novel. Scenes appear within scenes as the tales unfold in true keeping with the genre that recounts a hero’s progress. The sequence of events is made to make sense by sheer deftness of Joyce’s skill as a narrator and his willingness to use the unexpected as a structuring device, as well as an excuse to delight. Making sense of the past through the telling of his tales, Joyce offers his readers a fresh experience of a classic form filled with contemporary references. — Johanna Drucker

James Merrell

Violet Oakley. "Quaker Legend of the Latch String" Mural for the Pennsylvania State House, 1919.

May 16, 2018.

Season Finale:  James Merrell, Professor of History at Vassar College on the Lucy Maynard Salmon Chair, talks about historical vocabulary and his article "Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians" (William and Mary Quarterly July 2012), as well as his two monographs The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal  (North Carolina, 1989) and Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier(Norton, 1999), both winners of the Bancroft Prize.

"This stunning history of the Catawbas―and their black and white neighbors―sets a new standard for the field. Merrell's book bristles with new insights and skilled decoding of difficult evidence. After reading this book, all those involved in teaching early American history should want to alter their perspective." ―Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles

"The Indians' New World is closely argued from an astonishing amount of evidence, and it is lucidly written.... It emphasizes the ingenuity and strength of will by which the Catawbas coped with disaster and preserved their identity as a people. Only a genuine scholar and fascinating writer could have paid tribute as James Merrell has done." ―Francis Jennings, Director Emeritus, D'Arey McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, The Newberry Library

"James Merrell's Into the woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier is an account of the "go-betweens," the Europeans and Indians who moved between cultures on the Pennsylvania frontier in efforts to maintain the peace. It is also a reflection on the meanings of wilderness to the colonists and natives of the New World. From the Quaker colony's founding in the 1680s into the 1750s, Merrell shows us how the go-betweens survived in the woods, dealing with problems of food, travel, lodging, and safety, and how they sought to bridge the vast cultural gaps between the Europeans and the Indians. The futility of these efforts became clear in the sickening plummet into war after 1750. "A stunningly original and exceedingly well-written account of diplomacy on the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness."--

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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.

Sally Van Wagenen Keil

September 20, 2017 (SEASON OPENER).

Author and pilot Sally Van Wagenen Keil (VC ' 68) discusses her narrative history of the WASPs (Women's Air Service Pilots) of the Second World War, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines (Four Directions, 1990).

"Those Wonderful Women in their Flying Machines hones in on World War II to recount the story of the over 1,000 women pilots who flew in the military as part of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASP). Over 25,000 women applied and 1,800 were selected to train at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. From 1942 to '44, these pilots flew over 60 million miles in every type of plane the airforce had, and 38 women lost their lives in service. Here, in biography style, the niece of one of these pilots recreates the amazing story of what she calls 'one of the best-kept secrets of World War II.'"

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Dawn Seymour Interview on NPR's The Moth, November 2013. (10:31 minutes.)

Martha C. Nussbaum

September 28, 2016.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, discusses her book Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, just published by Oxford University Press.

"Written with her usual mix of grace, precision, passion, and breathtaking scope, Nussbaum probes two seemingly polar emotions underlying our notions of justice-anger and forgiveness. She finds them part of the same vindictive drama, and each problematic. Her call is to move beyond them to become 'strange sorts of people, part Stoic and part creatures of love.' The book offers an important and timely challenge, a most worthwhile and enlightening read for those interested in philosophy, psychology, law, politics, religion-or simply living in today's world." -- C. Daniel Batson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Kansas

45:14 minutes.

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