Mary-Kay Lombino

Richard Barnes, Murmur #23, Dec. 6, 2006, 2006

October 23, 2019. 

Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, discusses her exhibition Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, on view through December 15, 2019.

Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents a survey of Vassar’s renowned collection of close to 4,500 photographs. Spanning the history of the medium, the exhibition features numerous innovations in the history of photography including various types of photographic practices from daguerreotypes and gelatin silver prints to large-scale Polaroids and digital color prints as well as a wide range of styles and geographic focuses. This extensive exhibition, the first of its kind at the Art Center, aims to highlight the Art Center’s long interest and dedication to the photographic medium and present the unique character, depth, and diversity of the collection. Shape of Light also celebrates twenty years of commitment from the Advisory Council for Photography for supporting photography acquisitions.

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H. Daniel Peck

Thomas Cole.  Detail from View on the Catskill--Early Autumn, 1836–37. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

May 15, 2019 (SEASON FINALE).

H. Daniel Peck, Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College, discusses his monograph and exhibition,  on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill May 4 - November 3, 2019 entitled: Thomas Cole's Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek.

Thomas Cole's Refrain shows how Cole's Catskill Creek paintings, while reflecting concepts such as the stages of life, opened a more capacious vision of experience than his narrative-driven series, such as The Voyage of Life. Relying on rich visual evidence provided by paintings, topographic maps, and contemporary photographs, Peck argues that human experience is conveyed through Cole's embedding into a stable, recurring landscape key motifs that tell stories of their own. The motifs include enigmatic human figures, mysterious architectural forms, and particular trees and plants. Peck finds significant continuities—personal and conceptual—running throughout the Catskill Creek paintings, continuities that cast new light on familiar works and bring significance to ones never before seen by many viewers.

Thomas Cole Historic Site in Catskill, NY.

Explore Thomas Cole website.

Molly Nesbit

Rachel Whiteread. Water Tower,  Lower Manhattan.  Public Art Fund, 1998.

February 21, 2018.

Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about her new book, Midnight: The Tempest Essays, just published in 2017 by Inventory Books.

“'What Was An Author?' Right from the opening words of these Tempest Essays, we see the great Molly Nesbit at work undoing and radically repositioning the time codes for the artist. She creates a living archive of critical debates, politics and philosophies. She paints a vivid picture of the many junctions between people, objects, quasi-objects and non-objects throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a true protest against forgetting as well as a toolbox for contemporary art criticism. Call it a guidebook to the labyrinth of reality.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist

Elizabeth Eisenstein

May 28, 2014. (SEASON FINALE):

Elizabeth Eisenstein (VC'45), author of the massively influential history on the impact of the introduction of printing on Western society, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge 1979), will discuss her book Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West (U Penn, 2011).

"Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship and extends as far back as Roman copyists. . . . Her breadth enables her to identify topoi and their mutations; to observe long-term trends, diminishing ripples, and delayed reactions; and to distinguish what is new or newly dressed in authors' concerns and readers' complaints."— Journal of Scholarly Publishing

45:57 minutes.

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Leah Price

May 8, 2013:  SEASON FINALE.

Leah Price, Professor of English at Harvard University and Senior Advisor in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, discusses her book: How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

“Leah Price has challenged every book historian, librarian, and reader of secular or spiritual scripture to think through the object we fondle or maul and the ways in which it circulates in whole and in pieces through our home and global economies. . . . [T]here's no doubt in my mind that this is a potent intervention in the study of material culture. No one who cares about books should miss handling and reading it." -- Robert L. Patten, Review of English Studies

1:05:23 minutes.

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