Anne Gaud Tinker

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. Landscape, c. 1928. 10-3/8 x 13-3/4". The Johnson Collection, Spartenburg, S.C.

December 14, 2022. 

Anne Gaud Tinker (VC '67) discusses the book she co-authored with Dwight McInvaill and Caroline Palmer, Alice: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Charleston Renaissance Artist, published in 2021 in Charleston by the Middleton Place Foundation and Evening Post Books.

A lifelong Charleston resident with limited professional training, Alice Smith forged her style from a wide range of sources—her French teacher at the local Carolina Art Association, mentors who introduced her to Tonalism and Japanese woodblock prints, and extensive fieldwork. In a career of sixty years, she defied gender expectations and gained national acclaim.

Descended from prominent rice planters, Alice’s work reflects a reverence for nature and nostalgia for an idealized past. She helped spark Charleston’s historic preservation movement, depicted the waning days of rice planting, and captured the mystical spirit of the Lowcountry’s coast, marshes, and woodlands in luminous watercolors.

Alice was one of the principal guiding lights of an invigorating cultural change that flourished between the twentieth century’s two world wars called the Charleston Renaissance. In recent years, this artistic and cultural movement has been reexamined for its elitist perspective and romanticized view of Charleston and the city’s fraught history. Alice’s story raises important questions about historical memory and the forces that shaped Charleston into the city it is today.

Middleton Place Museum Shop Books

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James Mundy

Edvard Munch, “Moonlight” (1896). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Gift of Philip and Lynn Strauss, Class or 1946, 1995.20

May 8, 2019.

James Mundy (VC '74) Anne Hendricks Bass director of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, will talk about his education and life at Vassar in connection with the exhibition highlighting additions to the Loeb Center collections over his 28 year tenure: An Era of Opportunity: Three Decades of Acquisitions, on view April 26 - September 8, 2019.

This exhibition is a tribute to James Mundy (Vassar class of 1974) upon his retirement as the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, a post he has held for twenty-eight years. Organized by the curators of the Art Center, the exhibition spotlights a range of drawings, paintings, photographs, and other works acquired over three decades, and encompasses art from across the geographic scope of the collection. The exhibition emphasizes the dynamic role that opportunity has played in shaping the dramatic growth of the permanent collection of the museum during Mundy’s tenure. The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund.

Karen Hwang & Patricia Phagan

October 30, 2013.

Karen Hwang, Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, and Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, will discuss the traveling exhibition currently on view at the Center through December 15, 2013  entitled "Genji's World in Japanese Woodblock Prints."

 "The Tale of Genji, written in the eleventh century by the Japanese court lady Murasaki Shikibu, has greatly influenced Japanese culture, from novels and kabuki performances to today’s manga and animé. That influence can be clearly seen in the works in this exhibition, which features a rich array of fifty-seven woodblock prints by many of Japan’s leading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists."

39:05 minutes

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Andrew Watsky

February 20, 2007

Andrew Watsky, art historian and professor of art at Vassar College, discusses his award-winning book about the Japanese island of Chikubushima, it's history, architecture, and art.
49:59 min.

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