Wyeth Foundation for American Art Programs

In this lecture, released on December 3, 2021, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), discusses her recent research and curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. Dr. Norby shares her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.

In this lecture, released on December 3, 2021, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), discusses her recent research and curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. Dr. Norby shares her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.

Steven Nelson, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, introduces Patricia Marroquin Norby, associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who will deliver the 2021 Wyeth Lecture in American Art.

Watch the 2021 Wyeth Lecture in American Art on the National Gallery’s YouTube channel.

Kellie Jones, Columbia University. In this lecture, presented on November 6, 2019, Kellie Jones, of Columbia University, looks at international conceptual art networks and the making of global community in the late twentieth century. The lecture considers moments in the global reach of performance art in the 1970s in locales from Mexico City to London to Los Angeles, considering projects by artists including Felipe Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi, and David Lamelas.

Kellie Jones, Columbia University. In this lecture, presented on November 6, 2019, Kellie Jones, of Columbia University, looks at international conceptual art networks and the making of global community in the late twentieth century. The lecture considers moments in the global reach of performance art in the 1970s in locales from Mexico City to London to Los Angeles, considering projects by artists including Felipe Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi, and David Lamelas.

Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine. In this lecture, presented on October 25, 2017, speaker Cécile Whiting of the University of California, Irvine, analyzes the ways in which artists depicted landscapes joining the national and the international. Whiting's research focuses on how American artists recast the terms of landscape painting as it had been practiced in the 1930s, broadening its scope from the local to the international and from the pastoral to the antipastoral. During World War II, maps that pictured troops advancing and retreating across national borders, along with photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in locations around the world (including the naval base of Pearl Harbor, the tropical rain forests of Guadalcanal, and the beaches of North Africa), prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. In particular, the lecture examines paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, who adopted a panoramic mode, literally and metaphorically widening the horizontal scope of their paintings to encompass both the United States and Europe. As a counterpoint, Whiting discusses The Rock, the painting in which Peter Blume attempted to fit the globe into his landscape

Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine. In this lecture, presented on October 25, 2017, speaker Cécile Whiting of the University of California, Irvine, analyzes the ways in which artists depicted landscapes joining the national and the international. Whiting's research focuses on how American artists recast the terms of landscape painting as it had been practiced in the 1930s, broadening its scope from the local to the international and from the pastoral to the antipastoral. During World War II, maps that pictured troops advancing and retreating across national borders, along with photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in locations around the world (including the naval base of Pearl Harbor, the tropical rain forests of Guadalcanal, and the beaches of North Africa), prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. In particular, the lecture examines paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, who adopted a panoramic mode, literally and metaphorically widening the horizontal scope of their paintings to encompass both the United States and Europe. As a counterpoint, Whiting discusses The Rock, the painting in which Peter Blume attempted to fit the globe into his landscape.

Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall; Ruth Fine, moderator and former curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. In this program, presented on March 17, 2017, eight distinguished artists discuss their careers and relationships as members of the Washington, DC, art world. Panelists are Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall. Ruth Fine, former curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, moderated the panel, which was part of a two-day symposium at the National Gallery of Art. The program was organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in collaboration with the Howard University Gallery of Art and was supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

In this program, presented on March 17, 2017, eight distinguished artists discuss their careers and relationships as members of the Washington, DC, art world. Panelists are Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall. Ruth Fine, former curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, moderated the panel, which was part of a two-day symposium at the National Gallery of Art. The program was organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in collaboration with the Howard University Gallery of Art and was supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

In this lecture, presented on October 21, 2015, speaker Kirk Savage of the University of Pittsburgh discusses the massive physical displacement of bodies during the Civil War, the scale of which was unprecedented in U.S. history. Equally if not more troubling, the war caused a shocking metaphysical displacement of bodies from their names, creating legions of the “unknown” (bodies without names) and the “missing” (names without bodies). This lecture examines how art was invoked and deployed to come to terms with what Savage calls the "metadata crisis" of the war dead. At once material and immaterial, the art of the name provides a lens through which to plumb the transformations in personal and national identity wrought by the catastrophe of mass warfare.

In this lecture originally presented on November 20, 2013, speaker Jennifer L. Roberts of Harvard University explores one of the fundamental operations of printmaking—reversal—in order to trace its impact on American art across a spectrum of media. Behind every print lies a matrix (from the Latin for mother): a plate or block or stone or screen from which the print has been "pulled." And in most printing processes, the final print is a reversed version of the matrix. Although reversal may seem at first to be a simple geometrical switching operation, its material and philosophical complexity is profound; indeed, one may posit a kind of "negative intelligence" that informs any work of art that deploys reversal. To focus on reversal is to open up new ways of thinking about connections among the fine, decorative, and industrial arts in America, not least because so many prominent American artists from the 18th through the 20th century had backgrounds in print and printmaking. "Apprenticed as an engraver"; "trained as a lithographer"; "found initial success as a commercial artist": such are the typical preludes of American artists' biographies. A rigorous analysis of reversal offers an opportunity to expand the adventure of print from the preludes into the main narratives of the stories we tell about American art. The lecture addresses reversal in several contexts, from the nature prints of Joseph Breintnall in the 1730s to the handprints of Jasper Johns in the 1960s, with a core focus on the later 19th century in the work of James McNeill Whistler and the American trompe-l'oeil painters.

John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West were born in 1738; Charles Willson Peale, some two and one-half years later. Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, born in 1755 and 1756, respectively, belonged to the next generation. Their paths crossed and recrossed throughout their uniformly long lives. They formed friendships, influenced each other both through their art and personally, competed for clients, and eventually drifted apart, or, in the case of Copley and West, became bitter enemies. This lecture by Jules David Prown focuses on the artists’ personal and professional encounters and interactions to tell the story of how they affected each other’s lives and work.

Speaker Bryan J. Wolf of Stanford University here presents the fifth Wyeth Lecture in American Art. In the years between 1967 and 1970, Philip Guston scandalized the New York art world by renouncing abstraction and turning instead to figurative modes of painting characterized by cartoonish images that mixed Ku Klux Klan hoods, idioms of popular culture, and a private vocabulary of cigars, light bulbs, legs, shoes, and other assorted—and often hairy—body parts. Buried within these often outlandish works are three recurring concerns: questions of pilgrimage, revelation, and epiphany that link Guston to Hudson River School painting of the nineteenth century; a covert interest in writing as a cultural logic that informs his painting practices; and an obsessive focus on line that distinguishes his art from the drips and gestural forms of Jackson Pollock. Ultimately, each of these concerns points to what can be seen as the real focus of Guston’s figurative work: the history and memory of the Holocaust. Recorded on October 19, 2011.

Recorded on November 4, 2009, this podcast presents the fourth Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Richard J. Powell focuses on Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) as uniquely empathetic among the many 19th-century artists who depicted African American performance and entertainment. Eakins' Negro Boy Dancing (1887; Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows a young banjo player, an elderly teacher, and an adolescent dancer, evoking the American rage for the form of musical theater known as minstrelsy. Eakins' watercolor, along with two oil-on-board studies at the National Gallery of Art, challenged the tendency of minstrelsy to employ racial ridicule and physical exaggeration. Instead, Powell argues, Eakins adhered to a painterly realism as well as his own brand of empathy and ethics.

Edward Hopper's paintings often show people and places in states of enigmatic isolation, loneliness, and contemplation.  These are among the fabled Hopper themes-so fabled it would hardly seem possible to go beyond them to give another account of his art. Focusing on one Hopper painting, Ground Swell of 1939, this lecture tries to provide a thicker, denser, more surprising story of what it meant for Hopper to make a painting, especially in the year 1939. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Edward Hopper.

Kathleen A. Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art delivers the second biennial Wyeth Lecture in American Art, originally presented on October 27, 2005. Codified in the late 18th century as a full-length, life-size portrait with impressive costume and attributes of rank and identity, the Grand Manner portrait evolved in the 19th century to suit the status-consciousness of a new, bourgeois era. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), born and educated in Philadelphia and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris,  painted about two hundred fifty finished portraits in his lifetime (apart from portrait-related figure subjects), most of which depict the sitter at life size but on a small canvas that shows less than half the figure. But from the very outset of his career, and with increasing frequency after 1889, he essayed full-length portraits in the Grand Manner. Between 1870 and 1909, when he all but ceased painting, Eakins produced 36 full-length portrait figures, either seated or standing. A closer look at the choice and treatment of these relatively few sitters teaches us much about Eakins, his methods, and his values. If, as Oscar Wilde remarked, every great portrait is a picture of the artist, this “grand” series reveals in the most ambitious format the identity of the artist, covertly buried in the elaborate perspective coordinates of each composition, or enacted in a private pantheon of colleagues—artists, scientists, and teachers—that embody his grandest aspirations and mirror his sense of self.