News from the Center

Upcoming Lecture

Blood Joining Blood: The Immersive in Caravaggio’s Malta

For the 28th annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art on November 17, Keith Sciberras of the University of Malta will dive into Caravaggio’s use of complex spatial relationships and audience immersion, supported by Sciberras’s decades of site experience and archival research.

Just Announced

Mabel O. Wilson, 2025 Mellon Lecturer

Mabel O. Wilson of Columbia University will give the 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in spring 2025. She will present a four-part lecture series entitled America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom in the National Gallery’s East Building Auditorium every Sunday from March 9 to March 30, 2025.

Research Talks

2024–2025 Colloquium Series

Join us in person or online for our research talks by Center professors and senior fellows in residence from September to May. Presentations will begin at 2:00 p.m. on select Thursdays in the West Building Lecture Hall.

Book Discussion

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print

On September 27, we held a book discussion about Contact: Art and the Pull of Print with author Jennifer L. Roberts and Steven Nelson, dean of the Center.

Appointments

Visiting Senior Fellows and Guest Artist

We’re pleased to announce the appointment of six visiting senior fellows and a visiting guest artist. Based in Brazil, Canada, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and across the United States, they will join the Center for two-month appointments between September 2024 and February 2025.

Appointments

2024–2025 Academic Year

We’ve announced this year’s appointments, including Mary Beard, award-winning author and professor emerita of the ancient world at University of Cambridge, as Kress-Beinecke Professor.

Pictures for a New World

How Does Seurat Connect Pointillism to Workers Rights?

Former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future. Watch the final video in the series on Georges Seurat.

Mellon Lectures

Anna Deavere Smith

Actress, playwright, and professor Anna Deavere Smith presented the 73rd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in April to May 2024. Watch the four-part lecture series, Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me.

Pictures for a New World

How Artist Philip Guston Became an Ally

Former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future. Watch the fourth video in the series on painter Philip Guston and his “Head II,” a 1969 self-portrait in which the artist interrogates his complicity in the racial violence surrounding him.

Pictures for a New World

How Eva Hesse Changed the Face of Minimalism

Former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future. Watch the second video on Eva Hesse’s Test Piece for “Contingent,” which plays off of gravity and presents fleshlike material suspended in air.

Lecture Recording

Latinx Art and the Intimacy of Dislocation

We’re pleased to make available a recording of the 2023 Wyeth Lecture in American Art, delivered on December 2 by Roberto Tejada of the University of Houston.

Lecture Recording

Sofonisba Anguissola: Recent Discoveries and Debates

We’re pleased to make available a recording of the 27th Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art, delivered on November 12, 2023, by Michael Cole of Columbia University.

Pictures for a New World

Chakaia Booker Turns Car Tires into Transcendence

Former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future. Booker’s “Egress” transforms recycled tires, symbols of urban waste, into extraordinary visions of renewal and transcendence. 

Pictures for a New World

Who Did Pop Art Leave Out?

Former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future. Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith reclaimed the pop art techniques of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol in her 1992 artwork Target.