ACHIEVING AMERICAN ART: Fifty Years of Change and Challenge

9-Week Lecture Series, Wednesdays, March 31 – May 26, 10 a.m. & 5:30 p.m.

at The Strand Theater, Rockland

 

Presented by Director of Education, Roger Dell & Guest Scholars                       

The Farnsworth is pleased to present Achieving American Art: Fifty Years of Change and Challenge, the third installment in this popular, annual lecture series. The 2010 course will focus on the art of the nation from 1945 to the present. The series will be divided into three sections by media (painting and drawing, architecture and photography) and will be presented by Farnsworth staff members and guest speakers from museums and colleges. The Farnsworth’s Director of Education Roger Dell will host the series, providing an introduction for each guest lecturer’s presentation. The same ninety-minute lecture will be offered twice every Wednesday (10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.) at The Strand Theatre in Rockland.

 

Artist as Oedipus: How Artists of the 50’s and 60’s Revolted Against Abstract Expressionism
Lecture by Farnsworth Director of EducationRoger Dell

The first truly American art style, Abstract Expressionism, was forged by a handful of artists living and working in lower Manhattan in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. They became stars of the art firmament, although in short order their successors began to overthrow their fundamental ideas—and the art world went Pop!

In the early 1950s, New York City painters such as James Brooks, Alex Katz, and Charles DuBack first began to summer in Maine. They brought with them a variety of modernist styles from pure abstraction to figuration. This lecture will explore their impact on the local art scene and their role in stimulating other New York modernists who soon followed in their footprint.

April 14
Why Drawing Matters Now

While artists continue to value drawing as a preparatory tool, in the past half century they have also instilled this age-old medium with greater legitimacy, independence, and agency. Using ample visual examples, this lecture will investigate the evolving status of drawing and consider its impact on museums, galleries, and private collections.
 

Frank Lloyd Wright's 1950 Zimmerman house in Manchester, New Hampshire was one of the first significant examples of mid-20^th century architecture in northern New England.  This presentation will examine the circumstances of its commission, the relationship between the clients and the architect, and its context in what was a large manufacturing city.  

Over the last fifty years, hundreds of American museums have been built or had new wings added. This lecture will trace the development of this distinct type of architecture, from Frank Lloyd Wrights’ Guggenheim Museum to Renzo Piano’s recent addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. During these often lengthy projects, what are the special tensions between architect and client, aesthetics and function, art and architecture?

This lecture will survey the evolution of architectural form over the second half of the twentieth century with emphasis on much-talked-about, trend-setting buildings by Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Rudolph, I.M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Eero Saarinen, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and others.
 

These turbulent decades of societal change are demonstrated profoundly in the context of American photography. Frederick Sommer, Robert Frank and Chauncey Hare are three contemporaries with three distinct voices describing what they observed and experienced in America.

In the 1970s, photographers began to challenge the classic image of the American landscape as wondrous, harmonious, and pristine. Informed by the burgeoning environmental movement, they reinterpreted nature as inseparable from culture and eschewed emphasis on aesthetic form. 

Among the various types of photography, such as fashion, portraiture, reportage—street photography held special interest for many New York photographers in the middle of the 20^th century. Ranging all over the city, these urbanist photographers captured middle class life from Harlem to the Lower East Side.

 

General admission $12

There are no reservations for individual lectures; please pay at the door ($10 members, $12 nonmembers).