Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Senior Historian and Acting Chief Curator, Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs, Smithsonian National Portrait GalleryThis talk examines the engagement with history and contemporary events by two of the most prominent artists working today, Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems. Over the past three decades, each has sited their work […]

In twelfth-century monastic culture in Europe, the fragility of life and the inevitability of death became codified in images of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. A fifteenth-century treatise by Denis the Carthusian titled De quatuor hominis novissimus (The Four Last Things of Man) is visualized in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. […]

Suzanne Preston Blier is one of the most preeminent art historians working on Africa today. She is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The True Origins of a Modern Art Masterpiece (Duke University Press, 2019) was the finalist for […]

Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson lectures on the work of Louise Nevelson, the Ukrainian-American sculptor whose career intersected with the feminist art movement. Her talk focuses particularly on Mrs. N’s Palace (1964-77), Nevelson’s largest sculpture. Comprised of some hundred found objects, painted black, the work echoes both public monument and intimate, domestic environ.

Join us for a lecture by Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University. This talk explores a diverse array of visual and material culture, including paintings, sculptures, textiles, liturgical objects, and even quipus (mnemonic devices consisting of knotted cords) in the forging of an anticolonial consciousness in the eighteenth-century Andes. Conversely, […]

Join us for a lecture by Dr. Monica Amor, Associate Professor at Maryland Institute College of Art. Dr. Amor will lecture on specific chapters of her career-long research on late modern artistic practices by artists from Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela as it implies a reflection on historical, local, and material conditions of cultural production beyond […]

Join us for a lecture by Cheryl Finley, Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University. "Black Art Futures" examines the state of the contemporary arts ecosystem to propose sustainable pathways for art, innovation and activism. Drawing on a book in progress of the same name, this talk is inspired by the current exhibition, "Shadow […]

Join us for a lecture by Mechthild Fend. Focusing on turn of the nineteenth-century France, from the eve of the Revolution to the Napoleonic period, this talk seeks to explore relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. During this period both physical and mental disorders started to be visually recorded in a systematic […]

Join us for a talk by Sérgio B. Martins, Professor of History, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC_RIO). Art as Project, Project as Art: Antonio Dias and Painting after Conceptual Art explores two competing notions of “project” that informed Antonio Dias's painting in the early 1970s, one relating to the unfinished project as a […]

Join us for a talk by Jenni Sorkin, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara: "Deviant Scale."Intense and immersive, the immediacy of cloth is its evocation of the body. Conveying abstraction, embodiment and corporeality in the shadow of U.S.-based Culture Wars, and the global AIDS epidemic, 1990s-era sculptural textile practices offered […]

At the Edge of Whiteness: Brown Feeling and the Public Life of Blackness in José Clemente Orozco’s U.S. based PrintsMary Coffey, Professor of Art History, Dartmouth CollegeThis talk explores the Mexican artist, José Clemente Orozco’s, US-based lithographs on the public life of Blackness, executed during his second and longest sojourn in the United States between […]

WOMEN ARTISTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA: A PREHISTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY Dr. Julia Andrews, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University This talk will reflect on two intersecting themes, the rise of women as artists and as female subjects for art, in the context of the evolving status of women in twentieth-century China. Against the backdrop of […]

POSING QUESTIONS ON POSING BEAUTY: A CONVERSATION WITH DEBORAH WILLISDeborah Willis, University Professor and Chair, Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York UniversityJoin us for a conversation with Deborah Willis, award winning MacArthur Fellow, artist, curator, professor and eminent scholar in the history of Black photography, and Jade […]

FASHIONING RACIAL REVOLUTION: THE SIGNARES IN GORÉE AND SAINT-LOUIS Anne Lafont, Directrice d’études, EHESS, l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris Could it be that in the geographical conception of art developed in Enlightenment Europe, the primary role and the function of the so-called Black Continent was one of ornament? Or, on the contrary, […]

Chic Radicals: Street Drag as Critical Performance Art in the late 1960s and 1970sDr. David GetsyEleanor Shea Professor of Art History, Department of Art, University of VirginiaDr. David Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History, Department of Art, University of Virginia, will lecture on the intersections of drag and performance art in the 1960s and […]

“Freddy Rodriguez‘s Geometries: Diaspora, Networks, and Context”E. Carmen RamosChief Curatorial and Conservation Officer, National Gallery of ArtJoin us for a HESCAH lecture by E. Carmen Ramos, Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer, National Gallery of Art. “Freddy Rodriguez‘s Geometries: Diaspora, Networks, and Context” is part of the Curating Networks: From Latinx to Caribbean series, co-sponsored by the University Galleries […]

Rachel Weiss Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoJoin us for a HESCAH lecture by Rachel Weiss, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The artistic collaborative group Los Carpinteros produced some of the most commented and lauded works to come out of Havana in the 1990s. Placing virtuosic craftsmanship at […]

Release and Recuperation: Caring for the Colonial in Latin AmericaDr. Dana LeibsohnAlice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College How do colonial creations circulate in the present? What are the ethics of keeping these works alive, remembered, valued? Focusing on modern practices of worship, conservation and collecting, this talk centers works from colonial Latin America, […]

Women are active participants in devotional activities around the Himalayas today. Did women play any role in religious pursuits of the Himalayan communities during the second millennium? While we hear of many male monastic teachers, tantric practitioners, and royal patrons in historical records, it is rarer to find accounts of women’s active participation in the […]

Women Artists, Nudes and Models: Observation and Imagination in Early Modern EuropeDr. Patricia SimonsProfessor Emerita, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Professorial Fellow, University of MelbourneBy exploring ways in which women artists managed to present nude figures, male and female, despite institutional barriers, this lecture takes gender analysis beyond the study of biography. The core examples […]

The Royal Inca Tunic: A Biography of an Ancient Andean MasterpieceDr. Andrew James HamiltonAssociate Curator of Arts of the Americas, Art Institute of Chicago; Lecturer, Department of Art History, University of ChicagoThe most famous work of Andean art in the world is an enigmatic tunic in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Thought […]

Art, Nationalism and Power: Gazbia Sirry and Egyptian Modernists in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Revolutionary Egypt​Dr. Chika Okeke-AguluRobert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Color, Catholicism, and the Continuance of Maya Religiosity in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán​Dr. Amara Solari​Professor of Art History and Anthropology, Penn State University ​In the middle of the sixteenth century, Franciscan friars launched a massive evangelical campaign that attempted to convert the Yucatán Peninsula’s Maya population to orthodox Catholicism. […]

Dr. Darby EnglishCarl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, University of ChicagoPresented in conjunction with the Harn Museum of Art exhibition Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection. This talk will approach elements within works in the exhibition where, it seems, you can see art doing for artists — and possibly for observers — what […]

"Remapping the "Paris" Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue"Dr. Meredith Martin, Professor of Art History, New York UniversityThis talk explores deep, mostly unknown connections between the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the production and consumption of art in Paris in the decade preceding the French and Haitian Revolutions. It focuses on Saint-Domingue plantation owners who […]

Dr. Delinda Collier, Dean of Graduate Studies; Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Join us for "Mobilized Media: A Discussion of Works by Mónica de Miranda, Sammy Baloji, and Theo Eshetu", a HESCAH lecture by Dr. Delinda Collier exploring the works of three contemporary photographers working in and out of the […]

"Marcel Duchamp Underground​"Dr. Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art, Vassar College.Join us for "Marcel Duchamp Underground," a lecture by Dr. Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art at Vassar College, on Thursday, April 3, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. in Chandler Auditorium at the Harn Museum of Art. The lecture is free and open to the public, with a […]

The most famous work of Andean art in the world is an enigmatic tunic in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Thought to be the only surviving royal vestment of the Inca Empire, it has spawned controversial theories that its intricate patterns are a long-lost writing system. For over a decade, Andrew James […]

Join us for a HESCAH lecture by Dr. Marni Kessler, Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas. Lecture Title: "The Air of Modernity: Edgar Degas’ Ironers Ecocritically" Date: Thursday, September 4, 2025, 6:00 p.m.Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of ArtReception to follow In his over forty representations of ironers, Edgar […]

"The Colonial Forest and the French Landscape"Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke This talk explores how the French landscape tradition was shaped by a new science of forest management in territorial France and colonial Algeria. Artworks and technical diagrams alike gave pictorial form to technocratic procedures for exploiting various kind of “value” in forests, both in the metropole and […]

HESCAH welcomes Dr. Jesús Escobar to give a lecture based on new and ongoing research on seventeenth-century Spanish architecture in a transatlantic context. Dr. Escobar is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, where he specializes in the architecture, urbanism, and cartography of […]