Symposium

Art Interrupted: Reinterpreting Advancing American Art

October 18 & 19  

The symposium is free and open to the public; to register, contact Robbin Birmingham at (334) 844-3085, or email her at robbinb@auburn.edu. Boxed lunches will be available Friday for $15 by preorder. Orders must be placed with Robbin by Friday, October 12.

Thursday, 5 pm

Lecture: “The Pleasure of Failure: The Saga of the Advancing American Art Exhibition” by Serge Guilbaut, Ph.D.

University of British Columbia Professor Guilbaut holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California at Los Angeles. His area of special interest is Post-war American and French history, including the history of post-war Franco-American relations as they relate to art. His publications include How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Modernism and Modernity, and Reconstructing Modernism, Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-1964 as well as “POSTWAR: On an exhibition: tempestuous transatlantic culture, 1946-1956,” which he wrote for the exhibition he curated in Barcelona that included paintings from JCSM’s Advancing American Art collection. 

Friday, 10 am Coffee/Galleries Open

Lecture: “Advancing American Art: LeRoy Davidson’s ‘Blind Date’ with Destiny” by Dennis Harper

Dennis Harper is curator of collections and exhibitions at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. Harper’s recent curatorial projects include Facing South: Portraits of Southern Artists by Jerry Siegel; Bacon Level, Hickory Flat, and the Illustrious Potteries of Randolph and Chambers Counties, Alabama; and As Above, So Below: Recent Work by Scherer & Ouporov, which received the Southeastern Museums Conference Award of Excellence in 2011. Harper has written on American art from 1930 to 1950, among other subjects, for publications at the Georgia Museum of Art, where he was curator of exhibitions until 2008.

FRIDAY, 11 am 

Lecture: “One World: Advancing American Art, Modernism, and International Diplomacy” by Mark White, Ph.D.

Mark White (B.A., Oklahoma State University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Kansas) is the Eugene B. Adkins Curator at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma. He specializes in American and Native American art of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the Southwest. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1999, he joined the faculty at Oklahoma State University in 2000. In 2008, he joined the Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art and recently curated the reinstallation of the museum after the expansion.  He is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues on diverse artists, including George Bellows, Peter Blume, Alexandre Hogue, Oscar Howe and Olinka Hrdy. He is currently working on an exhibition of Abstract Expressionism in the American Southwest.

FRIDAY LUNCH, 12-1 pm

FRIDAY, 1:30 pm

Panel discussion and wrap-up:
Serge Guilbaut, Dennis Harper, and Mark White