Talks & Conversations

The Art of Looking: Grace Hartigan, Summer Street

Broad strokes of paint create blocks of color in tones of emerald and celery green, topaz and sapphire blue, red, orange, bright yellow, white, and black in this abstract, vertical composition. A collection of peach-toned colors in the lower left quadrant could loosely represent a person. Other shapes give the impression of a room with a window and furniture, though details are left to our imagination.
Grace Hartigan, Summer Street, 1956, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Dorothy C. Miller), 2014.136.132

Grace Hartigan's Summer Street is the inspiration for this interactive conversation. Join us for a one-hour virtual session and share your observations, interpretations, questions, and ideas about this work of art.

These conversations will encourage you to engage deeply with art, with others, and with the world around you as you hone skills in visual literacy and perspective-taking.

The program is free, open to the public, and is designed for everyone interested in talking about art. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and over.

Due to the interactive nature of this virtual program, sessions are not recorded.

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The soaring, gilded vault of a central aisle of the inside of a church fills this horizontal painting. The ceiling of the nave curves up and away from us like a tunnel. It is lined with coffers, which have inset panels, decorated with gold. The light-filled nave angles down from the top center of the composition toward the lower left as it moves away from us. The white stone pillars supporting the barrel vault are intricately carved and decorated with pudgy, winged cherubs holding portraits of men, and aisles run parallel to the central nave to our left and right. In the side aisles, pink marble columns flank altars in chapels. At the far end of the church, the nave is interrupted where it opens into the light-filled crossing, before continuing beyond. Marking the space where the long hall of the church is intersected by a shorter arm to create a cross shape is a structure made of four twisting columns supporting a pointed canopy, all cast in bronze. Tiny men and women pray or gather in pairs and small groups along the nave. Some wear tattered clothing and others are elegantly dressed.

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