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Washington, DC—The National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts announced today that Mabel O. Wilson of Columbia University will give the 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in spring 2025.

Wilson 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. Her lectures will present key themes and examine buildings, works of art, and other historical documents from her forthcoming book, Building Race and Nation: How Slavery and Dispossession Shaped U.S. Civic Architecture. She will bring together historical research on the United States’ early civic architecture, including Richmond’s Virginia State Capitol, the White House, and the design of Washington, DC. Her talks will explore the complex dichotomy between the founding ideals of these institutions and the reality of their construction.

“Wilson’s groundbreaking research on our nation’s architecture, including that which surrounds the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, encourages us to relearn and reconstruct our lived environments, providing new insights and reckonings into the past, present, and future,” said Steven Nelson, dean of the Center.

About Mabel O. Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and professor and chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. Wilson’s scholarship and projects have explored Black culture, race, and the built environment. She was a member of the design team for the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She also co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

About the Mellon Lectures

Inaugurated in 1949, the Mellon Lectures is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded to present the best contemporary thought and scholarship in the fine arts. The program itself is named for Andrew W. Mellon, founder of the National Gallery, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941. Lecturers have included art historians, artists, archaeologists, poets, actors, and musicologists. See the full list.