Just Announced
The 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 2022
Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect
Richard J. Powell, Duke University
March 20
March 27
April 3
April 10
April 24
May 1
Further information to be announced.
News from the Center
View updates from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, including upcoming and recent programs, fellowship deadlines, recordings, and publications.
Photo © Chester Higgins
Recent Lectures
The 70th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print
Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University
New Undergraduate Internship Program
The Center has established a multiyear undergraduate paid internship program in partnership with Howard University and with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This four-year pilot program aims to create pathways to careers in museums and arts-related organizations for students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other institutions that serve populations that are underrepresented in the museum field.
New Publication
Bollingen Series
The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855‒1280Vidya Dehejia, May 2021
Leading art historian Vidya Dehejia presents the first book to put the sacred and sensuous bronze statues from India’s Chola dynasty in social context.
Part of the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press, this publication follows The 65th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, presented by Dehejia in the spring of 2016.
Recent Symposium
Wyeth Foundation for American Art Symposium
Feminism in American Art History
December 4–11, 2020
This annual program supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art was a two-part symposium consisting of eight prerecorded lectures and a live panel discussion. Presentations by Kirsten Pai Buick, Aruna D’Souza, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Lisa Farrington, Jessica Horton, Jenny Lin, Helen Molesworth, and Jennifer Van Horn were available between December 4 and December 18, 2020.
Recent Article
From the Bulletin
Gilbert Stuart and the Representation of the Nation
Bulletin 62 (Fall 2020)
Portraiture is a genre in which the subject and its context, both physical and historical, have infinite possibilities for interpretation and understanding. This article by Dean Steven Nelson reflects on the artist’s Gibbs-Coolidge paintings, the only surviving set of works depicting the first five presidents of the United States, showing how they are situated in both past and present narratives of national identity. He discusses the portraits’ relationship to changing definitions of American ideals and how the National Gallery of Art as an institution must strive to expand this representation and address the absences in its narrative.
Recent Lecture
Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Telling the Past Differently: Italian Renaissance Art in the Hands of the Beholder
Megan Holmes, University of Michigan
New Fellowship
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
The Center announced the creation of the Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship—a biennial appointment for two consecutive academic years. The inaugural Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship will be awarded from September 2021–August 2023 and was made possible through the generosity of Frederick W. Beinecke and his family in response to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Endowment Challenge Grant.
Recent Presentation
Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art
David Bomford on Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873)
David Bomford (former conservation chair, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and 2018 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses the importance of Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873), painted at a pivotal moment both in the artist’s life and for the city of Paris. Identifying the setting and the sitters in the painting as well as Manet’s innovations in painting technique, Professor Bomford shares what makes this painting one he most admires in the collection.
Annual Report
Center 40: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2019–May 2020
This year the Center welcomed fellows in residence from Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The topics of their research ranged from the response to industrially produced metals in mid-nineteenth-century France to the emergence and reception of Michelangelo’s non finito, from Japanese export lacquer for an Iberian clientele at the turn of the seventeenth century to work of the Italian artist Jacopo Bassano in the context of agricultural transformation on the Venetian mainland, and from sensory perceptions among the Yorùbá people to conceptual and performance art and social commentary in Chile from 1977 to 1983.
Postponed
The 69th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Transparence and Ambiguity: The Modern Space of Axonometry
Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
Fall 2022 dates to be announced.