Mother and Child (A Goodnight Hug), 1880, by Mary Cassatt
Please Note: Due to the government shutdown, this program has changed locations. See travel information at the end of the description.
Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, and Cindy Sherman worked at different periods and in different media and styles. However, they did share one thing: the desire to ignore society’s dictates and live and work according to their own. Art historian Nancy G. Heller examines how these controversial American artists helped to ignite some of the most important and radical developments in modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, and photography.
The day’s sessions are lavishly illustrated with examples of major works created by all four women, plus extensive biographical and comparative materials.
9:30–10:45 a.m. Mary Cassatt: A Pennsylvanian in Paris
The radical late 19th-century style known as impressionism was born, and focused, in Paris, yet one of its principal exponents was an American expatriate. Cassatt’s luscious landscapes and tender portraits of women and children exemplify the impressionists’ interest in fleeting images of everyday subjects, depicted as they were actually perceived by the human eye, not according to the strictures imposed by academic training.
11 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Georgia O’Keeffe: More Than Just Flowers and Skulls
This iconic artist is best known today for the striking and colorful works she painted during her long residence in New Mexico. However, it was actually the Wisconsin-born artist’s astonishing early experiments with abstraction in the form of watercolors and charcoal drawings created between 1910 and 1920 that initially established her place in the history of American modernism.
12:15–1:30 p.m. Lunch (Participants provide their own).
1:30–2:45 p.m. Louise Nevelson: Grande Dame of Abstract Sculpture
As a Russian Jewish immigrant in rural Maine, Nevelson was an unlikely candidate for artistic superstardom. But her ability to identify the beauty in such humble materials as discarded scraps of wood, plus her remarkable sense of design and her carefully cultivated, highly theatrical persona, made this artist a major presence on the New York art scene for many decades. To this day Nevelson’s signature sculptures—monochromatic, wall-like assemblages—are still readily identifiable, and often imitated.
3–4:15 p.m. Cindy Sherman: Self-Portraits That Look Nothing Like Her
The most-prominent member of the so-called “Pictures Generation,” beginning in the early 1980s Sherman upended the venerable concept of self-portraiture by taking unrecognizable photographs of herself, her face and body obscured by elaborate makeup, wigs, costumes, and prosthetic devices. Sherman’s work, which rapidly achieved both commercial success and scholarly recognition, had a major hand in establishing photography’s new identity as an art form equal in importance to painting and other, more traditional, techniques.
Heller is a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the author of the book Women Artists: An Illustrated History.
World Art History Certificate elective: Earn 1 credit
TRAVEL & GENERAL INFORMATION with NEW LOCATION:
- CUA Campus Map (Gowan Hall is located at H15 on map)
- If you take Metro, closest station is Brookland-CUA on the red line.
- If you plan to drive, parking is available in the McMahon Parking Lot, which is located between Hannan Hall and Caldwell Hall (C11 on the map). Please note that if you use Google maps (or Uber or Lyft), enter “McMahon Parking CUA,” for best results.
- For lunch break, participants who bring their own lunch may eat it in the auditorium during the lunch break; there are also several eateries within a short walk of the auditorium where participants may purchase lunch.
