Museums are places for ideas and dialogue that use collections, exhibitions, and programs to inspire people. The power of museums lies in acting as agents of social change. Museums are uniquely positioned to acknowledge and accept the needs, concerns, and issues of the diverse, often disenfranchised, and shifting audience landscape. As a place of dialogue…
The Twentieth Century presented society with a long list of incomprehensible situations and events, beginning with World War I. Acting as a buffer between the horrors of reality and individual’s perceptions of the world, art helps to inform, explain and educate society, but it can also be used to change people’s perceptions. In August 1914,…
Narrative scenes of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary were, by the Middle Ages, the most common images in Western art, and were found throughout the architecture of the church – pulpit, doors, altarpieces, and so on. These scenes were remarkable for their consistency of composition. The reason is that these scenes were…
Anthropomorphism parodies our tendency to see the human in everything, reminding us at the same time of the separate, secret reality of nature. Most cultures possess a long-standing fable tradition with anthropomorphized animals as characters that can stand as commonly recognized types of human behavior. This lecture traces the anthropomorphic development of the classic characters…
The American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko once said: “A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.” Objectively, color is the element of art that is produced when light, striking an object, is reflected back to the eye. Subjectively, color is a sensation, a human reaction to a hue arise in part from…
When World War I broke out in August 1914, many German Expressionist artists initially believed it could be the apocalyptic event that would at last overthrow the self-satisfied materialism of the nation’s monarch and bourgeoisie. Franz Marc and August Macke, two of the leading artists of German Expressionism, were among those who enlisted for active…
