This lecture traces the evolution of personifications of America from the beginning of European exploration through the emergence of the United States as a modern international superpower. Across this timeframe, artists symbolized America in a range of guises, including as a Native American princess, the classicized goddess Columbia, the personification of Liberty, and Uncle Sam. As emblems of America—the place, the nation, the concept—these figures embodied the values associated with the country and its people. Appearing in many different artistic media, images of personified America reflect shifting ideas about what America is, as well as revealing art’s important role in constructing national identity.

African American artists occupy an important, though often overlooked place in the history of American art. This lecture surveys the creative work of African American artists from the colonial period through the 1960s—artists including Joshua Johnson, Robert Duncanson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, and Norman Lewis, among others. In addition to examining their diverse subjects and styles, this lecture also places the work of African American artists within broader social, political, and cultural contexts.

The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes in American society in general and women’s lives in particular. Many women gained new educational, occupational, and political opportunities, while also enjoying unprecedented social and sexual freedoms. Their experiences challenged traditional gender hierarchies and long-held assumptions about female nature. The so-called New Woman embodied modern femininity and proliferated in the pictorial arts during this period. By surveying various permutations of the New Woman—including the ardent suffragette, the liberated flapper, the independent worker, and the gender-bending artist—this lecture explores the shifting and often conflicted attitudes about modern womanhood in the United States.

Legends and images of Pocahontas, the young Native American woman who reportedly rescued Captain John Smith of the Jamestown settlement in the early 1600s, became popular in Western culture during her lifetime and continue to evolve into the present day. This lecture examines representations of this renowned yet elusive historical figure in the context of various narratives about her life and period attitudes about Native Americans. In images ranging from seventeenth-century prints, to the VMFA’s 1889 portrait by Richard Norris Brooke, to the late-twentieth-century Disney movie, Pocahontas appears as a complex character invested with diverse meanings as an exotic curiosity, exemplary Christian convert, and feminist heroine.

Widely regarded as one of America’s greatest artists, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) first gained national recognition for insightful paintings and illustrations about the Civil War. Informed by his first-hand observations at the Union front in Virginia, Homer adopted an unconventional approach to representing war: instead of depicting dramatic battle scenes and heroic military leaders, he humanized the conflict with pictures that explored soldiers’ daily life in camp and the war’s impact on the home front. This lecture examines Homer’s unique and highly influential vision of the sectional conflict. His images address some of the most complex and pressing issues of his day—the nature of modern warfare, shifting gender and race relations, and the return to normalcy in peacetime. Provocative and visually powerful, as well as deeply nuanced and often witty, Homer’s Civil War pictures continue to resonate in the twenty-first century.

Robert Rauschenburg once commented “I think art is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.” In this workshop, you’ll explore this thought by considering how artists use found objects to transform materials as they pursue powerful new meanings. By looking closely at works by ground-breaking artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, Jim Dine, and Sonya Clark, participants will analyze different methods of assemblage. Found materials will be used to experiment in connecting meaning and material, and discussion will cover how these ideas can translate into your classroom. In addition, this is a great way to use personal found art objects as a form of self- expression.

As a student of the nineteenth century, particularly the Neoclassical era (ca. 1750 – 1815), and as a one-time student of the Classical world, I am intrigued by Aby Warburg’s “afterlife” or “survival” of antiquity unto our own time. The artists I will discuss are drawing upon Classical and Neoclassical art works and motifs, reactivating them to question, critique, and explore the artistic and intellectual ideals within those art works. In these moments of inspiration and reincorporation, artists connect to the past. Artists to be discussed include di Chirico, Picasso, Dali, Lily Cox-Richard, Karen LaMonte, Vik Muniz, Kehinde Wiley, and others.