Program Calendar

This talk will address a range of recent approaches by a range of international artists to drawing as a medium of contemporary art, often in direct dialogue with painting. Drawing tends to emphasize the importance of making things by hand, but without the associations of finish and monumentality associated with painting. Artists from a range of different backgrounds have used drawing to question inherited notions of history and social identity by making figural images abstract or combining them with other types of visual imagery. This lecture examines drawings that represent the human figure through a process of emergence or disappearance in order to develop incisive social commentary about race and other intersecting categories of social identity in a time of increasing attention to histories of violence and colonialism.

Presented by Karen Kurczynski is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Free admission to the Museums a la Carte lectures for all museum members made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the #SHARP program.