Learning Series Lectures: Two Histories of Abstract Art

Floor Three, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Learning Series members in the Curate Your Own Membership program

This two-part lecture program taught by teaching fellow Elizabeth Buhe will provide art historical context for the exhibitions Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016. The first lecture will explore works in a variety of media that engage with modernist abstraction and disrupt habitual ways of perceiving space and form. These works may employ disorienting illusions of depth and flatness, intensely affecting color, or synesthetic auditory and haptic stimuli to put forward new kinds of sensory experience that in some cases suggest a utopian vision of the future and in others embody critical or ambivalent attitudes towards contemporaneous reality—social, political, and technological. In the second lecture, the focus will shift to questions of biography and identity, exploring the impact of gender, race, and nationality on the work of abstract artists and on the critical and popular reception of their work.

Active Learning Series members are invited to register for these options:

Option 1: Saturdays, October 15 and November 5, 7–8 pm
Option 2: Mondays, November 7 and 14, 5:30–6:30 pm
Option 3: Sundays, December 4 and 11, 11:30 am–12:30 pm

Please note: This event has reached capacity. Individual and Dual Learning Series members are invited to this event: For Individual members, the invitation is for one; for Dual members, the invitation is for two. Registration instructions will be provided by email.

To join or upgrade, call (212) 570-3641.