Art History from Home: Immigration and the Jewish Diaspora in American Modernism 1900-1960

Online, via Zoom

Focusing on select works from the Whitney’s permanent collection, this online lecture will explore the complex sociocultural histories of the Jewish Diaspora in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Ranging from Max Weber’s reimagining of Cubism to depict the dynamic changes in early-twentieth-century immigrant life in New York to Louise Nevelson’s reclaiming of the city’s detritus to harness and elevate its vitality, we will examine the impact of Jewish immigrant artists on the diverse trajectories of American modernism.

Patryk Tomaszewski is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching global twentieth-century realisms. His dissertation offers the first scholarly examination of state-sponsored exhibitions of art and visual culture in early communist Poland (1945–56). His writing has appeared in ARTMargins Online and MoMA’s post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, among other publications, and he is an adjunct lecturer at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.