Learn to See Like New: Roy Lichtenstein’s Perception
Roy Lichtenstein, Artist's Studio "The Dance", 1974. Acrylic, oil, graphite pencil on canvas, 98 1/8 × 128 3/4in. (249.2 × 327 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse, Jr. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2026 © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
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Online, via Zoom
Open to all members
Friday, September 25, 12 pm
Monday, October 5, 6 pm
Wednesday, October 14, 6 pm
Today, Roy Lichtenstein is viewed as one of the defining artists of the Pop art movement with a distinct visual language that changed the way we see images. In this member-exclusive talk with Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow Caitlin Chan on the occasion of Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, discover the unusual practices that led Lichtenstein himself to see images differently.
Under the instruction of Professor Hoyt L. Sherman at Ohio State University in the 1940s, Lichtenstein was introduced to the flash lab—one of the Professor's unorthodox artistic practices in which students watch images flash across a screen for a tenth of a second. In a 1963 interview, Roy Lichtenstein said, “The ideas of Professor Hoyt L. Sherman on perception were my earliest important influence and still affect my ideas on visual unity”. From Sherman’s methods, Lichtenstein took away an understanding of both how to see and, notably, how not to see.
This talk will explore the roots of Lichtenstein’s engagement with perception and chart how those ideas developed throughout the Pop artist’s career and beyond his passing in 1997. Chan will invite members to apply Sherman’s lessons themselves, explore the innovations of Like New co-curator and artist Alex da Corte’s reimagining of this experience for the forthcoming exhibition, and help viewers see some of Lichtenstein’s most iconic works at the Whitney like new.
Caitlin Chan is an art history Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has presented her work at Columbia University, the College Art Association, the Association for Art History, and Leuphana University. At Stanford, Caitlin is a recipient of the Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Fellowship in American Art and Culture. Previously, Caitlin has worked at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gallery 102, and Christie’s Auction House.
