Art Appreciation   

Look out: this year is the year of the woman artist. Celebrations of the important role of women in the visual arts in Early Modern Europe are happening around the world. Here in the US, two major shows in Baltimore and Boston focus on creating an art “her”story, focusing not only on the major mediums of painting and sculpture but also the “minor” arts of tapestry design, lace making, etc. From the convent to the family studio to the rise of independent female artists like Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Michelina Wautier, and Italo-British miniaturist Maria Cosway, we will chart not only how these artists achieved international renown in a sexist world, but how they often subtly shifted traditional subjects to reflect the reality of their lives.

Cypress trees, painted repeatedly, expressively, and so movingly by Vincent van Gogh over the course of a single year, are among the most iconic images of Western art and were celebrated by an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum earlier in 2023. The 19th-century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin was also creating equally iconic and haunting images of cypresses twenty years before van Gogh. Through vividly colorful and detailed images, this presentation will compare and explore how the unique shape, color, and presence of cypress trees inspired unforgettable works by Vincent van Gogh, Arnold Böcklin, Edward Munch, Paul Signac, and 16th-century Persian artists, through vividly colorful and detailed images.

Referencing The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s groundbreaking exhibition titled The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, February 25 - July 28, 2024, we will explore the masterworks of major Harlem Renaissance artists including Jacob Lawrence, Agusta Savage, Archibald Motley, and others, in dialogue with their European counterparts such as Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, and more. This presentation will compare American and European, realistic and abstract–all thoroughly Modern–art through vividly colorful and detailed images.