Gallery Talk: Bonnie Lautenberg: ARTISTICA!

Curator Jack Rasmussen and artist Bonnie Lautenberg, will discuss the exhibition "Bonnie Lautenberg: ARTISTICA! Where Hollywood Meets Art History", in a gallery talk scheduled for

Saturday, 2:00- 3:00pm

About the exhibition:

Bonnie Lautenberg, Artist

Known for her photography across politics, music, and the arts, Bonnie Lautenberg creates a lively visual history lesson by pairing iconic works of art with film stills from the same year.

As you look, you begin to see art and film side by side in a new way, noticing how images “speak” to one another across media. Her process is intuitive—sometimes she starts with a painting and searches for a cinematic counterpart; sometimes a film image leads her to an artwork. Lautenberg began this series in 2017 and continues to expand it, including new work created especially for this exhibition at American University Museum.

As you move through the exhibition, you’ll encounter pairings that span decades of film and art. René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928) meets a still from The Mysterious Lady, starring Greta Garbo and Conrad Nagel. The Golden Age of Hollywood appears in a pairing of the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story with a painting by Stuart Davis, once owned by Lautenberg’s parents. Singin’ in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, joins a work by Yayoi Kusama, noting a shared texture between Kusama’s surface and the brick and rainfall in the still. In another instance, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl meets Tom Wesselmann’s American Nude No. 99, where a subtle echo, a cigarette, links the two images.

Across these works, Lautenberg places two powerful visual languages on a single plane. The result is open-ended: a field of formal, emotional, and historical connections that invites each viewer to look, compare, and draw their own conclusions.

This event will be held in-person at the museum.

Please direct any questions about this event to the museum's main contact for this event, Patricia Poku-Speight at [email protected].

Image: Bonnie Lautenberg, 1940 The Philadelphia Story- Starring Katharine Hepburn and James Stuart, Artist - Stuart Davis, Hot Still Scape for Six Colors — 7th Avenue Style. Giclee, 48 x 36.5 inches. From collection of the artist.

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Host or Publisher American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center