The Past is Prologue

Join us for a conversation, using the work of Eastman Johnson NA as a starting point, moderated by Boston University Professor Emerita Patricia Hills, Ph.D., Director/Author of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, which centers past and present National Academicians (NA) and the ways each interpreted different themes like landscape, self-portraiture, and genre and figure painting. Exploring how present Academicians reinvented and upturned traditions of the past, the public will see models of contemporary strategies for engaging the past, featuring Dread Scott NA, Roberto Visani, and other surprise speakers.

RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required.

ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to [email protected].

About the Speaker

Patricia Hills, Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné (BA, Stanford University; MA, Hunter College, City University of New York; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is Professor Emerita of Art History at Boston University, where she taught from 1978 to 2014. She was also an instructor at York College, CUNY, and Hunter College, CUNY; the Graduate School of Columbia University; the Institute of Fine Arts; the University of Wyoming; and the Freie Universität in Berlin. From 1972 to 1987 she curated exhibitions for the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has published books, exhibition catalogues, and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, African American artists, and art and politics of the 1930s and today, including Eastman Johnson (1972); The Painters’ America (1974); The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1980); Alice Neel (1983); John Singer Sargent (1986); Stuart Davis (1995); Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century(2001); May Stevens (2005); and Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2009). In 2011 she received the College Art Association award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History. She has received numerous grants: three from the National Endowment for the Humanities; three from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research; a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellowship; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work on the catalogue raisonné of Eastman Johnson began in 1971 as she was organizing the exhibition of the artist’s work for the Whitney Museum and writing her dissertation.

Image: Kay Walkingstick, Volute, 2009, Courtesy of the artist.

Host or Publisher National Academy of Design