Lectures, Artist Talks, and Panel Conversations

Esteemed artists, curators, and scholars spoke on art, culture, and other aspects of the Museum’s collections and exhibitions. All programs were delivered live via Zoom or in person and the recordings are available below.

Architect Gunny Harboe provides insight into preserving one of St. Louis’s architectural treasures—the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park—a Frank Lloyd Wright “Usonian” design located in Kirkwood. Learn how a conservation management plan is guiding the restoration of its distinctive roof and how it will inform future preservation.

This partnership program is the Joanne and Alan Kohn Lecture presented by the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park.

In connection with “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery,” artist Nora Naranjo Morse shares stories from Pueblo clay workers past and present. Her stories create a deeper appreciation of the exhibition and speak to the power of the land and her people.

The annual Mary Strauss Women in the Arts lecture was given by Furio Rinaldi, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Rinaldi in revisits the path-defining career, layered artistry, and adventurous life of Tamara de Lempicka, one of the great protagonists of the artistic scene in the early 20th century. This lecture was in conjunction with the first US-museum retrospective of de Lempicka’s work in San Francisco and Houston, and in preparation for SLAM’s exhibition “Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France.”

This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

The 2024 Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art was given by Philip J. Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History and the Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard University.

Active between the late 1920s and early 1940s, Dakota artist Mary Sully created a series of “personality prints,” abstract portraits of American popular culture and its celebrities that drew upon modernist tropes and urban cosmopolitan styles. Yet Sully’s geometries, color choices, and ethnographic inclinations point just as strongly to Native women’s arts traditions of the Great Plains. Filtered through works in the Danforth Collection, this talk explores Sully’s eclectic and rangy visual vocabulary as an expression of her essential grounding in Plains aesthetics and material culture.

Romare Bearden Fellow Charlie Farrell moderates a panel of artists whose practice is rooted in the principles of Juneteenth, history, and freedom. André Fuqua and Brianna McIntyre of Occupy Vacancy confront legacies of racism and urban renewal in north St. Louis neighborhoods. Patrick Earl Hammie’s series I AM… THE NIGHT explores the psychology of racism through lynching photographs manipulated to look like Rorschach tests. Together in conversation, these artists discuss the importance of remembering history and ways we can imagine new Black futures. The program opens with Gwen Moore, curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity at the Missouri Historical Society, who will discuss the local history of Juneteenth.

For the 2024 annual Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Lecture, art historian Betsy Wieseman focuses on the scholarly sleuthing that has—at long last—returned Michelina Wautier’s creations to their rightful author. Active in the court city of Brussels, Wautier (1604–1689) was an artist of exceptional versatility, producing portraits, genre scenes, allegories, and still lifes as well as religious and mythological scenes. Paradoxically, her command of a broad stylistic and thematic range resulted over time in many of her paintings being attributed to various other (male) artists. Only in this century have art historians begun to fully appreciate Wautier’s audacious talent.

This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

The 2024 panel discussion celebrating women of color in the arts explores memory. Artists Alayna N. Pernell, Marina Peng, and Allena Marie Brazier discuss how their multidisciplinary practices emerge from photography and use memories as vehicles for introspection, healing, and advocacy. The artists identify, reflect, and challenge systemic issues that shape their identities. The conversation is moderated by Justice Henderson, the 2023-2025 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow.

Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art

In the 1960s and 1970s, tipis circulated alongside domes as emblems of environmental sustainability and countercultural cool. Yet these architectures advanced radically different visions of the future. Jessica L. Horton, associate professor of modern and contemporary Native American art at the University of Delaware, will tell the story of a Blackfeet painted lodge commissioned for the United States Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, which answered urgent Cold War debates about pollution and climate change.

Andréa Purnell and Hannah Klemm, co-curators of The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, have an insightful conversation with Wendel Patrick and Tef Poe, hip hop artists and members of the exhibition’s global advisory group, about the relationship between hip hop’s musical history and its influence on contemporary art and the potential future for hip hop culture to shape how museums connect to their communities.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s–1970s, three artists whose artwork is featured in the exhibition discuss their time at the Institute of American Indian Arts and reflect on how it shaped their work. Alexander Brier Marr, SLAM’s Associate Curator for Native American Art, moderates the discussion with artists Anita Fields, Linda Lomahaftewa, and Alfred Young Man.

Artist Faye HeavyShield will speak about her creative practice and the collection-based installation “Native Artist Collaboration: Faye HeavyShield” in the Donald Danforth Jr. Gallery 322. Among the leading First Nations artists in Canada, HeavyShield belongs to the Kainai (Blood) Nation, a member of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) with ancestral territories in southern Alberta.

Beginning in the 16th century in Europe, collectors assembled Wunderkammern, so-called cabinets of curiosity designed to evince wonder and awe. These collections housed weird and sometimes wild conjunctions of the natural and the man-made, the local and the exotic. Claudia Swan, the inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, will discuss how objects in curiosity cabinets were collected, exchanged, stolen, organized, and valued.

In April 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright mounted an exhibit on a project he called Broadacre City, which proposed radical changes to cities and how we live in them. A veritable Trojan horse that challenged the very urbanity of the space in which it was installed, Broadacre City called for widespread decentralization whereby communities would be based on small-scale farming and manufacturing, local government, and property ownership. Jennifer Gray, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Taliesin Institute unpacks the ways that Broadacre, though never built, was a vehicle to address pressing social, economic, and environmental issues, many of which have contemporary relevance.

The Joanne and Alan Kohn Lecture presented by The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park.

In 1968 artist Joan Mitchell moved from Paris to La Tour, a country estate in Vétheuil that overlooks the Seine as well as a cottage where Claude Monet lived and worked from 1878 to 1881. While Mitchell was known as an Abstract Expressionist painter in New York and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, her relationship to landscape and 19th-century French painting blossomed in her decades in the countryside. Marin Sarvé-Tarr, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will examine how Mitchell looked back to propel her work forward in the final decades of her career.

The Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Lecture is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

This annual panel discussion celebrating women of color in the arts explores depictions of landscapes. Panelists Allison L. Norfleet Bruenger, Sarah Sense, and Tiff J. Sutton discuss their relationships to the environment and how it informs their practice. The discussion is moderated by Charlie Farrell, the 2022–2024 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow. This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

Jeffrey L. Forgeng, curator of arms and armor and medieval art at the Worcester Art Museum, has a perennial fascination with the human imagination. Armor was mythologized by the cultures that produced it, and it remains a vibrant part of modern mythologies through stories, cinema, and digital games. But what of the realities behind the myth? Who made the armor, who wore it, how well did it work—and how did it come to be in Saint Louis half a millennium later? Forgeng, curator of Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum, takes you on a personal journey through highlights of the exhibition and the centuries of human stories forged into the steel of these objects.

With Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art

Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) was an internationally recognized painter and one of the most foremost abstract artists of his time. He was most widely known for the large color stained canvases he draped and suspended from walls and ceilings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Featuring works in the Thelma and Bert Ollie Memorial Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Courtney J. Martin discusses Gilliam’s three-dimensional approach to painting from the 1960s through to the end of his life.

This program is supported by the Ronald M. and Monique M. Ollie Education Endowment Fund for Abstraction by Black Artists.

Indian craftspeople are heirs to thousands of years of natural dye knowledge. Charllotte Kwon and Tim McLaughlin have had the opportunity to study and work with some of the finest artisan families still practicing traditional methods. In this talk Kwon and McLaughlin discuss the Ajrakh printers of the Kachchh region of western India and the kalamkari printers of Andhra Pradesh. They give an overview of the printing process and touch upon the history and remarkable legacy of this craft, in connection with the exhibition Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz.

The 2022 Ann W. Olin Endowed Lecture was given by Diana Seave Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Interim Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and author of Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art.

Diana Seave Greenwald blends historical and social scientific methods to provide fresh insights into 19th-century art. In particular, she focuses on a case study that combines theory from labor economics with data about works by 19th-century women artists. This insight into how artistic form and content change in response to demands on women’s time highlights structural barriers that still hamper 19th-century women artists’ posthumous reputations and continue to limit women artists’ accomplishments and recognition today.

The 2022 Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art was given by Christina E. Burke, Curator of Native American Art, Philbrook Museum of Art.

Dakota and Lakota artists have always created bold geometric designs using pigments, quills, and, later, glass beads. With historical works in the Danforth Collection as a foundation, Burke illustrates aesthetic and cultural connections between 19th-century art and the innovative Abstract paintings of Oscar Howe in the 20th century and Dyani White Hawk today.

Enrique Chagoya, artist Larissa Goldston, Universal Limited Art Editions David Kiehl, curatorial advisor Susan Sheehan, Susan Sheehan Gallery Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs

Focusing on the prints and drawings previously on view in the exhibition “Catching the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Ted L. and Maryanne Ellison Simmons Collection,” panelists will engage in a lively and informative conversation about their perspectives on building a strong collection of fine art prints.

Curators Elizabeth Wyckoff, Clare Kobasa, Andrea L. Ferber, and conservator Sophie Barbisan speak about Catching the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Ted L. and Maryanne Ellison Simmons Collection. They share how the curators translated the collectors’ passion for contemporary art into an exhibition and its catalogue, and discover what goes into making a print in the 21st century.

An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, artist Cara Romero’s identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective. Romero speaks about her process, influence, and her photograph Coyote Tales No.1, which is in the Museum’s collection.

Mary Strauss Women in the Arts lecture with Bridget Quinn, author of Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order)

In 1971 art historian Linda Nochlin posed an astonishing question in her revolutionary essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In subsequent decades, much has been discovered and hotly debated, yet many of Western history’s great women artists remain obscure. Author Bridget Quinn aims to provide a short corrective to this lamentable fact, discussing several artists featured in her book whose works are in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection.

Artist Oscar Murillo examines notions of cultural exchange, globalization, labor, and action through his monumental paintings that reflect the processes of their making. Watch this conversation between Murillo and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, as they discuss his recent paintings created in his Colombian hometown, La Paila, where he has resided during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Panel moderated by Shaka Myrick, the inaugural two-year Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow, with artists Summer Brooks, Jada Patterson, and Joann Quiñones

Join the Saint Louis Art Museum for our annual celebration of women of color in the arts. This year’s program explores the history of African American and Afro-Latina hair in contemporary art and Black culture. Hear from panelists about how this history informs their sculptural work.

This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

Judith Mann, senior curator of European art to 1800, discusses her nearly 20-year endeavor to bring the exhibition Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800 to fruition. She discuss the emergence of this artistic process in the 16th century as well as the origins of the exhibition when the Museum purchased a small painting on lapis lazuli in 2000.

Judy Watson is an Indigenous artist whose matrilineal family is from Waanyi country in Northwest Queensland, Australia. She is a member of the first generation of Aboriginal artists to employ the conventions of a studio-based fine art practice to examine contemporary identity and historical trauma. During this talk she discusses her artistic practice and her abstract painting in the Museum’s collection titled suture.

This panel examines the process of portrait photography, both behind and in front of the camera. Hannah Klemm and Eric Lutz, cocurators of Currents 120: Jess T. Dugan, lead a discussion with artist Jess T. Dugan and two sitters, Shira Berkowitz and Collin Elliott, who have been the subjects of numerous portraits. In sharing their experiences working together over the course of many years, they shed light on the unique dynamics of this genre.

Damon Davis is a postdisciplinary artist based in St. Louis. In a practice that is part therapy, part social commentary, his work spans a spectrum of creative media to tell stories exploring how power is informed by identity and mythology. During this talk, Davis introduces his All Hands On Deck project and discusses how, through his art, he seeks to empower and give voice to the powerless and combat systems of oppression, focusing not only on pain but also on the joy of the Black experience.

For more than 50 years artist Oliver Lee Jackson has created complex and layered images in which figurative elements emerge from abstract fields of vibrant color. The exhibition traces Jackson’s aesthetic evolution and demonstrates his significance as a highly experimental artist working across a range of media. In a conversation with Saint Louis Art Museum curators Simon Kelly and Hannah Klemm, Jackson discusses his career, his connections with the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), and his artistic process.

The 2021 Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art was given by Joe D. Horse Capture, vice president of Native collections and the Ahmanson Curator of Native American History and Culture at the Autry Museum of the American West The relationship between Native communities and museums has been a challenging one for decades. In recent years some museums have developed relationships with Native communities that provide an interface for collaboration, exploration, and compromise. Understanding the importance of collections, the power of artworks, and how to move forward is key to ensuring objects are utilized for the betterment of Native people. This lecture explored those relationships and provide examples of ways to make progress.

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity—particularly gender and sexuality—through photographic portraiture. Drawing from their experience as a queer, nonbinary person, Dugan’s work continually investigates what it means to live authentically and how visual representation plays a powerful role in that process. Dugan was the 2020–2021 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and their work is featured in Currents 120. The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund.

Artist Dana Levy was intrigued by St. Louis native Cheeraz Gormon’s poem “Who Moved My Memories” while in the process of creating video installations for her exhibition Currents 119: Dana Levy. Gormon, Michael Allen, and Gwen Moore are a few of the individuals featured in Levy’s work, “The Mississippians,” speaking professionally and personally about their relationship with the city of St. Louis. Using the poem and artwork as a guide, panelists dig deeper into the concepts of preservation, removal, and regrowth.

With Michael Allen, senior lecturer, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, Washington University in St. Louis; Cheeraz Gormon, poet; Dana Levy, artist; Gwen Moore, curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity, Missouri Historical Society; moderated by Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art

This lecture explored the women of Nubia—priestesses, queens, and goddesses—as they are depicted in the artifacts that were on display at SLAM during the exhibition Nubia: Treasures of Ancient Africa. Royal women often served as manifestations of the goddess Hathor, whose iconography is present on many protective amulets buried with Nubian queens.

Presented by Solange Ashby, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles

Since traditional Korean clothes didn’t have pockets, Korean people carried “jumeoni” (pouches) to transport their personal belongings. Jumeoni are drawstring pouches made with fabric, paper, or leather, and many were embroidered with plants, animals, and Chinese characters. San Francisco–based artist, Youngmin Lee, demonstrated how to make these colorful pouches and spoke about this traditional Korean accessory.

Presented in partnership with the Gateway Korea Foundation, which received a Creative Impact Fund for Diversifying the Arts grant through the Arts and Education Council.

Panel moderated by Victoria McCraven, the 2020-2021 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow, with artists Nnenna Okore, Song Watkins Park, and Edna Patterson-Petty.

Learn about the enduring history of the fiber arts and hear from panelists about the importance of fiber in their work during the Saint Louis Art Museum’s annual celebration of women of color in the arts.

This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.

Join curator Hannah Klemm for a conversation with Israeli-born, New York–based artist Dana Levy. Levy is the recipient of the 2019–2020 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, which includes a residency at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and a Currents exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Her Currents 119 exhibition explored how humans interact with historic architecture and highlights disparities between what we expect of architecture and urban planning and the real, nuanced histories of the built environment.

Virtual Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Lecture with Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Rhode Island

Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was an Austrian-Swiss artist who began her career in Italy, where her clients included British tourists who encouraged the young painter to pursue her profession in England. Over the 15 years she worked in London, Kauffman achieved fame and fortune and returned to Italy as an international celebrity. This lecture celebrated a portrait recently acquired by the Museum. Wendy Wassyng Roworth discussed Kauffman’s life and work in England as a fashionable painter and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, a rare distinction for a woman, and how the artist used her talents to her advantage.

There are very few distinct lines in nature, so the task of an artist rendering forms is one of making lines stand in for edges, delineating forms in space as boundaries on a plane. If a drawn line is an edge, can a material edge, as on a sheet of torn paper, be understood as a drawn line? This philosophical question extends toward a complex of other boundaries: of perception, identity, memory, and ethics. Artist Buzz Spector presented a line of argument, in images and texts, about edges, both those we see and those that demarcate something lost.

Ethiopian artist Elias Sime creates large-scale, modular artworks from discarded technological materials that explore themes ranging from environmentalism and globalization to the history of Modern art. In addition to his studio practice, Sime cofounded and helps run Zoma Museum, an Addis Ababa institution dedicated to community engagement and sustainability that is comprised of a school, farm, library, garden, café, and exhibition space. In conversation with curator Hannah Klemm and his longtime collaborator, Meskerem Assegued, Sime discussed  his practice and the work presented in the exhibition Currents 118: Elias Sime.