The art world is no stranger to controversy. Recently, a number of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to postpone a major retrospective of the work of the American painter Philip Guston, citing the necessity for…
In my research into the CFAM American collection, I have been moving more-or-less alphabetically by century, with occasional detours to consider specific objects and themes that interest me. That means my day-to-day experience is somewhat eclectic, jumping around in terms…
Back in June, I wrote about Jacob Lawrence’s silkscreen practice, relating it to his long-running immersion in Black life and history. At the time, I wanted to write about the other work by Lawrence in the collection, Harlem Scene (The…
In July you may have seen me deliver a Collections Conversations talk on one of my favorite objects in the collection, Shoshone Indians Rocky Mountains, an 1859 oil sketch by the American painter Albert Bierstadt. In it, I talked about…
As I have written this blog, I have tended to highlight recent scholarship that sheds new light on artists on the collection, or on interesting connections between and among artists and works. Sometimes, however, I find myself simply stopping to…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the African American abstract painter Sam Gilliam and his sometimes uneasy relationship with the artistic style of Black activists in the 1960s and 1970s. This week, I ran into some of the same…
In the very first entry in this blog series I wrote about connoisseurship, one of the processes art historians use to help determine which works of art are by which artists. I was reminded of that post this morning, as…
Sam Gilliam has long been one of the foremost American abstract painters, as well as one of the most successful African American artists. He was the first Black artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1972.1…
I live in a smallish college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, far from the bustling museum and gallery scenes of New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., three places I have lived over the years. Still, D.C. is about four…
I, like many people across the country, have been using YouTube yoga videos to break up my routine and introduce a little more physical activity in my life during these long months of stay-at-home orders. Even as my state of…
Recently in the United States there has been a great outpouring of activism, causing many of us to examine our places in the country and the world. Activism often goes hand-in-hand with artistic production, with professional and amateur artists alike…
During the past months of lockdown, many of us have been spending a lot of time with our beloved pets. If you follow CFAM on social media, you may have seen an image or two of a staff member’s furry…
Over the past weeks, due to the killing of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, America has been engaged in a national conversation about privilege, bias, and whose voices are heard in our country and its institutions.…
This week I have been immersed in the life and work of Jacob Lawrence, one of the best-known artists of the Harlem Renaissance as well as one of America’s foremost modern artists. Lawrence, who got his start painting scenes of…
I am fortunate to live in a house with big, floor-to-ceiling windows. While researching the CFAM collection I often sit by one of these windows, and occasionally steal a glance outside. When I do, I nearly always see some bird…
