Initiatives in Art And Culture's 18th Annual American Art Conference
This year's conference honors Dr. William Gerdts. In this conference focusing on 1700 to the 1930s and beyond, we explore American artists once well-known but now obscure. We consider too the work of well-known artists that have, since their creation, been eclipsed by cycles of taste, or aspects of an artist's oeuvres that have fallen out of favor. Why do artistic stars dim? What causes tastes to change and works to be consigned to museum basements? In confronting these questions, we will look at the vagaries of the marketplace, the effects of choices made by museums, and the roles of individual collectors, dealers, and the critical establishment in defining and redefining the cannon over time, and at how the specifics of artists' careers affect their fates and that of their works. The process of rediscovery is made possible by new generations of dealers, scholars, and collectors, whose professional and personal efforts make once-forgotten works resonate in new ways, bringing them in tune with our time and place. Formal sessions taking place at CUNY Graduate Center (34th & Fifth Avenue) are complemented by an evening at Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Company and a reception at Meredith Ward Fine Art. Speakers include: William Agee, Hunter College, CUNY; David Anfam, Commissioning Editor for Fine Art, Phaidon Press and authority on Abstract Expressionism; Charles Brock, National Gallery of Art; Lily Downing Burke, Director and Vice President, Gerald Peters Gallery; David Park Curry, Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA); Stacey Epstein, Director of Modernism & Research, Hollis Taggart Galleries; Linda S. Ferber, The New-York Historical Society; William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art History, CUNY Graduate School; Alfred C. Harrison, owner of North Point Gallery and authority on California painting; Liza Kirwin, Interim Director, Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art; Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Valerie Ann Leeds, independent curator and scholar specializing in Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters; Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, conservators of paintings; Steven Miller, authority on Currier & Ives; Mark D. Mitchell, Philadelphia Museum of Art.; Andrew Schoelkopf, co-founder and partner, Menconi & Schoelkopf Fine Art, LLC; Paul Staiti, Mount Holyoke College; James W. Tottis, Museum of the City of New York . IMAGE: Severin Roesen, Flower Still Life With Bird's Nest 1853, oil on canvas, 40 x 32 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art
