Master Drawings New York, January 23-30, 2021, includes online exhibitions and programming. 

Panel Discussion: Artists of African & Mulatto Descent 18th to 19th Century @ Online via Zoom, Jan 29 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, see Calendar.

This virtual discussion will spotlight the talents of seven mixed-race artists who lived and studied in either the United States or Europe. Panelists will discuss what influenced these people to become artists and what their impact on world politics entailed. 

The panel discussion is led by Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund. Joining McClain is William Keyse Rudolph, Ph.D, Deputy Director, Curatorial Affairs, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Virginia Anderson, Ph.D., Curator of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art ; Paul H. D. Kaplan, Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY; Daniel M. Fulco, Ph.D., Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts - Washington County.

The artists are Prince Demah Barnes, Grayton Tyler Brown, Robert Scott Duncanson, Julien Hudson, Joshua Johnson, Mary Edmonia Lewis and Eugene Warburg. 

MUSEUM PANEL

Dr. William Keyse Rudolph is Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a key role that helps shape the museum’s curatorial team, permanent collection, conservation, and exhibition directions. Rudolph previously served as Chief Curator and the Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American and European Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, 2013–2020, along with duties as co-interim director. He also has served as a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum, in addition to holding research and support positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in European paintings and European Decorative Arts.

Major exhibitions Rudolph has organized or co-organized include Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist (2008–2009), In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans (2011–2012), Thomas Sully: Painted Performance (2013–2014), Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Collection of Roberta and Richard Huber (2016–2017), and Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid(2018).

Besides receiving a Ph.D. in the history of art from Bryn Mawr College, Rudolph also has received advanced decorative arts training through the Attingham Summer School for Country Houses and Collections and Royal Collections Studies. In 2017, Rudolph was a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, an intensive leadership skills training program for art museum curators. 

Virginia M. G. Anderson is the Curator of American Art and Department Head of American Painting & Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Baltimore Museum of Art, and an Adjunct Professor in the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University. She has a BA from Harvard University, and received her PhD from Boston University. She is a scholar of American painting from the 19th century to the present, and her research interests also include the intersection of collecting and identity. Her recent exhibitions at the BMA include Oletha DeVane: Traces of the Spirit (2019); By Their Creative Force: American Women Modernists (2019-20); and Free Form: 20th-Century Studio Craft (2019-20).

Paul H. D. Kaplan is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY.  He is the author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985) and of numerous essays on European images of black Africans and Jews.  He served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s “Speak of Me as I Am,” an installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. In 2008 and 2012 he was a fellow of the Du Bois (now Hutchins) Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.  He is a major contributor to volumes 2, 3 and 4 of Harvard University Press’s The Image of the Black in Western Art (new ed., 2010-2012).  His new book, Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era (Penn State Press, 2020), extending his research into the nineteenth century and American art and literature, includes a long chapter on Eugène Warburg. 

Daniel Fulco serves as Agnita M. Stine Schreiber Curator at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD. Dr. Fulco brings more than ten years of museum experience from appointments in the curatorial, administrative, and archival departments of regional and national institutions. He graduated from Connecticut College, New London, CT, with a degree in Art History and a Museum Studies Certificate (2004). From 2004 to 2007, he served as Assistant Director and Curator of the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT.  Dr. Fulco received his MA (2009) and PhD (2014) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, he taught art history at the University of Maryland Global Campus, Marymount University (Arlington, VA), and Howard Community College (Columbia, MD). 

Dr. Fulco has curated numerous special exhibitions at the WCMFA, including The Blues & the Abstract Truth: Voices of African American Art (2019) and the new permanent installation American Narratives: 1700-1920 (2018–19). In 2019, he gave lectures at the Frick Collection, New York, and at the University of Edinburgh (UK). Dr. Fulco’s newest exhibition project is Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore (2021). In addition, he has two forthcoming edited volume essays that will be published by Brill Publishers in Leiden, The Netherlands.

Philippe Halbert is a  graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. Halbert is a PhD candidate in Yale's history of art department. He studies cultural exchange between Europe and the Americas before 1800. His in-progress dissertation explores the art and performative dimensions of creole identity and self-fashioning in the French Atlantic world.

MODERATOR 

Savona Bailey-McClain is Executive Director/Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past 20+ years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem. Her public art installations encompass sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media, and have been covered extensively by the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, among many others. She is host/ producer of “State of the Arts NYC,” a weekly radio program on iTunes, Radio Public, Youtube, Mixcloud and other audio platforms. She is a member of ArtTable, Governors Island Advisory Council and NYC Sacred Places Advisory Board.

ABOUT MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK

Masters Drawings New York (MDNY) is the pre-eminent event for the celebration and exhibition of Old Masters through contemporary drawings, paintings and sculptures in the United States. Dealers from the United States and Europe showcase the highest quality works of art in galleries along Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Scheduled for the last week of January, the event coincides with the major Old Master auctions and scholarly events focused on drawings. It is a week dedicated to historic art, where collectors, scholars, museum curators and dealers travel to New York from around the world to view artwork and participate in the events around the city.