Join us for a summer evening in the garden and gallery for drinks, conversation and some hands-on fun with the Pewabic Pottery Street Team!
KREM: Curated by Stephen William Schudlich, come browse this intimate exhibition made up of 30 or so of some of the most iconic, and highly impactful artists working in illustration today.
Pewabic Street Team:* Try your hand at glazing a small pottery piece that is fired using a portable kiln and glazed by Raku or just watch your friends do it! Build a city scape out of clay and explore their museum on wheels to learn about the historic Pewabic Pottery and the science of clay-making.
*Ticket price will offset costs activity costs. Food & Beverage are complimentary by the Scarab Club.
Thank you for being a member!
Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other FablesSpeaker: Barbara Haskell, Senior Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Thursday, September 27, 2018 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture
Deadline for dinner registration: Monday, September 24, 2018 (to accommodate catering) Attendance for lecture only guests available | Pay at the door $15/SC members & students | $20 Non-members
Grant Wood's American Gothic—the double portrait of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and a woman commonly presumed to be his wife—is perhaps the most recognizable painting in 20th century American art, an indelible icon of Americana, and certainly Wood's most famous artwork. But Wood's career consists of far more than one single painting. He was a complex, sophisticated artist whose image as a farmer-painter was as mythical as the fables he depicted in his art. Wood sought pictorially to fashion a world of harmony and prosperity that would answer America's need for reassurance at a time of economic and social upheaval occasioned by the Depression. Yet underneath its bucolic exterior, his art reflects the anxiety of being an artist and a deeply repressed homosexual in the Midwest in the 1930s. By depicting his subconscious anxieties through populist images of rural America, Wood crafted images that speak both to American identity and to the estrangement and isolation of modern life.
Barbara Haskell is a long-time curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a well-known scholar on American modern art, and author of over thirty publications. Among the landmark thematic exhibitions she has curated are The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950 (1999) and BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958–1964 (1984). In addition, she has curated retrospectives and authored accompanying scholarly monographs on a range of early-twentieth-century and post-war American artists, including H. C. Westermann (1978), Marsden Hartley (1980), Milton Avery (1982), Ralston Crawford (1985), Charles Demuth (1987), Red Grooms (1987), Donald Judd (1988), Burgoyne Diller (1990), Agnes Martin (1992), Joseph Stella (1994), Edward Steichen (2000), Elie Nadelman (2003), Oscar Bluemner (2005), Georgia O'Keeffe (2009), Lyonel Feininger (2011), Robert Indiana (2013), Stuart Davis (2016), and Grant Wood (2018). In 2005, she was awarded the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Thursday, November 8, 2018 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture Deadline for dinner registration: Monday, November 5, 2018 (to accommodate catering) Attendance for lecture only guests available | Pay at the door $15/SC members & students | $20 Non-members
Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Origins of Time-Based Media in Modern Art
Keely Orgeman, Alice and Allan Kaplan Associate Curatorof American Painting and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery
Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Origins of Time-Based Media in Modern Art, Keely Orgeman will focus on the work of the Danish-American artist Thomas Wilfred, who built an international reputation in the first half of the twentieth century as the pioneer of a new art form, which he called Lumia. Wilfred invented sophisticated analog “instruments” that produce brilliantly colored displays, realizing a fusion of modernist abstraction and pre-digital technology. My talk considers at the formal and conceptual affinities between lumia and the wide-ranging work of Wilfred’s contemporaries, from other early kinetic-light objects, such as Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s Synchrome Kineidoscope and László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage, to experimental films, Abstract Expressionist paintings, Light and Space environments, to psychedelic light shows.
Keely Orgeman is the Alice and Allan Kaplan Associate Curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery. She received her Ph.D. from Boston University in 2014, writing her dissertation on representations of radioactivity in American art. At BU, she received the Presidential Fellowship, as well as the Jan and Warren Adelson Fellowship in American Art, organized the exhibition Atomic Afterimage: Cold War Imagery in Contemporary Art (2008) at the Boston University Art Gallery, and authored its accompanying catalogue. Since coming to Yale in fall 2008, she has served in several curatorial roles in the American Paintings and Sculpture Department and has contributed entries and essays to museum publications, including collection catalogues and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin. In 2017, she organized the traveling exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light for the Yale Art Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., which was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. Currently, she is embarking on a new project that centers on a historical portrait miniature.
Image: Thomas Wilfred, Unit #50, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, from the First Table Model Clavilux (Luminar) Series, 1928. Metal, fabric, glass, and electrical and lighting elements on a maple table. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Thomas C. Wilfred.
Thursday, February 28, 2019 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture Deadline for dinner registration: Monday, February 25, 2019 (to accommodate catering) Attendance for lecture only guests available | Pay at the door $15/SC members & students | $20 Non-members
Albert Kahn: The Architect VanishesMichael H. Hodges, Fine Arts Writer, Detroit News
Industrial architect Albert Kahn was a giant in Detroit’s heroic age, the visionary who invented the humane “daylight factories” that helped birth both modern manufacturing and modern architecture. In this lecture and slideshow, Detroit News reporter Michael H. Hodges — author of “Building the Modern World: Albert Kahn in Detroit” — will review Kahn’s local legacy, his vigorous defense of Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals when under attack, and his role helping the Soviets beat the Nazis in 1941-42.
Michael H. Hodges is the fine-arts writer for The Detroit News, where he's worked since 1991. "Building the Modern World: Albert Kahn in Detroit" is his second book on local architecture. His first, "Michigan's Historic Railroad Stations," was named a Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. Hodges blames his architectural enthusiasms on both the picturesque Oakland County dairy farm he grew up on, as well as the six years he spent as a student at the Cranbrook School for Boys.
Thursday, April 11, 2019 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture Deadline for dinner registration: Monday, April 8, 2019 (to accommodate catering) Attendance for lecture only guests available | Pay at the door $15/SC members & students | $20 Non-members
Florine StetheimerNancy Shaw, Curator Emerita of American Art, Detroit Institute of Arts
Thursday, May 30, 2019 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture Deadline for dinner registration: Monday, May 27, 2019 (to accommodate catering) Attendance for lecture only guests available | Pay at the door $15/SC members & students | $20 Non-members
Frederic RemingtonJennifer R. Henneman, Assistant Curator, Denver Art Museum
While Frederic Remington is often thought of as a western character, namely because of the subject matter of his artwork, he was in fact a cosmopolitan New Yorker who socialized with America’s most important artists at the turn of the twentieth century. This talk will consider his relationship with the American Impressionists, including John Henry Twachtman, Julian Alden Wier, and Childe Hassam, with whom he regularly socialized at the Player’s Club in New York City, and discuss how these artists influenced the development of his artistic technique and philosophy.
Jennifer R. Henneman, PhD is Assistant Curator at the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum. Her interdisciplinary transatlantic research, which has taken her from the wilds of the American West to the cosmopolitan streets of London, reflects her own upbringing on a cattle ranch in Montana and her interest in the dominant cultural and artistic spheres of the late Victorian era. Most recently she co-curated Backstory: Western American Art in Context (March 2016 – February 2017), an exhibition in collaboration with the History Colorado Center that told the story of the West through art and artifact.
Jennifer received a PhD in 19th century British and American Art and Visual Culture from the University of Washington, an MA in Non-Western Art History from Richmond, the American International University in London, and BAs in Studio Art and French from Montana State University. During her doctoral degree she completed research fellowships at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Her curatorial and collections experience includes posts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Morris Graves Foundation, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Scarab Club is supported in part by awards from the Kresge Foundation, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.