ART TALK

The New York Times award-winning author Susan Straight returns to read from her latest and much lauded novel, Mecca. Set in Southern California’s inland and high desert area, this is a story of freeways, wildfires, secrets, and struggles that is, at its heart, a love song for a place and its people. Told from different points of view in interwoven narratives, Mecca speaks of loneliness and grief, family, and home, and the ways in which language, with its power and peculiarities carries a culture’s hopes and fears. With courage and grace, Straight, noted as “an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West,” looks closely at the California few see, pushes deep into the difficult territories of the past few years, and shifts how we see the land and each other.

Book signing to follow.

Panel Discussion about architect Barry Berkus by Jeffrey Berkus, Dane Goodman, and Tony Askew.
Discussion will be from 5:30-6:30pm
Light refreshments will be served

Art Matters Lecture with Harmon Siegel, Ph.D.
Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows

Impressionism has, from the beginning, been seen as an art of nature. Today, however, in the moment we call the Anthropocene, when human projects have transformed every corner of the planet and threaten to make it uninhabitable, this commitment may seem hopelessly naive. In fact, however, impressionist paintings illuminate our condition, revealing the entanglement of nature and society. In so doing, they help us overcome nostalgia for a lost nature and recognize our responsibility for shaping the world we inhabit.

Free Students and Museum Circle Members
$10 SBMA Members
$15 Non-Members

Nigel McGilchrist’s book, which was released in July of 2022, looks at the moment in history when a way of thinking which we can truly call ‘Western’ was born. It was a fruitful coming together of the ancient knowledge of the East – of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India – with the restless curiosity and ingenuity of the Greek mind. It was a hinge moment in which what we understand as the scientific way of thinking, first gained traction. And yet it was a science that was also deeply imbued with spiritual awareness and a sense of the beauty and unity of creation.

Venice is perhaps the world’s most beautiful city, and certainly one of its most anomalous human creations. Built in the water of a lagoon, it needed, as it grew in size and importance, a hinterland of its own which both protected its approaches from the land, and provided it with agricultural produce and timber. This became the area known as the Veneto – the flat-lands and alpine foothills that extend to the north and west of Venice. The unequalled international wealth and culture of Venice at its apogee, in the 15th and 16th centuries, flowed out into this area, imbuing it with some of the most accomplished painting and dignified domestic architecture we possess – the works of Paolo Veronese, Titian, Cima, and Giovanni Bellini, and the harmonious villas and gardens of Andrea Palladio which were to influence so profoundly American architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Veneto is the incarnation of a quality of life and civilization that has rarely been equaled in history.

Susie Orso and Nigel McGilchrist converse and reminisce about the Museum’s Travel Program over its busy half-century of history – discussing what the real significance of travel is for us, how travel is done at its best, and what instructive lessons we all learned from our abstention during the pandemic years. They share stories and joyous moments - including reflections on gastronomy and art - as well as pictures from recent journeys, far and wide, with the Museum’s indomitable group of traveling members and friends.

Julie M. Rivett, Dashiell Hammett’s granddaughter and archivist, will discuss Hammett's noir in literature and how it was adapted for the big screen.

Based on the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 American film noir written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, and indebted to the 1931 movie of the same name. It stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his femme fatale client. Gladys George, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet co-star, with the latter appearing in his film debut. The story follows a San Francisco private detective and his dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers, all of whom are competing to obtain a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette.

Art Matters Lecture with Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers, Ph.D., Independent Curator

Parallel Stories with Rachel Cusk, Siemon Scamell-Katz, and Andrew Winer

Join Mayela Rodriguez to hear how explorations of her family history led her to create her exhibition of photography, video, text, and installation art.

Art Matters Lecture with Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Inspired by the artistic collaboration of Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and the SBMA exhibition Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz, this series explores what happens in fiction and life when artist couples work together or in parallel, and sometimes within competitive creative spaces.

Contemporary artist Cassandra C. Jones, whose work has shown in venues throughout the US and Europe, including Mass MoCA, Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the MFA Houston, is joined by her husband, Mikael Jorgensen, the Grammy award-winning keyboardist for Wilco. The two reflect on marriage and being a creative couple in an audio-visual presentation and guided conversation with James Glisson, SBMA Curator of Contemporary Art.

$5 SBMA Members
$10 Non-Members