ART TALK

Art Matters Lecture with Frank Kelly
Senior Curator and Christiane Ellis Valone Curator of American Paintings, National Gallery of Art.

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.