The New Social Environment#755

Robert Motherwell: The Drawings of a Painter

A Critics Page Discussion

 

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Featuring Kenneth Brummel, Mary Ann Caws, Tim Clifford, Jennifer Field, Maria Quinata, Jennifer Cohen, and Katy Rogers. We conclude with a poetry reading by Oscar Vargas.

In this talk

Read the Brooklyn Rail’s February 2023 Critics Page →

Kenneth Brummel

Photo of Kenneth Brummel
Kenneth Brummel is currently the curator of twentieth-century art at Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska. Co-curator of the internationally acclaimed 2021-2022 exhibition Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, he has published essays on a range of late modern artists, including Anthony Caro, Joan Mitchell, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Andy Warhol.

Mary Ann Caws

Portrait of Mary Ann Caws. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
Distinguished Professor Emerita of several Literature Ph.D. programs at CUNY, Mary Ann Caws holds a Doctor of Humane Letters, is an Officer in the Palmes Académiques, a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include The Modern Art Cookbook, Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism, Alice Paalen Rahon: Shapeshifter, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius. She was the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, chief editor of the HarperCollins World Reader, and the co-editor, with Michel Delville, of Undoing Art, the Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, and Beginnings: The Early Prose Poem, and the French Prose Poem.

Tim Clifford

Black and white photo of Tim Clifford
Tim Clifford is a visual artist in Brooklyn. With Jack Flam and Katy Rogers, he is co-author of Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941-1991 and Robert Motherwell: 100 Years.

Jennifer Field

Photo of Jennifer Field
Jennifer Field is Executive Director at The Estate of David Smith. She has held curatorial and research positions at Di Donna Galleries, the Willem de Kooning Foundation, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her projects have included the exhibitions Songs of the Horizon: David Smith, Music, and Dance; Surrealism in Mexico; Martin Puryear; Manet and the Execution of Maximilian; and De Kooning: A Retrospective. Dr. Field received her MA from Hunter College and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation examines episodes in printmaking among mid-twentieth century New York School painters.

Maria Quinata

Maria Quinata is the Catalogue Raisonné Researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and is a Ph.D. Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Jennifer Cohen

Black and white photo of Jennifer Cohen
Jennifer Cohen is Curator of Provenance and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in modern art and the historical avant-garde. Her exhibition Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears, which she co-curated with Caitlin Haskell, opened at the Art Institute in February 2023.

Katy Rogers

Photo of Katy Rogers
Katy Rogers is the Programs Director and Director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné Project at the Dedalus Foundation, where she has worked since 2003. She is the author of the catalogue raisonné of Motherwell’s drawings, published by Yale University Press in fall 2022, and a co-author of the catalogue raisonné of Motherwell’s paintings and collages, published by Yale University Press in 2012, and of Motherwell: 100 Years, published by Skira in 2015. Ms. Rogers has written catalogue essays and articles published by a number of museums, galleries, and educational institutions, including Hunter College, El Museo del Barrio, and Kasmin Gallery, among others.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Oscar Vargas reading.

Oscar Vargas

Photo of Oscar Vargas
Oscar Vargas is a Mexican-American writer based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he has lived his whole life. He completed his MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College in 2019. Currently, he is working as a part-time Adjunct Instructor and full-time corporate digital marketer. His poetry reflects the experiences gained by traveling back and forth to Mexico in his childhood and growing up in a gentrifying Bushwick. His works are products of conflicting binaries and are attempts at a reconciliation that is a little more than acceptance but a little less than forgiveness.

❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.