Athens, Ga. – John Wilmerding, an influential curator and collector of American art, will give the 2010 Shouky Shaheen Lecture at the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art on Thursday, Sept. 23. Wilmerding will lecture on his current project, an overview of the American Pop artist Robert Indiana, at 5:30 p.m. in room S151 of the art school. The lecture is free and the public is invited to attend.
Professor emeritus of American Art at Princeton University, Wilmerding is a former visiting curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and deputy director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is currently president of the board of trustees at the National Gallery, as well as a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum, the Wyeth Foundation of American Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
An important collector of American paintings and drawings from the mid-to-late 19th century, Wilmerding comes from a family whose rich history of collecting art has had long lasting impact on American art. His great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his second wife, Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, amassed the collection of European and oriental works of art that when it was eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, formed the core of its collection of American Art. Wilmerding has organized many exhibitions on American Art, including American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, held at the national Gallery of Art in 1980.
“As an art scholar, curator and collector, his work and the work of his ancestors has transformed American visual culture,” said Asen Kirin, associate director in the art school who was a graduate student at Princeton while Wilmerding served as chair of the Department of Art and Archeology. “His ability to innovate within institutional collections and share new aesthetic and cultural statements in the realm of American art is unmatched.”
Established through the generosity of Doris Shaheen as a birthday gift to her husband, Shouky, the Shouky Shaheen Lecture brings a distinguished nationally or internationally recognized artist or scholar to present a lecture at the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art each year.
The Lamar Dodd School of Art is located at 270 River Road on the UGA campus; S151 is located on the first floor of the building. For further information, see http://art.uga.edu.
