Emmanuel College in Boston currently has on view an exhibition I’ve organized titled Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist. Trunk was a Brooklyn based artist and well know during the 1920s and 30s for his modernist still life paintings. He was also a devout Catholic. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue examine the ways in which Trunk’s Catholic faith informed his painting, and more broadly, the relationship between American modern art and religion. From the Herman Trunk exhibition, an interesting symposium that explores this question from the perspective of a variety of religious traditions has been organized. Modern art and Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Native American religious traditions, and theosophy will receive scholarly attention at this symposium. It will be held at Emmanuel College on Saturday, October 3, 2009.
The symposium is free and open to the public. Here’s the schedule:
October 3, 2009 from 10AM to 4PM
Janet M. Daley Library Lecture Hall
Emmanuel College, 400 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
10AM Opening Remarks
Fr. Thomas Leclerc, MS, Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies Dept., Emmanuel College
Dr. Cynthia Fowler, Associate Professor of Art, Emmanuel College
10:15AM Anarchy, Abstraction and Catholic Modernism
Timothy Andrus, Ph.D. candidate, Virginia Commonwealth University
10:45AM Traces of the Spiritual: Catholicism, Modernism and the Still Life
Dr. Dena Gilby, Professor of Art History, Endicott College
11:15AM Closing the Divide Between Christianity and Modernism: Christian Themes in the Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Stella
Dr. Herbert H. Hartel, Jr., Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
11:45AM Why is this Mural Unlike Every Other Mural? Passover, Zakhor and Ben Shahn’s Murals for the Jersey Homesteads
Dr. Diana Linden, Independent Scholar and Scholar in Residence, Pitzer College
12:15PM Break for Lunch
1:30PM “Forging” an “Authentic” Indian Art in the 1930s: Studio-Style Depictions of Native American Spiritual Traditions
Dr. Jo Ortel, Professor of Art History, Beloit College
2:00PM Laying the Groundwork: Mystical Modernism in 1930s America
Valerie Hellstein, Ph.D. candidate, Stony Brook University
2:30PM The Spirit in the Machine: Jane Heap, the Gurdjieff Group, and the Machine-Age Exposition of 1927
Dr. Kristina Wilson, Assistant Professor of Art, Clark University
3:00PM Roundtable Discussion on Religion and American Modernist Art
3:45PM Concluding Remarks
4:00PM Reception in the Lillian Immig Gallery
Free and open to the public. For more information contact Cynthia Fowler at fowlecy@emmanuel.edu, or 617-975-9110.
Cynthia Fowler
Very upset that I missed your show. Is it possible to get a copy of the catalogue? Thanks! -K
Comment by Kimberlee — October 28, 2009 @ 9:37 pm