Date/Time
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
Lyman Allyn Museum
Categories
$10 members / $15 non-membersSpirited: Prohibition in America Lecture Series
Lecturer: Dr. Robin Jaffee Frank, Ph.D. │Curator, award-winning author & historian on American visual culture
The first generation of American artists working in the aftermath of World War I experienced a time of rapid economic growth and consumerism. This lecture will bring together works by painters, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors to explore the electrifying cultural forces that shaped their art in the 1920s. They created art that was intimately a part of their time and place by selecting quintessentially American subjects like Coney Island — called the World’s Greatest Playground. Notions of limitless personal freedom combined with freewheeling artistic experimentation gave rise to new forms of not only visual but also literary, musical, and popular expression.
Please RSVP to 860.443.2545 x2129 or email us.
Robin Jaffee Frank, Ph.D., has organized exhibitions, lectured, and published widely on American visual culture. She curated World War I Beyond the Trenches, on view this past fall at the New-York Historical Society. From 2011 to 2016, Robin was Chief Curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, where she led the museum’s renovation and reinstallation. Simultaneously she organized the traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008 (Wadsworth Atheneum, San Diego Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum), and authored the award-winning book. She also curated a version of her exhibition to tour until 2022 through NEH On-the-Road.
Prior to the Wadsworth, Robin was a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery. Among her exhibitions and accompanying publications are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery; Stagestruck in America: Artists, Entertainers, and Audiences, 1906–1956; Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures; andCharles Demuth Poster Portraits: 1923–1929. Robin holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University.