Symposium: Challenging 1945
July 14-16, 2011
http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/symposium.html

Recent scholarship has increasingly called into question the use of 1945 as a marker to separate pre-World War II developments in American art from those occurring later. This division has characterized art developments of the century in terms of rupture and division, often implying that the art made before 1945 is inferior to the art that came after. Yet many artists who began their careers in the early twentieth century lived well into its second half and produced outstanding work both before and after this dividing point. Moreover, not only did the work of many artists overlap this artificially imposed marker, their works borrowed from and reacted to earlier developments in American art. This is the subject of Challenging 1945: Exploring Continuities in American Art, 1890s to the Present, the symposium sponsored by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center July 14–16 in celebration of the Center’s 10-year anniversary. Over the course of two and a half days, distinguished artists and art historians will assess this period from the perspective of its continuities and interdependencies in order to further expand our understanding of its complex, nuanced, and pluralistic history.

American art historian William Agee will present the keynote address Thursday night at the Hilton Hotel, followed by a reception. The symposium sessions begin on Friday morning and run through Saturday morning, and each session will be followed by a question-and-answer period. Presenters include Whitney Chadwick, Huey Copeland, Thomas Crow, Erika Doss, Patricia Hills, Michael Leja, Michael Loble, Richard Meyer, Elizabeth Turner, Terry Smith, and Robert Storr. Saturday’s session includes a panel discussion with art historian and artist Jonathan Weinberg, and artists Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, and Barkley Hendricks.

During the symposium, works by Bechtle, Flack, and Hendricks will be on view at the Museum in the exhibition Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, whose co-curators are myself and independent scholar and artist Jonathan Weinberg. Since the invention of photography in the late 1830s, tensions have existed between the art of painting and the art of photography and one has often been assessed as more valuable or more important than the other. Shared Intelligence expresses a different point of view: in bringing together photographs and paintings by artists for whom the two mediums were essential to their practices, it explores the fraught relationships between painting and photography in terms of how they nourish and invigorate each other to reveal both continuities and interdependencies.

The Shared Intelligence exhibition developed out of ideas that were presented at the July 2006 Research Center symposium Painting and Photography in American Art: Sources, Ideas, and Influences, 1890s to the Present. Several speaker presentations from that symposium have been published in the Shared Intelligence exhibition catalogue (along with essays by other prominent historians of art and photography). The exhibition catalogue was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center is the only museum-related research facility in the world devoted to the study of American Modernism (late-nineteenth century to the present). It is equally unique in that its mission parallels that of exhibitions organized or sponsored by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum: to shed new light on the history of American modern art as well as O’Keeffe’s contribution to it.

Every five years the Research Center sponsors a symposium in Santa Fe that considers an issue of overarching concern to historians of American art. It has also realized three symposia (in 2001, 2003, and 2005) on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum website, all of which were subsequently pub­lished as books. Each online symposium was moderated by noted art historian Maurice Berger.

Every year the Research Center’s competitive scholarship program supports the work of six scholars and/or museum professionals whose projects explore subjects in American Modernism in the fields of art history, architecture and design, literature, music, and photography. We have wel­comed many dozens of individuals to the Research Center, some of whom have organized exhibi­tions at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Moreover, the Research Center sponsors public lectures, conferences, and publications, and houses a highly specialized research library and an extensive archival collection related to Georgia O’Keeffe and her contemporaries.