Arthur Dove

This program was presented by independent curator and writer Debra Bricker Balken.

Balken will gave an illustrated lecture on her new book, Arthur Dove, A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Things, an authoritative compendium of Dove’s known work.  Her lecture dove into the subjects and themes derived from the natural world that preoccupied Dove over a forty period.  Additionally, her talk considered the nature of his friendship with Georgia O’Keeffe and their overlapping aesthetic interests.

Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and writer who has organized numerous exhibitions on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art for major museums internationally.   Her award-winning books include Philip Guston’s Poor Richard (2001) and Abstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art (2005), as well as exhibition catalogues such as Arthur Dove, A Retrospective (1997), The Park Avenue Cubists (2003),  Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (2009), After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest (2009), John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist (2010), and  John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (2011).

Recipient of an Inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (2001), a Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation (2002), and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2006), she has just completed a study of the American midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg for the University of Chicago Press (forthcoming fall 2021) with grants from the Getty Research Institute (2002) and Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts (2008).  She has taught at numerous universities, including Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and the Rhode Island School of Design.  In 2005, she served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Her exhibition, Mark Tobey, Threading Light, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with the Venice Biennale in May 2017.

She has recently completed a revision to the Arthur Dove Catalogue Raisonné (2021) that has been distributed by Yale University Press.  In addition, she is currently guest-curating an exhibition, Americans in Paris,  1946-1962, for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (2023).

This program was presented on September 1, 2021 as a part of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Mornings with O’Keeffe series.