Keynote Speaker's Biography

Fred Wilson has received numerous honors for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1999. He represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Wilson is known for his unorthodox re-installations of museum collections that lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. He questions—and forces the viewer to question—how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express.

Read an expanded biography at pbs.org »

Speakers' Biographies

Sarah Lea Burns is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University. She is the award-winning author of Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1989) and Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996). This year's symposium takes its topic from her most recent publication, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2004).

David Peters Corbett is a Professor in the History of Art department at York University, Leeds, England. He currently serves as the editor of Art History. He has published widely on English art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including The Modernity of English Art, 1914-30 (1997) and the edited collection The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National past, 1880-1940 (2002), both of which won prizes. He has also published articles on the Ashcan artists, and is currently preparing a book on nineteenth-century American landscape.

Dora Apel is the W. Hawkins Ferry Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University in Detroit. Dr. Apel's book Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing was published in 2002. She also has published articles on gender and national identity in visual imagery of the Weimar Republic in The Art Bulletin and New German Critique, as well as articles on Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and Diego Rivera's RCA mural in New York. Her most recent publication is Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob, published in 2004.

Randall R. Griffey is Associate Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. His research has focused on issues of masculinity and national identity in the work of American Modernist painter Marsden Hartley. He contributed the catalogue essay, "Encoding the Homoerotic: Marsden Hartley's Late Figure Paintings," for the 2002 retrospective exhibition Marsden Hartley. He is contributing author to the scholarly catalogue, The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (2007).

Henry Adams is Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. He has curated at numerous museums, including the Carnegie Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of American Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Additionally he has served as director at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens. Adams has written over 200 publications in nineteenth and early twentieth century American art, including scholarly and popular articles, books and exhibition catalogues. His most recent publication is Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (2007).

Angela Miller is Professor of Art History at Washington University, St. Louis. She has written extensively on American Art, including Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (1993), which won several awards, and Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s (2006). She was most recently a co-author for the survey text, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Prentice-Hall, October 2007).

Jonathan Weinberg is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Male Desire: the Homoerotic in American Art (2005); Fantastic Tales: the Photography of Nan Goldin (2005); Ambition and Love in Modern American Art (2001); and Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First-American Avant-Garde (1993). He has been a recipient of several important research grants and residencies including a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. Weinberg's paintings are in several public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Montclair Art Museum.

Artists' Biographies

Sean Foley is a painter, lecturer, and past curator. Foley's work was recently featured in the exhibitions Cryptozoology (Bates College Museum of Art, 2006) and Big Bang: Abstraction in the 21st Century (DeCordova Museum of Art, 2007). Additionally, Foley has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants and residencies. Foley recently acted as guest curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts for its exhibition State Fare (2007).

Laurel Nakadate is a video artist and photographer. Her recently released first feature-length film, Stay the Same, Never Change, has received critical praise. Past exhibitions of her work include Love Hotel and Other Stories (Danziger Projects, 2005) and We are All Made of Stars (Daniel Silverstein Gallery, 2002), among others. Nakadate's works fearlessly explore sexuality and critique the social dynamics of gender and age.

Paul Shambroom is a photographer who explores American power and culture. His work is in the collections of many major American museums and has been exhibited internationally. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation, among others. His photographs have been published in Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War (2003), and Meetings (2004). His recent project "Security" documents official U.S. government preparedness and training in the aftermath of 9/11. An exhibition of Paul's work, Picturing Power: the Photographs of Paul Shambroom is on display at the Museum from May 10 through September 14.

Special Exhibitions on View During the Symposium

Great Expectations: Aristocratic Children in European Portraiture
February 15 - June 8, 2008

This collection of 40 paintings from the Jakober Foundation collection (in Mallorca, Spain) features Old Master portraits of European royal and aristocratic children, including Louis XIII of France, Louis XV of France, Charles I of England, and Charles II of Spain. These portraits of children and adolescents open a window onto a fascinating world that has long passed. In societies governed by dynastic descent, children played a surprisingly important role as the portraits in this exhibition demonstrate. A boy might be thrust upon his country's throne under the tutelage of a regent; a little girl could be betrothed to forge a foreign alliance. Political necessity as much as the natural interest to preserve their likenesses, accounts for many of the sumptuous portraits of royal and aristocratic children that have survived from the 16^th through the 19^th centuries.

Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power
May 10 - September 14, 2008

Picturing Power brings together for the first time selections from Paul Shambroom's five most important series to date—"Factories" (1986-88), "Offices" (1989-90), "Nuclear Weapons" (1992-2001), "Meetings" (1999-2003), and the ongoing series "Homeland Security" (begun in 2004). In Picturing Power Shambroom addresses the places and practices of power in America. Together these series explore how everyday citizens intersect with the dominant institutions of their times. Shambroom's images are remarkable both for their stark portrayal of people and places of power and as evidence of his access to the sites. Negotiating access in an open and democratic manner is a hallmark of the artist's process. Embodying curiosity, persistence, and empathy, Shambroom's work illustrates and champions engaged citizenship and democracy.