Smithsonian curator to speak at FIU


Virginia Mecklenburg, curator of “Modern Masters” at FIU’s Frost Art Museum, will bring to life the history of 20th Century Abstraction and the artists who transformed American art.

By Kitty Dumas

Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will speak on Friday, Jan. 23, at 8 p.m. at FIU’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center as the featured lecturer for the Frost Art Museum’s Steven and Dorothea Green Critics Lecture Series. Mecklenburg will talk about 20th century abstraction and the exhibition Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on view at The Frost through March 1.

The Frost is the first stop on a national tour for Modern Masters, which features more than 30 artists who transformed American art in the years after World War II. The show includes five pieces donated to the Smithsonian by Patricia and Phillip Frost in 1986, including works by Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. Modern Masters is the debut exhibition for the new Frost Art Museum, which opened to the public Nov. 29, 2008.

Mecklenburg is a writer and lecturer who specializes in American art. She has organized exhibitions and written on Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Earl Cunningham, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s and other 20th century artists and movements. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, which she co-authored with Rebecca Zurier and Robert Snyder, won the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award in 1997.

In the important exhibition Modern Masters and in her lectures, Mecklenburg chronicles the emergence of postwar abstraction and Abstract Expressionism in particular, from the mid-1940s through its “triumph” in the late 1950s. She brings to life this pivotal period and the artists who helped define the movement. Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira in California; immigrants Hans Hofmann and Louise Nevelson; New Yorkers Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, and many more explored powerful color and the nuance of line as they sought to express what it meant to live in the mid-twentieth century. For more information, call 305-348-2890 or visit frostartmuseum.org.

 

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