Nov. 16: Robert Mattison to lecture on the abstract expressionist painter Grace Hartigan
On Thursday, November 16, 2006, at 4 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons (first floor of Syracuse University’s E. S. Bird Library), Robert Mattison will give a lecture entitled “Grace Hartigan: Painting the Past and the Present.” This event, sponsored by Syracuse University Library Associates, is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture.
Grace Hartigan (1922–) was a major participant in the explosion of creative energy that was the New York artistic and literary scene of the early 1950s. An important abstract expressionist painter, Hartigan was included in the famous show Twelve Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. This lecture will focus on Hartigan’s distinctive inventions during her long career and place her in the cultural context of the modern era, with particular emphasis on her relationships with such writers and artists as Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Barbara Guest, and Joan Mitchell.
Robert S. Mattison is Marshall R. Metzgar Professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Princeton University. Mattison is the author of four books and more than sixty articles and exhibition catalogs on modern art. In addition to Hartigan, he has written on such artists as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. His particular fascination is working with living artists.
PLEASE NOTE: This lecture is being held in conjunction with a Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) exhibition entitled Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School on the sixth floor of E. S. Bird Library. The exhibit is part of the Syracuse Symposium, which for 2006/2007 has chosen imagination as its theme.
On display is material from the recently processed Grace Hartigan Papers, as well as from the Syracuse University Art Galleries, the Grove Press Archives, and SCRC’s extensive holdings of art and literary magazines from the 1950s.
The exhibition is free and open to the public. It will be available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (excepting holidays) until December 15, 2006, after which time it will travel to the Palitz Gallery at the Joseph I. Lubin House in New York City.
Pay parking for the lecture and the exhibition is available in the Marion visitor lot on Waverly Avenue.
CONTACT
Mary Beth Hinton
Syracuse University Library
315-443-2130
mbhinton@syr.edu
