On Wednesday, November 16 join scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson for a lecture on women artists of color using embellishment as a strategy to blur the lines between function and décor. Her talk, Embellished Legacies presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, looks at the craft-practices of artists like Pacita Abad and Rosie Lee Tompkins, whose intricately adorned domestic objects can expand our understanding of women’s work.
Bryan-Wilson is an award-winning author, critic, and curator whose 2017 book Fray: Art and Textile Politics received the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award. Her show, Louise Nevelson: Persistence, is an official collateral event of the 2022 Venice Biennale, and her monograph on Nevelson is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Currently, she is a professor of LGBTQ art history and core faculty in Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender.

This talk is the final program in SAAM’s annual Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art. Established in 2004 to present new insights from the perspectives of outstanding artists, critics, and scholars, this series takes place each fall and is made possible by the generosity of Clarice Smith (1933–2021). This year, the talks were presented both in-person at the museum and live online. Earlier presenters were Roberto Lugo, a Philadelphia-based artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator, and John Yau, an art critic, poet, fiction writer, freelance curator, and regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

Viewers can watch recordings online of this year’s first two speakers, along with past lectures by renowned voices in American Art including Bisa Butler, Kerry James Marshall, Washington Post critic Sebastian Smee and more.

Julia Bryan-Wilson: Embellished Legacies
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2022, 6:30PM EST
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Lecture is free but registration is required

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the nation’s first collection of American art and is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character, and imagination of the American people throughout four centuries. The museum, along with its branch for contemporary craft the Renwick Gallery, is the home to one of the most significant and inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America’s rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today.
Pacita Abad, Watusi: I’m Lost Without You, 1991, woodcut on handmade paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Ronald and Anne Abramson. © 1991, Pacita B. Abad