SOF Forum: Art, Music, and Film of the American Mid-Century (AT CAPACITY)
This half-day forum will explore the ways in which the new ideas and values of the American modernist movement were expressed through art and music. How did American artists and musicians respond to the horrors of the 19th century, the Great War, and the Great Depression? How did the onset of mass production, marketing, and consumerism in this era influence creatives and vice versa? Intellectual movements of the time rejected idealism and embraced pragmatism and that which was deemed the natural state of society and mankind. America had just stepped onto the world stage. How are these movements evident through the art and music of that period? How did creatives give shape to the American identity and help globalize it? In what ways has our society evolved from modernism to a post-modern movement and beyond? And where do we see remnants of the modernist movement in today’s America? View full agenda here.
SPEAKERS
Dr. Leon Botstein has been the President of Bard College since 1975, where he is also the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. Since 1992, Leon Botstein has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and a conductorof international renown. With the American Symphony he has pioneered the concept of thematic concert programming, relating musical works to cohering extra-musical themes drawn from history, literature, politics, and the visual arts. Botstein holds doctoral and masters degrees in history from Harvard. Amongst honors received are the National Arts Club Gold Medal, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences, the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Carnegie Academic Leadership Award, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Alan Fletcher, President and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School, is one of this country’s most accomplished music administrators and respected composers. Fletcher was previously head of the school of music and professor of music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. He has won numerous composing awards and commissions, including recent commissions for the Pittsburgh Symphony and the National Gallery of Art.
Barbara Haskell is an American art historian and a museum curator. She is currently a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has worked since 1975. She has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Museum. She holds a bachelor’s degree from UCLA. Her area of expertise is early to mid-20th century painting and sculpture, including American Modernists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists. She is the founder and leader of the American Fellows, a patrons group for major donors to the Whitney. Among the landmark thematic exhibitions she has curated are The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-1950 (1999), and BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958-1964 (1984). In addition, she has curated retrospectives and authored accompanying scholarly monographs on a range of early-20th-century and post-war American artists
Cost: $75/person
*This event is by invitation only.