February 2, 2017

6-7pm

Hurley Convergence Center, Digital Auditorium

Dr. Leo G. Mazow, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will give a lecture entitled, “Defining American Modernisms.” The lecture is in association with  the exhibition American Perspectives on Modernism on view in the Ridderhof Martin Gallery.

Dr. Mazow has been at the VMFA since 2016. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American painting and cultural history, he received his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2010 through 2016 he was an associate professor of art history at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. From 2002 through 2010 he was curator of American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University.

Among the exhibitions and accompanying publications he organized there are Picturing the Banjo; Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art; and Shallow Creek: Thomas Hart Benton and American Waterways. His book Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound was awarded the 2013 Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Mazow has published articles on Edward Hopper, Regionalism, New York Dada, and American landscape painting in such journals as Art Bulletin, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio. In 2015 he held a Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where he worked on his book project, Hopper’s Hotels, which will also be the subject of his first exhibition project at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.