The Library Café: Recent Episodes
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February 2, 2022. The scholar, librarian, and Catholic Hermit Julia Bolton Holloway, Custodian of the English Cemetery in Florence, talks about her scholarship, her role as keeper of an historic cemetery, about cemeteries and libraries as vital mirrors of memory, and her project to develop a cultural heritage library documenting the Cemetery’s many notable residents and their […]
December 8, 2021. The Artist Aaron Sinift and project co-curators Kahkashan Khan and Jitendra Kumar discuss the artist book featured in the exhibition “OTHER IMAGININGS: Artist Collaborations with Gandhi Ashrams“ on view in the Vassar College Art Library through March 4, 2022. As western modes of advertising and television began to be adopted in India on a mass level […]
November 17, 2021. Elizabeth Nogrady (VC’99), Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, Lara Yeager-Crasselt (VC’06) Curator of The Leiden Collection, and Ronald Patkus, Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections and Associate Professor of History at Vassar on the Frederic Weyerhauser Chair, discuss the […]
October 27, 2021. Nancy Bisaha, Simona Bondavalli, Alberto Gelmi, Emma Iadanza, Elizabeth Nogrady and Ronald D. Patkus discuss the teaching of Dante at Vassar through the College’s history, and the opening of a series of three simultaneous exhibitions on view through December 4, 2021 in the Thompson Memorial Library and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center under […]
October 13, 2021. The acclaimed art historian and cultural critic, Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, talks about her recent monograph, Calling Memory Into Place (Rutgers UP, 2020). Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob; Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of […]
September 21, 2021. Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, discusses her award-winning book, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke UP, 2019). “It is a condition of masterworks that they attract, even demand, interpretation and reinterpretation. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a case […]
SEASON OPENER September 15, 2021. The painter, printmaker, and writer Robert Kipniss talks about his memoir Robert Kipniss: A Working Artist’s Life (University Press of New England, 2011). “A painter’s life is a solitary one, alone in the studio, combining intelligence and imagination with technical skills to create a unique vision. Robert Kipniss’s elegiac and mysterious landscapes and still […]
May 12, 2021. The author and biographer Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about her new memoir, Word for Word: A Writer’s Life, newly published by Artemis Editions. “With Word for Word, Laurie Lisle enters the pantheon of great memoirists . . . Bolstered by exquisite, evocative observations of the physical world that inform her prose, past and […]
April 7, 2021. Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Strauss Curator at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, will discuss her exhibition Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Ventures, on view through June 13, 2021.“Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Ventures studies the key themes that emerged when selecting works by women depicting women. In […]
March 31, 2021. The artist Buzz Spector talks about his retrospective exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum on view through May 31, 2021: Buzz Spector: Alterations. Spector is a contemporary Conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic possibilities of language, paper, and books. The exhibition spans the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present and includes […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/VotesForWomen.mp3 November 4, 2020.Miriam Cohen, Professor of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair at Vassar College, and Vassar Special Collections Librarian and Cataloger Mark G. Seidl will discuss the exhibition entitled Votes for Women: Vassar and the Politics of Women’s Suffrage, sponsored by the Vassar College Libraries to celebrate the centenary of the adoption of the […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/OKeeffe.mp3 October 14, 2020. Author Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about another of her landmark artist biographies: Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (Seaview 1980). “Portrait of an Artist is a sensitive and beautifully documented biography. It moved me deeply–I can’t remember when a book involved me so totally.”Patricia Bosworth, author, Diane Arbus: A Biography “What […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Tavarez.mp3 October 7, 2020David Tavarez, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies, talks about the exhibition Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States, on view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center September 5 – December 13, 2020.Usually commissioned from local artists working anonymously, retablos feature a […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Liza.mp3 September 30, 2020. Cartoonist, activist, author, and frequent visiting Vassar professor Liza Donnelly visits to talk about cartooning and the retrospective exhibition of her work, Liza Donnelly: Comic Relief, on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Liza is a New Yorker staff cartoonist, a resident cartoonist for CBS News, and has published in a […]
September 23, 2020.Bryan W. Van Norden, Professor of Philosophy on the James Monroe Taylor Chair at Vassar, talks about his recent monograph, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (Columbia UP, 2017).Are American colleges and universities failing their students by refusing to teach the philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures? This biting and provocative […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Lindsay2.mp3 May 20, 2020.Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC’10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, returns to discuss her English translation of a new monograph by former Vassar Professor of Art Andrew Tallon and Dany Sandron, University Professor at the University of the Sorbonne, entitled Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History(Penn State, 2020).Since its construction, […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Lisle.mp3 March 25, 2020.Author and biographer Laurie Lisle discusses her book Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life (Simon & Schuster 1990; Rev. Ed., Open Road, 2016.) ‘From her birth in Russia, her girlhood in Maine, to her years as an artist in Manhattan, Nevelson’s life was difficult, dramatic and, after years of struggle, finally triumphant. Her rich iconography expressed in […]
February 19, 2020. Wendy Graham, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Vassar College, talks about her latest monograph, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia University Press, 2017.)Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity sheds new light on Victorian discourses on sexuality and masculinity through a thick description of literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding […]
http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Bourgeois.mp3 February 12, 2020.Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center curator Patricia Phagan talks about the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Ode to Forgetting, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, on view January 24 – April 5, 2020. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. She […]
Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale Universiy February 5, 2020. Nicholas Adams discusses his biography of the 20th century architect whose work defined the built environment of corporate modernism: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (Yale University Press 2019). Gordon Bunshaft’s (1909–1990) landmark 1952 design for Lever House reshaped the Manhattan skyline and elevated the reputation of […]
November 26, 2019. Wendy Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, discusses her exhibition: Panoramas: The Big Picture, on view at the Society through December 8, 2019. Panoramas: The Big Picture explores the history and continued impact of panoramas from the 17th to the 21st century, as they were used to […]
October 30, 2019. Leah Price, Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and Founder and Director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, returns to the program to talk about her book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (New York: Basic Books, 2019). “Price’s book-unlike other examples of what she calls ‘autobibliography’-is funny and […]
October 23, 2019. Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, discusses her exhibition Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, on view through December 15, 2019. Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents a survey of Vassar’s renowned […]
October 16, 2019. Yvonne Elet, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Vassar College, discusses her article, co-authored with Virginia Duncan for Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (39:2, 2019) entitled: “Beatrix Farrand and campus landscape at Vassar: pedagogy and practice, 1925-29.” Farrand, one of the great landscape architects of the 20th […]
October 9, 2019. Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC’10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, discusses her essay “Religious Freedom and Architectural Ambition at Vassar College, 1945-1954,” and Philip Johnson’s unbuilt design for a modernist Vassar Chapel sited near Noyes Circle in the early 1950’s. http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Lindsay.mp3
September 18, 2019 (SEASON OPENER). Michael Joyce, acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, media wayfinder, and Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about his most recent novel, Remedia: A Picaresque (Steerage, 2018), and about creative writing, teaching, hypermedia and other conceptual wormholes, and about his relationship with media and literature. Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre […]
May 15, 2019 (SEASON FINALE). H. Daniel Peck, Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College, discusses his monograph and exhibition, on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill May 4 – November 3, 2019 entitled: Thomas Cole’s Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek. Thomas Cole’s Refrain shows how Cole’s Catskill Creek paintings, […]
May 8, 2019. James Mundy (VC ’74) Anne Hendricks Bass director of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, will talk about his education and life at Vassar in connection with the exhibition highlighting additions to the Loeb Center collections over his 28 year tenure: An Era of Opportunity: Three Decades of Acquisitions, on view April 26 – September […]
May 1, 2019. Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College, discusses his book Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam (PublicAffairs, 2018). The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended […]