DISCOVER WITHIN: ART LECTURES
Rashid Johnson | A Poem for Deep Thinkers
This lecture explores the artistic vision of Rashid Johnson whose work includes paintings, sculptures, installations, and films that create powerful narratives around race, identity, and belonging. Drawing on personal history and collective cultural memory, Johnson employs culturally symbolic materials such as shea butter, black soap, and ceramic tile to craft deeply layered and emotionally resonant works. Merging abstraction with potent social commentary, his practice invites viewers into visual dialogues that are both intimate and expansive. This seminar, concurrent with his current exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , considers how his new body of work explores memory, language, and the search for meaning in turbulent times. Special attention will be given to Johnson’s ability to infuse formal innovation with poetic and political discourse, challenging viewers to reconsider the intersections of personal narrative and shared histories. Aimed at retracing the conceptual threads that weave through Johnson’s career, this talk illuminates how his work continues to shape and expand the discourse of contemporary art.
Thursday, September 4, 2025 at 5pm EST
Ruth Asawa | A Retrospective
This lecture explores the extraordinary career of Ruth Asawa whose intricate wire sculptures and public artworks have redefined the possibilities of form, space, and material. Emerging in the mid-twentieth century, Asawa developed a unique visual language inspired by nature, geometry, and traditional craft, including the basket-weaving methods she learned while teaching in Mexico. Her looped-wire constructions, at once delicate and architectural, challenge distinctions between fine art and craft through a sculptural rhetoric that fuses personal expression with communal purpose.
Timed to coincide with the opening of her traveling retrospective that comes to the Museum of Modern Art in late October 2025, this lecture is both an overview of her oeuvre and a virtual visit of the most comprehensive view to date of Asawa’s artistic achievements. At the same time, special attention will be given to her tireless work as an educator and advocate for access to the arts while highlighting how her work’s formal innovation is inseparable from her belief in art’s social value. This lecture aims to illuminate the poetic rigor of Asawa’s practice, revealing how her intricate sculptures transform humble materials into transcendent meditations on light, shadow, and interconnectedness.
Thursday, October 30, 2025 at 5pm EST
Henri Rousseau | A Painter's Secret
This lecture examines the remarkable artistic journey of Henri Rousseau, the self-taught French painter whose lush, dreamlike scenes redefined the boundaries of modern art. Rising to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rousseau developed a distinctive style marked by precise outlines, vivid color, and fantastical compositions that defied academic conventions. Drawing inspiration from botanical gardens, illustrated books, and his own vivid imagination, he created exotic landscapes and mystical jungles without ever leaving France, blending reality and fantasy into an entirely new visual language. This discussion, which reflects on the artist’s upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation opening October 2025, offers an in-depth look at Rousseau’s most celebrated works alongside pieces by artists he influenced. In considering how his works stage tension between innocence and sophistication, we will explore how his paintings invite viewers into spaces that are at once enchanted and unsettling. Finally, this seminar aims to reveal how Rousseau’s singular rhetoric transformed naïveté into the radical forms of modernism, offering timeless meditations on wonder, strangeness, and the power of artistic vision.
Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 5pm EST
John Singer Sargent | Sargent in Paris
This lecture explores Sargent in Paris, the landmark 2025 exhibition tracing the evolution of John Singer Sargent’s artistic vision through his dynamic relationship with the French capital. Long before he became synonymous with society portraiture, Sargent honed his craft in the studios and salons of Paris, absorbing while subtly challenging the conventions of the day. And so, even if you missed the exquisite show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can still experience its splendor with this exclusive Aesthetic Adventurer talk!
Focusing on the formative years of the artist’s career, this talk examines how Sargent synthesized academic training with impressionist experimentation, producing works that dazzled with technical brilliance while pushing the boundaries of genre and subject. From atmospheric interiors to boldly lit portraits and sensuous studies of modern life, this seminar highlights how Paris, as well as other cities, including Venice, shaped Sargent's painterly language and positioned him at the intersection of tradition and innovation.
Occasioned by the fall 2025 Paris presentation of the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, the discussion will delve into key works featured in the show, offering fresh insights into Sargent’s cross-cultural influences, his cosmopolitan identity, and his lifelong dialogue with European art. Through close analysis and historical context, we’ll uncover how Sargent’s time in Paris forged a new mode of portraiture—one that was as much about surface and style as it was about personality and performance.
Thursday, December 11, 2025 at 5pm EST