Description
Register and join the session here
Join us for the first in a series of frank discussions assessing our institution’s century of collecting and display. For our first program, Kate Lemay and Carolina Maestre of the National Portrait Gallery and Gabrielle Niu, curator at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, will join NMAA’s Lunder Curator of American Art, Diana Greenwold. Together, the group will explore questions of collecting and American expansion in the Gilded Age. Greenwold will outline Charles Lang Freer’s collecting in relationship to Theodore Roosevelt’s political ambitions for the United States overseas at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Niu will assess Isabella Stewart Gardner as a collector of Asian art in Boston, while Lemay and Maestre will offer a sneak peek into their work for the upcoming exhibition 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery in April 2023.
About the Speakers:
Gabrielle Niu is the assistant curator of the collection and exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Previously, Gabrielle was the Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she co-organized an exhibition on historic Chinese and contemporary art. She has taught Asian art history at Indiana University, Yale University, and Boston University. Gabrielle holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kate Clarke Lemay, PhD, is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. She is a Fulbright Scholar; a presidential counselor to the National WWII Museum; an advisor to Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art; and an advisor to the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation. In 2019, Lemay curated Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence to usher in the centennial of the U.S. American women’s suffrage anniversary. Accompanying this exhibition, she published its eponymous catalogue with Princeton University Press in 2019, which was awarded the 2021 Smithsonian Secretary’s Prize for Excellence in Research as well as the 2020 Amelia Bloomer Book Award from the American Library Association. Her current project is 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions, cocurated with Taína Caragol, with the assistance of Carolina Maestre.
Carolina Maestre is the curatorial assistant of Latino art and history at the National Portrait Gallery, providing scholarly research and writing support for 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions. In this role, she also supports the curator of painting and sculpture and Latino art and history with research on Latino artists and Latino historical figures. Prior to joining the Portrait Gallery, Maestre completed a master’s degree at New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies with a concentration in museum studies.
Cost
Free
