ART FOR LUNCH LECTURES

With the informality of a brown-bag lunch and the stimulation of new ideas, Art for Lunch provides regular enrichment opportunities for the community.  The lectures, offered free-of-charge throughout the academic year, are one of many educational programs offered by LCVA. Topics range from the lives of artists, to art techniques, to issues in art collection.

SPRING 2008 LECTURES

Art Education in the Public School Curriculum with Wilma Sharp
Thursday 21 February 2008
12:30 p.m.
LCVA Lower Level

Creating art is its own reward, but are there further benefits to including the arts in school curricula?  In an era when schools are pressured to improve test scores and focus on “the basics,” can we make a case for preserving room in the school day for art, music, and other forms of creative self-expression?  Surveying both professional literature and citing successful programs, educator Wilma Sharp of Williamsburg will answer these questions with an emphatic “Yes!”
 
For fourteen years, Mrs. Sharp has served as an elementary Gifted Resource Specialist in the Williamsburg/James City County Schools.  She received her B.S. from Longwood and her M.A. from William & Mary, where she is currently pursuing her doctorate in education.
 
“I believe strongly in providing a curriculum that will prepare all students for gainful participation in the many facets of our diverse society and that will encourage them to become ‘life-long learners.’ I believe strongly in the importance of incorporating the arts into curriculum beginning at the earliest ages.  Art speaks volumes about cultures, history, and society.”

China: A Travelogue with K. Johnson Bowles
Thursday 6 March 2008
12:30 p.m.
LCVA Lower Level

After spending years preparing for the award-winning Reflecting Centuries of Beauty: The Rowe Collection of Chinese Art, LCVA Director K. Johnson Bowles was asked to represent Longwood University in a delegation to China, headed by President Patricia Cormier.  Touring Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou, Ms. Bowles says that the trip “opened my eyes to the current, living culture of China, as opposed to the historic – but still-vibrant – culture I had been studying in preparation for the exhibition.”  Using her own photographs, Ms. Bowles will share her trip, including stops at the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Suzhou’s new museum, designed by I.M. Pei.

K. Johnson Bowles has served as the LCVA’s director since 2000.

Art, Internationalism, and Identity:  An Exploration with Erin Devine
Thursday 10 April 2008
12:30 p.m.
LCVA Lower Level

Using the work of three women artists who have left their native lands of Iran, Palestine, and Cuba, art historian Erin Devine will examine the role of identity and place in their art.  Focusing on the acclaimed work of Shirin Neshat, Emily Jacir, and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, the illustrated lecture will explore the “New Internationalism,” which questions traditional boundaries between countries, genders, and races.

Erin Devine joined Longwood’s art department in 2007, where she teaches art history.  She is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, where she studied contemporary art and served as the Curatorial Associate for the School of Fine Arts Gallery.  She has previously published scholarship, owned a gallery, managed exhibitions, juried competitions, and served on various professional and civic art boards.

The Cloth Unfolded:
Linen, Domesticity, and Laundry in 19th-Century France
With Mary Prevo
Thursday, 22 May
12:30 p.m.
Lower Level

Mary Prevo, art historian and museum educator, will discuss her most recent project:  the carefully laundered linen table covering in nineteenth-century still life painting and its value as a measure of the rise of the bourgeoisie.  In the hands of artists from Fantin-Latour to Cezanne and Gauguin, cool, smooth, and subtly colored table coverings become symbols of comfort and domestic order.  Prevo will walk the audience through a series of examples of these paintings while entertaining the question of who was responsible for these beautifully laundered and ironed table linens.  In other words, what developments were taking place in domestic economy and the laundry industry in the 19th-century and how do those developments relate to still life paintings and to the laundresses and ironers painted by Daumier and Degas and described by Alcott and Zola?

A former museum educator at the LCVA and at The Cloisters in New York, Mary Prevo has also worked for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Getty Trust.  She teaches art history in the Fine Arts Department at Hampden-Sydney College.  She received her M.A. in art history from Columbia University.