Art historian Patricia Johnston and artist, critic and curator Robert Storr will present the final lectures in the spring Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series.
Johnston will present her lecture on Wednesday, March 28. Storr will present his lecture on Thursday, April 5. Each lecture begins at 5:30 p.m. and takes place in Richards Hall Rm. 15. The lectures are free and open to the public.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students.
Johnston studies how early American arts were influence by global trade, especially trade with Asia. She is the Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J., Chair in Fine Arts and Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts, and a nationally recognized scholar of American art and its wider visual culture.
Johnston is the author/editor of three books: Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (1997), which won three book awards for its study of the relationship between fine and commercial photography; Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (2006), which examines how concepts of high and low art changed from the 18th to the 20th centuries; and Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (2014).
In 2016-17, she was the Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has held prior research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently writing a book Art and Global Knowledge in Early America.
Storr was appointed professor of painting/printmaking and dean of the Yale University School of Art in 2006 and was named the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean in 2014.
Storr received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1972 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. He was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1990 to 2002, where he organized thematic exhibitions such as Dislocations and Modern Art Despite Modernism, as well as mongraphic shows on Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Tony Smith and Robert Ryman.
In addition, he coordinated the Projects series from 1990 to 2000, mounting exhibitions with Art Spiegelman, Ann Hamilton and Franz West, among others. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Storr has also taught at the CUNY graduate center and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, New York Studio School and Harvard University.
He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), Frieze (London) and Corriere della Serra (Milan). He has also written numerous catalogs, articles and books, including Philip Guston (Abbeville, 1986), Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons, Rizzoli, 1987) and the forthcoming “Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois.”
Storr has received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maine College of Art, as well as awards from the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and subsequently awarded him the status of Officier in the same order. From 2005 to 2007 he was visual arts director of the Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.