“Self-Taught Artists and the National Identity” with Katherine Jentleson, PhD

Thursday, September 12, 5:30-6:30 PM

Black Box Theater, Zoellner Arts Center

Public Reception to Follow, 6:30-8:00 PM

LUAG Main & Lower Galleries, Zoellner Arts Center

LUAG is proud to host the traveling exhibition, Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, curated by Katherine Jentleson PhD., the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In her discussion, Dr. Jentleson will present Rowe’s practice in the context of developments that shaped the United States’ social climate, both nationally and locally, during a lifetime that spanned most of the twentieth century. These include the influence of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, the rise of the Feminist movement, the disruptions of predatory urban expansion and Black removal, all consciously referenced and transmuted into the endogenous spiritual home ground of her art.

Advanced RSVP is appreciated, but not required. 

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Katherine “Katie” Jentleson, PhD, is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Her most recent exhibitions, Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America and Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, opened to the public in Atlanta in fall 2021 and began national tours in 2022. Since joining the High, she has overseen more than half a dozen exhibitions and grown the collection by more than five hundred objects, including major acquisitions of work by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, the Gee’s Bend quilters, and Henry Church, many of which debuted in the newly expanded and thematically integrated Folk and Self-Taught Art galleries as part of the Museum’s 2018 reinstallation. Her exhibitions and collection-based initiatives have been awarded major support from Bank of America, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art Bridges Foundation, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

Before she became a curator, Dr. Jentleson worked as an arts journalist in New York. Through her editorial assignments and general experiences at galleries and museums there, she discovered her passion for self-taught artists and their historical legacy in the United States. In 2010, she began her graduate studies in art history at Duke University, where she focused her research on the rise of self-taught artists during the interwar period. During her graduate career she received awards and fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, and the Dedalus Foundation, and she contributed research and writing to exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, the Ackland Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Prospect.3 New Orleans. Dr. Jentleson adapted her dissertation into a peer-reviewed book Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America (University of California Press, Spring 2020) and the High Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition of the same name.

An ASL interpreter will be in attendance to interpret the lecture and will be available as a floating interpreter for the duration of the opening reception.

CART Captioning will be available for the lecture portion of the evening. Provided by Becky Tallerico.

Questions, concerns, and any accessibility needs can also be directed to Elise at ejs421@lehigh.edu or call 610-758-6882.

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