Lectures and Talks

Throughout his nearly 50 year career, highly regarded photographer and educator Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) has explored the importance of community and weight of history through his compelling portraits and landscapes. From 1988 to 1991, he photographed African Americans in the streets of various American cities. For this project entitled Street Portraits, Bey asked a cross section of these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

Please join us for a conversation between Dawoud Bey and Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the Denver Art Museum, to learn more about the artist’s process, inspiration, and the importance of this earlier work to his career as a whole. This program is presented in connection with his exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits.

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

Shiva Ahmadi orchestrates exquisitely crafted scenes of beauty and terror. Her vibrant fantasy realms are, upon closer inspection, macabre theaters of conflict where faceless figures engage in endless cycles of struggle and pain. Combining luminous colors and mystical beings with violent imagery, Ahmadi creates watercolor paintings, sculptures, and digital animations that illuminate global issues of migration, war, and brutality against marginalized peoples. Her work is informed by current events in the Middle East and the US, and inspired by Iranian, Turkish, and Indian book and miniature painting traditions.

In 2016, Ahmadi received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Dallas Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

Sonya Clark transforms everyday fiber materials hair, flags, and found fabrics into profound statements on race, culture, and class. Working with her chosen objects, Clark weaves, stitches, folds, braids, dyes, pulls, and snips threads of ideas to create new meanings. For more than thirty years, she has explored ideas of Blackness, uncovered little-known objects from American history, and sought to bring greater visibility to figures from the African diaspora.

Clark is professor of art at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and was Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts and Commonwealth Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where she served as chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department from 2006 to 2017. Her work is the public collections of Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, among others.
 
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Avenir Institute of Textile Arts and Fashion and the Modern and Contemporary Art department.

Vance Kirkland, namesake of Kirkland Museum, was a lifelong painter, art educator, and proponent of modernism in Denver, Colorado. His involvement with the University of Denver, Denver Art Museum, and many of Colorado's artists from 1929 to 1981 left a lasting impact on the cultural landscape of our state. Kirkland Museum's merger with the Denver Art Museum is the culmination of almost 100 years of connections. Join us to learn about this visionary artist and his enduring influence.

Maya D. Wright grew up in Denver and has worked at Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art since 2005, most recently as Director of Interpretation. She is now on staff at the Denver Art Museum, managing the interpretation and communications aspects of the Kirkland integration.