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| All lectures will take place in Viewing Room 1 in White
Hall at 11a.m. After speaking date, please click on name to view biography
and links. Tom Burckhardt, Painter January 24th Walt Reed, Illustrator (speaking on the History of Illustration) February 7th Natalie Charkow Hollander, Sculptor February 21 Raul Colón, Illustrator March 7th Lois Dodd, Painter March 28 Jim Peters, Painter April 11th Kinuko Craft, Painter April 25th Jake Berthot, Painter May 9th The Weir Farm Trust lecturer for 2005 is the highly respected landscape painter, Jake Berthot. After studies at the New School and Pratt Institute he received early and wide recognition with his rich and mysterious abstractions. Early in the 1990’s, however, he moved from a New York City Studio to a farm in upstate New York. Surrounded by nature, his work began to change in a dramatic way. The critic William Corbett writes of his recent paintings “…they are sublime, American sublime. Entering the room is like walking into the 18th and 19th centuries, the world of The Deerslayer, Hawthorne’s dark woods, the world of Transcendentalists and Bierstadt and Albert Pinkham Ryder. It is a world of thrilling darks and thrilling mysterious light, storm light dusk morning and sunset fire. These are frankly romantic paintings but they are not nostalgic. Their time is the present, one in which the past, and this is part of the force of nature is eternal. They are indications of the oldest, holiest of American verities and they are unflinching in their regard for the darkness that surrounds us and our brief light.” Jake Berthot’s work has been collected by a majority of significant American museums including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boston museum of Fine Arts, The Fogg Museum, The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection and the Whitney Museum of Art. He has been reviewed frequently in Art in America, Artnews, Art New England, The Boston Globe, The New Criterion, Modern Painters, The New York Times and New York Observer. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Elizabeth Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Cooper Union, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania and is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. Jake Berthot is represented by Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York and is a member of the National Academy of Design. The Weir Farm Trust has been sponsoring annual lectures in the M.F.A. programs visiting artist series since the program’s inception in 2000. Weir Farm National Historic Site is the only National Park in Connecticut and the only National Park in the country devoted to American painting. The Weir Farm Trust works in partnership with the National Park Service to provide outstanding programs for the public and to preserve the Farm’s unique environment. There is a natural connection between Western’s M.F.A. program and the distinctive opportunities for artists provided by the Farm’s historic landscape and cultural resources. With similar goals for artists and the University’s close proximity, it is an exciting collaboration for both programs. All lectures are open to the public as seating allows. |