UNF art history professor presents lecture series with Cummer Museum

Dr. P. Scott Brown, professor of art history, will present a three-part virtual lecture series in partnership with the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens and the Beaches Museum, that highlights a selection of works in the Cummer Museum’s permanent collection.

To participate, register on the event pages. A Zoom link for access will be sent to all registrants the week of the lecture. Lectures take place from 7 to 8 p.m., as follows:

Thursday, October 1: "The Anatomy of a Still Life"

The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens' rich collection of still life paintings offers a wonderful perspective on how paintings without people or action tell stories and engender meanings. Still life paintings are feasts for the eyes. They delight the senses by focusing and intensifying our optical experience of texture, color, light, and luster and through contrasts and oppositions with the suggestive potential of poetic metaphor. As we savor these paintings, still life subjects take on symbolic meanings that supply the elements of grand narratives: of life, love, desire, and human vanity and mortality. Register

Thursday, November 5: "Degas and the Past"

A drawing by Edgar Degas in the Museum reveals a little-known artistic side of the famed French Impressionist: his interest in classical art and Greek antiquity. The drawing depicts a group of dancers-the artist's most characteristic subject-juxtaposed with an image of the Greek Parthenon in the background. The Museum's drawing has a companion, a painted sketch on wood of the same subject in the Dallas Museum of Art. Together these works draw attention to Degas's distinctive interest in classical art and archaeology and to the influence of ancient Greek art on Degas's Impressionist dancers. Register

Thursday, January 7 "From Pietà and Lamentation - Themes of Compassion in Cummer Collection"

Images of the Pietà and Lamentation are among the most moving and powerful works of art in the Museum's collection, and they include some of the Museum's masterpieces of late medieval and Renaissance art. These works aim to stir the feelings of the viewer, to pierce to heart, to arouse compassion. Compassion is literally the feeling of "suffering with" another. The history of this theme and its development in late medieval art and culture offer matter for reflection on the values of empathy and understanding in our own time and society. Register This lecture series is co-hosted by the UNF Department of Art, Art History and Design, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens and the Beaches Museum, and sponsored by Dr. Diane Jacobsen.