Art and Culture Lectures
Led by distinguished art historians, artists, curators and other experts, our art lectures provide a unique opportunity to delve deeper into diverse artistic genres and to learn more about the contributions of women artists past and present. Expand your horizons, broaden your perspectives, and cultivate a deeper appreciation for the transformative power of art. All lectures are recorded (see below), free and open to the public with the generous support of our Oregon Chapter members and sponsors.
UPCOMING LECTURE:
November 16, 2025 2PM at PNCA
Jennifer Stoots presents Dorothea Lange: Photographer and Agent for Change - Join us as Jennifer illustrates illustrate Dorothea Lange’s remarkable career as a professional photographer in the early 20th century. By the end of the 1920’s, Lange had a successful portrait studio in San Francisco, photographing some of the city’s most affluent residents. Like the rest of the country, however, the Bay Area was hard hit by the Great Depression. In addition to the impact on her own business, Lange saw and extraordinary number of the city’s homeless and unemployed who gravitated to the soup kitchens in the Mission District, not far from her studio. Shocked to see men sleeping on sidewalks, Lange was moved to take her carmera onto the streets - to use it as a vehicle to convey the current hardship among the working class. It was this act, her interest in the welfare of her neighbors, her community, and her country, that would define her career going forward.
RECENT LECTURES:
October 19, 2025 @ 2PM
Christine Weber presents Resistance in the Kitchen: Legacies of Women at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design On the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, this talk explores the experiences of women designers during the second phase of the influential art and design school. The Bauhaus presented itself as a radical, egalitarian experiment in 1920s Germany; however, the Bauhaus rhetoric was not consistently upheld in practice. Throughout the school’s history, women like Marianne Brandt, Gunta Stölzl, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, and Grete Schütte-Lihotzky had to fight to pursue paths not considered suitable for women.
RECORDING LINK
April 8, 2025 @ 6PM
Lumi Tan, Curator of Converge45, Join us on Tuesday, April 8th, at 6:00 PM for a lecture by Curator Lumi Tan, hosted by Converge 45 and The Oregon Chapter of The National Museum of Women in the Arts at the PNCA Mediatheque, 511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209. This event is a great chance for art lovers, community members, and students to explore Tan's impressive work and her curatorial process at The Kitchen in New York and Luna Luna in Los Angeles, current projects, including a preview of the Converge 45 2026 Triennial. Don't miss the opportunity to connect with the creative community and engage with the local contemporary art scene!
RECORDING LINK
November 17, 2024 @ 2PM
Kris Timken on The View from Here: Land, Art and Historical Monuments is based on Timken’s dissertation “Women, Land Art and the Social (1978-1983)”, a revisionist project that moves beyond the necessary impulse to recover forgotten female artists as pioneers in the early years of the land art movement.
PRESS RELEASE
RECORDING LINK
2023- 2024 Lecture Series:
"Women & Art in the 20th Century."
Led by distinguished art historians, artists, curators and other experts, our art lectures provide a unique opportunity to delve deeper into diverse artistic genres and to learn more about the contributions of women artists past and present. Expand your horizons, broaden your perspectives, and cultivate a deeper appreciation for the transformative power of art. All lectures are free and open to the public.
LECTURE SCHEDULE:
September 17, 2023 @ 2PM
Prudence Roberts speaks on Sonya Delanay, (14 November 1885 – 5 December 1979) a French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in the Russian Empire, in the area which is now Ukraine, and formally trained in Russian Empire and Germany before moving to France and expanding her practice to include textile, fashion, and set design. She co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Honor. Her work in modern design included the concepts of geometric abstraction, and the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing into her art practice. This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.
PRESS RELEASE
RECORDING LINK
October 15, 2023 @ 2PM
Abigail Susik on Surrelism and Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.
PRESS RELEASE
RECORDING LINK
March 17, 2024 @ 2PM
Bruce Guenther, "Hand and Eye: Louise Nevelson and a Bricolage Future"
Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine), she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home.
By the early 1930s she was attending art classes at the Art Students League of New York, and in 1941 she had her first solo exhibition. Nevelson experimented with early conceptual art using found objects, and dabbled in painting and printing before dedicating her lifework to sculpture. Usually created out of wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces, often 3-D. The sculptures are typically painted in monochromatic black or white.
PRESS RELEASE
RECORDING LINK
April 21, 2024 @ 2PM
Sue Taylor, "Alice Neel and the Politics of Figurative Painting"
Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. This is done by depicting women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralizing effects of the male gaze.
PRESS RELEASE
RECORDING LINK
**All lectures are presented live at:
The Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University,
511 NW Broadway in Portland and made available online shortly after via the links above.