Events

Speaker: James Glisson, Bradford and Christine Mishler Assistant Curator of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Lecture: "Beautiful Fury"

About the Lecture: The sublime is an endlessly elastic idea, which probably explains its longevity. From the ancient Roman writer Longinus to the 90s punk band “Sublime,” it has undergone many transformations, not mention deformations. Nonetheless, one theme does emerge: it concerns human limitations in the face of nature--our smallness in comparison to the universe, aeons of history, and our powerlessness to prevent floods, fires, or hurricanes. How beauty can be wrested from destruction and danger is the focus of the his lecture, and an aspect of the Timken’s current exhibition, The Romantic Impulse in the American Landscape Tradition.

About the Speaker: James Glisson (PhD, Northwestern University) is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. He has written for afterimage, caa.reviews, artforum.com, and Panorama. His exhibitions have been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Wallpaper, El Pais, and Art Newspaper. A co-curated exhibition Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking will travel to the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe for summer 2018 and was the subject of an recent interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.