Curated Conversations [Online Event]

How do museums decide what to acquire?
What and who is involved?
What does it mean to have a diverse collection?
What are the challenges to achieving that?

Join a conversation about the Blanton’s recent acquisitions of important works by four groundbreaking female artists. After a short presentation, you can participate in an “Ask Me Anything”-style Q&A with our Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Carter Foster and Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings Holly Borham. From a drawing by Elisabetta Sirani, who established a painting academy for woman artists in Bologna, Italy in the mid-seventeenth century, to prints by twentieth-century trailblazers Elizabeth Catlett, Helen Frankenthaler, and Barbara Jones-Hogu, our curators will discuss the ways these recent additions to the collection expand the story the Blanton can tell about the history of art.

And, because it’s happy hour, we encourage you to sit back and sip a cocktail – or mocktail – inspired by tonight’s talk. We suggest a Manhattan, in honor of featured artist Helen Frankenthaler, who was born in and spent her formative years in the Big Apple. Below, a recipe for both a regular Manhattan and a non-alcoholic version.

[button link=’https://blantonmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Manhattan-Recipe-Blanton.pdf’ target=’_blank’ label=’Download PDF of Recipe’]

About our Speakers

Carter E. Foster is Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He has written extensively on the history of drawing and contemporary drawing practice, as well as on the work of Edward Hopper and Ellsworth Kelly.

Holly Borham is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she oversees the Julia Matthews Wilkinson Center for Prints and Drawings. At the Blanton, Holly curated Copies, Fakes, and Reproductions: Printmaking in the Renaissance, and coordinated the traveling exhibition, Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders. Her upcoming exhibition After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints, will open at the Blanton in March 2021. Holly earned her Ph.D in art history from Princeton University, where she also interned at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Image Caption: Elizabeth Catlett, American Women Unite [Unidad de la Mujer Americana], 1963, color woodcut, Purchase through the generosity of the Still Water Foundation.