Art History from Home: Realisms and Revolution

Online, via Zoom

Galvanized by emerging socialist ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European realist artists sought to challenge the idealized representations prevalent in Academic art by shifting their attention toward ordinary, everyday activities. As the movement spread into the U.S., realism offered American artists a potent tool to address urgent social and political issues throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Including works by Paul Cadmus, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, and Henry Taylor, among others, this program will highlight selections from the Whitney’s collection to examine the diverse ways modern and contemporary American artists have utilized realistic vocabularies as a site for visual and political revolution.

This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum’'s collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat. Sessions are live, but registered attendees can request a temporary link to view the program afterward.

Patryk Tomaszewski is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching global twentieth-century realisms. His dissertation offers the first scholarly examination of exhibitions of Socialist Realist art in Stalinist Poland (1948–56). His writing has appeared in ARTMargins Online and MoMA’s post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, among other publications, and he is an adjunct lecturer at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.