CLARK ART INSTITUTE’S RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM PRESENTS FREE LECTURE: ‘ROCOCO THOUGHT PATTERNS’

January 31, 2018

Williamstown, Massachusetts—Lauren Cannady, assistant director of the Research and Academic Program and Manton Research Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, presents the free lecture, “Rococo Thought Patterns” on Tuesday, February 13 at 5:30 pm. The lecture will be held in the Clark’s auditorium, located in the Manton Research Center.

If eighteenth-century curiosity cabinets were repositories for the dead, the garden was a parallel cabinet that provided a space for living curiosities. The organizing principal of the parterre—an ornamental flower garden with the beds and paths arranged to form a pattern—was applied not only to plants, but equally to naturalia in the cabinet. This lecture maps the ways in which pattern and design within these different spaces served as one model in early modern empirical thinking and knowledge transmission.

Before joining the Clark, Lauren R. Cannady was a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris, and the Columbia University/NYU Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History. She has published on eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and systems of the decorative and is preparing a book manuscript titled Natural Seduction: Thinking through the Early Modern French Garden. Her second project considers artisanal practice, collaboration, and exploitation in the global eighteenth century.

ABOUT THE CLARK

The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of more than 270,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is $20; free year-round for Clark members, children 18 and younger, and students with valid ID. Free admission is available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; EBT Card to Culture; Bank of America Museums on Us; and Blue Star Museums. For more information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.

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