Final Provost's Series Speaker

Susan Rather, an authority on American art, will discuss the politics of portraiture in colonial times when she returns to Denison as the final speaker in the inaugural season of the Provost Alumni Scholar Series. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Denison in 1978, Rather will discuss "An Artisan and a Gentleman: Copley, Revere, and the Politics of Representation in Late Colonial Boston" at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday (April 13) in Slayter Auditorium. The presentation is free and open to the public.

The new Provost Lecture Series invites Denison graduates who have distinguished themselves in higher education to return to campus. In addition to her lecture, Rather will meet with students in art department chair Joy Sperling's class, Modern Art ? 1900 to 1939.

Now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Rather earned both a master's (1981) and doctorate (1986) in art history at the University of Delaware. She served as the John D. Murchison Faculty Fellow in Art at the University of Texas in 1997/98, a Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of American Art in 1982-84, a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art in September 1990, and as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research fellow at the Winterthur Museum from October 1990 to August of 1991.

Author of one book, "Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship" (University of Texas Press, 1993), Rather's articles and essays have appeared in Arts Magazine, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and Art Bulletin. She was a participant in a seminar on John Singleton Copley's "Watson and the Shark" sponsored by the National Gallery of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 1993 and has presented papers and lectures around the country, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the American Studies Association annual meeting, the National Portrait Gallery, Winterthur Museum, Smith College and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Rather returned to Denison to speak on "Archaism as Modernism: Subject, Technique, Style" in 1990 and also participated in a symposium on the Art Deco Era at the Columbus Museum of Art where she spoke on "Paul Manship and the Taste of the Twenties."

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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