Modern Voices, Modern Women – New Series with Rena Tobey!

No matter if you think you know the artists, it will be quite different exploring them, their influences, and their stories with Rena.

While we think of modern art as a 20th-century phenomena, the daring aesthetic choices of artists from the 1850s on established the foundation for experimentation and expression in our time. At the same time, western society was going through the massive changes of modernization, brought on by urbanization and its effects on economics and the everyday lives of men and women. This five-session course takes on this complex narrative by focusing in on a select group of artists whose voices revolutionized art.

We begin around 1850, with Lilly Martin Spencer, a self-taught genius for sussing out the subtleties and growing anxieties of a new middle class. Her work coincided with and benefitted from an effort to grow art collecting beyond the wealthy, and her subject matter captured the tensions from shifts in gender roles. Once Spencer arrived in New York City, she never left the region. Our next three artists ex-patriated from the U.S. to make their careers in Europe.

Together, through the lenses of men and women artists, we consider how modernity sprouted its roots from the 1850s until the outbreak of World War I. Look forward to seeing you there!

This is a 5-week program:
Lilly Martin Spencer: Feb. 24
James McNeil Whistler: Mar. 3
John Singer Sargent: Mar. 10
Mary Cassatt: Mar. 17
Cecilia Beaux and the Gilded Age/New Woman: Mar. 24