Art Professor to Present Research at Crystal Bridges Museum

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Edward Hopper Blackwell's Island, 1928 Oil on canvas Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo © Christie's Images

BENTONVILLE, Ark. – Leo Mazow, associate professor of art history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, will speak at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s Great Hall at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, April 2, as part of the Museum’s programming in conjunction with the Edward Hopper: Journey to Blackwell’s Island exhibition.

Mazow will discuss his ongoing research for his book project, Hopper’s Hotels: Edward Hopper and the Promise of American Mobility.

“This study explores the hotel, motel, and boarding house subjects in Hopper's body of work,” Mazow said. “This is a modest-size body of work – four hotel paintings, one motel painting, one boarding house painting, and several magazine covers – but it captures powerfully the themes of transience, waiting, and social alienation for which the artist is best known.”

A brief concert by Mazow and vocalist Brittany Stephenson will follow the lecture.

“Hopper was a great follower of film, music, and theater,” Mazow said, “and many of his hotel pictures demonstrate consonance with popular hotel-oriented themes from these formats.”

Coupled with a backdrop of Hopper paintings, the performance will “trace the theme of the hotel, in all its manifestations – as signs of love, blind ambition, and desperate mobility – – in selected American music from the Depression to the present,” Mazow said.

Guests are encouraged to visit the Museum’s Edward Hopper special exhibition after the performance. The exhibition is on view through Monday, April 21.

This performance is free, but reservations are required. Tickets may be purchased online at www.crystalbridges.org or at Guest Services.