Art History Professor to Lecture at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

"America Today: City Activities With Dance Hall," 1930-31, by Thomas Hart Benton

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Leo Mazow, associate professor of art history and Thomas Hart Benton expert, will give two lectures March 1 and 2 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in conjunction with the museum’s March 2 symposium titled "The Full Force of His Spiritual Bellows: Thomas Hart Benton’s American Today Mural."

Each lecture will emphasize the roles of sound and music in the mural.

His Sunday lecture will focus on specifically New York subjects in "America Today." The presentation will be followed by a short concert by The Coverlets, a duo composed of Mazow and Brittany Stephenson, performing three popular period songs capturing the urban and musical contexts in which Benton produced the mural. Monday’s lecture, "The Sounds of America Today," will deal with sonic metaphors in the mural.

The symposium celebrates the mural "America Today," which was recently gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company. Depicting American life throughout the 1920s, the 10-panel mural hangs in a gallery recreating New York’s New School for Social Research boardroom, where the mural originally hung.

Eight of the panels depict life in different regions of the United States: the South,, the Midwest, the West, and New York. In the 1920s, Benton traveled throughout these areas of the country, creating a body of studies from life, mostly in pencil, on which he based many of the details in "America Today."

Mazow is a specialist in American art history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. His book, "Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound" (Penn State University Press, 2012), was supported by a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by the College Art Association. The book was awarded the 2013 Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Mazow came to the University of Arkansas in 2010 after eight years as curator of American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University.