This event is part of the New Work in the Arts & Humanities: Bodies of Knowledge series.

The American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce its inaugural panel session at the 2016 College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in Washington, DC: “Key Sets: Photographic Collections and Visual Art,” on Wednesday, February 3.

In 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe donated to the National Gallery of Art a collection of photographs taken by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a champion of photography as a modern art. Stieglitz had selected the prints before his death in 1946; O’Keeffe spent the next three years organizing them with equal care. The result was the “key set”: a photographic collection representing the cream of Stieglitz’s art. Today, the “key set” has not only determined the artist’s legacy, but also laid the groundwork for the National Gallery’s photography collection and informed our understanding of photography and art as disciplines.

Sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, this session uses the “key set” as a springboard to consider how photographic collections shape our thinking about art. How do the formation, scope, and structure of photographic collections reveal the values of the people who comprised them? How does their format—album, archive, or museum collection—impact our assessment of photography with regard to national identity, or artistic criteria? Extending the Academy's humanities scholarship from Rome to the United States, the panel will address these issues as part of the Academy’s 2015–16 programming series, Bodies of Knowledge, which investigates how the organization of information impacts the structure of disciplines from ancient to modern.

Session Chair

Lindsay Harris (2014 Fellow), Andrew W. Mellon Professor, School of Classical Studies, American Academy in Rome

Session Participants

Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art
Robert Slifkin, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Beth Saunders (2013 Fellow), Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Panel Session Information

Wednesday, February 3, 12:30–2:00 pm
Washington 6, Exhibition Level
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
2660 Woodley Road NW
Washington, DC

To attend the session, please register for CAA at http://conference.collegeart.org/about/