The art historian Hérica Valladares (2009 Fellow, 2023 Resident) and the artist Jennifer Coates (2009 Fellow Traveler), who met at the American Academy in Rome, will use Coates’s recent paintings as a jumping-off point to discuss the relevance of classical mythology to the contemporary depiction of landscapes. Valladares, a specialist in the art of ancient Rome, will expand on the cultural context of the mythology and iconography that Coates references. From Bacchus and Diana to flora and fauna, their mutual interests and parallel disciplines will structure the conversation.

Valladares is associate professor of classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily on Roman visual and literary culture from the late republic and early empire. She is the author of various articles on Roman wall painting, Latin love elegy, and the Renaissance reception of classical antiquity. Her book, Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire (2021) analyzes amatory representations in Roman wall painting and Latin poetry between the late first century BCE and the late first century CE.

Coates is an artist working in Brooklyn and Lakewood, Pennsylvania. Most recently, she had a solo exhibition, Edge Effects (2024), spanning two galleries in New York at High Noon and Chart. Coates was selected for The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition opening in October at the Brooklyn Museum. Coates was the 2021 recipient of the John Koch Art Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2021 award in painting from the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Program, a 2019 fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a 2018–19 residency in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Her work has been written about in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Bomb Magazine, the Huffington Post, ARTnews, and Smithsonian Journeys. She will be featured in the forthcoming book Nature into Art: Landscape Then and Now by Marcia B. Hall and Dana Prescott, to be published by Brepols.