ARTS ON THE LAKE
Lake Carmel Arts Center
640 Route 52
Kent Lakes, NY 10512

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Office hours:
3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Mon., Wed. & Fri.; other times by appointment.

845 228-AOTL (2685)

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The Story of American Art - with Alex Shundi

Monday, October 25, 2021 at 7:00 pm

 

Coming soon to Arts on the Lake

A 6 Week Lecture Series via Zoom

This 6 week course is on the Zoom platform. You can view the previous sessions by viewing the videos. These links are provided when you register for the course and we will send you the link to the video of the session.

This is a 6 week lecture series on Monday evenings on the Zoom platform. Each night's lecture is slated to last one hour but usually lasts about 1 1/2. Links are provided on the day of the lecture and the sessions are taped for re-watching at any time.

 

Alex Shundi's statement about this class.

 

 

The Story of American Art


Art has always reflected the society within which it was created. The American experiment, is no exception. The colonization of an immense expanse of land encompassing an endless diversity of landscape and atmospheres, being the home of empires counting many more than 60 million peoples in two continents. North America was fundamentally divided, and therefore influenced, by Spanish Catholicism and north-European Protestant ethics.

 


What followed was a rapid extinction and/or misappropriation of originally native people, and the settling of European cultures in the creation of a diverse and complex society.
The art that it sparked, is but a mirror of all that, beginning from a folkloristic symbolic concern and developing into a diverse and exciting cultural dictum.

 


We will study that early introduction stemming from purely European influences, through the Hudson River School, the Luminists, California Impressionists, Western art, from Remington to the Taos and Sana Fe schools, the first purely American Avant-Guard in New York, to the Ash-Can and WPA and the influences of European artists seeking shelter from pogroms of WW2 European artists, to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and the couple of dozen other “isms” that were peculiarly mostly Americans up to today.

 


The cross-cultural influences and the creation of a particularly American art as a direct consequence of the essence of who we are will be presented and explored.