Benjamin West Lecture Series

The Benjamin West Lecture, made possible by gifts from members of the Class of 1905 and other friends of the College, is given annually on some phase of art. The lecture was named for the American artist who was born in a house that stands on the campus and became president of the Royal Academy, London.

2024-2025 Benjamin West Lecture:

Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley
Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 4:30pm, Kohlberg, Scheuer Room
Reception to follow.

Professor Lenssen holds a Toban Family Faculty Fellowship. She is author of the 2020 monograph Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press), and co-editor of the 2018 anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Between My Eyelids: War, Performance, and Media--As (Not) Seen from Beirut

The theme of this talk is a set of questions about the ethical position of the art historian in a time of ever expanding war. Hoping to think the question together with the audience, I unfold an account of my attempt to research the performance work of Lebanese artist Rabbia Sukkarieh, who in 1988, during the Civil War, worked with a television cameraman to stage an action wrapping bullet-scarred trees in a “green line” demarcation zone. Although a few seconds of footage aired on national television, subsequent accounts of Sukkarieh’s performance relegated the work to unillustrated speculation about lost histories. Once I located a VHS tape of Sukkarieh's appearance two years ago, this seemed poised to change. Yet Sukkarieh herself had anticipated the fugitivity of her resistance actions. “Third World problems sleep between my eyelids,” she wrote, invoking the discontinuous story-telling of Scheherazade (a feminist hero as well as an Orientalist cliche) as a tactic of survival and a repository of shared experiences of dispossession. In a world constituted by too much documentation of violence, how can artists bear witness? And what are the terms of an art historian’s participation in this task? 

Past Benjamin West Lectures:

• 2023-2024
  Lia Markey, Director of the Center for the Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library
  The Persistent Portolan: Binding the Globe in the Early Modern Mediterranean World
  Atlas production struggled to keep up with the changing world of the sixteenth century. With the explosion of cartography, travel writing, and cataloguing, luxury atlases developed out of the portolan chart with elaborate illustrations representing newly imagined people, flora, and fauna. This lecture explores three case studies of magnificent atlases at the Newberry Library produced in the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
• 2022-2023
  Dr. Sonya Rhie Mace, Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Cleveland Museum of Art
  The Gods of Stone Mountain: Restoration and Exhibition of Sculptures from a Pre-Angkorian Temple Complex
  
• 2021-2022
  Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black, University of California, Los Angeles
  Art and Radical Hospitality
  

• 2020-2021
  Professor T.J. Demos, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Racial Capitalocene: Visual Cultures and Abolitionist Ecologies

• 2017–2018
  Professor Kellie Jones, Columbia University
  Women and the Dreamwork
  
• 2016–2017
  Professor Paul Jaskot, DePaul College of LAS
  Mapping German Architecture in an Era of Crisis (1914-1924): Digital Methods for Art Historical Work
• 2015–2016
  Professor Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Barnard College/Columbia University, NYC
  Seeing Sovereignty in Early Portraits of Native Americans
• 2014–2015
  Dr. Susan Walker, Sackler Keeper, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
  Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time: New Displays for Historic Collections at the Ashmolean Museum
• 2013–2014
  Dr. Renata Holod, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Professor in the History of Art 
  On Interiors and the Regimes of Lighting: Vision in the Mosque of Cordoba
• 2012–2013
  Critical Histories of Modern Architecture and the Built Environment
  Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University of Dublin
  From the Bauhaus in Calcutta to the Swiss Minaret Debate: Who Wants Modern Architecture and Why?
  Alice Friedman, Wellesley College
  American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture
  Zeynep Celik, New Jersey Institute of Technology
  Archaeologistsí Palaces, Indigenous Villages, & Life at the Dig Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara City and Country in South Asia
• 2011–2012
  Steven LeBlanc, Peabody Museum, Harvard University
  Individuals, Specialization, and Prehistoric Pottery
• 2010–2011
  William Wallace, Washington University
  Writing Michelangelo's Biography
• 2009–2010
  Margaret S. Nesbit, Vassar College
  Gordon Matta-Clark in Italy
• 2007–2008
  Leo Steinberg
  O! Say, Can You See?
• 2006–2007
  Richard Meyer, University of Pennsylvania
  What Was Contemporary Art?
• 2005–2006
  Masatomo Kawai, Keio University
  Tea Ceremony as Environment: Historical Considerations on the Display and Reception of Japanese Art
• 2004–2005
  John Clark, University of Texas at Austin
  Power Over the Other — or the Other's Power? Laughing at the ‘Pygmy’ and the ‘Black’
• 2003–004
  Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University
  Decentering Rome:  Mantegna, Correggio and the Gonzaga
• 2002–2003
  Joan Brenton Connelly, New York University
  Beyond the Icon: The Parthenon and Its Sculptured Frieze
• 2001–2002
  Samuel Y. Edgerton, Williams College
  The Cross and The Tree; The Arch and The Cave
• 2000–2001
  Cècile Whiting ’80, UCLA
  Pop Outside Manhattan/Inside L.A.
• 1999–2000
  Madeline Caviness, Tufts University
  Norman Knights, Anglo-Saxon Women, and the Third Sex: Re-evaluating Gender in the Bayeux Tapestry
• 1997–1998
  Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard University
  Reformation Portraits & the Routines of Modern Belief
• 1996–1997
  Rowland Abiodun, Amherst College
  What follows six is more than seven
• 1995–1996
  Carol Armstrong, Graduate Center, CUNY
  Julia Margaret Cameron and the Feminization of Photography
• 1994–1995
  Michael Camille, University of Chicago
  Illuminating Philosophy:  Art and Science at the Medieval University
• 1993–1994
  Norman Bryson, Harvard University
  Orientalism and Occidentalism
• 1992–1993
  Suzanne Preston Blier, Columbia University
  The Danger of Art: Anomie, Alchemy, and African Vodun
• 1991–1992
  Madeline Caviness, Tufts University
  The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux: A Medieval Discourse of Sexuality
• 1990–1991
  Michael Fried, The Johns Hopkins University
  Manet in his Generation
• 1989–1990
  Eunice Lipton, Imagining a Woman's Life: The Case of Victorine Meurent
• 1988–1989
  Esin Atil, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
  Origins of Islamic Iconography
• 1987–1988
  Robert Herbert, Yale University
  Impressionism and Tourism Along the Channel Coast
• 1986–1987
  Irene Winter, Harvard University
  Reading Concepts of Space from Ancient Mesopotamian Monuments
• 1985–1986
  Robert Venturi, Architect
  Current Works and Ideas
• 1984–1985
  Ernst Kitzinger, Harvard University
  A Donor Portrait in Norman Sicily and its Byzantine Context
• 1983–1984
  Richard Brilliant, Columbia University
  On Portraits: Modes of Representation
• 1982–1983
  James Cahill, University of California, Berkeley
  Quickness & Spontaneity in Chinese Ptg: The Ups and Downs of an Ideal
• 1981–1982
  Albert Elsen, Stanford University
  In Rodin's Studio: The Sculptor and the Photographers
• 1980–1981
  George Kubler, Yale University
  A Sixteenth Century Meaning of the Escorial
• 1979–1980
  Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University
  The South Tower of Chartres Cathedral
• 1978–1979
  Colin Eisler, Institute of Fine Arts
  Titian's Marsyas: Art's Martyr
• 1977–1978
  Alfred Frazer, Columbia University
  The Emperor Claudius as Architect
• 1976–1977
  James Ackerman, Harvard University
  Michelangelo's Religion
• 1975–1976
  Oleg Grabar, Harvard University
  The Meaning of Ornament in Islamic Art
• 1974–1975
  Vincent Scully, Yale University
  Modern Architecture
• 1973–1974
  Helen Frankenthaler
  Helen Frankenthaler Presents Her Work
• 1972–1973
  Irving Lavin, New York University
  Bernini's Chapel of Saint Theresa in Santa Maria Vittoria, Rome
• 1971–1972
  Leo Steinberg, Hunter College, CUNY
  Picasso at Large, or The Art of Being Everywhere
• 1970–1971
  Andrew Sarris, Columbia University and Village Voice
  Keaton/Hitchcock
• 1969–1970
  Michael Sullivan, Standord University
  The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art
• 1968–1969
  John Rosenfield, Harvard University
  Classical and Pre-Classical in North Indian Sculpture
• 1967–1968
  Lotte Brand Philip, Queens College, CUNY
  The Ghent Altarpiece: A New Solution to an Old Problem
• 1966–1967
  Seymour Slive, Harvard University
  Rembrandt's Self-Portraits