Benjamin West Lecture
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.
2022-2023 Benjamin West Lecture:
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
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
4:30-5:30pm
Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room
Please view a recording of the September 14th, 2022 lecture below:
Around the year 600 CE, followers of Hinduism in southern Cambodia installed eight monumental stone sculptures in individual temples on a twin-peaked mountain known as Phnom Da (Stone Mountain). Destroyed seven centuries later, the sculptures were found in pieces over time between the 1500s and 1992. In an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, four of the sculptures were reunited. All eight were presented digitally in interactive projections of 3D models, and the story was presented in an augmented reality tour. Join the curator in her discussion of how the exhibition came about through international and interdisciplinary collaborations and how the museum used technology to reveal the environmental, historical, and iconographic contexts of a masterpiece in the museum’s collection.
Since 2012, Sonya Rhie Mace has been the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. Previously, she served as the Curator of Asian Art at the San Diego Museum of Art and taught classes in South Asian and Himalayan art history at UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC San Diego. Her publications include History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, ca. 150 BCE to 100 CE (Brill 2007) and multiple articles and essays on topics in early Indian sculpture, Indian painting, South Asian modernism, and restitution. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose, which opened at the San Diego Museum of Art and traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in 2008. More recently, her major exhibitions at Cleveland include Art and Stories of Mughal India in 2016 and Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain in 2021, an iteration of which is now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art until September 18.
Past Benjamin West Lectures:
- 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
