Lee Frank Lecture Series

An endowment by the family and friends of Lee Frank, Class of 1921, sponsors a special event each year : a visiting lecturer or artist, a scholar or artist in residence, or a special exhibit.

2025 Lecture information:

SARA ZEWDE
Landscape Architect
Founding Principal, Studio Zewde
Assistant Professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Finding Frederick Law Olmsted in Cotton's Kingdom
This lecture will frame Zewde's ongoing research retracing landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted's steps through the Slave South, and how lessons about his legacy and the South itself have emboldened her own contemporary practice of landscape architecture. After an introduction to this research project, Zewde will discuss selected projects from the office.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025
4:30pm, reception to follow
Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room

Past Lee Frank Lectures:

• 2023-2024
  Miranda Belarde-Lewis, Assistant Professor, Joe and Jill McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellow in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge, University of Washington Information School
  Visual Sovereignty in the Informatic Age
  Native artists have always created pieces that reflect a relationship with specific land bases and ways of knowing. Our collective reality now includes a digital scape mediated by platforms; these environments require a modified set of protocols to navigate. Native artists continue to lead the way, offering both documentation and critique, as they hold up a mirror to the ways Native peoples are impacted and participate in our tech-obsessed world. 
  

• 2022–2023
  Sarah Lopez, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
  Architectural History as Migrant History: Cantera Stone and Construction Labor in Mexico and the United States

  Architectural History as Migrant History reframes histories of migration and construction by tracking the development, over the last fifty years, of the excavation, processing, and distribution of cantera stone across the US-Mexico boundary. Cantera literally means “quarry,” but the Spanish word is used in Mexico to describe a specific brittle rock used to build colonial churches and civic infrastructure. More recently, a network of Mexican quarrymen, stonemasons, homebuilders, architects, and businessmen have refined a market that caters to a Mexican and Mexican American clientele in the American Southwest. Architectural History Is Migrant History tracks the development of a meaningful and sophisticated binational commercial network that has reshaped design norms and building trades in two countries from the shadows of a formal American economy.  

  Sarah Lopez, a built environment historian and migration scholar, is an Associate Professor at The University of Pennsylvania. Lopez' book, The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 and won the 2017 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She teaches at the intersection of histories of the built environment, migration, and spatial justice. Lopez is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

• 2018–2019
  Roberta Wue ’85, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine
  Amoy Chinqua/Chitqua: On Imagining the Chinese Artist in 18th Century London

• 2016–2017
  Deborah DeMott ’70, Professor of Law, Duke University
  Disavowed Art
• 2015—2016
  Elizabeth Sutton, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Northern Iowa
  Mapping Colonization and Decolonization in the 17th Century and Today
• 2014—2015
  Daniela Bleichmar, Associate Professor of Art History and History, USC
  The Legible Image: Translating Pictorial Knowledge in Early Colonial Mexico
• 2013—2014
  Julia Bryan-Wilson ’95, University of California at Berkeley
  Cecilia Vicuna & the Problem of Thread
• 2012—2013
  Susan Walker, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University
  Renovating the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford
• 2011—2012
  Ken Tadashi Oshima, University of Washington
  In-between Space: Constructing Modern Architecture between Japan and the World
• 2010—2011
  Julie Nelson Davis, University of Pennsylvania
  Reading The Mirror of Yoshiwara Beauties, Compared
• 2008—2009
  Keith Eggener, University of Missouri.  
  Settings for History and Oblivion in Modern Mexico, 1942—58
• 2007—2008
  Rachel DeLue ’93, Assistant Professor of American Art, Princeton University.  
  Painting as Translation, or Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Arthur Dove
• 2006—2007
  Louise Allison Cort, Curator for Ceramics, Freer Gallely of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
  A Japanese Potter's Study Trip to Edo: Ceramic Research and Development in the 17th Century
• 2005—2006
  Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Associate Professor of American and African American Art, University of Pennsylvania
  Imagined Subjectivity:  Portraits of the Past in Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum
• 2004—2005
  Joseph Rishel, Senior Curator of European Painting, PMA
  Latin American Art 1492-1825:  Making an Exhibition
• 2003—2004
  Ingrid Schaffner, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
  The Dream of Venus Dreams On: Salvador Dali's Surrealist Funhouse and Contemporary Art
• 2002—2003
  Matthew Biro ’83, University of Michigan
  Raoul Hausmann's Revolutionary Media:  Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Development of the Cyborg in Germany
• 2001—2002
  Susan Sidlauskas, University of Pennsylvania
  Cezanne's Significant 'Other': The Portraits of Hortense
• 2000—2001
  Bonnie Yochelson ’74    
  The Story Behind Berenice Abbott's Changing New York
• 1998—1999
  Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, University of Delaware
  Delacroix's Late Works:  Between Aesthetics & Consumerism
• 1997—1998
  Angela Dalle Vacche, Emory University
  Italy 1945:  Cinema and Painting
• 1996-1997
  Maxwell Hearn, Curator of Chinese Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
  Possessing the Past:  Treasures from the National Palace, Museum,     Taipei
• 1995—1996
  Joanna E. Ziegler, College of The Holy Cross
  Dance, Film, & Gender:  Retrieving Historical Women
• 1994—1995
  Christine Poggi, University of Pennsylvania
  "Vito Acconci's Bad Dream of Domesticity"
• 1993-1994
  Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania
  Construing Mapplethorpe
• 1992—1993
  Richard Martin, Fashion Institute of Technology
  Fine Arts and Finery Arts: An Inquiry and an Odyssey
• 1991-1992
  Robert Storr, Museum of Modern Art, NY
  ...that was then, this is now--modernism, post-modernism, and post po-mo...
• 1990—1991
  David Freedberg, Columbia University
  Naming the Visible: Art and Science in the Circle of Galileo
• 1989—1990
  Alison Kettering, Carleton College
  The Courtship Paintings of Gerhard ter Borch
• 1988—1989
  Linda Seidel, University of Chicago
  Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait:' Business as Usual?
• 1987—1988
  Meredith Claussen, University of Washington
  The Department Store: Development of the Building Type
• 1986—1987
  Shen Fu, Freer Gallery, Smisthsonian Institution
  The Mongol Princess Sengge as a Chinese Art Collector
• 1985—1986
  Dale Kinney, Bryn Mawr College
  An Excellent Horse: Critical Understandings of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius from Antiquity to Modern Times
• 1984—1985
  Elizabeth Johns, University of Maryland
  Thomas Eakins and Nineteenth Century Heroic Ideals
• 1983—1984
  Kathleen Weil-Garris-Brandt, New York University
  Raphael and Cinquecento Sculpture
• 1982—1983
  William Heckscher, Rare Books, Princeton University
  Egogenesis: Fundamental Change as an Essential Ingredient in the Formation of Genius
• 1981—1982
  Joanna Gottfried Williams, University of California, Berkeley
  The Non-Finito in Indian Sculpture
• 1980—1981
  Wanda M. Corn, Woodrow Wilson International Center (Smithsonian)
  The Birth of a National Icon: Grand Wood's American Gothic
• 1979—1980
  Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley
  Looking at Words: The Representation of Texts in Dutch Seventeenth Century Art