Temporarily Closed – Opening May 11, 2024
Join us on Saturday, September 10 from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. for a dynamic and esteemed panel of American folk art scholars to discuss the topic of Folk Art Today, moderated by Thomas Denenberg, John Wilmerding Director and CEO.
Panelists are:
Michael Bramwell, Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Michael J. Bramwell is a visual artist, doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Joyce Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His research focuses on the material and visual culture of the African diaspora, with particular interest in spiritual dimensions of folk and self-taught art. Bramwell’s scholarship: Potter’s Field: Trauma and Representation in the Art of David Drake and Heard a Voice, Saw a Light: Spiritual Implications of Creative Belief in Black Vernacular Art, are published by Oxford University and Yale University presses respectively. His research is included in the exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art September 9, 2022, and traveling to the MFA, Boston, March 2023. Bramwell’s work is supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities for the Public Good, Joan Mitchell, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, among others. His art is in permanent collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the New School University in New York City.
Emelie Gevalt, Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art at the American Folk Art Museum
Emelie Gevalt is Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Often looking at earlier material through the lens of twentieth-century histories of collecting and collective memory, her work encompasses research interests in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American decorative painting, portraiture, African American material culture and representation, and the Colonial Revival movement. Gevalt received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University and her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. She has previously held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and at Christie’s, New York, where she was a Vice President in the Estates, Appraisals & Valuations department. Gevalt is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware in the art history department, where her work has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Track PhD Fellowship. Her dissertation is entitled Unseen New England: Identity & Exclusion in Early American Art & Material Culture. Looking through the lens of race and the construction of social hierarchy, her project investigates the conflicting forces of predominantly white New England memory-making and the collective forgetting of Black and Native histories, through a trans-temporal study of some of the region’s earliest images.
Katie Wood Kirchhoff, Curator at Shelburne Museum
Katie Wood Kirchhoff is the Curator of pre-1945 American Fine, Decorative, and Folk Arts at Shelburne Museum. Kirchhoff received her BA in art history from Smith College, her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. She has previously held positions at or received research funding from institutions including the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Since arriving at Shelburne in 2016, Katie has researched, written about, and created exhibitions grounded in Shelburne’s extensive collections of American material culture, with special emphasis on furniture, textiles, paintings, and works on paper. Her most recent exhibition and publication, Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light, examines the work of Italian-American twentieth-century modernist Luigi Lucioni.
The hour-and-fifteen-minute-long panel discussion will be followed by a fifteen-minute live question and answer session then meet-and-greet with the panelists. Light refreshments provided.
This event is free with Museum admission and pre-registration is required. This event will be live-streamed and a recording will be made available afterwards on the Museum website.