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For Community and Campus Audiences
Voices in American Art

Created in support of TJC's mission to increase understanding of the role that Southern art plays in the larger context of our national history, Voices in American Art invites prominent arts professionals from across the country to Spartanburg for annual lectures.
 
 
LIFELONG LEARNING

VIAA 2020
Celebrating a Centennial

Dr. Evie Terrono, Professor of Art History and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s Studies at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, delivered the keynote address at the seventh annual Voices in American Art lecture, held on Thursday, February 13, 2020. The year 2020 marks important political and cultural milestones in the history of the United States, including the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's constitutional right to vote as well as the two-hundredth anniversary of Susan B. Anthony's birth in 1820. A highly-regarded scholar on understandings of gender, race, and politics, Dr. Terrono titled her upcoming lecture "Creativity, Collaborations, and Communal Uplift: The Careers of Southern Women Artists." The event, which was open to the public without charge, took place at Wofford College's Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at 7pm.

Amendment XIX
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

EVIE TERRONO

As an Americanist, Dr. Terrono challenges her students to see the vital intersections between ideas of American exceptionality, and understandings of gender, race, and politics and their inscriptions in American material culture and fine art. Her study of the problematics of Confederate memory and Civil War commemoration on the public symbolic landscape began over a decade ago and has produced acclaimed publications, including "‘Great Generals and Christian Soldiers’: Commemorations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Civil Rights Era," in Civil War in Art and Memory (Yale University Press, 2016); “Confederate Memories, Contemporary Concerns: Challenging the Authority of the Confederate Flag,” for Public Art Dialogue (March 2019), and a forthcoming chapter on the controversy of the Lincoln and Tad statue in Richmond, Virginia, in Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue & Resolve Controversies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). In her essay “Suffrage, Social Activism, and Women Artists of the South,” featured in TJC’s 2018 book, Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, Dr. Terrono investigated several creators whose careers were aligned with the early twentieth-century fight for women’s rights in the conservative South. Her lecture on African American Women Artists in the Civil Rights Era was featured on C-Span in March 2019.

Raised in Greece, Dr. Terrono trained as an archaeologist in her undergraduate studies at the University of Crete. Upon arriving in the United States, she shifted gears for her graduate studies, focusing on American art for both her MA at Queens College and her PhD at the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY. The recipient of many intra-mural and external grants, Dr. Terrono has been honored with the Thomas Branch Excellence in Teaching Award (2005), the United Methodist Church Exemplary Teacher Award (2016), and the Samuel Nelson Gray Distinguished Professor Award (2018), Randolph-Macon College's highest faculty award.

Photo credit: "Silent Sentinel" Alison Turnbull Hopkins at the White House on New Jersey Day. Washington, DC, United States, 1917. Image retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Lifelong Learning

Established in 2014, Voices in American Art brings distinguished arts leaders from important national institutions to Spartanburg for annual presentations. In addition to an evening keynote lecture that is open to the public at no charge, visiting speakers meet with college students for informal master classes on career paths.

The 2019 installment featured Dr. Tuliza Fleming, Curator of American Art at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Smithsonian Institution, and was held on Thursday, February 28 at Chapman Cultural Center in downtown Spartanburg. Previous VIAA speakers include Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017); Jane Panetta, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jan Postma, a Spartanburg native and Chief Financial Officer of the Museum of Modern Art (2016); Elizabeth Pochoda, editor of The Magazine Antiques (2015); and in 2014, Sarah Cash, associate curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art and former Bechhoefer Curator of American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.