Barbara Rossetti Ambros, professor in East Asian religions and department chair, department of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-chair, Animals and Religion Group, American Academy of Religions Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Barbara Rossetti Ambros spoke on the variety of roles animals have played in religious rituals in Japan, such as offerings and instruments of divination at Shinto shrines as well as Buddhist mortuary rituals and “life releases,” in which the lives of animals destined for slaughter are saved. Ambros described how religious views of animals influenced human interactions with animals through the example of Buddhist life releases and Kanō Eitai's early nineteenth-century painting of such a ritual. Life releases served as a critique of prevalent social practices toward animals and demonstrated the virtues of compassion and filial piety.

R. Keller Kimbrough, professor of Japanese, department of Asian languages and civilizations, University of Colorado, Boulder Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, R. Keller Kimbrough explored the roles and representations of animals in Japanese picture scrolls and illustrated books from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. In particular he addressed a series of questions pertaining to the nature of animals and humans. How should we treat animals, based on what we can learn about them in Japanese illustrated fiction? How might we choose to behave if or when we find ourselves reborn into the animal realm?

Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Sarah E. Thompson discussed The War of the Twelve Animals, a fifteenth-century narrative handscroll, also known in many later copies, that depicts a war between the Twelve Animals of the East Asian zodiac and the rebel animals led by the tanuki, or “raccoon dog.” According to Thompson, the original work was created at the court of the retired shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and refers to the events of the Oei Disturbance of 1399–1400, with animal characters representing the competing warriors; Yoshimitsu himself is the dragon. This interpretation counters the more common view that animal-to-human comparisons are inevitably negative. While the rebel animals are indeed mocked, the Twelve Animals and especially their leader are glorified, although humorous animal allegory masks any arrogance.

Eric Denker, Senior Lecturer and Manager of Gallery Talks and Lectures for Adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this final lecture, “In Situ: Tintoretto in Venice,” held on May 14, 2019, Denker discusses the many masterpieces by the artist scattered throughout Venice. Tintoretto was both a superlative painter and an ambitious entrepreneur. As a native Venetian, he worked for the Republic of Venice, for the church, and for charitable confraternities throughout his long career, often for below-market prices. Without a carefully planned route through Venice it is difficult to understand the trajectory of Tintoretto’s career from his early experimental years to his mature work. This lecture offers a chronological itinerary that begins with the early work in the Accademia Galleries, proceeding to the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, the church of San Cassiano, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and ends in the Ducal Palace.

Celeste-Marie Bernier, professor of United States and Atlantic Studies and personal chair in English literature, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh; in conversation with Walter O. Evans, collector. Walter O. Evans has spent decades collecting, curating, and conserving a wide variety of African American art, music, and literature in an effort to preserve the cultural history of African Americans. Part of his collection focuses on the nineteenth-century formerly enslaved statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895). In addition to inscribed books from Douglass’s and his descendants’ libraries and printed editions of his speeches, the collection contains letters, manuscripts, and photographs. Much of the material is of a personal nature: correspondence between family members, family histories, and scrapbooks compiled by Douglass and his children; the scrapbooks, with their personal documents and familial relationships, illuminate Douglass in ways never before seen. In 2018 Celeste-Marie Bernier and Andrew Taylor of the University of Edinburgh published If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection, a guide to the collection born of a longstanding collaboration between the authors and Dr. Evans. Within its pages they have reproduced letters, manuscripts, and photographs from the collection along with transcriptions and commentary that provide an invaluable resource for Douglass scholars. On Friday, April 26, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition In the Library: Frederick Douglass Family Materials from the Walter O. Evans Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Bernier speaks with Evans about the role of his collection in scholarship on Douglass and the preservation of Douglass’s legacy for a new generation of Americans.

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In the first lecture, “Tintoretto in Context: Framing Tintoretto: Sixteenth-Century Venetian Painting,” held on April 16, 2019, Denker discusses Venetian Renaissance painting beginning with Giovanni Bellini, his workshop, and his followers, in the second half of the 15th century. Giorgione and Titian were among his most prominent pupils, developing out of Bellini’s linear style the more atmospheric color, light, and shadow characteristic of Venetian High Renaissance oil painting. Though Titian would dominate the painting of large-scale altarpieces and decorations in Venice during the first half of the 16th century, rivals influenced by contemporary central Italian art appeared in Venice by the 1520s and ’30s. Artists including Pordenone and Andrea Schiavone provided alternative sources of style and imagery for both painters and patrons.

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this third lecture, “Tintoretto Central: The Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” held on May 7, 2019, Denker discusses the decorations for the charitable confraternity Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which occupied Tintoretto for more than 25 years. In 1564 his painting San Rocco in Glory won the competition for the central ceiling canvas of the Scuola’s board room. His greatest masterpiece, the 40-foot-wide Crucifixion, was painted the following year. In the 1570s he completed the Old and New Testament cycles for the upper level of the Scuola, and in the 1580s he finished the decoration of the ground floor with scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. In all, Tintoretto executed more than 65 paintings for the brotherhood of the Scuola, a remarkable achievement for the humble cloth dyer’s son.

Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this second lecture, “Tintoretto: The Early Work,” held on April 23, 2019, Denker investigates Tintoretto’s formative years as an artist. According to early biographers, Tintoretto only briefly studied with the eminent painter Titian early in his career. The ambitious young son of a cloth dyer drew his inspiration from both the older master’s works and from a variety of younger, more experimental artists during his formative years. Tintoretto’s work was informed both by the example of Pordenone as a kind of anti-Titian mannerist and by the experimentation of younger collaborators, including Andrea Schiavone and Bonifacio dei’ Pitati. By the time Tintoretto was 30, his own painting had reached a new level of sophistication and confidence, as seen in St. Mark and the Miracle of the Slave, which he painted for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in 1548.

Oliver Lee Jackson, artist; Marty Ehrlich and Oliver Lake, musicians; and Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with A.B. Spellman, poet, music critic, and arts administrator American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work that masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz. On view from April 14 through September 15, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings presents 18 paintings created over the past 15 years, many of which are being shown publicly for the first time. Jackson’s often large-scale paintings blend figural elements of bodies pointing, kneeling, drawing, and playing instruments with colorful abstract compositions and vigorously worked surfaces. To celebrate the exhibition opening, the Gallery hosted Evenings at the Edge performances by the Marty Ehrlich Ensemble and TRIO 3, featuring Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, and Andrew Cyrille—collaborators of Jackson and the influential Black Artists Group. On April 12, 2019, A. B. Spellman, distinguished poet, music critic, and arts administrator, moderated a post-concert discussion with renowned jazz musicians Ehrlich and Lake, along with Jackson and senior curator Harry Cooper. The conversation explored the relationship between music and the visual arts, ranging from shared experiences in Saint Louis in the 1960s to the present day.

David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner in history. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom sheds new light on Douglass (c. 1818–1895), particularly the last 30 years of his life, thanks to a trove of letters, manuscripts, and scrapbooks in a private collection that no other historian previously used in any full-length biography. Blight writes that the collection, owned by Walter O. Evans of Savannah, GA, “makes possible many new insights into the final third of Douglass’s life. The younger Douglass—the heroic escaped slave and emerging abolitionist—is better known, in part because of the author’s masterful first two autobiographies. The older Douglass, from Reconstruction to the end of his life in 1895, has never been so accessible or rendered so fascinating and complicated as in the Evans collection.” In this lecture held on June 2, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition In the Library: Frederick Douglass Family Materials from the Walter O. Evans Collection, Blight shares how this material revealed the full extent of Douglass’s complex personal life. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019, this biography masterfully weaves together the more popularly known story of Douglass’s life of public activism with his perhaps lesser-known private life to paint a complete portrait of the great American hero.