Friday, May 12
4:00–7:30 p.m. PT
James S. Copley Auditorium and Online
Hybrid Event
Join us for a half-day symposium featuring presentations by world-renowned experts of the life and work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. The symposium will be presented alongside O’Keeffe and Moore on view May 13, 2023–August 27, 2023.
Symposium participants include Anita Feldman, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Education at SDMA; Dr. Ariel Plotek, Former Curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; Dr. Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath and former Head of Displays Tate Britain; Dale Kronkright, Conservator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; Dr. Barbara Buhler Lynes, author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné; and Dr. Hannah Higham, Former Senior Curator of Collections and Research at the Henry Moore Foundation.
Free Friend members and above | $10 Individual and Dual members and students | $15 seniors and military | $20 nonmembers
Symposium Program
Welcome Remarks
Roxana Velásquez is the Maruja Baldwin Executive Director and CEO at The San Diego Museum of Art. As a passionate advocate for the arts, Ms. Velásquez has focused on fostering cross-cultural dialogues within the San Diego community as well as nationally and internationally. Throughout her professional career, she has organized many high-profile exhibitions in her capacity as the Executive Director of the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and currently with The San Diego Museum of Art.
O’Keeffe and Moore: Working with Photography
Anita Feldman is Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Education at The San Diego Museum of Art. She joined the Museum in 2014 and prior to that was Curator, Head of Collections and Exhibitions, and a member of the Moore Authentication Committee, for the Henry Moore Foundation for eighteen years, curating exhibitions of his work worldwide and overseeing major conservation initiatives for Moore’s works including for the Houses of Parliament and Kensington Gardens. Her publications include the first books on Moore’s textiles and his original plasters, as well as Moore/Rodin (2013). At The San Diego Museum of Art, she co-curated Richard Deacon: What You See is What You Get (2017) with Ariel Plotek; and curated Art of the Open Air (2015); Tim Shaw: Beyond Reason (2018); Terra: Fernando Casasempere (2022); and Justin Sterling: Chapel of the Rocks (2022). She is the curator of O’Keeffe and Moore and editor of the accompanying catalogue.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Opinions and Realizations
Dr. Barbara Buhler Lynes is an independent scholar and leading expert on Georgia O’Keeffe. She authored Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 1999), as well as numerous publications about the artist and her contemporaries. She was founding curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and founding director of its research center (1999–2014). In addition, Lynes has taught art history at Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, and Maryland Institute College of Art, and served as Sunny Kaufman Senior Curator at Nova Southeastern University Art Museum, a position from which she retired in 2020. She lectures widely in the United States and Europe and has contributed an essay entitled “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Icons, Innovators, Voices of Authority” to the O’Keeffe and Moore exhibition catalogue.
Henry Moore: National Institution
Dr. Chris Stephens has been Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath, since 2017. Before that he worked at Tate in London for twenty-one years, as Head of Displays at Tate Britain and Lead Curator of Modern British Art, and oversaw the creation of the Tate’s Henry Moore gallery. His numerous exhibitions include Barbara Hepworth: Centenary at Tate St Ives (2003) and, in London, Francis Bacon (2008), Henry Moore (2010), Picasso and British Art (2012), and David Hockney (2017). He has published extensively and his book St Ives: The Art and the Artists was published in 2018. Dr. Stephens contributed and essay on the artists entitled “Modernism, Nature, and National Identity” to the O’Keeffe and Moore exhibition catalogue.
Getting At The Meaning of Things : Georgia O’Keeffe’s Material Interrogation of Life, 1915–1985
Dale Kronkright is Head of Conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where he has worked since its inception in 1997. His research into O’Keeffe’s studio materials and techniques in collaboration with scientists and conservators at the National Gallery of Art resulted in the 2006 exhibition and catalogue Color and Conservation, which documented the forty-year friendship of conservator Caroline Keck and Georgia O’Keeffe. His work also includes studying the efficacy of micro-environmental framing systems for the preservation of O’Keeffe’s paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings, as well as the use of 3-D imaging for the documentation of O’Keeffe’s historic homes and studios at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Sculptor
Dr. Ariel Plotek served as Curator of Fine Art at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum from 2018 to 2023. Among his recent projects at the O’Keeffe Museum are Making a Life, an exhibition that explores the many ways in which O’Keeffe was a “maker,” and an exhibition in the museum’s “Contemporary Voices” series that paired paintings by Josephine Halvorson (the museum’s first artist-in-residence) with works by Georgia O’Keeffe. Prior to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, he served as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The San Diego Museum of Art. Plotek has contributed an essay on O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s use of found objects entitled “Finding the Form” to the O’Keeffe and Moore exhibition catalogue.
“Looking Inwards”: The Role of Memory and Association in the Perception of Henry Moore’s Internal/External Forms
Dr. Hannah Higham will soon join the Royal Academy of Art in London as their new Senior Curator, RA Collections. She leaves her current role as Senior Curator of Collections and Research at the Henry Moore Foundation after seven years in the organization. Previously she has worked for Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norfolk, and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. She has curated numerous exhibitions and published widely on both Henry Moore and the subject of sculpture. Higham has contributed an essay titled “Forms within Forms, The Evolution of the Internal / External Theme” to the O’Keeffe and Moore exhibition catalogue.
