Close Looking: Charles Sheeler's American Interior

• Friday, September 20
• 12:30 PM
• Yale University Art Gallery, 3rd Floor
• 1111 Chapel Street
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Charles Sheeler based his 1934 painting American Interior on a photograph. He interwove this modernist vision with his response to the purity of forms and patterns in handmade objects from the American past, such as the simple Shaker designs in the box, textiles, and chair. Kathryn Scanlan and Karin Roffman will talk about objects, painting, photography, and the fine line between the imaginary and the real.

Karin Roffman is currently a senior lecturer in Humanities, English and American Studies and the Associate Director of Public Humanities at Yale University. She was previously an Associate Professor of English at West Point and a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College.

She most recently published the first biography of John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (2017), which was named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times. She is currently at work on a full biography of John Ashbery, a project which began when she discovered Ashbery’s juvenilia, childhood diaries and other papers while doing research in the Hudson house. A biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher will follow. In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she released John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on John Ashbery’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/).