This event is part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world. Join the conversation and attend events featuring cultural luminaries. Learn more →
Curators Lynn Gumpert and Debra Bricker Balken discuss the key artists featured in the exhibit “Americans in Paris” about American artists in postwar Paris, whose catalog was on the American Library in Paris 2023 Book Award short list. This groundbreaking volume explores the American creative community in postwar Paris, uncovering the academies, galleries, and artistic exchanges that defined their experience. Featuring never-before-published interviews and new scholarship, Americans in Paris examines how the city influenced a pivotal moment in American art between 1946 and 1962.
About the speakers:
Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.
Lynn Gumpert has been Director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than seventy-five exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France and as senior curator at the New Museum, New York. In 1999, she was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
