2024 Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Lectures – Day 2

From May 8–10, 2024, the Smithsonian American Art Museum will present a series of lectures by the museum’s 2023–2024 research fellows. This webcast captures the six talks presented in Sessions III and IV of the series on May 9. For more information on SAAM’s fellowship program, visit
The third session focuses on representations of nature and landscape in the work of three twentieth-century women painters, featuring research by predoctoral fellows Kelly-Christina Grant, Chaeeun Lee, and Tyler Shine. Talks in this session shed light on Loïs Mailou Jones’s representations of the French landscape that engaged with modern artistic movements; aspects of melancholy in Bernice Bing’s Mayacamas Series, painted in the Napa Valley; and Alma Thomas’s artistic relationships to botanical and domestic spaces. The fourth session sheds light on artistic expressions of personal and communal identity, bringing together new research by predoctoral fellows Kéla B. Jackson, Sonja Gandert, and Li Machado. These presentations explore ideas of rupture and suture in the multimedia work of Faith Ringgold, activist aspects of luminosity in the fiberglass sculptures of Luis Jiménez, and expressions of queer Chicanx identity in the photographic and digital portraiture of Laura Aguilar and Julio Salgado. Session III: Moderated by Melissa Ho, curator of twentieth-century art, Smithsonian American Art Museum Kelly-Christina Grant, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art, Paris Nanterre University, "Beyond the Picturesque: Connecting French Impressions in Loïs Mailou Jones’s Landscapes" Chaeeun Lee, SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in Asian American Art, City University of New York, The Graduate Center, "Haunted Landscapes: Race and Abstraction in Bernice Bing's Mayacamas Series (ca. 1963)" Tyler Shine, Will Barnet Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, "Infinite Radius: Alma Thomas's Homeplace and Garden" Session IV: Moderated by Randall Griffey, head curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum Kéla B. Jackson, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art, Harvard University, “‘All I Had to Do Was Fly’: Faith Ringgold’s Sutured Visions of Black Girlhood” Sonja Gandert, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, City University of New York, The Graduate Center, “Casting Resolana: Glitter, Shine, and Luis Jiménez's West as Protest" Li Machado, SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in Latinx Art, Temple University, “The Portrait as Archive and Activism in Queer Chicanx Los Angeles”