Katie Hornstein is a professor of art history at Dartmouth College and the author of Picturing War in France (Yale, 2018) and, more recently, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century (Yale, 2024). A collection she co-edited with Daniel Harkett, Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, is forthcoming from Leuven University Press in 2025.

A specialist in the long nineteenth century, Katie’s current work engages with contemporary debates in art history and the humanities more broadly, including post-humanism, the intertwined logics of empire and ecological destruction, and the representation and uses of non-human animal bodies in modern material and visual culture. She is currently developing a new project dedicated to carrier pigeons and their expansive labors in service to humans.

Katie received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Join Ngoc Minh Ngo (author and photographer) and Ivan Shaw (Corporate Photography Director at Condé Nast) for a conversation about her career and lifelong engagement with flowers and gardens. Ngo’s work has appeared in The World of Interiors, T Magazine, Vogue, and Architectural Digest, and she is the author of three books: Bringing Nature Home, In Bloom: Creating and Living with Flowers, and Eden Revisited: A Garden in Northern Morocco, each featuring her own photography.

Ngo will also discuss her latest publication, Roses in the Garden. The inspiration for this series and book came from her father, a former colonel in the Vietnamese army and avid gardener who settled with their family in California in the 1970s. In his final days, Ngo tended his garden in hopes he would see his roses bloom one last time. After his passing, she returned to Brooklyn, New York, where she lives, volunteered at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and began photographing rose cuttings. What started as a personal meditation grew into a series exploring the rose’s cultural and historical significance, culminating in a book celebrating the iconic flower and the renowned gardens where it thrives.

Image: Ngoc Minh Ngo, Ninfa Garden, Italy, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. (c) Ngoc Minh Ngo, 2025.

Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment

Dr. Mary Morton, Curator and Head of French Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition in Paris, widely regarded as the birth of Impressionism. In this lecture, Dr. Mary Morton will share new insights from her recent scholarship, examining the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped this pivotal moment in France. She’ll explore how the artists we now call Impressionists responded to the world around them — and how their work fit within a broader, dynamic artistic landscape, where they exhibited alongside the official French Salon.

The Lecture is presented as Bonnie Ann Larson Modern European Artists Series Lecture.

Image: Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

The DIA's Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art presents a conversation on urban renewal with scholars Esther da Costa Meyer and Lauren Hood. During the second half of the 19th century, Paris underwent a radical transformation which provided a model for urban renewal, widely accepted in its day, while at the same time dramatically increasing social inequality. Considering the urban past and present of Paris and Detroit, Da Costa Meyer and Hood will discuss how the impulse to modernize impacts local communities.

Esther da Costa Meyer is Professor emerita, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, and the author of Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870.

Lauren Hood is Assistant Professor of Practice in Urban and Regional Planning at University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Founder and Chief Visionary of the Institute for AfroUrbanism (IAU), a global think tank exploring the conditions for Black thriving.

Presented with American Sign Language interpretation.

This event is sponsored by the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art. A private reception for FMCA members will follow the lecture. Become an FMCA member to access special members-only experiences.

Photo: Aerial view of Paris, ca. 1870

25th Annual Elizabeth Sites Kuhlman Lecture featuring Daniel Santamaria, floral artisan from Spain and Creative Director at the Escola Disseny Floral I Paisatgisme de Barcelona.

Optional luncheon immediately following the lecture.

Running the Gamut? Recent Acquisitions of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dr. Jack Hinton will present the (sometimes dizzying!) range of acquisitions made by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in recent years in the areas of European sculpture and decorative arts. A focus on selected highlights will reveal curatorial strategies to deepen historical context and broaden representation across collections, and the impact these additions have on the museum’s installations and programs.

The DIA’s Visiting Committee for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (VCESDA) auxiliary group sponsors programs and lectures that celebrate decorative arts and sculpture in all their variety. This free springtime lecture will offer insights into the ways that one of the DIA’s most prominent peer museums is expanding its collection and the stories it shares with visitors.

Hinton is Henry P. McIlhenny Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). He studied Histories of Art and Design at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Royal College of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. A distinguished specialist in Renaissance decorative arts, he has spent over 20 years researching and presenting the PMA’s world-class collection of more than 22,000 objects made in diverse media from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Looking at paintings through a prism

This lecture highlights the role scientific imaging of paintings, more precisely molecular and elemental imaging spectroscopy, has played in helping to address questions from conservators, curators, and art historians. Case studies will include understanding the original composition in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading, c.1769 before it was reworked, visualizing the painting stages in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Ginevra de' Benci c. 1474/1478, determining the original appearance of Italian Renaissance masterpiece Feast of the Gods 1514/1529 as completed by Giovanni Bellini before it was reworked, and elucidating the working methods of Johannes Vermeer from studies of Woman Holding a Balance c. 1664 and Girl with the Red Hat c. 1669.

Biography

Dr. John K. Delaney is senior imaging scientist in the scientific research department of the National Gallery of Art, Washington where he oversees the Chemical Imaging Laboratory. His research involves the adaptation of remote sensing techniques for the study of paintings to help address questions in conservation and art history.

Building a National Collection in a Changing Nation

Kaywin Feldman (Director, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) leads an institution of intriguing paradox. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was founded in 1941 by Andrew Mellon to bestow contemporary ideas upon and share world-class art with the American public. Mellon’s offering was a true gift that continues to benefit his nation to this day.

Yet as societies shift and change, what is the unique but ever-evolving role of a national art museum as it navigates the challenges and opportunities of a dynamic and expanding global audience? What does it mean to be and to become the nation’s art museum?

The Dr. Coleman Mopper Memorial Lecture was established in 1997 in memory of Dr. Coleman Mopper, a longstanding member and patron of the DIA and a founder of the Visiting Committee for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts auxiliary group. In Dr. Mopper’s memory, friends generously endowed an annual lecture on European art to be given by an internationally recognized specialist.

Appointed in 2019, Kaywin Feldman is the National Gallery’s fifth director and the first woman to lead the museum. Her vision for the National Gallery focuses on expanding the museum’s service to the nation. Dedicated to connecting people to art through the power of wonder, Feldman has initiated new programs and exhibitions, expanded the National Gallery’s audience, and increased the national collection through acquisitions that reflect a wide spectrum of art history.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, author Nancy Nichols discusses her new book, Women Behind the Wheel: An Unexpected and Personal History of the Car. The automobile had an outsized impact on American culture and industry. Nichols will explore how car design is uniquely gendered, and the distinct role it has played in defining modern womanhood. 

Books will be available for purchase and a book signing will follow the lecture.

Presented with live American Sign Language interpretation

This event is sponsored by the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art. A private reception for FMCA members will follow the lecture. Become an FMCA member to access special members-only experiences.

The Friends of African and African American Art will present the 32nd Annual Alain Locke Awards to artist Titus Kaphar.

Kaphar will receive the Alain Locke International Award for his work as an artist, sculptor, and filmmaker, creating socially and politically powerful works that reflect on the experiences of Black Americans and his own life story. 

Kaphar "confronts history by dismantling classical structures and styles of visual representation in Western art, which, in turn, subverts centuries of art historical traditions." A Michigan native, Kaphar lives and works in New Haven, CT. 

He received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant, and a 2015 Creative Capital grant.

The Alain Locke Recognition Award will be received by Detroit-based artist Rashaun Rucker, renowned for his drawings, sculptures, printmaking and installation art.

Free with registration. A reception will follow the awards event.

• 2 – 3:30 p.m. Awards, Lecture Hall
• 3:30 – 5 p.m. Reception, FJC Dining Rooms