Guest Curator Talk: The Art of Response

Members: Free
General public: $20
Students: $5
Reservations required. Reservations will open one month before the event. Limited tickets available.

Join us for a special presentation by Adrienne L. Childs, PhD, esteemed independent scholar, art historian, and curator celebrating the opening of the exhibition, Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets. Dr. Childs will draw on her deep experience exploring the connections between the birth of modernism and contemporary art—across lines of culture, race, gender, and power structures—to address the underpinnings of this exhibition. Her talk examines the contemporary artistic and curatorial practice of response: how artists interpret, expand, and reorder the history of art.

*Please note: Museum lectures will take place in Gallery 105 during the renovation of the lower level.

About the Guest Speaker:
Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Her current book project is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, forthcoming from Yale University Press. She recently co-curated The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2020.

In April 2022 the High Museum of Art awarded Childs the 2022 Driskell Prize in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history.

Childs co-curated The Black Figure in the European Imaginary at the Rollins Art Museum at Rollins College in 2017. She is co-editor of the volume essays Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, Routledge. She also contributed an essay on art and activism to Volume V, part II of The Image of the Black in Western Art edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and David Bindman.

As former curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, she curated many exhibitions including Her Story: Lithographs by Margo Humphrey; Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie Pogue; Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell and Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art.

Childs holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MBA from Howard University, and a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Maryland. Learn more at adriennelchilds.com.

Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets is organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in collaboration with Supermrin and the School of Art, University of Cincinnati, and with the generous support of Iris Cantor.

Sponsored by the Harold C. Schott Foundation.

Image credit: Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917), Jacques de Wissant (detail), 1885–86, cast 1989, bronze, h. 83 7/8 in. (223.2 cm), Courtesy of Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, Photo Addison Doty.

If you need accessibility accommodations, please contact us in advance at access@cincyart.org or fill out the accessibility request form.