At the PMA in the Bernard Osher Foundation Auditorium

Marsden Hartley (United States, 1877–1943), On the Beach, 1940–1941, oil on Masonite, 22 x 28 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation, 2023.37.1. Image courtesy Luc Demers

Join Chief Curator and the Susan Donnell and Harry W. Konkel Curator of European Art, Shalini Le Gall, for this year’s Barnet Scholars Lecture, featuring a lively panel discussion about Maine artist Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), and celebrating the recent gift of four paintings by Hartley from the Alex Katz Foundation. Originally from Lewiston, Hartley was a key figure in American Modernism , and he traveled extensively through Europe, the US, and the Carribean before returning in his later years to work and live in Maine. Working in the same circles as artists such as Peggy Bacon, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Marin, Hartley has a powerful legacy within Maine that continues to this day.

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Speakers

Donna M. Cassidy

Donna M. Cassidy is the Professor Emerita, American & New England Studies and Art History, University of Southern Maine. Over her thirty-five-year career at the University of Southern Maine, Professor Cassidy taught courses on American art and culture, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art, as well as gender and modern art. She has published widely on modernism and regionalism in early twentieth-century American art and culture, most notably her books Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (1997) and Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (2005). She is co-author with Elizabeth Finch and Randall R. Griffey of Marsden Hartley’s Maine (2017), the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name which she co-curated. She was guest curator of Shifting Sands: Beaches, Bathers, and Modern Maine Art at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (2023) and is working on another exhibition for the museum on Carl Sprinchorn (2026). She also continues her research on U.S. artists in Quebec and Atlantic Canada—an important, yet understudied, region of artistic interest in the early twentieth century.

Elizabeth Finch

Elizabeth Finch is head curator at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. In this role she oversees the exhibition program, curatorial research, and collection development; she also serves on the museum’s leadership team. Finch holds degrees in art history from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A.) and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (PhD). She participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Prior to the Colby Museum, Finch worked as a curator at the Drawing Center, New York. With expertise in American art, contemporary art, and works on paper, she has curated and co-curated dozens of exhibitions and has contributed to the various publications that have accompanied these projects as well as other writing projects.

Randall Griffey

Randall Griffey is Head Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum Randall Griffey is Head Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Gail R. Scott, Director and Lead Scholar, Marsden Hartley Legacy Project

Gail R. Scott started her career as Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was there that her abiding interest in Marsden Hartley blossomed. She later received a three-year NEH grant to research and edit Hartley’s writings, resulting in two publications: On Art by Marsden Hartley (Horizon Press, 1982) and The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley (Black Sparrow Press, 1987). Subsequently, she was commissioned by Abbeville Press to write a monograph on his visual art, Marsden Hartley (1988). As an independent art historian, she has published books and catalogue essays on Ambrose Webster, Carl Sprinchorn, William and Marguerite Zorach, Harold Garde, and James Fitzgerald—in addition to Hartley. In 2019 she entered into a partnership with the Bates College Museum of Art to sponsor the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: Complete Paintings and Works on Paper (MHLP), the first ever compendium of his entire oeuvre. After five years of intensive research, the MHLP website is expected to be launched in 2026.

This program is generously supported by the Will Barnet Foundation. Learn more about the Barnet Scholars Lecture here.