FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2015

IMAGES: Contact University Relations at 479-575-5555 for a print-quality image.

Art History Professor to Lecture at Metropolitan

Museum of Art
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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. Leo Mazow, associate professor of art history and Thomas Hart
Benton expert, will give two lectures March 1 and 2 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York in conjunction with the museums March 2 symposium titled The Full Force of His
Spiritual Bellows: Thomas Hart Bentons American Today Mural. Each lecture will emphasize
the roles of sound and music in the mural.
His Sunday lecture will focus on specifically New York subjects in America Today. The
presentation will be followed by a short concert by The Coverlets, a duo composed of Mazow
and Brittany Stephenson, performing three popular period songs capturing the urban and musical
contexts in which Benton produced the mural. Mondays lecture, The Sounds of America Today,
will deal with sonic metaphors in the mural.
The symposium celebrates the mural America Today, which was recently gifted to The
Metropolitan Museum of Art from the AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company. Depicting
American life throughout the 1920s, the ten-panel mural hangs in a gallery recreating New
Yorks New School for Social Research boardroom, where the mural originally hung.
Eight of the panels depict life in different regions of the United States: the South,, the
Midwest, the West, and New York. In the 1920s, Benton traveled throughout these areas of the
country, creating a body of studies from life, mostly in pencil, on which he based many of the
details in America Today.
Mazow is a specialist in American art history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and
Sciences. His book, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (Penn State University Press,
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2012), was supported by a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered
by the College Art Association. The book was awarded the 2013 Eldredge Prize for
Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, presented by the Smithsonian American Art
Museum. Mazow came to the University of Arkansas in 2010, after eight years as curator of
American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University.
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CONTACTS:
Leo Mazow, Associate Professor of Art History
J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences
479-575-5202, lmazow@uark.edu
Tara Grubbs, communications intern
J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences
479-575-3712, tgrubbs@uark.edu
Members of the media can subscribe to the Arkansas Newswire weekday email by sending a note to Charlie Alison at calison@uark.edu.

MAIN IMAGE:
City Activities.jpg America Today: City Activities with Dance Hall, 193031, by Thomas
Hart Benton (American, 18891975). One of ten panels: Egg tempera with oil glazing over
Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panel with a honeycomb interior.
(Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History)
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RELATED WEB SITES:
Department of Art - http://art.uark.edu/
The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/lecturesand-panels/free-lectures/the-full-force-of-his-spiritual-bellows?eid=A001_%7b897C530CBDE8-4BB4-A237-A7DF370CB474%7d_20141226144754

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