Mastrangelo Lecture Series – Powers that Be

Powers that Be: The Expressive Figure in the American Renaissance, 1876–1917
Mark D. Mitchell
Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University

Friday, September 8, 7pm
FWMoA Lincoln Auditorium
$15.00 – FWMoA Members
$20.00 Non-Members
RSVP at https://fwmoa.org/Events/

Support provided by the Michael & Grace Mastrangelo Foundation
Silver Members and Above are invited for cocktails and appetizers at 5:30pm with Dr. Mitchell and Charles Shepard, FWMoA CEO. 

To celebrate the art of Fort Wayne’s treasured Allen County Courthouse and the corresponding exhibition, An American Renaissance in Fort Wayne: Muralists from the Allen County Courthouse, FWMoA will launch the Mastrangelo Lecture Series on Friday, September 8 at 7pm with a lecture by esteemed scholar Mark D. Mitchell, Yale University’s Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. 

Mitchell will present his talk entitled, “Powers that Be: The Expressive Figure in the American Renaissance, 1876–1917,” which will explore the emergence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the expressive human figure as the primary vehicle for a new vision of American civic identity. He will reveal how the artists’ most direct and clearest expressions of their ideas may often be found in their vital, immediate, and engaging preparatory studies, which are among the highest achievements in the history of American art. Today, only a few of the artists responsible for these monuments are well known, and so Mitchell will draw some of the period’s many forgotten talents out of obscurity and reintroduce their best work alongside that of their peers.

Mark D. Mitchell is the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. He completed his doctorate at Princeton University in 2002 and previously worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Academy Museum, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and Princeton University Art Museum. His research interests in American art extend from the colonial period to the later twentieth century in all media, with particular depth in landscape and still life painting. He is currently at work on an exhibition about the American Renaissance that will open at Yale in fall 2024.