INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED CURATOR/ART HISTORIAN CATHERINE DE ZEGHER TO LECTURE AT MILLS COLLEGE 

Jane Green Endowed Lecture to Bridge Politics, Culture, and Visual Art on Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Oakland, CA - Catherine de Zegher, an internationally acclaimed curator, art historian, author, and editor will present a public lecture at Mills College entitled “Liberation of Line: Drawing and Subjectivity in the 20th Century to the Present,” on Wednesday, October 25, 2006. Free and open to the public, the event will take place at 7:30 pm in Mills’ Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613.  Following the lecture, a public reception will be held in the Mills College Art Museum.

Since the late 1980s, de Zegher has promoted the feminine principle and radically expanded the definition of drawing. The former executive director of New York’s Drawing Center, she has curated major exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Her highly influential books include Inside the Visible, 3 x Abstraction, and Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War. She is also co-editor of Women Artists at the Millenium.

De Zegher has presented the drawings of Eva Hesse, Nasreen Mohamedi, Richard Tuttle, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Ellen Gallagher, among other major artists. Her recent considerations explore the medium of drawing and its transformation in the 20th and 21st centuries as a philosophical model of relationships and resistance in a rapidly changing global socio-political landscape.

This event is funded by the Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism that brings outstanding speakers to Mills. Created in 1993, the endowment aims to give students and the community access to distinguished art historians, researchers, and critics who have made significant contributions to the fields of art history and art criticism.

Prominent speakers previously featured in this series are: Lucy R. Lippard: “Around Here: Land, History, Culture and Place”; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt: “Re-presenting Michelangelo's Last Judgment”; Geeti Sen: “Image and Imagination: Contemporary Art in India”; Linda Nochlin: “Picasso: The Color of Portraiture”; Vishakha Desai: “Re-Figuring Asian Art at the Dawn of a New Millennium”; Elizabeth Cropper: “Poussin's Transvestite Achilles: Politics in Paris”; Alberto Manguel: “Portrait of Fear: The Hairy Girl”; Apinan Poshyananda: “Asian Spectacles: Contemporary Asian Art in the International Arena”; Whitney Chadwick: “Intimate Visions /Global Perspectives”; Deborah Willis: “Imagining Blackness; Wu Hung: Contemporaneity in Contemporary Chinese Art: Exploring Issues of Censorship in Chinese Art Today”; Patricia Fortini Brown: “Seen But Not Heard From: Renaissance Children and Their Visual World”; and Holland Cotter: “In Distrust of Merits: A Critic in Wartimes.”

Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering innovative degree programs for undergraduate women, and graduate degrees and certificate programs for women and men. Consistently recognized as one of the top 100 liberal arts colleges in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, Mills currently ranks among the top 20 most diverse liberal arts colleges.

This year, the Washington Monthly College Rankings (September 2006) named Mills a leading liberal arts college based on community service, research spending, quality of preparation for graduate education, and social mobility. In addition, The Princeton Review’s annual guide, the Best 361 Colleges (2007) included Mills for the second year in a row among top U.S. institutions offering students an outstanding undergraduate education.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California on 135 lush acres, Mills provides a dynamic liberal arts education fostering women’s leadership, social responsibility, and creativity.

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Deborah Dallinger
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