Cross Cultural Interchange and Aspirations of Universality: The Peacock Room in 1908

Online interactive colloquium
Recorded: May 11, 2011
Recording Available

Taking the Freer Gallery’s exhibition The Peacock Room Comes to America as a jumping-off point, this webinar recording explores ways in which James McNeill Whistler’s famed interior became a space filled with complex narratives of multidirectional aesthetic interchange. Exhibition curator Lee Glazer provides an overview of the installation and discusses how Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit industrialist and collector who purchased the room in 1904, used it as an aesthetic laboratory to test his cosmopolitan philosophy of collecting and display.  A “lightning round” of presentations focusing on the global circulation of artistic objects and international patterns of patronage and critical discourse follows. The program includes Q and A and discussion between the audience and presenters.

Presenters include:

Lee Glazer
Associate curator of American Art
Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art|Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Arabella Teniswood-Harvey
University of Tasmania
Whistler in Australia: Cross-Cultural Connections

Patricia de Montfort
University of Glasgow
‘Bought by an American’: The Peacock Room Heads West

Ayako Ono
Shinshu University
Aesthetic Dialogues of East and West: Whistler’s “Points of Contact”

This event was organized by the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery with a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of American art for national and international audiences. Closed captioned in English. Live voice translation in Japanese. The program recording is now available and is free and open to the public.