Denver, CO – June 14, 2023 – Curator and scholar Bridget R. Cooks will share her thoughts on the theme “feeling” during a talk from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on June 29 in the Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) lobby. Prior to the program, the Museum’s galleries will be open from 6 to 6:30 p.m.
The talk is the second in the “Big Ideas Series” during the Museum’s exhibition Awful Bigness, which features some of Clyfford Still’s largest and most ambitious works. The series explores monumental topics related to exhibition themes.
“I recently learned that Bridget Cooks, an extraordinary scholar and curator, has always responded powerfully to Still’s paintings, but has struggled to put into words the ways they make her feel,” said Joyce Tsai, CSM director. “How do we describe the ways an artwork grip us, overwhelm us, and render us speechless in their presence? Her talk promises to be both deeply personal and richly theoretical, linking her own experience in the face of these enormous paintings to broader philosophical reflections on the way our words give shape to feeling.”
About Bridget R. Cooks
Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator focused on the art of African Americans. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Her books, articles, and essays are in many interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogs. She is most well-known as the author of the book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011).
Cooks has curated many art exhibitions, including Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) (Pasadena Museum of California Art); Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective (2019) (California African American Museum), The Black Index (2021-2) (national tour), and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art). Her work has been awarded by the Ford Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, California Humanities, the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
About the Clyfford Still Museum
Designed by Allied Works Architecture to display the revolutionary art of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, the Clyfford Still Museum opened in November 2011 in Denver’s Golden Triangle Creative District. Considered one of the most important and mysterious painters of the 20th century, Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was among the first generation of abstract expressionist artists who developed a new and powerful approach to painting in the years during and immediately after World War II. The Museum’s collection represents more than 93% of the artist’s lifetime output. As the steward of Still’s art and legacy, the Museum’s mission is to preserve, exhibit, study, and foster engagement with its unique collections; generate outstanding exhibitions, scholarly research, educational and other cross-disciplinary programs that broaden the definition of a “single-artist” museum; and be a gathering place for the exploration of innovation and individual artistic endeavor. Connect with the Clyfford Still Museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or at clyffordstillmuseum.org.
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