The Clyfford Still Museum is proud to inaugurate the Dr. Morris Susman Luminary Lecture, a new annual series featuring artists, intellectuals, and museum leaders whose work exemplifies Still’s creativity and renegade spirit.
For this inaugural lecture, Harry Cooper, Bunny Mellon Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, invites us to reconsider what it means to encounter Still’s paintings. Through close looking and Still’s own words, Cooper explores the museum as a place of refuge—not an escape from the world, but a space where art offers another mode of encounter. Together, we’ll consider how Still’s paintings invite us into an experience that is at once deeply personal and profoundly connected to the world beyond the gallery.
Registration will open soon.
About Harry Cooper
Harry Cooper is the first Bunny Mellon Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, where he has worked since 2008. Before that, he was a curator at the Harvard University Art Museums for a decade. A native of Bethesda, Maryland, Cooper studied English at Harvard College and studio art at the Corcoran. He earned an M.A. in art history from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. from Harvard with a dissertation on Piet Mondrian. He has organized or co-organized exhibitions on the work of Mondrian, Medardo Rosso, Frank Stella, Stuart Davis, and Philip Guston, among many others. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and Johns Hopkins, and he has written about many artists, including Clyfford Still. His next exhibition, opening in 2028, will be a retrospective of the work of Helen Frankenthaler.